Comment Re: Meanwhile (Score 1) 180
A random gunman and terrorist doesn't start a war.
Ahh, so what about the guy that started WWI?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
A random gunman and terrorist doesn't start a war.
Ahh, so what about the guy that started WWI?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Social primate brains. We're wired to worship the high-status people, and we have a lot of trouble telling the difference between 'popular' and 'good leader/advisor material'. We usually can't even stop paying attention to them when we finally figure out they're not the gods we thought they were.
I'm sure Shatner can be an interesting guy to talk to on the right subject and if you let it be a mostly one-way conversation. Having had the opportunity to go into space (even if it was just a sub-orbital hop) does give him a rare experience to speak about. Being the object of fan obsession as a cultural icon for most of his life gives him another.
But I would never take political, financial, or in fact any other kind of advice from him.
If someone pops up on TV giving you political, financial, or in fact any other kind of advice then they're probably a specialist in that field with an agenda, you'd be best to treat them with extreme skepticism.
Shatner, as a smart talented person with fame for other reasons, might actually be the better bet for reliable advice (as long as he's not one of those outsiders pushing who have developed their own agenda).
I honestly do not know how the man racked up two Emmys and a Golden Globe. Competent, sure, but 'extremely talented'? In no way does he come close to the recognized greats among his peers.
A great among actors? Probably not.
But he's not some hack actor who lucked into an iconic role, without him it's quite possible that Star Trek ended up just another forgotten 60s SF serial. Look at the original pilot with Jeffrey Hunter. He was a perfectly competent actor but nothing about his performance jumps out to grab my attention.
Now look at this weird alternate pilot scene with Shatner, even with some awkward interactions that's a far more engaging performance. Critically, he gives the character a sense of fun and adventure missing from Hunter's portrayal, an attitude that was central to Trek's appeal.
His style reminds me of a movie star, not that Shatner was a movie star but I think a similar thing goes on with both. You don't watch a movie star to see them disappear into a role, you watch to see the character expressed through their particular style. Shatner performed a lot of different roles in a lot of different genres in the style of Shatner, and people generally enjoyed those performances.
That takes a ton of talent.
I wouldn't frame is as "too many accountants" as much as "putting bad accountants in charge".
The primary mission of Boeing should be to make safe airplanes, the role of accountants should be to enable the engineers to do so while keeping the company profitable.
Instead the accountants treated safety as just another margin to optimize, among other things, that means fewer, more junior, engineers doing review. It doesn't matter what the best practises are, without resources errors will accumulate.
Same thing with the door incident. Safety means reducing complexity, one way you do that is by keeping the irreducibly complex bits in-house where you can manage them (unless scale + specialization means it's better done external). Spinning off the manufacturer of the planes didn't create an organization that was better at specializing, it just created one they could leverage to push down costs. The cost of this was more complexity, as evidenced by the door issues.
First, the standard complaint about IQ: It's a very bad idea to think human intelligence can be quantified with a single number. Even if the tests were perfectly accurate, your brain does a bunch of different kinds of things and you can be a genius at one while an idiot at another. And the tests are not really accurate. They're a bit better than just guessing based on your first impression of someone, but otherwise a bit silly.
Second, IQ is based on standard deviations from the average (which is set at 100), and below 40 you're pretty much a vegetable and above 160 is so statistically improbably high an IQ test wouldn't reliably measure it even if it was trustworthy closer to the average. The highest possible score on the scale is 200 - an IQ of 300 is something for super-villains in comic books.
This is a common misconception among people with an IQ under 231.42.
What has this "journalist" been drinking? It has widely been established that the "simple remedy" suggested by Boeing did not work in reality. You had to turn off the electronic trim control and then use a small manual crank that required a stupid amount of strength at flight speeds. Yes, it was even worse because they were still at the take-off full throttle when they realized and started cranking, but it's doubtful they'd have much better luck otherwise. The plane was a deathtrap despite the warnings by many engineers, all because of profit incentives. It's exactly the opposite of what the columnist asserts according to TFS. I obviously did not RTFA.
