I think it's all about barriers to entry (no pun intended).

Ie, some woman you think is attractive enough to warrant sexual interest, has an interest in you for same, doesn't care you're married, you're able to engage in this without your wife or anyone else who might bust you suspecting anything.

I think if the barrier to entry was low, a lot more men would be tempted. But what's probably holding them back isn't so much their morals, but their own unwillingness to have sex with a less attractive woman or take many risks.

All the married men I know seem to be happily married and we've ALL had what-if conversations about affairs. Usually it seems to boil down to which set of totally unrealistic circumstances might arise and at which point the regret of not doing it is greater than doing it.

Like, I'm trapped in a hotel during a blizzard and by sheer chance so are two super hot movie stars and after killing time drinking they both decide they want me.

Short of that, other opportunities just seem unlikely or destined for serious nightmares.

It reminds me of something I read about when MBAs buy apartment buildings. They said if your building has a full roster of tenants, you're not charging enough in rent. You should be raising rents frequently enough that you always have 1-2 empty places that result from people who can't afford the rent increase.

It sure seems like it's a not entirely nuanced attempt to claim that Silicon Valley is struggling to suppress its desire to be willfully racist, conspiring with venture capitalists to ensure that black entrepeneurs are deliberately kept ot of Silicon Vallley and relying on discriminatory, elite colleges to make sure their "pipelines" are kept full of priviledged white people. Really?

I also can't help but ponder the contradiction in the institutional bias narratives. On one hand, institutional bias has kept the vast majority of blacks segregated, in desperate poverty, grossly uneducated and running through a revolving door of police harassment, arrest, and prison.

Yet in spite of this narrative (which I think is probably more true than false), the black community is still creating legions of talented professionals and entrepeneurs, so many that only discrimination can account for their inability to be represented proportional to their overall population among the ranks of Silicon Valley or corporate America as a whole.

Which is it? Either the black community is so healthy and well served that it's capable of producing all these entrepeneurs, IT experts, and other sundry well-educated professionals for corporate America to discriminate against. Or, the black community is shattered and oppressed by a system that can't give them a secondary school education and wants to keep them imprisoned. It can't be both.

I kind of want to agree with you that stopping it would be difficult due to market forces, but then why hasn't Eastern Europe become the new home of Google, Microsoft, et al?

They have a large and pretty well established educational system with lots of trained people from high quality educational systems that are not terribly unlike the US and have overall technical accomplishments similar to the US in terms of general engineering and science. They're physically close to Western Europe where so many of these companies already have significant business presences. The physical infrastructure is on par with the US (roads, electricity, housing, etc).

You might even argue that culturally they're more compatible, or at least less different, which could make for better social and organizational interfaces with US organizations.

The blog post was pretty content free about what exactly went wrong.

I would have guessed they would have the functional ability to either restore a storage snapshot to get back an entire LUN or a VM from a VM-based backup, and maybe they did.

I think the weight thing might be a wash. There's a metric ton of stern drives out there with one and, over about 30', two V8 engines, often big blocks. With large fuel tanks, 100 gallons and sometimes more isn't uncommon. I think if you swapped a couple of Tesla power trains for a pair of 496 cu in gas engines and their gas tanks you might even be lighter than you started.

For the use case of a lot of freshwater recreational boating, 30 miles range might be perfect. A lot of people don't go very far or run their engines for long -- they run to a cove to anchor for the day, then back to a slip where there is often a 30A outlet. If all they need is 10-15 miles per day and 15 knots will do, I could see this working.

Even if you made it Chevy Volt style with a small generator capable of providing a partial recovery charge, it'd still be less gas intensive than a pair of big block V8s.

Electric motors would also make for some interesting propulsion options, like pod drives with the motor in the pod (basically scaling down what a lot of big diesel-electric ships use now) and without a lot of the mechanical linkage losses of a mechanical pod drive.

Marinas with covered slips could cover the slips with solar panels and make the electric generation a lot greener. 75 300 sq ft slips in a marina should be capable of a couple hundred killawatts of power.

You'd have to accept the more limited cruising ranges and speeds, but honestly I don't see a ton of Sea Ray express cruisers on inland lakes going wide open. I see most of them doing 10-15 knots for a couple of hours -- there simply isn't that far to go period due to the size of the body of water and a lot of boaters just go anchor anyway.

I was thinking about that the other day.

It'd be interesting to see a Tesla powertrain used to replace the engine on a stern drive. If you were willing to accept some limitations in top speed and cruising range, it might be viable. A lot of inland lakes boats don't actually go very far and return to a slip with power connections.

