I was with you until this heh. In my experience no they do not, they get a jr analyst to do it then take credit for the resulting reporting.

Even if the bosses aren't doing the spreadsheet work today themselves, 10-30 years ago they were the junior analysts who did the spreadsheet work.

No. SVB failed because the price of T-bonds fell. T-bills are very short-term, so are easy to manage against interest rate risk, and are highly liquid so are essentially as good as cash.

While there are plenty of scientist in the DOE, none of them are going to have any specialty in anything to do with Covid.

Wrong. The US national labs do lots of things not directly related to nuclear weapons. Consider, for instance, Lawrence Livermore's biodefense research.

If you get enough people together that value quality then over time, that culture will take hold in new people working and in the end they can get much closer to the target they seek.

That's adorable..

Meanwhile:

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Those '80s sitcoms used "Very Special Episodes" to preach. They were explicitly advertised as such, and anyway usually dealt with nonpolitical things like dangers of child molesters (Diff'rent Strokes) or teenage prostitution (The Facts of Life). Popular culture made fun of the "VSPs" if the messaging was too heavy-handed (the above child molestation two-parter, for example).

Nowadays the preaching is a) implicitly political, b) what shows are fundamentally built around, and c) anyone who expresses dislike of such is denounced as racist/sexist/LGBTQXYZphobic/fascist/[insert expletive here].

Look up which US state is the closest to Africa.

But it is such a different time now. Trolling has expanded in some people's minds to include mere disagreement.

I get perfectly civil postings marked troll. They just disagreed.

Yes, those of us who have been online for a long time remember when trolling was intentionally saying something silly/ridiculous to see how many gullible people would fall for it.

In full disclosure, I do allow myself what I call "Saturday Night CurbStomping" posts when someone is being a particular asshole. This is kind of like a service to the community, and I try to keep it amusing. Weird thing is those don't often get modded as flamebait, because they are full on napalm operations.

I know what you mean. Again, those of us who have been online for a long time know how to unleash the full force of our argument in a thorough but civil manner. It's a skill that those newer can't/won't use, because they'll immediately jump to calling the other person a Nazi or equivalent epithet. (That's not to say that calling others a Nazi didn't occur back in the day; Godwin's Law was created for a reason. But in the '90s most viewed someone who invoked the Nazi/Hitler comparison as having lost the argument.)

And the weird folks with the psychosexual problems who took over many of the groups chased normal people away.

Yes. A description I heard a while ago of the long-time problem posters on Usenet seems very apt: "50 year olds with undiagnosed autism". I wrote more about this on Hacker News.

When I was a Comcast customer and visited the local Comcast store, I noticed how the store (and the AT&T store next door) emulates the Apple Store aesthetic: Huge space, lots of room, sofas and tables. There are already giant TVs showing content available on Comcast channels. Actually selling the TVs themselves is no big step.

They will come. Also when you print it, require each claimant to come in and pick up a bank check in person with an ID. Hell forget the check just require a person with an ID to appear before depositing the money.

Requiring an ID is "racist".

I took a course in speed reading, learning to read straight down the middle of the page, and I was able to go through War and Peace in 20 minutes. It's about Russia.

—Woody Allen

And yet, I'm 100% sure you have spam filtering on your mailbox.

Spam is not legal. In the US there is the CAN-SPAM Act; no doubt other countries have similar laws.

... and 2.99 billion of them no longer get system updates

Do you think an auction process, in which those who will be paid the highest salaries are given visas, would help end the body shop abuses?

GE did create a competitor. GEnie existed for years, quite successfully.