sorry for the typos

Yes! So anyway I was wondering if would fly on Klingon Wikipedia*, or one of the more obscure language Wikipedias. Maybe Tolkein's Elvish language. Seems Elvish was never seriously considered as a Wikipedia language, but Klingon was kicked out and went to Fandom/Wikia. AARoads didn't need Fandom since AARoads started pre-Wikipedia. And than led to...

• There 336 Wikipedias by language. Esperanto (constructed) is the 37th largest.
• Another 13 are "closed and read-only." All real languages, and only one was really deleted; most are in "the incubator."
• Another 4 are "deleted but hosted elsewhere:" Klingon, Moldavian (real), Siberian (a hoax), and frickin' Toki Pona, a simple constructed language for positive vibes, with only 137 words.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wik...

* Roads would be useful to Klingons for spying on Earth, or interested in its history.

The NPP seemed a bit trigger happy in my experience editing Wikipedia, but the site can't be a free-for-all, if you consider, say, spam. The contributors are called editors, not writers. It's worked out OK, but the complexity of managing Wikipedia can be tedious, as are the layers and layers of macros, not all in active development. I had no special role in managing it, but voted on a couple of things, and reverted obviously bad edits when I saw them. On NPP in particular, every added page does mean you need a community of people interested enough to maintain it. That doesn't apply to geeky things like roads, but even there you could have a morass that's hard to organize or navigate. What would be the disambiguation page for "95" if Wikipedia had every street address starting with 95? Maybe that's a straw man to what you're saying.

A good example of complexity and workload is the initiative to add structured data to Wiki Commons. You know, catalog pictures like a library would, with lots of meta fields, beyond what is shown when you go to the picture's page on Commons. It's not required when you upload a picture. It's a good idea, but also one more thing that takes time to do, and a certain critical mass to be useful.

The upshot is Wikipedia is usually reliable, but who knows about the future. Many references are dying out. New projects like the structured data on Commons might be a good way to keep people involved. Zealot-adjacent individuals and groups like NPP probably do more good than harm.

The psychology you describe is legit, and I try to avoid being around it, which not everyone can do. But I'll just say blanket statements about it are subject to lack of perspective and scale, and those two qualities are themselves things that separate mental illness from the normal. Almost all crazy people are normal with certain exaggerations, so not that different from you and I. It's a fine line! Even Carl Sagan (the popular astronomer) had a hard time explaining scale. But power trippers, yeah, not good.

s/the the/the

s/Missing from the news/Missing from the headlines/

The WSJ article is free to read if you register. No trial offer or anything.

There's not much to it though. It quotes a few experts, and leaves it at that. Two contradictory quotes:
* These types of audits are pass/fail only and provide no details at all. Only standardized, general language is allowed.
* These types of audits can point of failures, by saying they are not "unqualified," and giving details.

The reason audits have boilerplate language is so the auditor doesn't get sued. That's probably how the court looks at it. I don't know about these audits, but other audits say they rely on the company's numbers. Then you have forensic audits, like of the the Bahamas crypto scam with the Stanford prof parents and once-future-in-law MIT prof parents. So WSJ needs to tell us all the kinds of audits that exist, in some article that requires a paid sub, I guess.

Chris Christie when he was a chief US Atty pioneered a whole new business for large-sized law firms, brought in to run compliance programs, rather than the defeated companies paying their fines or suffering other penalties.

Missing from the news on the Sackler opioid case is that as part of a settlement, they wanted the bankruptcy court to bar suits not just against the family, but also against a list several pages long of other individuals and entities, who hadn't even been mentioned in the case, nor were party to it. Some of the plaintiffs wish that settlement had been accepted, because time is ticking.

Charles Dickens portrayed a court case that lasted so long generations of lawyers had lived off it, and nobody cared to or could discern the facts of the original case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why... The little plaintiff or defendant, who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled, has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world."

Interesting. I've noticed another feedback thing in pseudoephedrine, more congestion than I started with after going off it. And it has minor side effects systemically, some good, some bad. Low-key weird drug. So I use it sparingly. What I like to call psuedo-pseudoephedrine (phenylephrine) sounds like a good solution for you.

Pseudoephedrine is still fairly easy to buy. You just show your license. You don't need a prescription, but can only buy x amount every three months. Some pharmacies have stopped carrying it, though.

Crucially, Covid-19 patients at home didn't realize they were patients, and the blood ox level can crash quickly. (This was before rapid Covid-19 testing.) With a blood ox* meter, one can detect the initial drop and go to the ER before the crash. The initial drop precedes the crash by a few (?) days. When this news came out, drug stores ran out of $15 pulse oxs. Took about a month for the supply to stabilize.

