I think you misspelled "invasive" there...

... running from the police.

Back when Congress and NASA both had the staying power to see a massive project through, they were the right group for the job. These days there's more than enough private-sector knowledge to go around, and plenty of private-sector money out there to help smooth out the stupidities of Congressional budget cycles. I bet if NASA had put all the money ever spent for Constellation, SLS, etc. into private launch contracts instead, we'd have 4-5 major launch providers running superheavy vehicles on a regular basis, *today*.

Microsoft has gone decades with "two teams" and one of them sucks:

• Windows NT - good
• Windows 98 - bad
• Windows 2000 - OK
• Windows ME - bad
• Windows XP - OK
• Windows Vista - bad
• Windows 7 - OK
• Windows 8 - bad
• Windows 10 - OK
• Windows 11 - bad

Every time they sunset one of the bad ones, there's no outcry, no issues, etc. Every time they try to sunset one of the OK ones, there's a major outcry and they end up supporting it through extended contracts for years.

If they had a clue, they'd just dismantle the non-NT development team and find a way to split the actual smart people on the NT team in half.

Bitcoin has exactly as much intrinsic value as a dollar bill - that is to say: none whatsoever. A dollar bill costs money to print but its sole value is in what it represents. Bitcoin costs *FAR* more money/energy to "make" but in the end still has no value other than what it represents, which happens to be a wildly volatile approximation of accepted fiat currencies, which are still fundamentally (since the drop of the gold standard) a collective fiction.

Reference: https://cointelegraph.com/news...

Since sand is about 60% denser, you'd need to remove about 135Gt of sand to offset the that year's melt (the figure above from https://www.carbonbrief.org/gu... is the *net* loss of ice). With the Antarctic ice shelf roughly 10x bigger than that and experiencing roughly similar melting rates, you'd need to remove almost 1.5 *tera*tons of sand yearly, or about 250 times what the OP report indicates, just to keep things on an even keel. Unfortunately, even that figure is going to be increasing.

I would argue that the initial reaction to it was just right, because we literally had no idea how bad it could be, and we needed to "flatten the curve" to keep our systems from being totally overwhelmed.

Where the "overblown" reaction came in I think has more to do with the relevant experts and agencies having to fight back against the stupider elements of society. In order to achieve a reasonable level of control on the spread to keep from running out of beds and supplies, those of us who understood the science and the deleterious effects of the behavior of those who *didn't*, had to overcompensate. This of course leads to a vicious cycle of "this is a hoax their[sic] trying to control us all!" leading to a rise in cases, and everybody else having to compensate more and more.

As far as schools, I agree a significant amount of damage was done to students for whom their parents never really cared in the first place. We only have one child (now 8) so I don't really have a comparison available, but I don't think he's really got any serious long-term problems because of it, other than a hatred for any large Zoom meeting in general (maybe not a bad thing?). Heck, it's well documented that the lockdown had a major *positive* effect - with kids at home, parents realized how much trouble many had concentrating, and also had both the option and availability of remote diagnosis of ADD/ADHD, leading to a lot more treated cases (our son among them) and a better chance at school in general going forward.

However, I don't agree that it should have only lasted a few months, for the same reason as above. Kids are walking Petri dishes, and if a single case shows up in school it *will* spread to other kids, who then take it home and spread it to their grandparents and other medically-fragile family, and off we go. If *everybody* had taken reasonable precautions, the number of initial vectors entering the classroom in the first place probably could have been reduced to a manageable level, and they probably could have gone back much sooner than they did. But by the time we eventually did reach the point where it could have been managed, the anti-vax idiocy had thrown down deep roots too, and there was no chance.

Unfortunately (though I have done very little research on this so far) it seems that we may be heading into another COVID+flu season with a pretty virulent (if not as dangerous, as expected by anybody who understands viral evolution) strain, and I'm already seeing the crazies come out of the woodwork "I will not comply!!!" and "they say its[sic] coming in September, its[sic] all PLANNED I TELL YOU!!!1!!1! Maui was D.E.W. and blue roofs will save you!" (somehow FB has decided I need to see a large amount of that bullshit, so I've been on a reporting spree....), so we're going to dive straight back into that cycle. <sigh>

Also known as "astrology"....

IMO unless you're looking at a full order of magnitude cost reduction in the making/growing of a given commodity, throwing VC-level finding at something is just throwing money away. VC funding is only "reasonable" for disruptors. The various tech bubbles also bear this out - one or two companies with VC funding for e.g. mailorder pet supplies is fine, but when mailorder pet supply companies themselves become a commodity, it's game over. Bubble collapses, VC's lose their shirts (darn), and a lot of people lose their jobs as the "excess" companies are found not to be viable.

Should farmhands be paid more? Yes. Should we pursue these enhancements to growing food to lower costs? Yes. Will the combination of those result in an order of magnitude gap in price of the output commodity? No. Therefore, is there any scenario in which dumping $100M's into them a good idea? No. But... is it a good idea to abandon the enhancements just because some idiot lost money? Absolutely not.

If Redbox wants to keep the Netflix DVD business, they need to implement a system where the extremely "deep" catalogue that Netflix has can be requested for transport to a local Redbox for pickup. It doesn't do anybody any good if the one copy of some obscure movie languishes in an extra slot of some machine on the other side of the country. They can skip the mailing process, but only if they can handle the logistics of relocating requested discs to a nearby machine without also impacting capacity for the "current" catalogue. Though I think there will still be plenty of customers who'd pay a premium over that for the discs to still be mailed to them.

Except this has nothing at all to do with fast-turn hobbyist PCBs. This has to do with large-scale manufacturing of boards for other products. Your $2/sqin for 10 boards wallet can talk all it wants, but it's the companies ordering 100,000 boards that actually matter when it comes to US capacity.

I agree Google should lose this one, as the lawsuit makes a particular distinction that I don't see other people in the comments actually grasping:

- If *I* post a video with illegal content to YouTube, *I* should be held liable for it, but YouTube itself should be held immune *unless* they fail to remove such content when notified.
- OTOH, if YouTube is "recommending" a video, Google/YouTube itself is the originator of that "content" (the link to the illegal video) and therefore *they* must be held liable for it.

That changes the dynamic from "must take it down when informed" to "never should have created it in the first place", at which point Google should be held liable for the "recommendation content" that directs users to illegal videos. As long as changes to 230 make that distinction clear - namely that Google's recommendations are in fact Google-originated content and that they own liability for it - I see no "end of the internet" at all.

Hmmm, it's exactly your type of "personality" that the majority of people are trying to avoid, so.... yeah.

The entire concept of an open-plan office has never made even the slightest shred of sense to me, and I've been lucky enough to almost never had to work in one. There's a *reason* cubicles were invented to block sight and sound of co-workers from causing distractions, especially in high-focus environments like development and programming.

<quote>Yes it taking form those who did and giving to those who didn't is redistribution. If you your 'universal' system distributes based on "need" rather than some other criteria, than its Marxism.</quote>

So, let's be clear here. Because you claim anything at all that balances or redistributes resources is "Marxism" and inherently evil, you:

* do not have have health insurance - that redistributes your premiums to other people
* do not carry insurance of any sort - see above
* do not drive on public roads - you should only be able to drive on roads you personally paid for, right?
* refuse to take unemployment benefits
* refuse Social Security - even though it's roughly based on your working life, there's still a lot of redistributing between recipients
* etc, etc, etc.

As somebody else pointed out, your worldview is ludicrously simplistic and naive. Good luck if you ever fall on hard times, hold to your rigid anti-"marxist" views and you won't last a week - food banks are an evil Marxist plot you know.