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Comment Not even a little. (Score 1) 81

Actually thats not what it means, what it means is ethnic minorities get fingered for crime much more than their %age of population would seem to indicate.
The implication of course is that that is somehow unfair, the alternative explanation is that just perhaps they commit more crime per population size.

But no, its not because black people get IDed for white crimes, the software is not even a little bit that stupid, and even if it did, as a facial picture exists, it would be trivial to prove false. The reason people keep bringing this up is they dont like the statistics..

Comment Re:Hybrids still better than ICE (Score 1) 111

Hybrids use generators rather than ICE. As such, they are more efficient burners of gasoline, reducing pollution per mile.

The study said that they're better: 19% better. That's not nothing! It's just not the 75% better that lab testing showed.

The link you provided is the experience of one driver, one who is conscientious and focused on minimizing fuel consumption (within reason; hypermilers would do better). The study looked at the real-world results across 800,000 drivers, most of whom apparently didn't take so much care to minimize fuel usage.

Also, it's not true in general that "hybrids use generators rather than ICE". That's true of PHEVs that are strictly serial hybrids, but most are series-parallel or "power split" hybrids, meaning they can drive the wheels with the electric motor, or the combustion engine, or both. Often both the electric motor and the ICE are too small to provide the target maximum performance so must be used in parallel when you step hard on the accelerator.

One fascinating strategy for power splitting is "through the road", which has no mechanical connection at all between the ICE and the traction motor, and uses the wheel-driven traction motor as the generator. The way it works is the ICE drives one axle and the traction motor drives the other. Battery charging is done "through the road", using the road itself to transmit power from the ICE-driven axle to the electrically-driven axle. The ICE spins one pair of wheels, driving the vehicle forward, which forces the other pair of wheels to spin which turns the electric motor which charges the battery. This only makes sense in AWD drive cars but it's peak design elegance.

Comment Re:That's not good? (Score 1) 50

obviously we should be striving to make it 100%

If 100% of jobs meet some standard, we'll pick a higher standard. For example, consider the standard that employees not be chained to their benches, fed nothing but moldy bread and be brutally whipped if the overseer feels like it. 100% of legitimate jobs in the US exceed that standard. OSHA exists to ensure that jobs meet minimum workplace safety standards and minimum wage laws ensure that jobs pay at least a certain amount, so we don't discuss whether jobs meet those standards, we take them as a given and set the quality bar higher.

If a study finds that 40% of jobs meet some standard, it means that the researchers did a reasonably good job of writing a description of the median job, then tweaked it upward just a bit. It's not like there is some universal, eternal standard for what constitutes a "quality job". It would be interesting to take the current standard and apply to historical working conditions, 50, 100, 200, 500 years ago. I'll bet the 1975 percentage would be half of the 2026 percentage and the older percentages would quickly tail off to ~0.

Comment Re: TBH... (Score 1) 50

There's always going to be a systemic problem so long as we have capitalism, because capitalism relies upon maintaining a systemic problem, specifically, workers being paid less than the value of their labour, which is, on average, where profits come from..

Of course if you get rid of capitalism then you get a different systemic problem, massive shortfalls in production, making everyone worse off. Much like democracy, capitalism is the worst system except for all of the others.

Comment Re:Really should be honoring Woz Instead! (Score 1) 77

You're correct that Woz is brilliant, and did brilliant things, but it's completely incorrect to discount what Jobs did.

But what did he do that actually counts as innovation? What new did he bring into the world?

Some of his logic designs were amazing. I was learning digital logic when I got my //e and started studying schematics. (The //e was a generation removed, but had some features from the ][ series and I studied those as well.) For one example, the ][ disk drive. Just as a quick and simple example, he had a 7400 chip needed and used 1 ro 2 of the NAND gates on it. He used the other gates as amplifiers from the disk signal. Not something that was at all standard at that time (don't know if it is now). That's the one I can remember, but he was using ONE gate as an amp instead of at least one, if not three more chips. Things like that kept the costs down more than most would think.

