I meant to write that the discrepancies between monthly, early reporting, and later, quarterly reporting, have been a feature for years. Maybe decades. Much of this is structural, survey reporting v statistical reporting, but it's there. An astute observer would generally discount monthly reports knowing thewy are regularly revised in the negative.

I suspect those who have a serious, fiduciary interest in using these reports do indeed rely on the later, quarterly, 'revised' reports, and spend a fair amount of time explaining to their clients the problems with monthly flash reports. It's the problems of restating several months' worth that is of more interest to me. This is an issue of trust.

Yes, fair enough.

"early estimates have been consistently too *optimistic* for many months."

Maybe for many years, in total.

You trust 'them' to operate ML systems better and more objectively than any other system?

Software isn't true, ethical, honest, or trustworthy. Those qualities are what programmers and their employees exhibit. Or don't.

I get concerned when the revisions exceed certain margins. Especially when they restate by 25-50%.

Actually, does anyone who needs accurate data believe the initial reporting for any month? Doubt it.

I only care insofar as truth matters? Does it to you?

And I don't care what pronouns THEY use; I'm going to use the one that's descriptively factually appropriate. If it upsets them, maybe their bitch is with reality, not me.

I don't give the faintest shit what sort of role-playing someone wants to do in their life.
OTOH If a dude in a dress pretending to be a woman walks into the bathroom while my wife or daughters are in there, I'll make sure he's exiting that bathroom immediately. IDGAF about his kink.

You mean the democratically elected president and congress?
"Authoritarian" does not mean "someone who disagrees with me that is in power".

Maybe if your team stopped loosely throwing around terms like 'authoritarian' 'fascist' and 'nazi' because you're either disingenuous or too stupid to know what real ones look like, fewer people would get assassinated by your psycho crazy allies?

You want to see actual authoritarianism? Watch all 9 hours of Shoah, maybe you'll grow up a little at the same time?

Fully agree.

Pollsters generally are finding people are growing unresponsive to polling generally. Their task relies on the largesse of people's voluntary participation and that's been badly damaged by:
- fatigue: ain't nobody got time for that shit anyway.
- robocalls: nobody, I mean nobody, is going to wait to hear if it's a "real" survey or some marketing bullshit
- political everything: elections now never seem to end
- deliberate skew to polls: I don't know about you, but the last handful of times I bothered to listen, the polls were skewed in a way a 3 year old could tell the way they "wanted" you to answer. "Who will you vote for, our guy that loves puppies or that despicable Nazi?"
- deliberate skew to answers: it's a well-demonstrated effect that one side of the political fence in the US *loves* to overshare their opinions about everything, and the other tends to tell pollsters to fuck off.* This leads to a strong political cleave-line in the responses, and the near-impossibilty of getting an actual representative sample. On this basis, if I were asking a polling company to answer a question for me, I'd be highly suspicious of any answer essentially coming from one voice, not a bellcurve of the population generally.

*fwiw, when I do amuse myself by not hanging up immediately, I generally give them an answer based on a coinflip, to taint their data with noise as best I can. It's mildly amusing to do this as I have to often hastily give contrarian answers to the previous answer I just gave them. Call it an exercise in rhetorical nimbleness. I hate polls.

This one in fact, saying that survey response rates for official UK data had collapsed from 35% to 5%.

Survey fatigue is one, but I think people are also more wary about having their opinions attached to data these days. At least for formal, official data anyway, obviously social media is still going strong. I think a factor is that people aren't sure how it's going to be used and if it could come back to them in some way.

The USB-A should be relocated between the Centronics and RS-232 ports. Save space by mounting it vertically!

bizarre as it sounds, try Walmart's house brand, Onn.

they'er the only brand (other than apple itself) that I've tried that consistently works (and I've tried most if not all of the major brands).

They usually last until I do something stupid (leave behind, catch in hinges, drop laptop cable first, etc.). And the price is right, too--most are $6-$10.

>I'm hoping to see the first recycled reactor core! ;^)

c'mon, now.

*everyone* knows that reactor cores blow into a fireball of plasma when you eject them, as soon as they're far enough out that the writers think the ship can (almost) plausibly escape! :)

hawk

This is retarded.

1. It isn't for profit healthcare that is the problem, it's THIRD PARTY PAY.
2. I don't use third party pay, ever, for healthcare. I've been insured nonstop for over 30 years, and NEVER ONCE has my insurer paid my doctor.
3. Even when I've had emergencies, I still called around, negotiated a fair cash up front rate, paid cash up front, and billed it to my insurer. My cash up front rate was sometimes below any co-pay negotiated with my insurer, lol.

I just recently had some elective surgery that would have cost me about $2000 on my annual deductible, but I was able to cash pay a negotiated rate of $400 including a follow-up "free". I submitted the $400 to my insurer and they reimbursed me.

Third party insurance exists because YOU VOTERS demanded the HMO Act of the 1970s, which tied health care to employment, and then employers outsourced it to third parties.

Health care is remarkably cheap in the US (cash pay, negotiated) and I don't have to wait months to see a doctor when I call and say I am cash pay. They bump me up fast.

In 2000-2002 I managed security and infrastructure for a high school in Maine. This was a school with many very talented and diligent students. And some were learning to program in Turbo Pascal.

Someone either decided to, or did not notice the risks of, included the network libraries, something that was optional. I asked the publisher, and they confirmed, most school systems did not ask for that.

Sure enough, some students succeeded in writing a new GINA, intercepting attempted logins, and boom - they got a teacher's signon credentials to the NetWare server etc. And wasted no time rewriting some rows in the school grading and scheduling app. Much hilarity ensued.

It took while, but I was able to write a script to readily identify a non-student login, coloring the screen background bright red (it was NetWare, after all), and exposing the perp. The second part of this was a pair of cable scissors for the lab monitor or teacher in attendance. And the script dumped keystrokes to the equivalent of /dev/null for 10, later 15 seconds, trapping the perp at the screen. Some students power cycled, but most were a little stumped.

Instructions to the staff were simple. If a red screen appeared, take the scissors over. If a teacher or staff was not near that station, find the blue cable at the back and cut it. Took me about 30 seconds to re-terminate ethernet cables back than, and I had ago kit to do so, happily if we caught a perp. Most I passed in the hall, and they knew who I was, giving me some mean looks.

Solved in a few days. We left in the goodies, and I was tasked with giving a class on NetWare basics, oh fun. Which led to a much more devious intrusion, and a student being threatened with expulsion from they computer lab for the remainder... Their parents were outraged, this student needed those courses to get into the Ivy League school he was accepted at, early, (Legacy), and this was intolerable. My complaint was capturing data form backups to restore data that had been changed. And a brief discussion, which I led, pointing out that if such unethical if not illegal activity did not disqualify their son from entering that fine institution, well, my esteem for that institution was diminished somewhat. They curbed their child, and we got through the year. with no further detected breaches.

This isn't new, and this sort of behavior predates personal computers. But it is fun. They got to learn somehow.

There's been persistent rumors that there's widespread fraud from families keeping dead elderly on the benefit rolls and collecting their benefits.

Also, a totalitarian state or doesn't that matter for you?