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Comment Re:So! The game is rigged! (Score 2) 570

Personally I have almost no debt, just my car payment.

We opted out the debt economy years ago. We froze our credit reports and paid cash for our last house, car and motorcycle. We could have some dinky medical bill or something that slipped through the cracks in collections and not even know it. We might not even find out about it until we update our address when the credit freezes expire and we need to renew them.

You don't need credit cards, car loans, or mortgages. We're living proof. We fly, stay at hotels, rent cars all the things people think they need credit to do. We don't pay more for car insurance, though we do have the occasional utility deposit.

Nothing you can buy with credit feels as good as opting out of the debt economy.

Comment Re:already done (Score 2) 133

Given the situation, the outcome was quite easily predictable.

If it was that easy FP&L would be making plans to close Turkey Point instead of expand it. That whole site is going to be underwater and, before that happens, there's going to be a storm surge high enough to swamp it. That's a guarantee which seems to fly in the face of your supposition.

I worked in the nuclear industry for nearly a decade. What I saw with my own eyes could best be described as straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel.

Comment Not effective (Score 5, Insightful) 217

This kind of mass data collection on everyone is a huge waste of resources. The more people you add to a database, the less relevant it becomes for anything. People who know trade craft, know how to cover their tracks and pollute big data. So this is basically a giant database of amateurs, stupid crooks and ordinary civilians.

Another problem with big data are the large numbers of errors. I've run big databases where users were motivated to provide good data and there were still gaps in the data, misspelled names, numbers transposed, and some entries locked out because they were trying to enter duplicate primary keys. Travel data is coming in fast, I can't imagine what the exception reports look like every day.

Comment This illustrates my problem with creationism (Score 1) 77

Religious people claim we were designed by god That seems hard to believe when engineering improvements like this can be made so easily. Our skulls are too soft, our field of vision and range of motion is fairly limited. If the Great Engineer in the sky really did design human beings, it seems like he or she could have done a better job. We have features that give us a competitive advantage over other animals, nothing more.

Comment I'm one of those people (Score 1) 154

and because it's so realistic it can make some people (not everybody) feel nauseated if they start doing it for extended periods of time.

I had to quit playing FPS games for that very reason. I would get nauseous after a few minutes until I started taking ginger pills, which also work for me on boats. Can't rule out that it's not purely psychological but they worked whatever the reason.

Apparently ancient Chinese mariners used to use ginger for seasickness, but they all died anyway and didn't respawn. Obviously didn't do them a lot of good, did it?

Comment Everybody skips the interesting bits (Score 4, Interesting) 299

Not only did Harold get a dose that was way beyond the LD50 for humans, he lived for 11 more years and died of unrelated causes. His pastor had to convince people he was safe to be around.

Harold was far from the only Tri-Cities nuclear celebrity. There were also stories about guys who would drop their pants and squat over reactor vents until their balls got a little burned. Think of it like a nuclear vasectomy. I never documented any of those stories but there were a lot of them and worse.

One thing I did personally document was that, adjusted for age, the cancer rate for people who worked at Hanford was not statistically higher than that of the general population.

I achieved my own personal notoriety there by accidentally leaving my dosimeter in my shaving kit and leaving that on an orange Fiestaware platter that was so hot it would light up a pancake meter on three scales. A few weeks later I get a panic call from Rad Services asking if I'm okay. Hehe. God, I hated that place.

Comment Bigger than a tiny house (Score 4, Insightful) 118

Those structures are bigger and sturdier than a tiny house with the added advantage of being made from recycled building materials.

The real question is structural strength and integrity and what agents are they using to make the mix dry fast. The Chinese could be using some nasty chemicals that wouldn't fly in building materials over here (Chinese drywall anyone?).

Still, if the units end up being even roughly equivalent to poured concrete, I could see living in a printed house, no problem.

Comment Not news for anyone in the business (Score 1) 121

Talk about a headline from the No Screaming Shit Department, of course happier programmers are going to do a better job. There's no motivation to do your job well when you're miserable. That's why the team dynamics are more important than individual skill. I've seen one hot-shot programmer with great coding skills and horrendous personal skills totally undermine the team dynamic. No amount of skill makes up for being an arrogant ass.

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