I think it would be a weight savings which might be used to add battery capacity. Boats often have big-block engines and large gas tanks -- 120 gallons of fuel is half a Tesla battery pack and the electric motors are likely lighter than the ancient GM blocks Mercury uses.

The only thing that would have to be kind of thoughtfully designed would be protection from water. An engine compartment flooded with water is a headache, but not always a disaster. An electric system like that would be a problem.

If your attorney is advising you to go find another job and more or less ignore this, he is not the right person to be representing you. You are aware of the extent of the issue and the potential ramifications. Find a firm that also understands that and you all can make significant amounts of money.

It's actually not bad advice, IMHO. I think a lot of good legal advice is to avoid legal conflicts if you can do it without meaningful damages. In this case, the guy could just find another client and move on.

Sure, he could sue "and make significant amounts of money". But is that significant amount of money really recouping real damages on his part or just a chance to cash in? Plus it also seems that when lawyers take cases on contingency fees or in class actions, nobody really makes money but the lawyers.

With any government entity, you're facing an opposition with basically unlimited resources to defend itself. There's also the chance that someone high up the food chain and influential was the source of this policy. Those people can be dangerous -- what if this guy finds himself under investigation for some past project? Sure, it'd be bogus, but now you're defending yourself, too. And then there's the risk of getting blackballed from more work in that sector.

Back in the early 1960s, psychiatrist guided trips with LSD, Mescaline and Psilocybin were kind of a thing. I have an ancient copy of "The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience" and a common theme for many of the people who took LSD in controlled settings was a sense that it was a transformative experience.

Of course, that's probably what right wing nutjobs fear and why it got made illegal. Can't have the masses realize that religion, the rat race and the whole media-inspired hokum is bullshit.

My sense is that for severe bipolar, schizophrenic and psychotic people the meds all have pretty awful side effects. I can't even list the number of articles I've read about people who would rather live in dark hole, hallucinating and talking to Satan than NOT do that but put up with the side effects.

I think the challenge for bipolar patients is worse because when they quit taking their meds there is a transition period where the mania-dampening effects wear off over a period of time and during the transition the positive feelings (energy, positive mindset, sense of potential, etc) give them a false sense that they don't need the meds and by the time they start getting into trouble they're into a full-blown manic episode and out of control.

It's probably worse for a lot of bipolar patients because some of them end up on what sort of amounts to contradictory drugs, one pill to control the mania and another pill to control the depression, resulting not in feeling especially normal but kind of seesawing between mania and depression. It's like Leonardo DiCaprio in "Wolf of Wall Street" inhaling quaaludes to come down off all the coke he's doing and then doing a bunch of coke to overcome the quaaludes.

I feel like I know more than I probably should, but part of that is probably because her "boyfriend" slipped a phone to her in the psych ward and she called me (I don't know why, we were friendly but not friends, if that makes sense) several times so I think her family felt like I was owned some details.

Anyway, I don't have a great handle on her experience prior to this episode other than that she had been treated for it for a while and I'm sure her husband had struggled with her for a long time before this incident. The problem for any husband in this situation is that it's a community property state, so whatever debts she rung up would have been his debts. How's he supposed to help her if they're both broke because she spent all their money? Even with his insurance from the college he worked at, which is probably a better policy than many, mental health coverage is horseshit. A ton of out of pocket.

About the only other thing that could have been forcibly detaining her, heavily sedating her on ativan for a couple of days while re-starting her on her bipolar meds and keeping her detained until she recovered enough. Almost impossible to pull off without criminal charges, long-term resentment on her part and the cooperation of a psychiatrist to administer the meds via IV if she wouldn't take them. If it fails, well, now he's not just broke, but in prison.

The thing is she had a history of bipolar behavior which was stabilized by medication. I don't know why she quit taking it. It could have been a conscious decision or could have been the byproduct of going out of town without it, not taking it for three days, deciding she didn't need it and then the mania sets in and she *won't* take it because she feels so great.

I think a lot of people on meds for bipolar have this risk -- I think the onset of mania probably feels pretty darn good, filling them with energy and false self-confidence.

They had been married for 20-odd years, I'm pretty sure he'd spent a fair amount of time, money and effort helping her manage her situation. This wasn't the first or only time it had happened, but was probably the worst.

And in her situation when she stopped taking her meds, she goes off the rails and between her paranoia and crazy behavior he had to make a pretty difficult decision to either "stick with her" and have her ruin both their lives or finally decide enough was enough and divorce her just to save himself.

