ng7j5d9

Hooray! We can finally dispose of Betteridge's "Law"!

Embraer obviously isn't quite a Boeing or Airbus but their E-Jets seem like viable narrow-body jets. Now if the argument is that the USA isn't ok with all of the big jet manufacturers being foreign, then yeah, they have to bail Boeing out.

That's generally the case. Alaska's UBI program requires that the recipient live in Alaska for the previous calendar year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund#Permanen...

I'm not familiar with anti-gouging laws, but I'd be curious to see if Amazon's typical "we're the marketplace, not the seller" argument applies during declared emergencies or if they should be held responsible to reduce/eliminate price gouging on their platform.

They were going to get kicked out for spring break anyhow. Then again at the end of the semester. It's temporary housing.

I do empathize with the minority of folks for whom this represents a real challenge.

But having been enrolled at this particular university not all that long ago, my experience is that the vast majority of these young people are members of families that are fairly well-off - they were able to send their kids to a private university (with a reputation as a party school).

Because I looked at the photos of the "riot": https://www.daytondailynews.com/news/local/photos-police-rio...

And the kids on the street generally look like entitled middle-class white kids causing a disturbance, which reminded me of my own days at the University of Dayton.

EDIT: Perhaps they're being pressured by the administration but the Twitter account for the student newspaper says it was not a protest, and that "students were treating it as a potential last party of the semester".

https://twitter.com/FlyerNews/status/1237758188943966213

I'm not sure that this is why students are rioting, but the University of Dayton men's basketball team is currently experiencing unprecedented success (ranked third nationally), and the "March Madness" NCAA men's basketball tournament starts in a couple of weeks.

I wonder how much of this is truly about students having nowhere to go vs students being upset that they're going to miss out on a chance for wild partying.

I also wonder if the administration erred on the side of caution here as a means to avoid dealing with over-exuberant partying.

If you're not trying to be snarky avoid stuff like "dalliance for tech bros lighting money on fire"

Haha, that's fair. To be clear, I believe remote work is generally more productive and represents the future of most knowledge work. I was trying to put words into the mouth of an imaginary conservative executive who is afraid to go the remote path there.

Not trying to be snarky, but because I think it'll be meaningful to executives: What's the largest profitable remote-only company?

Sure, your Gitlabs, Elastics, Sonatypes, etc, are remote-only, but they're still in VC-funded, money-losing, growth mode, AFAIK.

Are there profitable remote-only companies that a more conservative, maybe even non-tech company could look at to get a warm fuzzy rather than being able to dismiss remote-only as a dalliance for tech bros lighting money on fire?

Mongo reminds me of Tesla - early products were shoddy but had incredible hype.

"It's incredibly fast!" "It's web scale!" "It'll be able to drive itself cross country in a couple of months!"

And I think the unfounded/exaggerated hype bothered a lot of us, but like Tesla, the actual product seems to have improved quite a lot as they've had time and resources to throw at it. So sure, some of us remember Teslas and MongoDB from 2013 and scoff, but the current reality is much different.

It's already been established that hosting the Olympics in the current fashion is generally a money loser for the host city. All of those resources expended to build state-of-the-art facilities, housing, transportation, etc...with rosy ideas of how they might be repurposed after the Olympics....which generally don't come to fruition.

And that's when the Olympics actually occur, and the host city is able to gain some revenue from visitors coming and spending a considerable amount of money.

If Tokyo builds the required infrastructure and then no one comes, I've got to think future host cities will re-think this madness.

Personally I'd like to see a distributed Olympics, with mostly pre-existing facilities being used. Maybe swimming happens in Copenhagen, basketball in LA, beach volleyball in Phuket, etc. Maybe some events could be held in smaller countries or cities that had never been able to complete for a full Olympics before. A larger percentage of the world population would be local to some part of the Olympics, perhaps for once highlighting sameness rather than differences.

Or screw it, we could just let dumb governments keep throwing piles of money at this nonsense.

That's funny, I just had a bad experience with Microsoft. I applied for a job on their site that had several locations listed, one of which was of interest to me.

A recruiter sent me a bunch of questionnaires to fill out and then connected me with a Tech Lead for the initial phone interview. The Tech Lead introduced himself and the position, said the position was available in 2 locations (neither of which were my preferred location), and that was that.

I followed up with the recruiter and she expressed surprise, since she saw the same job posting I did.

A couple days later, Microsoft's site tells me I was not chosen for the job, no further information.

But of course, that's just one experience, and it's a large company, and all that. Maybe I'll apply for something else there.

