Meritocracy is what leading institutions do to achieve world class research, which is one reason why the best research is increasingly NOT happening in the USA. Meritocracy is color blind, and whatever is between one's legs does not enter the calculus of whether an idea is valid or not. Interestingly, they talk about the achievements of this institution what happened in the 50s-90s, not what they've done since 2010.

I will give DEI one thing: what it does, if properly implemented, is bring in people with diverse and varied life experiences. I'm even willing to admit that might be advantageous; oftentimes a different point of view is valuable. However, it also brings in a lot of distractions and people who occupied the bottom rungs of their class scores, and grading curves shifted lower due to underachievement--but the administration will not accept most of the class failing. The optics would be HORRENDOUS.

If I find myself or my family members needing to go under a knife, I do not want my surgeon and anesthesiologist to be diverse. I naturally want them to be the best, the most experienced professional in their field. Recognizing that it's not possible to always get those people, we have to accept that we may get someone with middling competency, who passed at the bottom of their class. Fine, they are called doctor as well. What we should not accept lowering of those standards just to bring in an underrepresented, underperforming doctor. Sorry not sorry.

Same with pilots. I don't care if the pilot of my plane is an albino, trans, polka-dotted moomoo-wearing Eskimo, as long as it doesn't distract they them performing their duty. I want them to be a GOOD, safe, competent pilot, who earned their position because they demonstrated merit, not because they were shoehorned and kept in the job by a DEI cultist in HR despite numerous repeated near-misses.

Putting bean-counters as heads of tech companies almost always fails. It Killed Yahoo, the titan of the early web.

AI seems to be feeding the bloat habit instead of trimming it. It's becoming an auto-bloater.

Very few in the industry are interested in parsimony. Devs would rather collect buzzwords for their resume rather than try to trim out layers and eye-candy toys. It's kind of like letting surgeons also be your general doctor, they'd recommend surgery more often than you really need it.

The principles of typical biz/admin CRUD haven't really changed much since client/server came on the scene in the early 90's. Yet the layers and verbosity seem to keep growing. An ever smaller portion of time is spent on domain issues and ever more on the tech layers and parts to support the domain. Something is wrong but nobody is motivated to do anything about it because bloat is job security.

YAGNI and KISS are still important, but is dismissed because it reduces one's resume buzzword count. The obsession with scaling for normal apps is an example of such insanity: there's only like a 1 in 50k chance your app or company will ever become FANG-sized, yet too many devs want to use a "webscale" stack. You're almost as likely to get struck by lightning while coding it. They patients are running the asylum.

Humans, you are doing CRUD wrong!

You could do battery swaps for NEVs in a scheme where you didn't own a battery at all, and instead just subscribed to one. You could also do it for heavy diesel truck equivalents, as big diesels typically have the fuel tanks hanging on the outside of the frame where they're nice and accessible anyway. But it doesn't make any sense for the vehicles in between that, i.e. the bulk of them...

MATE is outdated (but good for resource constrained systems) and GNOME is dumbed down and hard to get good results from, you need a whole bunch of add-ins just to get where KDE is. KDE was very bad in the past, but it's really come quite a long way. GNOME was really quite good in the past, but it's really gone the wrong way. I'm not against having a simple mode but I don't want oversimplification to infest everything.

Only micro-movements are necessary to avoid most space junk*, using tiny "cold" thrusters which are not enough to serve as a rapid-response spy-probe. High-end spy probes probably have lots of fuel and big nozzles.

Don's spy-probe: "Hey Xi, look, my nozzle's bigger than yours!"

* If they have short notice to swerve, then small engines are probably not good enough, but that situation is probably not (yet) common enough to justify carrying large thruster systems.

...hide his farts.

There's like a dozen different ink cartridge gimmicks HP uses to fuck over consumers. In my case one had to press a "confirm" prompt every time one printed if the color cartridge was past an alleged expiration date even if I was only printing in black-and-white.

HP used to have a good reputation, then seemed to turn evil on a dime. Was there a board meeting where they had a "let's be evil" vote and it passed?

With our luck a bubble burst will also put a manufacturer out of business, meaning less choice and higher prices in the end. It would allow oligopolies to get oligopolier. The rich have the means to wait out slumps for advantage.

...Hydrazine nozzles are probably the simplest technique, being it doesn't need ignition, but are not as powerful as ignition-based path adjustment mini-rockets.

Maybe the speed and degree with which military satellites maneuver has increased of late? They probably can't tells us without having to kill us. You ask first!

Because the USA doesn't have the concept of absolute power, Donnie Dipshit's pet Catholic Court notwithstanding, and those files were sealed by a judge at the time. There are a lot of fundamental ways in which the two parties are up to the same bullshit, but Democrats tend to obey court orders.

Corrupt, yes.

Requirements, maybe. Meeting them, absolutely not. They aren't just reporting an amount spent on classified projects and therefore we can't have a breakdown, they're saying they can't figure out where an awful lot of money went at all.

Obama was more like the Republicans than they think. For example, he was fully behind the MIC, blowing people up without due process and so on. Obviously there is a big contrast, for example we know he did a lot of drone strikes because of his EO which gave us information on how many strikes were used and where, and Trump was doing about four times as many strikes per month when he rescinded that order so that we wouldn't know how many he's done since.

Even the ACA was a Republican health care plan, spruced up a little bit but still writing profit for insurance companies into the law. So no, the pendulum just wasn't pushed that far at all.

Revolution. The chances of us rewriting the constitution for that (which is what it would take) are roughly nil otherwise.

They were specifically chosen for their respective lacks of merit. They aren't DEI hires, they're anti-DEI hires, like matter vs. antimatter. And the purpose is to cause destruction when they come together.

To you, the centrist (pro-corporation, pro-authoritarianism, pro-incarceration, pro-MIC — based on voting records) policies of the Democrats are "too far to the left" when actual leftism includes far more liberal ideas. This is because you are too far to the right to even see the left from where you're standing.