A zillion years ago, I had a contract position at Disney. But I was a temp worker, so they didn't give me a desk. Or a phone. Or a PC to use. Or any official way to check my e-mail. But somehow they DID give me Forest Admin credentials for their ENTIRE Active Directory.

I was there for six months and when the full time replacement admin finally showed up, they had armed guards escort me out. My replacement let me know after the fact that someone done fucked up setting up my user account. I could've fucked the entire company, so I the order was given that I be treated as hostile until I left the premises. Why they didn't just, I don't know, select and delete the group memberships my account wasn't supposed have, I do not know.

Last year some IT worker at Disney got in a lot of legal trouble by using his still-active credentials to make tiny changes to the printed menus used on Disney Cruise ships. He apparently thought investigations into how that happened would eventually lead to getting his job back, but honestly ruining a print run or three of menus is probably about the most malicious thing I would've guessed WOULDN'T get LEOs to your door. It's just nice to know Disney's IT hasn't gotten any better since I worked there.

You forgot the noise of unwrapping sweets from crinkly bits of cellophane.

The thing to understand is we're talking about sixth tenths of a degree warming since 1990, when averaged over *the entire globe* for the *entire year*. If the change were actually distributed that way -- evenly everywhere over the whole year -- nobody would notice any change whatsoever; there would be no natural system disruption. The temperature rise would be nearly impossible to detect against the natural background variation.

That's the thinking of people who point out that the weather outside their doors is unusually cool despite global warming. And if that was what climate change models actually predicted, they'd be right. But that's not what the models predict. They predict a patchwork of some places experiencing unusual heat while others experience unusual coolness, a patchwork that is constantly shifting over time. Only when you do the massive statistical work of averaging *everywhere, all the time* out over the course of the year does it manifest unambiguously as "warming".

In the short term -- over the course of the coming decade for example, -- it's less misleading to think of the troposphere becoming more *energetic*. When you consider six tenths of a degree increase across the roughly 10^18 kg of the troposphere, that is as vast, almost unthinkable amount of energy increase. Note that this also accompanied by a *cooling* of the stratosphere. Together these produce a a series of extreme weather events, both extreme heat *and* extreme cold, that aggregated into an average increase that's meaningless as a predictor of what any location experiences at any point in time.

Rapid Accelerated Disassembly?

Rapid Anomalous Disassembly?

Or did you mean R.U.D. (Rapid Unscheduled/Unplanned Disassembly)?

Starship burns methane, not RP1.

Between SuperHeavy and Starship, a fully-loaded stack needs 3500 tons of LOX and 1000 tons of CH4. So what do those cost?

Well, oxygen is easy to get from the atmosphere, so the cost of LOX is really just some equipment (which isn't terribly expensive to buy and maintain) plus electricity, and the cost ends up being dominated by the cost of electricity. It takes between 150 kWh and 800 kWh to separate and liquify a ton of oxygen, so if you're paying $0.10 per kWh, LOX costs $15-80 per ton. There are some other costs to handle and store it, so let's say $100/ton.

CH4 can be created many ways. The cheapest is probably to purify natural gas, which costs about $190 per ton (that site shows ~$5 per 1000 ft^3, and a ton is 38k ft^3). Add some costs for purification and cooling, so call it $250/ton.

3500 tons LOX * $100/ton + 1000 tons CH4 * 250/ton = $600k. Musk usually calls it $1M, which seems pretty reasonable, since they're probably not separating/purifiying it themselves and there transportation costs. 150 tons of payload to LEO with $1M worth of fuel means the fuel-only cost is $6.67/kg.

Nonsense. Our only experience with reusable orbital rockets is the space shuttle, which was an unsustainably-expensive and complex beast that was more refurbishable than reusable and had a payload one fifth of what Starship is designed for. It's all of the differences that aim to make Starship both reusable and cheap that make it hard. It's possible that it's just too ambitious, that we don't yet have the technology to make a cheap, fully-reusable (not refurbishable, reusable) orbital rocket with massive capacity. No one else has done it... no one else is even trying, that's how hard it is.

Failure is expected. If they managed to launch and land both Starship and SuperHeavy in less than a dozen test flights, that would be the surprise.

I'm surprised, and you should be too, if your view is evidence-based, because this is a new effect that was not predicted by any of the previous models, which already consider the melting permafrost, methane emissions and fossil fuel use.

I hate Wayland. Still so frelling buggy. So many unfulfilled promises. So many things that just worked, and worked well, under X have been broken for so very, very long. I hope the teenagers who repllied "pffft" to the graybeards when they said "windowing is hard, secure remote windowing is really hard," have learned their lesson, who replied "X is just too complicated" have now recognized that they have something worse, who opined "the API is too obscure" have been brought to awareness.

Just because something is new does not mean it is better. Keep repeating that. If an old, working system appears to be complex, there just might be good reasons for it.

I used to be able to run remote windows on kinda slow cable with reasonable responsiveness, back in the day, under X. I could even run a browser. I haven't been able to do any of that under Wayland; opening a remote browser window now takes *minutes*, if it works at all, and I've got fat pipes now, compared to back in the day. Wayland, from the user's perspective, has been and remains an unmitigated disaster.