Every time I see yet another library of web components I think of the classic XKCD about standards.

Apparently there were N web component libraries but none of them were just what ING wanted, so now there are N+1 web component libraries.

I think the statistics to compare self-driving miles vs human driven miles are quite tough to judge.

Tesla was criticized quite a bit at one point for comparing deaths per Autopilot mile to deaths per all motor vehicle miles. This was a bad comparison because motor vehicles included motorcycles, as well as older, poorly-maintained cars, etc.

Then Tesla released a comparison between Autopilot miles in Teslas and human-driven miles in Teslas where Autopilot was eligible to be engaged. This felt like a much more fair comparison, but Teslas are lenient about where Autopilot can be engaged - just because the car will allow it doesn't mean many people would choose to do so in that location, so there might be some bias towards "easier" locations where Autopilot is actually engaged. There's also the potential issue of Autopilot disengaging, and then being in an accident shortly afterwards.

This is morbid, but I also wonder about the number of suicides by car that are included in the overall auto fatality statistics. If someone has decided to end their life, a car might be the most convenient way (and it might appear accidental after the fact). That would drive up the deaths-per-mile stat for human drivers, but makes it tougher for me to decide which is safer - Autopilot driving or me driving?

Options add value, in luxury cars, a sunroof and alloy wheels are pretty much essential, not getting one means negative value on resale.

I've heard the opposite, that options don't retain their value as much as the core of the car itself. It probably depends on the timeframe though.

I bought a 2011 Volvo C30 brand-new, with absolutely zero options. It was the cheapest car Volvo made that year - manual transmission, no extra-cost paint, nothing. I sold it last year and, looking at price guides, those nice options would have gotten me maybe an extra $1-2k. So sure, I could have spent an extra $5-7k to get a nicely equipped model, but there is no way I would have gotten an extra $5k back when I sold the car.

I'd concede that if you trade cars in while they're still quite fresh there might be some truth to this. If you have a really oddly configured 2-year-old luxury car, maybe it'd be "lot poison" without leather and a sunroof.

Reading their FAQ it sounds like you get to take a quick test drive and do a visual inspection, no mention of being able to take the car to a mechanic for a thorough pre-purchase inspection. There is a 7-day Money Back Guarantee (that does not cover delivery costs), so you could take a car to a mechanic post-purchase and then potentially get a refund if you find something you don't like.

https://www.carvana.com/faq

The Nordic Language Processing Laboratory has a sizeable collection of open source parallel texts: http://opus.nlpl.eu

Click on any of the headings in [brackets] on the top of the page to see the language pairs available for download for that collection.

That might be a good 90% solution - car registrations are public records, which tons of companies harvest, which is why you get those annoying extended warranty junk mailers, etc.

Not all cars get registered though - some are chopped for parts (in which case that infotainment system might live on in another car), some are shipped internationally to be re-sold elsewhere, etc.

And there could be a lot of lag - some cars languish on dealer lots, get auctioned, languish on another lot, get auctioned again, etc. Or a dealer might like your car and slap dealer tags on it and keep it essentially as his personal vehicle for a while without registering it.

Lots of little opportunities for data to leak or remote functionality to be abused. There ought to be a complete, no-joke, absolutely reset everything in the car (and expire any remote access tokens) option in the car itself, that either a buyer or seller can easily invoke.

How would manufacturers know when cars change hands?

Sure, in the example in the article, it was a lease that was turned in to a Ford dealer. But I've sold cars by handing my keys and a title to an individual who handed me money. The manufacturer of the car was not involved in the transaction.

Any support for languages other than English?

Does it do normalization as part of the typo search (in case of missed/incorrent accent marks, etc)?

Does it do stemming at all? For English or other languages? (ie, I search for "run" and you show me documents for "running" or the other way around).

Any support for Chinese text (which typically doesn't have whitespace between words)?

IANAL but the prominent

   (c) The Royal Collection Trust

Shouldn't these very old maps be in the public domain?

I feel like the problem is that it isn't a huge market opportunity (at least by Apple scale).

Checking out these graphs about Apple's revenues, apparently Mac revenues are pretty flat, while iPhone revenues continue to skyrocket (currently 5X Mac revenues!): https://sixcolors.com/post/2020/01/fun-with-charts-a-decade-...

So sure, a hobbyist-approved Mac desktop would please you and me and plenty of other geeks, but they'd also cannibalize their Mac Pro sales somewhat, and when it's all said and done, their Mac revenues would still probably be in the same ballpark. So, why do that when they can pour effort into new phones or TV services or AirPods or whatever?

