Unless you want to spend several months a year of your life auditing inefficient "charity" organizations and trying to make judgments about whether they're doing it right and spending your dollars wisely...and hey if you think you're good at that you should probably start your own charity. But if you do, everyone will expect you to work for free. It's a viscous circle.

Donate your time, you'll meet people too.

Unless you're a multi-billionaire, then start a foundation and direct where the money goes.

Well, hopefully Amazon is not doing what TigerDirect was and may still be doing, re-editing or "correcting" customer reviews, particularly negative ones.

That's you, but thats not the majority, and I bet most mothers would believe the posting, even if it was retracted. The harm has been done.

I think the legislators are all dumb, and think that the population is as dumb as they themselves are. Start with temperature. For 2 years mention both Celcius and Faharenheit, and after 2 years (or even 3) drop Faharenheit. Thats what Canada did. We transitioned to metric long ago, and thats helped Honda, Toyota and non-American car manufacturers to get a foothold in Canada and elsewhere. We have tools designed for metric measurements, not tools designed to American standards.
We do keep certain traditional sizes, such as a 4'x8' panels, and 2x4 inch lumber. But the houses are constructed with Metric measure. And new construction is done with prefabricated panels, measured and machined using metric measure, and with the panels fitting together precisely.

Your humor is very sarcastic. Sadly for the USA, almost any place is better than Silicon Valley. Why even Fairbanks Alaska or the Florida keys would be better. Most other US states, Europe, Canada, Latin America, India, Malaysia, and everywhere else have the talented engineers and imaginative people who can do better or equal.

Yes

about 50 years ago I worked with APL, It treated the following n/n = 1 for any perfectly eqal numbers (float, integer, bit, double...)

If n,m were approaching zero, as even 0.000000009/0.000000009 it was still considered as 1.000000000 (or 1)
So, whats the big deal?

Of course, for n not equal to m and m, extremely close to zero, a zero divide error could be raised.
APL had a variable called []CT (quad-ct ) representing global comparison tolerance. It affected divide by zero.

QuadCT allowed comparisons of two floats to be considered equal if their difference was less than QuadCT. That decision affected n/m for floats.
if abs(m - n) QuadCT then m =n and therefore n/m in this case was equal to 1.

Just loved that decision in the language.

The whole problem strikes me as one of human preferences, not technical requirements. There's absolutely no reason not to use our atomic clocks and just count number of seconds since some starting point. The desire to have the sun directly overhead at "noon" is a human one, divorced from any technical requirement. All of science, computing, networking, telecommunications, would be much happier if we didn't continually redefine time like this.

So let watch manufacturers and clock-app manufacturers deal with this, when reporting time for human consumption. It shouldn't be a problem for NIST and government bodies. NIST should instead be reporting Earth's orbital parameters as time delta from noon, as they change over time, not conflating time itself with Earth's orbital parameters.

This is the way GPS, Loran-C and TAI handle time, and it's the right thing to do.

Maybe you should switch banks. I can't speak for the UK, but it never ceases to astound me how many people whine about banking in the United States when there are thousands of small community banks you could be doing business with. It's a tough industry and the little guys are facing setbacks on a daily basis, but they're still there if people are willing to look for and do business with them.

In the day and age of remote deposit there's no reason to do business with a large national bank. I get waived ATM fees worldwide, no account fees of any sort, and competitive loan and deposit rates, all from a little regional bank that you've probably never heard of unless you're from my small hometown.

For the life of me I don't understand why Chase, Capital One, or Bank of America have any retail customers at all. They bend people over on fees, structure your transactions to obtain yet more fees, and generally do all sorts of nefarious things while offering no real advantage over their smaller competitors.

You're implying that people of the same ethnicity find it easier to agree politically. Reality suggests that's far from the truth. The Finns fought a pretty nasty Civil War, even by Civil War standards, within living memory.

The reason the Finnish system works on consensus has to do with the structure of their political system and the rules in their Parliament. I suggest reading Finland: Myth and Reality; it's a bit dated, most of the foreign policy stuff lost relevance after the Cold War ended, but the domestic discussions are still applicable.

Hey, I hang out with a lot of creative people. Not Elon Musk, but Steve Jobs for more than a decade, and lots of people at least as smart that you don't know. They can be really brilliant, and successful, and they can still make really stupid mistakes and sell them to the rest of us pretty well because they believe in themselves completely and they have a track record. I've done that too.

That's the hyperloop. Something Elon never meant to stand behind (and still really isn't), just put out there to torpedo a worthy project that he didn't believe in.

Anyone who looks at the hyperloop design can see it's not a no-brainer. It has safety issues up the wazoo :-) It's going to take a long time to get right.

Meanwhile, little Switzerland can have incredible trains everywhere and the United States can't get it together, and unlike with rockets and cars Elon's not helping this time. And I am not sure that the "lease" part of his solar business is a great thing for the world either.

Although the hyperloop is possible and might even be practical someday, let's please be honest about the reason it was created. Elon Musk just wanted to kill the California high-speed rail.

That might have been OK if there was a hope that we could actually replace it practically with a hyperloop. But given the history of bleeding-edge rail - ride any maglevs lately? We haven't even had much success with monorails outside of theme parks and Las Vegas - we don't really have any working system to replace high-speed rail. Hyperloop should really be called "Pipes that carry People" and we need decades of work on it before considering intercity lines.

Its not a question of cheapness, or under capacity. If the peak occurs for 5 minutes in the day, and then there is only 40% utilisation of the network, do you add 50% capacity for the 5 minutes per day. Consider the slowdown during the 5 minutes as being a factor of 5 or 10 versus normal non peak response times.

I think that the dowloading of an iso file should be throttled. Perhaps in place of x bits per second download, it is x/2 per second. or perhaps the wget, curl, or other download fire transfer system should be self throttling. You are sharing a resource. An ISO download at supper time is an abuse.
 

Your suggestion is a good long term solution. Will that solution bring down the cost of food? Israel has a worse solution, and wastes far far less water. They bring water to individual plants via piping and drip irrigation.