Argentina really only has its internal politics to blame. Unlike the rest of Latin America, they weren't just a hacienda for United Fruit agricultural exports, they had a large, Eurocentric population (and in the first half of the 20th century, probably a European *educated* population) and a reasonable basis for creating a self-sustaining internal economy neither overdependent nor incapable of exports or imports.

Extractive economies, especially oil states, never seem to use the financial windfall to develop non-oil economies. It's almost always used for dubious modernization efforts (ie, building underutilized skyscraper cities), buying poltiical loyalty, building up an unsustainable and outsized military or subsidizing prices for staple foods, fuel and substandard housing.

All of these probably have convincing arguments -- you can't attract business without modern office space (and bonus, we get to develop a construction sector that can build more than cinderblock and tin shacks), you need political stability to develop an economy, you need military security from your neighbor (plus developing military bases furthers your construction industry goals, making weapons improves your manufacturing base), and making food, fuel and housing available *now* is both popular and a humanist policy.

But they almost never develop sustainable *economies* that do anything else. I can't think of one thing Saudi Arabia does besides sell oil and they have probably taken in a trillion dollars in profit. Given quite literally "more money than God" why haven't they been able to buy their way into pharma, water purification, semiconductors, information technology, polymers, agriculture, shipbuilding, or any other industry that has grown up in the last 75 years? They have been politically stable, have good trade relations with the West and are at the geographic crossroads between the East and West.

Yet all they have to show for it is a bloated aristocracy, ridiculous overbuilt cities, a high tech military they can barely operate let alone fix or make parts for.

I think the fear aspect is hard to over state, especially if a threat of violence is made and especially if the threat of violence is actually demonstrated with even the slightest show of *actual* violence coupled with an obvious power imbalence, like a larger, stronger man grabbing a woman by the neck.

I don't remember where I read it or even if it is actually true, but I have read that women's vaginas respond physically to accomodate intercourse even when they don't want it, some kind of leftover (well, leftover in a modern sense) mechanism to protect them from serious injury from forced intercourse.

If that's true, then the enitre response pattern I hypothesized about the woman I originally posted about makes sense and is believable.

I think strange, convulsive, politics could be a major component of this. Argentina in particular could have been on par with Western Europe if it wasn't for the poltiical insanity from the 1950s onward.

When they build tunnels for trains now, don't they use those giant boring machines that excavacte the tunnel and line it with concrete now? The machines I think are giant not because of the digging itself but because they're usually boring a tunnel big enough to run a parallel set of subway-sized cars through. Add in cathedral-sized chambers for regular stops and its easy to see why its so expensive.

What would happen if they scaled that same excavation technology down so that the tunnel was something like 2 meters in diamater for a miniature train capable of just carrying parcels? The trains could run on rubber wheels following the tunnel. The cars could be flatbeds that carry miniature containers which could be inserted and removed via basically elevator shafts that grabbed them from above, eliminating the need for significant excavations for stations.

Powering it would be another issue, but maybe they could be powered by battery packs swapped at container insertion points or some kind of induction power cable pulled through the tunnel.

I just read a history of the Mississippi before the Civil War and I seem to remember something about large bones being discovered in giant burial mounds found near the flood plain.

I think they also mentioned that before the Corps of Engineers "tamed" the Mississippi (ie, turned it into an navagation canal) the regular flooding and natural erosion of the wild river would periodically expose giant bones, although those I believe were attributed to dinosaurs.

Wow, that is impressive. I doubt I'll ever see that much write intensive flash in one place. We added a flash tier to a seed install (dumb customer only bought a single 15k tier and wondered why performance sucked) and I can never get over how fucking outrageously expensive the flash tier costs. I think it was pushing $100k.

I'd wager that mid range flash like the Samsung 850 Pros are getting cheap enough that double parity, double hot spares and replacing disks regularly due to burnout is probably cheaper for nearly the same performance than buying write intensive flash for all but the most intensive applications.

It's too bad that inexpensive SAN controllers rely on such cheap processors and NICs. I think it's getting to the point where fairly dumb controllers and bulk prosumer ssds will outperform tiering controllers.

It's a good question and I can't say why for any concrete reason other than the vibe I got from her personally and knowing her boyfriend.

She struck me as a pretty demure; she didn't give off any kind of a sexual vibe or even that she was especially outgoing or adventerous. I just didn't believe she had the personality type that would be at all likely to get drunk and have a one night stand, especially with a coworker and especially not cheating on her boyfriend.

I didn't get a "blow by blow" account of her experience, but the same kinds of personality traits made me believe that once she woke up with the guy pulling her pajamas off she probably just kind of laid there and let him do what he wanted.

I've only had one other woman tell me about being raped in detail and what she described was pretty much the same. A guy knocked on her door, forced his way in and the shock and the fear were so great that she basically just went limp and he raped her and left. It was literally over in under five minutes, including the minute ripping her clothes off and pulling up his own pants.

