Big guy, I have been working in corporate America for 45 years. I am entirely too familiar with the culture. Small, large, old, startup, shutdown, high tech, low tech. Been there, done that.

Your mother's story is interesting, to be sure. Here's mine: in 1961 we could not afford food. By 1973 I was in college. During the 60's (and before), this country knew how to build and develop both industry and technology. I was one of many students who wore dog tags, living in a second-strike city (Pittsburgh). Under threat of thermonuclear annihilation this country built industry, built rockets, semiconductor industry, and many other improvements.

That said, by the early 1980's all that infrastructure development began slowing, and I started to see a transition to focus on finance/MBA model and away from development and production. That was the beginning of the movement of corporate management toward outsourcing and foreign labor. I watched firsthand as our automotive industry got creamed by Japanese quality, I watched our industrial production jobs moved to Malaysia and China. I watched as workers got shitcanned, watched as steelworkers got screwed over, watched as automation killed coal mining jobs (but this is where I get really pissed) while the mine operators kept production up and rising. My family had a farm near southeastern Ohio and we watched the depression got worse and worse with every year.

This is not "history" for me. What I am responding to is what I've been living. I've been reading, watching and noticing all of it.

I don't blame the F-150 driver beyond a lack of interest in identifying the real issues. Most people are overloaded keeping up and have been for decades.

I remember the arguments about leaded gas, and smoking, and the whole goddamned lie of "teach the controversy". I was there. Lead poisoning is a good example. Those motherfuckers knew lead poisoning was real from the '20s onward but kept it up until at long last and way too late, gas went unleaded. Look at the crime statistics sometime: Various property and violent crime rates began falling in response to reduction in atmospheric lead worldwide. Since countries reduced their lead pollution at different times, it was possible to see how the correlations occurred with similar latencies in each country.

Smoking was similar. Tobacco executives stood before congress, right hand up to God, saying they did not know that nicotine was addictive. While simultaneously they were managing nicotine content informed by the best research.

The question of CO2 affecting atmospheric heat was FIRST STUDIED by coal companies and oil companies, it's documented in their own reports. Yet when it came to managing emissions, yet again it was "teach the controversy, the research is at best incomplete and probably a lie told by the progressive hippies". Again, not history, this was current events.

Communist? no. Too much concentrated power in "the state", always leads to a state mafia.

Free enterprise? yes.
Competitive enterprise? Absolutely.
Concentrated corporate power? Absolutely not.

The bottom line is that concentrated power leads inevitably to corruption whether it is "left" or "right".

Seeing the way this shit is going, my wife and I are not looking forward to the next few years.

The sarcastic comment about "yokels' 40-gallon gas tanks" is a bit over the top, lacking "nuance". Here is another nuance: this country has had 45 goddamned years to research, build, and otherwise work on living efficiently while living well. Instead we have corporate motherfuckers selling fake manhood with 4X4s so goddamned big that normal sized people can't see over their hoods. Inefficiency is profitable for the executives but sucks for the rest of us. The lucky ones are occasionally a bit depressed reading about how fucked "the unlucky ones" are. Those unlucky ones get to deal with the fires, floods, hunger, thirst and mass migration.

I don't really blame the people who got sucked in by the propaganda but it is disappointing to see that they did not look beyond what they were being told by assholes that could give a tinker's damn about what happens in a few years.

The covid lockdowns were probably a mistake. The only guides the "big progressive government" had at the time were the successful management of SARS, MERS and ebola non-epidemics, controlled by lockdowns, careful monitoring, and good managment by various governments earlier in the century. Blame progressive ideology all you want but the covid pestilence started in an authoritarian regime, and found a USA being run by the Trump administration.

Agreed on the "hand in hand" comment. I am arguing against the overly simplistic point you began with:

Your response to my point shows that you have an understanding of the dynamics at play, that the transition screwed over many market participants. That's the bug I referred to, and why I have a cynical feeling that it's intentional. I checked into the ANSI docs, and they are stupidly expensive, requiring a large market presence to amortize their cost. (Almost as bad, from what I could see when studying some transaction files for my wife's practice to get a sense of their structure, the basic syntax would be considered amazingly shitty back in the 80's.)

With those points stipulated, that does not ipso facto imply that "the government has a new way to shake down businesses": The price we pay to get a look at those damn expensive documents does not go to the government, that money goes to a set of leeches who got the consulting contract. I would bet good money that someone ensured that the spec would not be an open standard, but rather be proprietary.

Similar logic applies to architectural and building codes. Documents whose content must be known and understood by architects and contractors but is copyrighted and either costs huge bucks to keep a copy on hand or requires regular trips to a county office.

