os2warpman

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Who, SPECIFICALLY PLEASE, at the CDC "branded the lab-leak hypothesis a conspiracy theory and quickly dismissed it"?

Not the press, not some rando on twitter, not some anonymous and probably made up "source", not "people are saying"-- which actual CDC employee or appointee did this?

I keep asking, and people keep making up bullshit.

If you think that's unfortunate, we used to call it "crib death".

Western powers embraced an ideology of peace and safety that stalled technological growth

Does Thiel have a hose running from his rectum to his nose so he can get high off the smell of his own farts?

More technological growth has occurred from Woodstock to today than at any similar-length span of time in human history.

He is rich because of that technological advancement and the fortune he amassed due to that technological advancement means he has the ability to pollute the media with his moronic worldview, and bribe politicians in order to make it a reality for the rest of us.

You're asking a lot from law enforcement if you're giving away something for free and then demand that law enforcement make sure that people use the thing exactly as you have mandated.

I don't think the Free Software Foundation is asking a lot when it uses the rule of law to control who uses their content and how.

A country must have a people.

Who are the people of the Vatican? The only persons who live there are temporary government employees and not even all of them are citizens because that is optional.

You cannot own property, vote for your government, start your own business, go to school, buy anything except what is stocked in the small canteen, or go to the hospital if you are a Vatican citizen and odds are pretty good you live in Italy anyways.

Imagine if a bank drew a boundary around its Manhattan skyscraper headquarters and declared itself a country called Bankistan whose only residents were janitors, financial analysts, and management-- and most of its citizens live in Brooklyn. Except for the C-suite and senior vice presidents who live in penthouses and the janitors who live in tiny rooms in the basement.

Also the second the bank fires you or you quit or retire, you're no longer a citizen of Bankistan.

At a minimum, a capital-see (heh) Country is something that belongs to you if but in a very, insignificantly, small part.

So my definition of "country" is ill-defined but does not include the Vatican.

I don't understand why the Vatican is considered a country, besides as a quirk of history.

It is smaller than high school campus nearest my house, is not a UN member, and seems to exist solely as a tax haven.

It also has no native citizens. No person has been born in Vatican City in a century and even if you pop out a baby in Vatican City and are you yourself a Vatican City resident and citizen, the baby is not a citizen until made so by legal decree, citizenship which ends the second your employment ends, of course, because citizenship is tied to employment.

It doesn't make sense.

It isn't a country.

It is a tax dodge.

My perspective may be skewed. I value "quirky quirks of quirktastic history" very little.

US government spending is (for now) easy to track, and you can get totals for spending by corporate entity.

In total across the entire US federal government, $518.8 million was paid to Microsoft for products and services in 2024. That is approximately 0.21% of their total annual revenue.

I assert that the threshold for "state sponsored" is well in excess of 0.21% of annual revenue.

Federal Spending: https://www.usaspending.gov/recipient/dd77b7c3-663e-cb91-229...

Microsoft Annual Revenue: https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar24/index.html

Why, given that the foam strike had occurred at a force massively out of test conditions had NASA proceeded with re-entry?

What was the alternative?

Columbia could not have made it to ISS.

Columbia could not have repaired the damage in orbit.

Columbia could not have lasted, after two weeks in space, long enough to launch a rescue mission.

I know the "In Flight Options Assessment" said they could launch at an accelerated pace but the assessment assumes that it's ok to launch another vehicle with the same problem, no fix, and no completed analysis of the cause.

Yeah, they suspected the external tank bipod foam, but WHY did the foam come off? Was it a fluke? Had some unknown factor not present in previous external tank bipod foam applications but now present in all external tank bipod foam applications manifested?

Two major assumptions, apart from the already stated assumption that the damage had to be visible, have to be recognized – the first is that there were no problems during the preparation and rollout of Atlantis, and the second is the question of whether NASA and the government would have deemed it acceptable to launch Atlantis with exposure to the same events that had damaged Columbia. At this point, at least two of the last three flights (STS-112 and STS-107) had bipod ramp foam problems, and the flight in-between these two, STS-113, was a night launch without adequate imaging of the External Tank during ascent.

https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/caib/news/report/pdf/vol2/pa... (page 397)

That's not a valid assumption.

This is from a pre-flight safety report for STS-113

“More than 100 External Tanks have flown with only 3 documented instances of significant foam loss on a bipod ramp”

STS-1 through STS-111, April 1981 - June 2002: three "significant" bipod foam losses

STS-112, October 2002: significant foam loss

STS-113, November 2002: night time, but they saw 112 and went "oh shit" and wrote a report

STS-107, January 2003: yet another, fatal, significant foam loss

If two of the last three flights had foam problems and the one that didn't only didn't because you couldn't see if it did, and over 100 of the preceding flights only had three, you don't risk four more lives.