I'm guessing this is pretty common for many rape situations. The expectation of fighting and screaming is probably less realistic than just freezing from fear. There may also be some fear that if they struggle that the guy will beat the shit out of them and that the intercourse will be even more painful.

Rightly or wrongly, the police may be influenced by their familiarity with the criminal justice system and circumstances that were reported. So many rape accusations boil down to a he said/she said situation that would be impossible to get charged by a prosecutor, let alone result in a convicton in court.

A woman I used to know was raped by a coworker. The woman and her roommate were waitresses at a restaurant and bar. They had the company Christmas party at the restaurant and the rapist was one of the employees. Everyone had too much to drink and the rapist was too drunk to drive and asked if he could crash on their couch. They said sure. In the middle of the night, he crept into her room and raped her and left the apartment afterwards.

In the morning, she told her boyfriend who insisted she go to the police who were basically dismissive of the claim, not because they thought she was lying but because there was no way to conclusively prove it was rape. There were witnesses who saw the three of them (the woman who was raped, her roommate, and rapist) voluntarily leave together. All had been drinking. The apartment wasn't forcibly entered. The rape itself didn't involve enough violence that she had bruises, scarring or signs of a physical struggle.

The cops said they would bring him in for questioning but that unless he actually admitted raping her outright, what would almost certainly happen is that he would say that after they got back to the apartment she invited him into her room for sex and that he left afterwards and that the rape accusation was that she felt guilty because she had a boyfriend. And because there was no way to disprove this version of events, the prosecutor wouldn't even file charges. They also said the presence of the roommate would work against her, since he would claim that since her roommate didn't wake up she wasn't fighting or resisting.

Are the cops insensitive? Maybe, but what can they do when there's no evidence?

I believed her personally because I knew her fairly well, but if I think about it too long even I can start to enterain doubts. Why was there no physical struggle? Why didn't she yell and wake her roommate? If I was a cop confronted with this a lot, I can see why they come off indifferent.

We sell and install Compellents where I work and AFAIK the models with flash tiers are marketed at 300k IOPS max. 1M IOPS sounds like a benchmarking flaw.

Maybe it would be possible to get 1M with multiple SSD enclosures uitlizing multilple SAS backend loops, but something tells me it would have to represent the sum of many workloads, not what would be possible for a single workload once you account for some latency associated with synchronizing dual controllers and the front end fabric connectivity limitations and RAID computation. Plus it would be outrageously expensive.

But the gimmick of Compellent I don't think is necessarily with single workload maximum throughputs, it's maximizing throughput relative to total system capacity with automatic tiering to cheaper disk.

I think the irony of this model, though, is that as SSD prices fall, capacities increase and general reliability goes up this whole model kind of falls apart. Why would you even bother tiering to slow rust if you could just use all flash? It greatly decreaes the software complexity, power consumption, etc.

The bigger problem becomes bus connectivity to lots of SSDs. A 24 slot shelf of SSDs seems like its pushing the envelope of SAS bus connectivity.

It looks like a serious degredation of peformance from the perspective of the difference between what the drives should be capable of versus what the bug limits them to, but the GP poster sort has a point in that the drive's performance doesn't seem to be dropping even to the level of a USB3 flash disk let alone a mechanical SATA disk.

Obviously nobody but the actual user of a specific setup would know whether or not it was burdensome, but I would be kind of surprised if it was generally noticable. I see a lot of commercial SANs in use by medium sized enterprises as backing stores for VM host clusters consisting of TBs of data used by SQL, SMB, Exchange that don't exceed 1000 IOPS and 75 MB/sec.

If this represents a real business workload, I would be kind of curious to know what kind of a workload you'd have to present to a stripe set of SSDs to see the effects of this performance bug. The linked article shows some kind of performance graph hitting a low of 100 MB/sec sustained read. A raid 0 stripe would be close to 200 MB/sec sustained read at worst. Maybe you'd notice it, but it seems like a pretty unusual workload that would expose this.

That's because you greasy limeys don't bathe. If you cleaned up more than once a fortnight or so your water usage would go way up,

After reading this quote, I didn't need read anymore.

And I actually think this is a major contributor to why pot remains illegal. Why bother with the treadmill?

It's kind of far, I know, but it would still be cool to see.

The Middle East has never been at peace and never will. I wish we'd stop meddling and let them solve their own problems their own way and if we don't like it, well tough shit.

Isn't this what we're doing or at least allowing to happen? Finally getting to the point where the Islamists can fight their own version of the 30 Years' War?

Syria is a shredded mess, Lebanon has more factions than LA has street gangs, Iraq is only viable as a state if you close one eye and look at it sideways, Iran's economy is teetering while still trying to maintain some semblance of regional influence in Lebanon, Iraq and now Yemen. Even the Saudis are getting into the game with their air campaign in Yemen and the desire to import a Pakistani mercenary army to fight on the ground.

The way it's going, the Middle East will be as spent and rudderless as it might have been after one of the Roman/Parthian stalemates.

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