I'm all for bringing back X. Maybe those guys at MIT knew what they were doing.

I suppose, but that's nothing like the world we live in. In our world, food is abundant at never-before-seen levels. Agricultural productivity has not only matched but significantly exceeded population growth. Unless climate change or some catastrophic event has large negative impacts on food production, directly or indirectly, it seems unlikely that the human race will ever again experience significant food scarcity.

I think it's more likely that approximation is necessary to complex, higher-level thinking, and that produces a certain form of error which is therefore inherent in all intelligences capable of it. This can be improved by adding subsystems that compute more precisely, just as humans do, using processes and equipment to augment their intellectual abilities, ranging from complex computation engines to pencil and paper (Einstein said "My pencil and me are smarter than me").

If they're still using VMWare's licensed software, are they a former customer? I think the answer depends on the details of the license and purchase agreements.

I think they'd argue that the audit is a condition of the license to use the software, which the customer already agreed to and which was not tied to an ongoing support contract. Depending on the details of the license agreement, this could pass legal muster.

It still seems like a stupid move on the part of Broadcom, alienating their customer base in the hope of extracting a few more fees. I wonder if they've decided that their virtualization business is soon going to be eaten up by OSS anyway, so they have to get what they can while they can.

The smaller it is:
* the easier it is to audit
* the less often it will need to be updated
This means that it will be less likely to break.

This claim doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

You need to actually look at the data here. Much of US healthcare is non-profit, at least on the provider side, and the for-profit provider institutions don't make that much money. People naturally then assume it's the insurance companies that are making out like bandits, except they're all publicly-traded so we can see exactly what their profit margins are and they don't remotely explain the high cost of healthcare. At worst, the for-profit model adds 5%, and there's no real reason to expect it to add even that. In most industries, for-profit is more efficient than non-profit, because it turns out that the competitive drive for profits drives costs down.

Again, look at actual numbers. What you'll find is that this explains basically nothing. Yeah, they have high salaries; take those and spread them across the patient base and you're talking about maybe 0.001% of healthcare costs -- and then only if you assume that these high salaries represent a pure loss, that an administrator getting paid a tiny fraction of that would the job just as well. If you assume that at least part of those high salaries are payment for services rendered, then the CEO salary overhead is even smaller.

Again, the pharmaceuticals are publicly-traded and they break out what they spend on advertising. Is is a lot in absolute terms? Yes. Is it a lot relative to the total amount of money we're talking about? No.

I'll stop here, but the same applies to everything else you mention. Yes, there is some waste due to the for-profit model, but it actually isn't that big. Our drug costs are high because we fund most of the research, because we can afford to. If we found a way to stop doing that, a lot of drug research would stop. Whether you think that's a good thing or a bad thing is something you have to decide. Personally, I think we get a lot of value for that money.

It feels like you should be able to point to just one thing and say "That's why healthcare is expensive in the US!" but you can't, really. The root cause is actually a lot of different things, and most of them have their roots in regulation (and, specifically, the way in which we regulate), rather than in a for-profit model.

If you want to make US healthcare both very cheap and very good, but only for those who can afford it, you should do the hard-eyed libertarian thing and go full-on for-profit, including removing the legal requirements that doctors treat people who can't pay, and eliminating Medicaid and Medicare and all of the complexity and cost they add. Also, make competition nationwide -- make provider and insurer licensing federal so states can't impose different requirements, and set up nationwide medical and nursing licensure processes that eliminate the ability of the AMA to artificially restrict supply. Quality would go up and competition would drive cost down for probably 70% of Americans. The other 30%, however, would be screwed, hard. Well, maybe 20%, or 15%, because prices would come down, making healthcare more affordable for everyone but free for no one.

But because we as a society will not leave the poor completely without care (not even free ER visits), the libertarian pure-market approach won't work. So, instead, we should go the other way and offer a national single payer option. This would not make healthcare cheaper by itself, but it would enable regulatory pressure to begin chipping away at all of the many sources of high prices. It wouldn't ultimately make healthcare as efficient, cheap or good as a pure market-based approach, and likely wouldn't make it as cheap as what other countries pay, but it's the best we're likely to actually achieve.

Look, this isn't complicated.

1. If you're going to claim you know what people should do to be healthy, you should have both formal education and experience in the space.

2. If you're going to be an administrator over a health organization, formal education and experience in healthcare are a very good idea, but what you really need is to know how to be a good administrator.

RFK Jr. wants and claims to be able to do #1, but lacks the knowledge, skills or experience to do so.

If RFK Jr. wanted and claimed to be able to do #2, that would be fine. He's maybe a little out of his depth in such a large and important organization, but if he could bury his ego and work hard at it, he could probably do it reasonably well. But the overriding requirement to do it well is to listen to his subordinates, who are experts in the field, while he's a lawyer with no medical or scientific training. But obviously he won't do that, because he thinks he does know better than the experts, i.e. he is trying do do #1, which he isn't qualified to do.