You start designing a memorial at Arlington.

Lounges used to feel special, a perk reserved for business travelers. Now they’re overcrowded, uninspired, yet somehow more coveted than ever—thanks to social media flexes and pricey credit card perks.

I think one of the author's main issues is that they want to feel special, and that feeling can only come through external validation like the exclusion of others.

Also, they seem to take the easy and lazy way out by seething instead of acting.

Also, they lie a lot. Nobody has hassled people with clipboards to save the whales for 26 years.

The only thing still alive is the endless, humiliating upsell and self-service. The drugstore, the bank, the dentist

Yeah.

Lazy way out.

When I had a bad experience at a chain pharmacy 10-ish years ago I spent less than an hour, googled "independent pharmacies" and found the National Community Pharmacists Association. They have a locator for locally-owned independent pharmacies and I switched to one of those. Now I know my pharmacist's name (not the tech, the actual pharmacist, though I know the techs too) and I don't even have any pressing or complicated medical issues. The only thing they've ever tried to upsell me is a self-published book on local lore and history written by a woman who lives in my neighborhood that was in a stack next to the register.

Yes I bought it. I'm a hoe for that shit.

Same with shoes. My feet are large and weird and shoe buying sucked, not to mention the clueless staff. Often a store would have one pair in my size so I would have to take what I could get. So I took a little time, did some research, and found that specialty running shoe stores exist, staffed by experts, locally owned and operated.

You can do this with many things. Banks (though I prefer credit unions, mine is so small that nearly every member can fit in a large ballroom for our annual meeting and we have an App and digital wallet and everything), doctors, dentists, clothing retailers, anything.

But instead of acting, the author chooses to seethe.

And before you say "there's no other option" you're wrong, unless you live in a deep rural area where the nearest store is 20 minutes away and is a Dollar General, you are wrong.

You just don't care enough to do anything about it, which is a goal with most businesses: plotting the pain/rejection envelope and operating as close to it as possible, to appease the shareholders. You may have to travel a little farther or spend a little more but like I said: pain/rejection envelope-- "how shitty can we be because we're in the main shopping center and the independent guy is on the edge of town?"

An easy way to avoid the race to the bottom is to exit the race.

Don't seethe.

Act.

It isn't hard.

Hypercard died because in 1997 Apple was 3-4 weeks away from bankruptcy and 1998 wasn't that great either.

Before that, Hypercard was so valuable to Apple that they kicked it out the door to Claris and only took it back when Claris turned into a disaster (due to the Apple disaster) and everyone quit to write software for BeOS (lol).

"A friend of a friend of a friend posted to macrumors that jobs killed it because he didn't like it" has as much evidentiary weight behind it as "An elite Knights Templar strike force broke into Apple HQ and stole the source code and threatened Jobs with death if he ever released another version because if you typed 'evilmagic' into the message box, a portal to hell opened up in your room and evil sexy demons were coming out and seducing all of the wholesome pure and innocent computer nerds learning hypercarding."

Nissan, Chevrolet, Fiat, and Hyundai/Kia all make small, lightweight, low range, low power EVs.

With a 0-60 of 9 seconds, the Fiat 500e may be too low power. A 1993 Honda Civic is quicker than that and if you optioned a Civic coupe up to what comes standard (AC, power doors and windows, cruise) on the 500e, it was $14,700 in 1993[1], which is ~$32k today, which almost the same exact price of a 500e.

And you even get more than one airbag now!

[1]https://bringatrailer.com/listing/1993-honda-civic-2/

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I forgot how I loaded it into the machine, but perhaps it was easier then putting a usb stick in a computer.

My library had two forms of microfiche.

One was a cartridge containing a single spool, which upon being inserted into the reader would unspool onto an internal mechanism. You used two jog wheels, one fine and one coarse, to control the speed at which you traversed the tape, and there were numeric inputs so you could go to an arbitrary page. (it got close enough)

The second were flat rectangular sheets with pages laid out in a grid, and you placed the flat sheet onto a glass bed, pulled down a cover and slid the plate into the reader, using etch-a-sketch-like controls to move along the x and y axis.

In either case you could insert a dime and a single page of whatever was on the screen would spit out from an attached printer.

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Why do you assume the person selling the PCB is the one who designed and ordered its manufacture?

Olimex sells kits, kits made by others.

They don't know how much copper is in the MPS430F5438 because Texas Instruments made the MPS430F5438.

now the likes of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are GSE’s.