I can't remember other examples, but his habits of having to keep chip counts down, so he could make what he wanted when his family didn't have a lot of money, came through in a number of ways in his designs.

Comment If I had one of those Jobs coins... (Score 3, Insightful) 77

To pay a fitting tribute to the man, I'd drop the coin into a dish of acid, but then instead of saving it while there was plenty of time left, I'd leave it to be slowly eaten away while occasionally dropping in healing herbs and drops of organic fruit juices, and then only try to rescue it once it was far too late

Comment Really should be honoring Woz Instead! (Score 5, Insightful) 77

They really should be honoring Steve Wozniak instead. He's the one that did the work, did the innovation, made a floppy disk drive work for a price lower than anyone else could imagine by innovating. He's the one who did the designs and made it all possible. But Jobs was more visible and knew how to capture headlines.

Seriously, Jobs and Apple would have been NOTHING without Woz doing the kind of stuff he can do.

Comment Re:Interesting change (Score 1) 82

According to Statista 53.76 million Americans traveled internationally in 2024. That's 15 percent of the population. Besides the pure numbers, business travel matters to our economic prosperity. Isolation is bad for business.

https://www.statista.com/stati...

Real 'Muricans don't leave the ol' US of A. Anyone who regularly travels beyond driving range of their home town is suspicious, frankly.

(Meanwhile, I got the extra-thick passport booklet and have made a good try at filling it with stamps.)

Comment Re:Wrong Starting Point (Score 1) 67

Yeah, I think they need to answer some basic questions first, like what do they see people using these phones for? If its goal is just to be able to play youtube, spotfy, etc, then whats the real point? Those are free either. Their approach with free operating systems made more sense, by focusing on free applications to replace the proprietary unix ones and someone came along and gave them a great kernel. Thats a thousand times more difficult now with phones. but ultimately phones or computers are a means to an end for most people. What is the end here?

Comment Re:If you thought SEO/affiliate marketing spam is (Score 1) 18

As if that's different from any other "Sponsored Item" search results?

I really look forward to more widespread adoption of AI search in listings. I hate spending hours having to manually dig through listings to see if the product listed *actually* meets my needs or building up spreadsheets to compare feature sets. This should be automatable. We have the tech to do so now.

Comment Re: I'm rooting for it!! (Score 4, Insightful) 166

To get an SLS-equivalent payload to the lunar surface, it will take 8-16 Starship launches

You're extremely confused. SLS cannot land on the moon in the way that the (lunar variant) Starship can. It can only launch Orion to the moon. Orion is 8 meters tall and 5 meters in diameter. Starship is 52 meters tall and 9 meters in diameter. These are not the same thing.

SLS/Orion missions are expected to cost approximately $4,2B each. If you fully disposed of every Starship, the cost for 8-16 launches would be $720M-$1,44B. But of course the entire point is to not dispose of them; the goal is to get it down to where, like airplanes, most of the cost is propellant. The propellant for a single launch is $900k. Even if they don't get anywhere near propellant costs, you're still looking at orders of magnitude cheaper than a single SLS/Orion mission.

Comment Re: I'm rooting for it!! (Score 4, Informative) 166

By far, most of SpaceX's launches are for Starlink, which is self-funded.
Nextmost is commercial launches. SpaceX does the lion's share of global commercial launches.
Government launches are a tiny piece of the pie. They don't "subsidize" anything, they're just yet another minor revenue stream.

The best you can say is that they charge more for government launches, but everyone charges more for government launches than commercial launches. You can argue over whether that's justified or not (launch providers have to do a lot of extra work for government launches - the DoD usually has a lot of special requirements, NASA usually demands extra safety precautions, government launches in general are more likely to want special trajectories, fully expended boosters, etc), but overall, the government is a bit player in terms of launch purchases.

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