(*) The TFS wrongly implies the company is "calling" the device a blood ox instead of a pulse ox. A pulse ox does both pulse and ox. Ox means blood ox.

One glitch, shutting down Windows with my old as mud MFC-based app still running causes a dismissable error.

Yes for Notepad++, it's solid.

And I guess the Microsoft Foundation Class that was basically Wordpad will keep working. Does MFC still exist? I wrote a customized wordpad-like app about 25 years ago, using Borland Delphi (Pascal) and its wrap of MFC. The exe still runs fine in fully updated Windows 11.

General de-staffing is common. Your comment on USAD shows malicious policy, but I guess I'll chip in with general woe.

1. Private: had a job in an operating power plant on the Ohio, 2008. Two floors of offices, for support functions like an infirmary, machine shop. All vacant except the engineering office and the union breakroom.

2. Public: conference in what's called the GSA Building (1800 F St NW) in the mid 1990s (nice auditorium). Typical miles of hallways, more than half the offices empty, people there told me. A big picture of Al Gore (V.P. 1993-2001) stood by the entrance inside, for leading the "Reinventing Government" initiative.

3. Semi-public: skeleton crews at USPS and Amtrak. It's become a safety problem on the latter, with local commuter trains typically better staffed.

4. Regulated/contracted: one-person crews on bucket trucks, garbage pickup, long-haul transport, all jobs that are easier with teamwork.

The only thing resembling former gangs of workers I see are on construction sites, road maintenance, business bubble offices, etc., and even then it's about half.

The question would be how much is efficiency, how much is social policy, how much is management bias. Academics and activists have spent two centuries trying to argue the market is not necessarily efficient even in micro-economic choices. Fairly obvious, and it's a mix, but plenty of well-funded groups take the other view.

As for having a microblogging service for public announcements, things are getting worse. It seems Twitter now requires all readers to have an account, and Threads requires a phone app, and I think an account. Is anything in the Fediverse or elsewhere available for public announcement microblogging, as it was once called? In other words, a built infrastructure, as opposed to software to run. At a reasonable cost I could see companies paying for it SaaS, but for public agencies procurement is a giant hurdle, and for journalists, for whom Twitter was perfect, demanding money is even more of a problem. The ethics of editorial control and payment are likely too tricky to handle for legit journalism enterprises. On the one hand, paying to publish would go against the grain. On the other hand, advertorials are by ethics walled off from news.

(a.k.a. Delphi)

Maybe referring to the essential libraries for Java? I'm not an expert in anything, but it certainly seems PHP took over from perl in web dev because the libraries were generally not confusing, or they were built-in. Perl libraries are the gold standard of old-school OSS for me, but PHP turned out to be more practical, whatever its mishmash of function names and parameters. Sessions for example were just done right, though they're not used much now. Yes I know this discussion is about compiled languages, but for that all I can say is, Turbo Pascal was amazing. Languages developed by a single author are sublime, and Borland squeezed compilers down from six diskettes to one. Now I'll be on my way, the night nurse is coming.

Texas has two e-schools in the top 10, three in the top 40. The closest top 40 to Florida is #7 Georgia Tech. In aerospace, it's even worse, with #109 Embry-Riddle topping the list in Florida, and Texas again with two in the top 10. The history of education in these two states, K through PhD, could not be more different, and Texas is actually rather similar to California.

Remains to be seen how Dobbs will affect young professional talent in super modern, super sized places like Houston, Dallas and Austin. If there's one thing would-be soccer moms and dual-earners talk about, it's obstetrics. The Space Coast in Florida is more akin to Hunstville, Alabama: many smart people but synthetically there from standalone federal institutions.

Speaking of which, NASA's Johnson Space Center outside Houston is well worth a visit, a sprawling campus. Later I talked to an engineer in a different field (Houston is full of engineers), and she told me those hundreds of acres of five-ish story office buildings on the Johnson campus are 85% empty now. Even the assembly floors are half occupied by contractor design-build programs.

And of course the California and Texas K-12 public school systems have been turned upside-sideways, from amazing for the whites; to a sliding scale by income from excellent to bad. The amount of talent that came out of small towns and cities mid-century was historic, if unjustly cut through with prejudice.

Fermion is talking about Enron 2000-2001, probably the worst blackouts in California history, right during the end of the first Dot Com bubble. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Highly paid Enron traders in Texas beat to death state employee traders in Sacramento. And bragged about the blackouts, which spiked prices. By the end of 2001, Enron was dead, largest bankruptcy till then in US history, as its own practices destroyed it in an accounting scandal.