gravescale

Note that "a bit" refers to the second half of the sentence, not your comment exactly.

A bit like imagining how many of the royal family have to die before Princess Eugenie becomes Queen or a Borgen-type affair where a junior minister becomes prime minister, can you imagine the crazy sequence of events that has astronauts rescued by a Shenzhou capsule?

And would it produce some detente or raise tensions?

Specifically, any new creative input to the book is copyrighted. Usually, this is things like new prefaces or forewords and new illustrations or cover art.

It comes from the Latin "laevus".

Funnily enough, although "sinister" came to mean "the bad side", it may have come from Proto-Indo-European for the "favourable side".

He told us our product was too expensive for what it was and that we would never succeed in business like he would.

To be fair, when you're a 15 year old selling homemade drink, everything seems expensive, because you have basically zero costs other than your own time and a sack of sugar and it's difficult to conceive how much money roars around in business with any non-family employee.

I've been working 20-ish years and I still get sticker shock over even quite minor things even though some sap pays me three figures, more than my childhood annual income maybe, a day.

Perhaps it's too much free (as in beer) software and over exposure to ridiculously cheap-through-insane-scale consumer goods - a whole mid-grade phone for the same cost as a meal for two, say. But I think there's also a huge disconnect with how we tell children the world of "good, capitalist work", in which they'll probably spend the rest of their lives, works, and how it really works. About all you really get is Peppa Pig setting up a lemonade stand and learning a lesson on the value of hard work, say, and a jagged line graph briefly mentioned on the news.

The school system, at least for me, was extremely light on that kind of thing, even when you include economics (which I didn't take). In fact even in the media, other then specifically financial things like the FT, how the whole world actual or books in the subject specifically, how everything actually functions at any practical level is just...never really mentioned. Kids might know every kind of dinosaur, the function of the bits on the steam engine, the names of the sails on a ship-of-the-line, but it's almost like everyone has agreed we just don't need to talk about daily reality. It's like a huge "draw the rest of the owl" meme.

Just like Amazon being unable to deal with fake reviews and listing manipulation, despite having so much data that they have to invent new words for it like lakes. They don't want to do it: presumably they make better and-or easier money by letting scammers operate with impunity.

But what is a Nixie Watch? How does it function? These are some questions worth exploring with this distinct and idiosyncratic wristwatch. So—let’s continue!

....

Without getting into the weeds too much, the watch harvests electricity from said battery; deploys that electricity through currents; then the currents are switched off-and-on at exact times via a circuit board—which governs the electrical currents.

While this certainly isn't "in the weeds", it does rather feel that this is not even within visual range of any plant at all.

At the risk of eating the Onion, though it's not inaccurate, it doesn't seem like a very useful description, to anyone, even if the reader has never encountered electricity. The juxtaposition of that sentence with the earlier airily unelaborated-upon "a Nixie tube is a cold cathode tube" is pure art.

"Some people (X'Grn'k et al) say it was a device used for humorous purposes. However, we consider that the presence of sacred etched silicon devices rules this hypothethis out. While crudely worked in that time, and despite the abundance of raw material on the planet, such silicon was in short supply and was central to the nascent Guptian Church movement. In addition, records suggest that the "geo"politics of the time, somewhere between 1980 and 2050, had silicon artisanry in constant high military demand (see the F'llr'wq Metaversity analysis on use of Phonic Screen Devices in Central-West Asian planet-surface warfare between 1945 and 2045), and if not inducted into the Guptian priesthood, a silicon carver could expect a so-called 99-6 life, a 105-Earth-hour cycle with 99 hours in a warfab and 6 hours to rest (J'Hrar et al). Furthermore, per a recent discovery of a transaction record thought likely to be payment for living volume at the Western-American coastal enclave, the artisan class appears to have little in the way of disposable resourcing. Thus, we consider it unlikely that an artisan of that period could have spared or even been allowed the resources or time for such levity."

I don't know, I think there was definitely a turn around the mid 2010s when actions and consequences really started to diverge.

And to be clear, I don't mean that the exposure of CA was the cause, I mean that what CA and their ilk was delivering to their customers - detailed, real time, granular analysis of the reactions to actions.

