Stockton Rush is a rare example of a tech bro who didn't get to walk away from his monumental fuckup and leave the rest of us to clean up his mess. Fortunately for us, his collapsible submarine only murdered a few people, along with the "genius" himself. We're just lucky Rush didn't decide he liked reactors more than submarines. No doubt that deficiency in America's tech bro-volution will soon be rectified.

If I weren't an atheist, I'd say, "God help us all".

My understanding is that the exports are going out under the Belt & Road Initiative, so as much as possible is done with local labor (so the opposite of IMF/World Bank programs), and local people are trained to manage it as well. This is one of several reasons why Belt & Road is replacing IMF infrastructure funding throughout the Third World, rather than having KBR come in and build facilities to support the foreign extraction industries and then abandoning the project to decay they're creating both the technical and financial underpinnings of sustainable public infrastructure. (This is not coincidentally the way Gate Foundations projects work.)

The Chinese build nuclear reactors in around six years from breaking ground to connecting to the grid. They've licensed 30 of them to be built in the last three years, and are exporting 15 more. Unfortunately we're not allowed to buy their tech.

I'm sure it will be the Baptists, they specialize in going into cultures that they don't understand and insisting that theirs is the only way to live, like this moron:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

He's the 2018 winner of the Darwin Award.
https://darwinawards.com/darwi...

You joke, but having something definitive allows researchers to work filling in the gaps. The decipherment of Linear B was accomplished only after Alice Kober figured out the coding for 'and'. Now instead of a few big long stretches of text that you don't understand you have more pieces of smaller stretches which you can compare and contrast.

And there's the rub...the very idea of an art class is anathema to a lot of people who call the shots at all levels of education.

My thought too. It'd be hard to find a startup like this which didn't juice its numbers, even if they weren't already in the business of making fake stuff.

Likely a lot more of the traffic is coming from smart TVs, vacuum cleaners, irrigation systems and the like.

They're looking at the upcoming effect on buying for the Christmas season. If Walmart's credit card processor gets DDOS'd at that scale they'd better be hosted on AWS or Azure, because Bank Of America's network sure as hell won't be able to deal with it. Amazon will be all right, but Pinconning Cheese's online store would be blown out of the water.

My daily driver is a 2002 Tacoma RWD with a five speed and the smallest 4-banger they sold, that vehicle or its equivalent is just plain not available in the US. I know damn well there's a market for it, since people keep leaving notes on it asking to buy it. I do a certain amount of remodeling and a lot of gardening and landscaping so I need a pickup. I don't need something that drives, sucks fuel, and weighs as much as a 737 MAX, but that's what manufacturers have decided that I have to buy. The 2003 Tacoma was the size of the 2002 Tundra, and it's only gotten larger and the same with Mazda. Why? Because the profit level is higher, so they can make more money from fewer vehicles. (Don't suggest something like the Santa Fe, it's a toy to carry other toys in. No one is putting a yard of manure or 1200 pounds of landscaping blocks in one.)

On the other hand, I **can** buy the vehicle that I need in Peru or Malaysia, but I'm not allowed to bring it home of course.

I do agree that incentives (and dis-incentives) are typically superior to other forms of regulation.

For example, a higher property tax for unoccupied buildings (or a tax break based on occupancy) might help get things moving.

Though, in the case of commercial property, that might not be enough. A root cause is Bank officers handing out loans like candy and basing the value of the collateral property on "anticipated rent". The owners are now afraid lowering the rent will trigger a re-valuation and the bank demanding repayment or starting foreclosure. Meanwhile, those officers know of the situation but don't want to rock the boat until they can get promoted far enough away not to have it come back on them , or better, make it to retirement first.

In truth, forced re-valuation is most likely the only way to break that log-jam at this point. The market isn't going to grow enough to actually make those turkeys rentable at current asking.

For residential, a grace period on some of those rennovations in exchange for actual occupancy may help.

The problem is that the most-often taught English cursive style is bad. Spencerian cursive _is_ faster than block letters, because it allows you to smoothly move the pen. It's also slanted because slanted movements are faster than straight up/down lines.

The line has muddied, as consoles went USB and console accessories started being PC compatible.

Once upon a time, you popped a game cartridge into a purpose built specialty thing with bespoke capabilities to do the things the game companies wanted, with proprietary connectors and instant boot up and what you get is what you have.

On the PC side, you futzed with config.sys/autoexec.bat to have just the right memory layout, depending on if you needed the maximum conventional memory, ems or xms, and environment variables to match your dip switches.

Now a game console is an x86 box that takes some time to boot to an OS then you select an app, which probably is a game, and good chance it's developed with a game engine that pretty much equally supports Nintendo, PS4, and Microsoft ecosystem.

The PC side you just plug in, often the exact same accessory, and things automatically go. The UI of Windows can be obnoxious, but this is a prime mindset for Valve to take advantage launching their PC that's 10-foot optimized out of the box.

Nintendo held on to console-ness longer, with their Wii and Wii-U gimmicks, and their switch admittedly isn't an x86 box, but it's basically a gaming tablet, which is the other big thing eating into the casual gamer market.

And the US is responsible for doing the same thing in 1985 and 2008 (plus their unacknowledged tests from the 1970s). The US is also responsible for blocking multiple UN agreements against putting weapons in space. The much ballyhooed vote against putting nukes in space only came about after China and Russia attempted to prohibit **ALL** weaponry on orbit (which implies that we probably already have stuff up there).