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Comment Re:The Dangers of the World (Score 1) 784

At 10 I could bike anywhere I could reach. I had my own boat, and a gas account at the marina, and would frequently be out all day.

I usually bussed to school, because it was a couple of miles, but I could and did walk or bike it fairly often.

I'm astonished at how coddled most children are, these days. No wonder everyone's scared all the time.

Comment Re:and when BSD moves to systemd... (Score 5, Informative) 403

The comparison to Windows NT is because systemd insists on binary logs, takes over vast chunks of functionality that it has no business touching, and makes it basically impossible to debug problems. It makes the experience of administering the server much more like administering Windows than administering Linux should be.

Comment Re:What special about beliefs if they're religious (Score 1) 894

You have to protect religion, or else certain sects of Christians pass laws that oppress everyone else just for believing in a slightly different sky faerie than they do, or even for not believing in sky faeries at all. Protecting everyone's beliefs or the lack thereof is the only way to keep the meddlers out.

Comment Re:Classroom participation (Score 1) 249

My grade 12 math teacher basically gave me a 0, dropping me 20%, for participation and attendance. Despite having a 95% test average that term. So for the rest of the year I brought no work to class and just sat and read a paperback. I figured I couldn't do worse than 0. Man that pissed her off.

Probably not the best way to handle it, but screw teachers who punish good students for not doing things their way.

Comment Re:Why bother? (Score 1) 421

All utterly irrelevant, since virtually any real application behind that is going to be doing at most a few hundred requests per second per core.

Web server differences are only relevant for serving tiny static files, or possibly a messaging app with millions of otherwise cheap requests coming in.

Also, most sites offload image and static file serving to a CDN.

I guarantee that 99.9+% of real sites will see no performance difference between Apache and Nginx.

Comment Re:Luddites (Score 1) 688

We DO have very low cost consumer goods. Most of it's crap and breaks in a few years, but it is certainly cheaper than ever. Clothes are basically free, electronics are super cheap. Appliances and furniture are pretty cheap.

The only things going up signficantly in cost are:

      housing - driven by government regulation, artificially low interest rates, and a large labour component in construction

      automobiles - seemingly driven by government regulation, but also by artificially low interest rates that have allowed feature-itis. Automation is widely used and you would think there would be low cost cars around as a result, but instead we get expensive tanks with 8 year loans.

    health care - huge labour costs, resistance to automation. In my country it's all unionized government labour too, which means the cost growth is practically unconstrained. In the US, cost growth is driven by monopoly practices that would be illegal in other industries and cost-shifting to third parties

  education - all labour costs. Also artificially low interest rates and government regulation of student loans has made large amounts of money available to people who shouldn't qualify to borrow anything. That in turn has enabled schools to siphon off all that borrowed money. Universities and bankers get rich, students get lifetime debt servitude, what's not to like.

  energy - well, we're running low on cheap fossil fuels. Not much to be done about that. It's tough to improve on "stick a pipe in the ground and free energy flows out".

Basically, any industry with a large labour component, or which experiences heavy regulation, or worse, both, has become increasingly expensive relative to how cheap everything else is becoming. Financialization and the suppression of interest rates have enabled that growth.

Labour gets more expensive as taxes get higher, and taxes get higher as more people lose their jobs or move into much lower paid work where their health care or transportation costs are subsidized by those still working higher paid jobs.

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