And?

First Street very likely doesn't have some magic model that can predict the future better than anyone else.

When you get a mortgage you have to pay for a flood survey. Even my house 700' above the village where the bank is.

Your flood risk is absolutely predicted by the flood history of your location. The bank writing the mortgage has the skin in the game which is why they make the buyer pay for the flood survey.

It sounds like First Street might be liable for damages based on pseudoscience if these Realtors bring a case. It would be interesting to see them present solid evidence that they prospectively beat the existing flood models and survive a cross-examination.

If they've published a peer-reviewed paper then I missed it.

Hostile design is often a sign of libido dominandi, not just laziness.

SmartTube has probably hundreds of settings you can tweak to improve usability and accessibility. The developer clearly has a user-first philosophy.

You have Revanced for Android but Apple doesn't allow such things.

It has some excellent accessibility improvements over stock.

Cheaper to just pay the bribes.

In America it's known as K-street. Or "donating" to an Inauguration Gala. Or hosting a high court judge in a European palace for a couple of weeks. Or giving decision makers absurd private sector salaries when they 'retire'. Or giving the Governor's wife a $200K no-show job. Pick your branch, there's a way.

In India the system is less formal.

It's a generous gift, if a bend of the knee to his royal lowness. Let the monarchy reign. We have work to do.

Consider that maybe they won't work at Starbucks, a scarier thought given the lowered standards in some institutions.

It's been, what, a week, and they got 6000 jets through maintenance during a very busy holiday travel season?

That speaks to fantastic logistics. There are anonymous folks out there who did a great job and deserve a ridiculously generous Christmas Bonus. :gallant bow:

Interactive voice response systems are actually customer repulsion systems used to keep costs down. Same answer for various chat systems. Cutting labor costs is the hyperfocus of many organizations, to their great peril.

Another side of this is that let's say we took 12Million taxpayers off the roles. They won't need housing, so mortgage lenders, builders, etc, don't get any revenue for them (data centers *might*).

They don't need healthcare, or hospitalization, pharma, etc. They drive no cars, need no roads, pay no fuel taxes. They have no progeny, no schools, and can't vote or donate to campaigns.

They don't drink much water, rarely poop, suck lots of air, and need wicked constant energy to do their job (if that's what you call it).

Commerce isn't bad, indeed it's how our civil cultures survive and sustain themselves. Remove the human elements and there's a very mixed result, with the reputation of getting blood from rocks, repulsing those that need actual customer service, and generally injecting more mud than high quality/low cost lubrication to revenue streams.

But hey, I'm not liplocked to VC udders. Races to the bottom are never fun, and while I find it's OK to have shareholders, some shareholders will do anything to milk that cow, it is what we teach MBAs today.

Investment is a tricky one.

I'd say that learning how to learn is probably the single-most valuable part of any degree, and anything that has any business calling itself a degree will make this a key aspect. And that, alone, makes a degree a good investment, as most people simply don't know how. They don't know where to look, how to look, how to tell what's useful, how to connect disparate research into something that could be used in a specific application, etc.

The actual specifics tend to be less important, as degree courses are well-behind the cutting edge and are necessarily grossly simplified because it's still really only crude foundational knowledge at this point. Students at undergraduate level simply don't know enough to know the truly interesting stuff.

And this is where it gets tricky. Because an undergraduate 4-year degree is aimed at producing thinkers. Those who want to do just the truly depressingly stupid stuff can get away with the 2 year courses. You do 4 years if you are actually serious about understanding. And, in all honesty, very few companies want entry-level who are competent at the craft, they want people who are fast and mindless. Nobody puts in four years of network theory or (Valhalla forbid) statistics for the purpose of being mindless. Not unless the stats destroyed their brain - which, to be honest, does happen.

Humanities does not make things easier. There would be a LOT of benefit in technical documentation to be written by folk who had some sort of command of the language they were using. Half the time, I'd accept stuff written by people who are merely passing acquaintances of the language. Vague awareness of there being a language would sometimes be an improvement. But that requires that people take a 2x4 to the usual cultural bias that you cannot be good at STEM and arts at the same time. (It's a particularly odd cultural bias, too, given how much Leonardo is held in high esteem and how neoclassical universities are either top or near-top in every country.)

So, yes, I'll agree a lot of degrees are useless for gaining employment and a lot of degrees for actually doing the work, but the overlap between these two is vague at times.

I too bought memory in April to avoid tariffs. I had to run a stupid python program to generate a dataset that required 96GB of RAM for a delayed project so I figured I might as well bite the bullet. DDR4 was still a good value at that point (it's a problem that can run overnight, performance wasn't too important).

But how are the tariffs limiting the manufacturing supply capacity of RAM factories in East Asia?

Do you have a mechanism to propose?

Do you think they're making enough to meet demand but then blaming tariffs to justify jacking up prices? All of them? It would be an interesting conspiracy but is there any evidence to support that theory?

> How much is this problem is down to AI and how much to beautiful tariffs?

What mechanism are you thinking of where tariffs could limit supply of VRAM from East Asia?

Simple price increases, sure, definitely, but this is described by manufacturers as a supply & demand problem.

Do you have a different angle we should consider?

The degree isn't about "getting a high-paid job", it's about knowing what the hell you're doing once you get a job. Although, fair enough, it's quite plausible that not many degrees would meet that standard either.

There is a possibility of a short-circuit causing an engine shutdown. Apparently, there is a known fault whereby a short can result in the FADEC "fail-safing" to engine shutdown, and this is one of the competing theories as the wiring apparently runs near a number of points in the aircraft with water (which is a really odd design choice).

Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that (a) the wiring actually runs there (the wiring block diagrams are easy to find, but block diagrams don't show actual wiring paths), (b) that there is anything to indicate that water could reach such wiring in a way that could cause a short, or (c) that it actually did so. I don't have that kind of information.

All I can tell you, at this point, is that aviation experts are saying that a short at such a location would cause an engine shutdown and that Boeing was aware of this risk.

I will leave it to the experts to debate why they're using electrical signalling (it's slower than fibre, heavier than fibre, can corrode, and can short) and whether the FADEC fail-safes are all that safe or just plain stupid. For a start, they get paid to shout at each other, and they actually know what specifics to shout at each other about.

But, if the claims are remotely accurate, then there were a number of well-known flaws in the design and I'm sure Boeing will just love to answer questions on why these weren't addressed. The problem being, of course, is that none of us know which of said claims are indeed remotely accurate, and that makes it easy for air crash investigators to go easy on manufacturers.