Boeing's root problem is the ascendancy of bean counting MBAs causing hard-to-value things like safety being undervalued.
The WSJ journalist is fighting this narrative because the WSJ's core demographic is bean counting MBAs.
If the US Government has the evidence that Assange committed Espionage by:
-taking advantage of Manning's psychological fragility to actively encouraging him (was a he at the time...) to violate his oath,
-and coaching Manning in HOW TO steal and exfiltrate the data,
then show it -publicly- in court.
If the US Government cannot produce such evidence, admit it.
Either way, end this bullshit. It is old news.
Ok, here ya go. There might be some work to prove that Assange is the individual texting, but he they can he's in trouble.
IANAL but AFAIK this is pretty standard stuff, if someone comes to you with stolen/leaked info the crime is already done and you can generally publish what you got.
But if you specifically ask someone to leak that info then you can end up a co-conspirator if they follow through, like I recall some left-wing pundit asking for someone to leak Trump's taxes, and could have landed them in legal trouble.
Even if they showed up after the initial leak the person Manning was chatting with seems to have been encouraging them to leak, that makes them a co-conspirator. Any country in the world is going to try and prosecute you for that.
Also, the stock market is not for the naive and inexperienced.
For that reason, I wonder if it will work - setting up a trading account takes a few days, and you have to have some money. Who will this tactic reach that hasn't already given all they want to give by clicking a link in a fundraising email?
It already worked, they bought into the SPAC which bought into Trump.
Personally, the only question I have is whether the investors thing they're investing in some amazing businessman, or if they're investing in a grifter hoping to get in on the grift.
Either way, I suspect the SPAC merger is the grift, he can use the shares as collateral to take out loans for other purposes and then start stripping assets when the price tanks.
Trump supposedly diluted two of his co-founders from 8.6% to less than 1%.
Which raises three questions. First, is this merger really going forward with ~8% of the shares (and the share structure) unaccounted for? Second, what the hell did those co-founders think was going to happen going into business with Trump? Third, what the hell do these investors think is going to happen going into business with Trump?
It actually had lots of awesome third party apps that hooked into APIs, which would then be maliciously changed constantly by Google and others.
WP was awesome.
I hadn't heard any of this, but if it was true that the Microsoft Phone was killed by monopolistic competitors underhandedly screwing with libraries and APIs to break them...
I'd laugh my ass off!
It's articles like this which achieve the intended purpose of deflecting blame for rising food prices from corporate greed to a nebulous phenomenon beyond the control of the average person.
For example, the price of wheat has fallen back to pre-pandemic levels, but we're still paying pandemic pricing for bread.
There's a few factors you're forgetting.
One, wheat gets stockpiled, so even though prices have dropped back now stockpiles might still be low.
But more importantly, wheat only makes up about 11% of the value of bread, the rest is gobbled up by other parts of the supply chain, including supermarket shelf-space.
That doesn't mean corporate greed doesn't play a role, sometimes egregiously so, but I wouldn't expect the price of wheat to have a big impact on the price of bread in even a well functioning market.
We need to gut the ability of corporations to constantly change the terms in which they operate. It should be relatively simple (famous last words) to create legislation that says that companies are bound by the terms of their own EULA which existed at the time that the data was collected. I only consented to providing certain data based on the "contract" we had at the time I provided it. If any company can later decide to change those terms to whatever they want, then the social contract completely breaks down. I mean, what the fuck is the point of even having an agreement if one party can later change it to be whatever they want whenever they want?
Then everyone's new EULA is "we can do anything we want with your data".
In theory you could make a law that says changes are explicitly opt-in, though again, knowing users that means 90% of your data is gone because many users will never log in again and again every EULA says "all your bits are belong to us!".
Then again, if the EULA is changed and you didn't opt-in then it's not clear to me that you couldn't sue the company for breaking the contract.
You will have many recoverable tape errors.