Some time a bit before the public CA exposure would have been when analysts looking at the data delivered by CA would have first realised just how little what would until then have been "scandal" actually moved the needle of their supporters, without having to infer from slow and inaccurate techniques like polling and focus groups.

The problem is that this (if my theory is not just bunk) isn't something you can really go back and do differently. An emergent property of the reactions of polarised groups to the behaviours of their leaders was discovered to be quite different to what had been assumed. You may as well say "we have to go back to the old ways" when lamenting the relativity makes physics too complicated.

Though, as to the point I think you're actually making, it's also been made very difficult to object to these things in any terms that could possibly have an effect without being thoroughly denounced as a nutter, an extremist, or worse. After all, the "right" thing to do is always to simply "vote!".

My pet made-up theory is that careers aren't really killable like that any more, since Cambridge Analytica.

Before CA, the received wisdom was that if you do something bad, you will need to resign before you are pushed for causing damage to the organisation reputation and therefore electability. This was perhaps borne out with enormous error bars by focus groups and polls asking "would you still vote for X in case of Y".

After CA, and in particular the live social media sentiment data that was gathered around the debacle of the UK Brexit referendum, the data showed that actually egregious misbehaviour did not materially affect sentiments, and perhaps even appealed to a larger proportion of people than believed. For example, the famous "shy Tory" might not show up well in a focus group, but it all hangs out after analysing Facebook's data.

With that data in hand, people started doing things that they would never have dared to do before, knowing that it won't actually harm them, at least in the short run (since this data only shows short term effects).

And that's how we go from resigning over fairly small gaffes to the "screw it, what you gonna do, we know you won't vote for the others, we've seen your data" of today.

Not long ago, calling a woman a bigot on a hot mic was a dreadful PR disaster. Now, you can physically snatch a journalist's phone and it barely registers.

It does, however stack up over time with catastrophic final effects, much like chasing only quarterly figures or always postponing dealing with technical or real debt.

My school had streams for several subjects which is perhaps unfashionably pragmatic, but at least it allows the top, bottom and inner quartiles to go at their own paces with more tailored tuition.

The lower streams also took the lower exam tiers. Which limited their maximum grades, but a C (or whatever the number grade is these days) from a decent showing in Foundation Maths is better than an fail from a disastrous attempt at the Higher tier.

It won't help when children are multiple entire years behind their peers, though. Short of actually repeating years with extra tuition and major parental involvement until they can catch up, I don't know what you're supposed to do at that point. Obviously just chucking them into the next year and marking it down as a "pass" might make look good for the paperwork, but it's just compounding the misery for the poor kid who might as well be being taught quantum chemistry in Ancient Sumerian for all the good it will do them.

White reflects sunlight better and leads to less heating of the airframe's skin, shows up damage and leaks well, and the expensive paint job doesn't fade in the high-UV troposphere, so it's the supreme paint colour for most civil aircraft both in practical and economic terms.

As usual, there's a relevant Akin's Law:

12. There is never a single right solution. There are always multiple wrong ones, though.

I'm not sure simple arithmetic is really the focus there, though I suppose "2²" is a good an answer to "what is 2 + 2" as "4".

The real right answer is of course "can't say without knowing what the field is that we're operating in".

https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html

That's a document that really has had money spent on the formatting, it's really very nicely designed.

The editable fields are a great touch as you can just paste in your answers directly from ChatGPT.

Which is a pity because my i7 Lenovo laptop is acoustically and thermally some kind of jet turbine in a case, because I was foolish enough to believe a review, and I really wish I could undervolt it so it can make it to lunchtime on a charge.

My comment is more of a tangent along people/products but certainly I agree in that I don't see why the wider Wikimedia group of sites including things like Wikibooks needed to completely evict "fun" content, even if I personally don't think it should be in some language's Wikipedia itself.

Not least, you can crosslink between Wikimedia sites, so you could just link to [[fans:Digimon:Whatevermon]] and have the content "nearby" in digital terms without drawing it under the same notability and sourcing guidelines as an article on benzene, say.

Which as you say would keep the (often very, perhaps to a fault) keen contributor to the fandom in the Wikimedia tent and might encourage them to contribute to Wikipedia and related sites as well.