Uh.. they've been GSEs since their founding. (12 U.S. Code § 1717)

"Yeah but in 2008 the government bought shares in th.." Doesn't matter. Still GSEs before that. "But they were privatiz.." Doesn't matter. Still GSEs after that.

Every time someone says "both sides are the same" a billionaire flooding media with 'both sides' messaging in order to distract from what is going on's taint twitches.

You don't need to pull quotes or provide references in a comment about the article you've just read and are commenting on.[1]

Of course, I read every word of the article instead of just the title, or skimming it, or having an AI summarize it and spoon feed it to me like I am a baby, and I expect others to do the same.

[1] common fucking sense

That business, Step Up Social, helped companies grow on TikTok and Instagram Reels.

I would rather push around a shopping cart full of aluminum cans whenever I'm not sleeping under a bridge than (waves hand) build that.

Instead, I leave my work at work once I hit 8 hours, get a full night's sleep, go scuba diving somewhere tropical twice per year, and build things that won't embarrass my parents.

There is no such thing as settled case law anymore.

There is only what the John Birch Society and Heritage Foundation tell the Supreme Court to do.

You are projecting an ideology onto these people for no reason other than to satisfy your own bias and/or earn a few cheap upvotes from likeminded readers.

No, I read what they said during the interviews used in the article.

One of my favorite genres of non-fiction is when people who claim they value independence and off-griddyness are forced to be independently off-grid.

"No no we meant off-grid in every aspect save one!"

I know these people, half my family is these people. I've listened to them rail against the man for decades and decades and decades.

When you tell them that the invisible hands of the free market will gladly sell them the bootstraps they require, they get mighty angry.

In this scenario am I a railfan or neurotypical?

There is a difference.

Excavation is an inherently dangerous and physically strenuous job. Additionally, when precision or delicateness is required human diggers are still used.

If AI was being used to automate dangerous and physically strenuous jobs, I wouldn't mind.

Instead it is being used to make everything it touches worse.

Imagine an AI-powered excavator that fucked up every trench that it dug and techbros insisted you were wrong for criticizing the fucked up trench.

The varieties of person are as varied as the total number of people so there will always be those who seek those things out, but if you look at the trends for clubs and organizations you will often see that participation and membership is declining.

Which is kind of the point of the article.

Installing and learning to use NixOS probably takes a layman longer than ordering a laptop from amazon, receiving it, realizing something's wrong with it, returning it, getting a replacement that works, then downloading and running this tool on an ssd they already own.

Klein's influential posters still look extraordinary to this day and "define the excitement and enthusiasm of the early years of post-war air travel."

I wish they were influential.

Modern corporate messaging is.... not influenced by these works.

American greatness has produced a society whose members know not what to do with the freedom and abundance that earlier generations secured.

There have been several posts on HN about this. I have commented every time I have seen one because I think the above quote is true. I also think it is one, of several, reasons things are going the way they are.

Many of my friends, coworkers, and relatives have fallen into the trap of being bored to death. They fill up their time with worthless empty "calories" of media consumption, ethanol, and doom scrolling. Almost all of them are unhappy. I think it is widespread to be like this.

But the problem is solvable.

There is no person, no person too busy, too tired, too poor, too disabled, too shy, too anything, who cannot find the time to do something that provides value to their life. They just have to, and this is the part that makes people mad, put down their phone and turn off the TV.

In every zip code in the entire United States of America, there is some group of people, somewhere, that is looking for someone to join them-- unless it is an isolated patch of remote wilderness where food and fuel need to be airlifted in or a remote island separated from the mainland by thousands of miles of sea there IS something.

You just have to get out, find them, and join them.

The last time something like this popped up I do what I usually do and listed non-work, non-social media things to do within an hour of my deceased grandparents' farm in central Southern Indiana. That's my benchmark-- if there are things to do here there are things to do everywhere because it is about as far from "the big city" you can get absent stretches of western desert or alaskan tundra.

Some quick searches found rod and gun clubs, knitting circles, small rural libraries with 3d printers going idle and anime clubs, three (yes, three) astronomy clubs, amateur radio clubs, gardening clubs, volunteer fire companies (who always, everywhere, need members), civic societies, book clubs, and even a small community performing arts center with a banging schedule of shows whose website was practically begging for people to come join them to be stage crew, performers, and set builders. Rural, barely-covered-by-a-cell-signal, southern Indiana, and those are just the things I found with online calendars full of events.

Being active in one's community outside of work, and deriving meaning not from work but your personal accomplishments and activities is a skill-- but it is a learnable skill.