The thing that worries me is that the hobbyist/geek is often the one who turns lots of others onto a technology. I'm probably where I am right now because my geek uncle passed down his used Mac to me and showed me Hypercard. And I'm pretty sure there are people who own Macs today that wouldn't if it not for me. I think appeasing the geeks is worth more than the direct profit or revenue that such a model would bring in, but in ways that aren't as immediately evident on the quarterly report.

Replacing an iMac also means getting rid of a perfectly good monitor.

This is the thing that absolutely friggin kills me with the Mac lineup.

As a developer I see monitors and computers as the perfect example of loose coupling. And I've absolutely had different lifecycles for monitors and computers in the past. My Mac mini that was once my primary desktop machine is now a media center hooked up to a TV.

But if the Mac mini doesn't meet your needs (fast CPUS, storage bays, whatever), and the Mac Pro doesn't fit your budget, Apple gives you a big ol' middle finger.

I mean, I COULD buy an iMac, but then 8 years down the road when I want a new desktop, I've got this unwieldy all-in-one where that big screen feels like more of a hindrance than an asset.

I haven't built a Hackintosh myself, but every time I look at the desktop Mac lineup I think about it.

Proximity matters. If I have a basketball court in my house, I'm going to want to have a little locker-room/bathroom off of it so that I (and my guests) don't have to trek to the bathroom in the main hall. If I have a 10-car climate-controlled garage with lounge where I hang out and show off my Ferrari collection, same thing. If I have an amazing pool that all of my kids' friends want to use, I'm going to want them to use the bathroom with the outdoor entrance so they aren't tracking water in the house.

These aren't small houses.

Not really though, right? I theoretically have the same commute every day, but there have been times when a moving truck has been stopped in my lane, or the period when a road was down to one lane as it was repaved, and then re-opened with a new traffic circle, etc. You can't train your truck how to complete a route today and then assume it'll be able to successfully complete that route everyday as detours, new traffic patterns, accidents, etc, happen.

Feels almost like the minor league / major league situation in professional sports. Minor league baseball players are generally not paid a living wage, and major league players start around half a million dollars a year. Obviously many players are doing everything they can to reach that dream job (even if most fail).

That idea of being a comfortable tenured professor at a great school is a dream for many. And obviously, many don't make it, lot of folks are going to just drift around as adjunct professors, scraping by, taking second jobs. But as long as SOMEONE is getting to be a full professor at Stanford, lots of people are going to think, "that could be me", and get exploited along the way.

And according to one company, daycare as a benefit pays for itself by reducing turnover ... although Patagonia really stands out by offering such a benefit in the current environment. If such a benefit became the norm maybe people would go back to hopping between jobs at something close to the previous rate.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3062792/patagonias-ceo-explains-...

Thanks for posting that link! I came across that presentation several years back and found it quite enlightening. Then I thought of it for some reason a few months ago and tried Googling for it but couldn't find it. Very glad to stumble upon it again, and this time I'll definitely bookmark it.

That's the opposite sentiment that I've heard recently (from an American perspective). My understanding is that our used cars are more expensive than ever due to:

a) Certified pre-owned and similar programs making some used cars more appealing (and thus more valuable), removing them from the supply of unvetted, cheap used cars.

b) More folks being able to afford used cars around the world. It seems like at the lower end of the market, many American used cars are shipped to Latin America or the Caribbean (in Europe many older cars are sent to Africa), again reducing the supply of used cars.

This is my sketchy recollection of things I've heard and read, I don't have any direct sources to link you to, but I've certainly heard multiple people bemoan that say, $5-10k doesn't buy you nearly as good a car as it used to (even adjusting for inflation).

EDIT: As an aside, the issue of shipping cars to different regions could also prove interesting for owners down the road. There are already some issues there - I believe my car's navigation system is for North America, or maybe US+Canada. So if my car gets shipped to Argentina in 10 years, the Nav will be useless or will need an update. Not a huge deal. But if Tesla's Autopilot is tuned for conditions and laws in a certain region, it would presumably require reprogramming for another region. Would that be an automatic over-the-air update? Or would Tesla not want to bother with free updates to a 20-year-old car?

I think to offer a differentiated product in this space, you have to be hostile towards the airlines. I know that Skiplagged will show me hidden city tickets that I won't find elsewhere. I know that Scott's Cheap Flights will alert me to fares so cheap that they seem like pricing mistakes. All of the aggregators that play ball with the airlines just offer the exact same results.