Then again, the auxiliary Wikimedia sites are pretty neglected by the parent foundation which has more important things on its mind much of the time, mostly fundraising and finding novel ways to spend that money.

I'm also a pretty strong inclusionist at heart, but I can see also that if the living-person rules were relaxed, self-aggrandisement would proliferate like crazy. Even under the current, slightly deletionist, status-quo in a 10000 word article about some random academic (1), who is going to fact check all that spew and edit it down? The answer on that page is "no-one, for years"(2). And that's with lots of references, even if they are all his own papers and therefore not secondary sources.

Now what would the millions of articles about every TikTok influencer look like?

And then the same goes for products and companies. Every scam Kickstarter and onanistic startup would get a massive screed.

And then it all sits and rots forever once the academic retires, the influencer gets a real job, the Kickstarter vanishes and the startup folds, because no one else cares. But someone has to go around and fix the links and update templates and generally expend effort indefinitely.

On top of all that, while the article creator is still around, because the article is actually an advert, any attempt to edit it into a more encyclopaedic article is disproportionately likely to cause drama that burns up volunteer time and effort.

(1): One I saw recently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didier_Sornette

(2): Especially as many people actually good enough at collating and editing encyclopedic articles about subjects that aren't about their own media-based hobbies quickly decide Wikipedia isn't a very fun place to do that any more.

It's a shame all the cool stuff is all hidden in a white box, but I suppose it does look a bit like a Hollywood depiction of a homemade nuclear bomb so the British Transport Police would be getting a few panicked calls if it were in a perspex box.

There's also no step-free access at South Kensington or Gloucester Road, so that must be a fun struggle for a grad student!

It's a fun theory, and sounds rather plausible at first blush, but do so many of the upper management class really have so many commercial real estate investments that they're willing to break the effectiveness of their core business?

I know of at least one company with an RTO drive but leased the office, and the land owner doesn't have external shareholders. Also the company paid for quite a snack supply, so backsides in seats actively cost a relatively small but still not trivial amount of money.

I imagine Fujitsu did everything they could to put only loyal management on the stand.

They did call the Fujitsu chief architect, who is now under investigation for perjury for his efforts (and I also imagine Fujitsu are less going to try to throw him under the bus and more have a tungsten bus dropped on him from orbit)

The UK justice system is pretty broken.

I don't think the Post Office debacle features, but at the end of the Secret Barrister(1), a hypothetical example is given where the many critical systemic failings described in the book align to get an innocent person found guilty and imprisoned. It's pretty close to what actually happened to the subpostmasters (but for assault rather then fraud).

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Barrister. It's very good and all you can say after reading it is "Jesus, I just hope I stay lucky enough to never get involved in the courts". I don't think anything has improved since 2018.

They're not pointless if you're in the Guild of Box Ticking Consultancies, and guess who gets to say what the boxes are?

I like this description of having major problems with GDPR as usually either being because you actually are abusing people's data, or because you've run up a huge pile of technical debt related to data handling: https://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/606812.html

Nothing represents the idea that cars were intended to be absolutely welded to the idea of respectable American society than the "parkway" (it's a park, but you drive on it!).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkway

And of course it turns out Robert Moses' fingerprints are on it.

Oh he absolutely did: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Didier_Sornette&a...

Any edits he made that aren't his own page are editing in references to his own work in other articles.

A lot of a baby's language pickup is also based on what other people do in response to their attempts, linguistically and behaviourally. Read-only observation is obviously a big part of it, but it's not "exactly" the same.

Another great book like that is Machinery's Handbook: https://books.industrialpress.com/machinery-handbook/

No, but when you do that you have to make sure it's used in a maximally ironic way like making a spy plane to use against them. Double points for telling them (or saying you told them) a story that makes them look like mugs in retrospect like "it's for pizza ovens, don't worry about it".

rely so much on imports

Seriously, try to design anything non-trivial without a TI part anywhere. Even in China, foreign brands are everywhere in electronics, and much of it is imported.

There's a lot of scope left for China to penetrate the "low end" semiconductor (and other electronic parts) market as well.