It's arguable that male on female spousal abuse is a mental illness, too, but nobody would suggest that the wife in such a situation should just stick with it, try to help him while he beats the hell out of her.

And the advantage her sister had was that she wasn't Theresa's husband, she was her sister. A longer, blood family relationship that couldn't feed into any husband/wife issues or paranoia. If I recall right, she also had the slight advantage that Theresa had a scene with the hotel staff (probably one of many) where the staff eventually called the cops and they got her put into the county psych ward on a 72 hour hold because of her obviously bizarre behavior. This psych hold was key in obtaining conservatorship by her sister.

I agree there can be abuse, but here's a counter example:

My neighbors across the street were a well-educated couple in their early 50s. Your stereotypical liberal, white academics. They had a son in college. Mike was a university professor and Theresa was a writer and an editor for a book publisher. We hosted several neighbors for a New Year's Eve party, including this couple. We had known all of them for a few years.

During the party, Theresa was unusually animated -- if I didn't know better, I'd thought she'd done a couple lines of coke. Fast forward a couple of months later, I see her pulling up to her house in a brand new hybrid sedan. I start talking to her and it's like, wow, Theresa, no more coke. She's, well, crazy animated. She's got a semi-paranoid story about how her husband left her. She's starting her own magazine. She's arranging a photo shoot in Nepal. She's just bought a $2000 recumbent bike. A $2000 set of downhill ski gear.

A week later, I see her again. This time "I've been staying at the Grand Hotel [a pricey, boutique hotel downtown] because I need Internet access and Mike made it so I can't get it at home."

A week after that, a really scary looking black guy is getting out of her car -- without her -- and is seen going in and out of her house, sometimes carrying stuff to load in the car. Her immediate next door neighbors try talking to the guy "Hey, how's Theresa?" and he's angry and threatens them. They call the cops, the cops detain the guy but they let him go after talking to Theresa on the phone "Yes, he's my boyfriend."

Fast forward a few weeks later and we see her ex-husband and we get the story. Theresa is bipolar. She's went off her meds around New Year's Eve. She got so bad and refused any kind of treatment or to take her meds, yes, he does leave her and basically files for divorce to protect himself from her.

By the time her sister -- working with lawyers -- is able to gain conservatorship of her, about a month later, after probably six weeks of trying, she's nearly bankrupt. When she and her husband divorced, their house had been recently remodeled and was owned free and clear. She stayed, mortgaged the place to cash him out and had blown through the $200k half of her equity plus another $50k in credit card debt. Fired from her job, the "magazine" a total fantasy. The black guy was literally some guy she met on the street outside the hotel.

Her sister finally gets her committed on a short-term basis and they get her back on her meds. By this time, though, she's done. She files bankruptcy, sells the house short along with almost all her possessions to try to pay off some debt. She ends up in a studio apartment somewhere, working part-time at a book store.

All of this happened in about six months. About 2 months into it, before the divorce is finalized, Mike had called her sister and said "Terry is out of control, we have to do something" but it was all futile. Had they been able to institutionalize her and stabilize her, she might still be living across the street with a manageable mortgage and some cash in the bank. But because it was so impossible, her life is basically over. Totally broke, divorced, career lost, friends alienated.

Disclaimer: My longest Perl programs were around 500 lines, designed mostly to process log files and provide some kind of selectable reporting capabilities.

Is this a function of Perl itself or a function of the people writing code adopting poor coding and commenting practices? Just because the language lets you use weird shortcuts to compact several atomic steps into one line, should you?

In my case, the scripts were dependent on the log files being in a specific format for parsing and analysis. A couple of times over the five year time I used them the vendor changed the log format, requiring me to modify the parsing and in one case make some non-trivial changes to a reporting summary due to differences in the log format.

I never had a problem going back to the script 18 months or so since the last time I edited it and understanding what I did or how I did it, thanks to generous comments and avoiding the kind of obfuscation Perl let you -- but doesn't require you -- to do.

I'm not a coder by trade and I thought Perl was very easy to learn. My sense is the complaints about Perl code are more a function of a language that's easy to learn and is thus adopted by a lot of amateur coders who then churn out a lot of code that they think is "made better" by some of Perl's shortcuts. I think it was one of those things where the user culture was such that the "smart guys" in the forums an newsgroups wrote obfuscated code and since they're elite, well, maybe I should to because it just might trim .025 seconds of execution time or something.

More complex languages are adopted by people with more discipline and experience and they just naturally impose more discipline on their coding style.