This is the sine non qua of the average SA/SRE/DevOps/Dev's diet.
I mean, how can you have brain function without excessive nitrates!
MMMMMMMM Bacon!

And now I'm hungry. And it's a fast day (health, no other reason). Sigh. More bacon tomorrow.

+1

Just like every year since like 2000....

Where I live, there are a LOT of electric cars. I mean, seriously, in our parking lot at work, 20% of the cars are electric or hybrid. Granted it's in the Valley but still....

It'll be a long time before cars are gone, at least to the extent that people will elect to give up cars, at least in the US. But why?

- Public transit is terrible. And I'm a user. I ride public transit regularly in conjunction with a bike because it's faster than driving where I live/work, and it's always crowded, slow, poorly or inadequately scheduled, and (once in a while) actively dangerous. All of these except the last can be ameliorated if we're willing to do what Europe's done, which is to say accept that it's a public good and put money into it; the last can be ameliorated if we're willing to actively police and deal with criminals or mentally unbalanced people.
- The layouts of our suburbs are awful. Suburbs are enclaves - very much moving in the direction of the walled-off Burbclaves that Neal Stephenson envisioned in Snow Crash thirty years ago. There are huge clumps of single family homes (which I think are awesome, even if they create sprawl; I hate sharing walls), and the problem's not the single-family homes, it's the idiot zoning that doesn't allow corner stores and small commercial activity within suburbs. And from the way some people react when a 7-11 opens nearby, you'd think that they sold murderers and rapists, not Slushees and downmarket sausages. Seriously, let's let the corner store come back so people legitimately can walk or ride or pull a wagon to the local store to shop rather than driving miles and wasting time looking for places to park. Where I live, I have a local grocery and commercial area that's about a half-mile from the house, and I can walk with a bag or wagon and shop. Most Americans can't, and that sucks.
- US infrastructure for pedestrians & cyclists sucks. I ride a bike a lot and I have been hit more than once in the last couple of years - fortunately, none causing lasting damage - despite the presence of bike lanes on roads. Drivers don't pay attention to bike lanes (or, indeed bikes on them); indeed, bike lanes may add to violent urges. At least one of the times I was hit was a 'punishment pass' where the driver crossed a striped separation area to bonk me with a wing mirror on a pickup truck, and this is a relatively common experience. Look at the Netherlands, look at Germany, hell, look at Spain - the cycling/pedestrian rights of way are usually separate from the main roadway.
- Work hours are crazy. US workers work a LOT - like, averaging 10+ more hours than their counterparts in many other parts of the world. Pay hasn't kept up with worker productivity. Workers don't have time to exercise, and even the walk or ride to a train station (let alone commuting by walking or cycling) is too great a time expenditure for someone who arrives at work at 8-9am and doesn't leave until 9pm or later - which is a lot of the tech workers out there. How do we fix it? Well, we have a dearth of people to do tech work now, so workers are being pushed harder to work longer to keep up with unreasonable schedules. Some workers tell employers doing this to bugger off and go elsewhere, and find the same behavior....it's endemic in the industry. I get wanting to clear the hurdle of the next good hack, but OTOH having enough time to work out and have a life seems like a public good....

This is all fixable. But the US doesn't have the political will to do it for a variety of reasons, and until it does, we'll continue losing ground to places which prioritize the well-being of the great mass of the citizenry over the profits of the very rich.

Two words: sous vide. That gets a steak right to the edge of readiness, needing only a minute or two of searing, to produce the best steaks ever. :)

And CNC produces good parts but hoomans are still needed for a while.

Very much so. This is one of the places where my otherwise-beloved Cory Doctorow's post-scarcity future falls down - in both Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Walkaway, he posits everything being something that can be made via params that can be stored in a git repo. I don't take issue with the whole premise - because, as an avocational artisan (lutherie, or stringed-instrument-making), what goes into the repo *can* be useful. For example, I create vector plans which translate to GCode or other CAM languages and can be used to cut out raw tops, backs, cut rabbets for inlay, cut fingerboards, headstock veneers, neck shapes, far more accurately than can be done by hand. It's a HUGE time saver.

But they still have to be assembled, and even the best collection of parts doesn't just snap together - there are variables that come from the protean nature of natural materials, for example. And that's where humans are necessary - right now, there's not a comprehensive spec that would allow a machine to construct an instrument that is as aesthetically pleasing as those created by humans.

This is probably going to change - and that wouldn't be a bad thing. I think there'll always be avocational builders but honestly, a good clear spec for what constitutes good performance in a machine-reproducible artifact is going to raise the quality baseline immeasurably. But until then, humans have the edge.

Without being an evolutionary biologist, maybe these serve atransitory useful function that hasn't been identified yet - hypothetically, maybe, creating structures that bones follow for growth, or a scaffold on which other structures rely. Hopefully research and closer analysis will provide some clues.....genetics is anything but simple.

Exactly. Without unions, the 5 day week wouldnâ(TM)t exist....and the decline of unions has corresponded with the decline of reasonable wages, work conditions, etc, esp for the lower-skilled working class.

+1

Yes, this ^
Trains are comfortable and generally, even ill-tempered American trains don't jerk you around like a bus. I *hate* buses. They're slow, they add to traffic - it's as if someone deliberately wants to hurt people who want to use public transit.

+1 - oh, for mod points.

Well, yeah. That's kind of obvious. But unfortunately, we're still stuck with zoning based on the conditions in 19th century New York, where areas where people both lived and worked were....well, just nasty. In the absence of adequate sanitation et cetera, such areas tended to be filthy and smelly, mostly from shit everywhere - on the street, steaming out of open pit privies in the backyard, et cetera. City planner of the time moved people out towards suburbs to reduce the overall load in given districts.

Now that we have sanitation, power, a/c, et cetera, it's possible to have the kind of live/work neighborhood you describe, but it requires a fundamental rethinking on the part of city planners. Granted, city planners *do* have a particular charge - keep a given area as livable as possible - but what 'livable' means has changed with technology, and it's time to realize that. Planned communities (Columbia MD, anyone?) are unwalkable and more or less enigmatic to anyone not local - they tend to be clusters of commercial stuff with integrated condos, and streets that aren't in a grid. Give me a New York neighborhood of brownstones any day.....

The real XB-70 at Wright-Patterson is....impressive. That was pretty amazing engineering.