Thus I stand by my point that government is the target of shysters, thieves and assholes who work tirelessly to make our participation in necessary transactions unnecessarily expensive, pocketing their ill-gotten gains privately. Government does not benefit from this arrangement, there's no additional "control" over society, and all of the shakedown profits go to the assholes. It is a sad fact that we seem unable to shut the revolving door of corruption.

Do you advocate for ending these revolving doors and similar forms of corruption? Every time I hear of anyone advocating for ending these corrupt practices, I hear lots and lots of outlets bitching about "limiting our freedom from big government overreach".

My wife is a provider in private practice, and I support her "I.T." work technically. (Day job: embedded data acquisition/control)

HIPAA does does require her to ensure that private patient data secure. The expensive record keeping is for damn sure a fucking corporate plan though. It has been a gift to fuckers who "provide EHS" and their product is extremely expensive. HIPAA has a very serious requirements/specification/design bug that may be a product of the intense lobbying by business groups: It does not require open standards for exchange, which is a perfect way for the assholes who own and run EHS software systems to grab shitloads of money from every provider, it's a real gravy train. But that is not government shaking us down, it's your god damned businesses owning tools of participation. Fuck them hard long and deep.

Apparently you are unaware of tthe real problem here. Government has problems but the greed of corporate America has absolutely no limits and every time my wife has to go through yet another set of bullshit hoops to get paid for doing the thing she studied for most of a decade to do competently is we get more frustrated.

She needs to be capable of receiving and transmitting health related records electronically in order to exchange those records with other medical providers. That is the "portability" part of HIPAA and was intended to allow patients to avoid the high costs of replicated testing/data collection, etc. that characterized the corporate health world before HIPAA. Duplicated processes and willful stovepiping data was VERY profitable.

Neither of those provisiions of HIPAA is a way for the government to shake down businesses. You are one of many many people erecting the "government control" strawman to serve your political goals.

In my naive youth, I thought nuclear was a great technology, would be reliable and with some practice could even limit the problems with fuel reprocessing and nuclear waste. Decades later, I find that failure has proven to be less work and more profitable for the "nuclear power industry" than delivery of power.

Fix that and the rest of your endlessly repeated arguments begin to hold water.

Implicit financial support for despotic killers to keep fossil fuel prices low has been an American achilles' heel in international relations for decades. All those assholes point to our realpolitik and argue that we talk out of both sides of our mouths. That provides rhetorical opportunity for other assholes to argue for their "solutions" which are also totally fucked up.

Dishonest authoritarian thieves controlling resources and nations' abilities to run their economies leads directly to lower economic efficiency, with consequent lower standards of living, higher costs of living, and (for those who care) unnecessry human suffering.

Developing effective technologies that allow communities/countries/etc to manage their own resources locally would go a long way to reduce the influence of despotic assholes. And that would be a good thing.

Nuclear could be reliable, and maybe price competitive, perhaps. But not with today's lazy, incompetent, corrupt "leadership". I live in Ohio where we pay for the nuc plant that could not be started due to shitty planning, plumbing, and implementation.

My message to them and anyone else unwilling to face the facts of human nature: Get honest or get gone.

...And ensuring, or trying to ensure, continued dependency on their product, which has that sweet, sweet ongoing revenue stream.

To the best of my knowledge, democrats want to terminate our dependency on foreign energy and concentrated power.

While climate change is almost certainly a threat and is by itself plenty of reason to manage energy supply, my real hope is to break the backs of those who manipulate our economy and politics to preserve their power.

Mod up... I suspect the wet market is more likely true, but whether it was a wet market of the type that the authorities had been warned about repeatedly for years or a lab leak, is essentially irrelevant.

At least Wuhan authorities, and possibly central CCP authorities, worked hard to suppress news of a viral disease late in 2019. They jailed a treating doctor (I forget whether it was an E.R., ICU or pulmonary care doc) for warning his family of some patients having surprisingly difficulty, sometimes dying, of a treatment-resistant pheumonia.

They fucked many of their own population and fucked the world, all unnecessarily.

The co-worker I share an office wtih grew up in Sichuan province whose in-laws live (in one case, died) in Wuhan, and keeps up with news from her homeland fairly closely.

The problem with X12 is not whether it's out of date, required by law or not. The problem is that the documentation required to implement it is very expensive. I wanted to implement electronic forms entry for my wife (a provider in private practice) and could do it without difficulty (experienced in everything from FORTRAN, COBOL modern Python3 asyncio, in addition to embedded).

What stopped me was the fact that the X12 docs which have not been revised in decades, and whose design/development costs were amortized years ago, remain protected behind high paywalls.

So the problem you cite is not a problem of "government specifying technologies or standards", it is the fact that the profits of the sons of bitches that are allowed to charge excessive fees for their implementation.

The solution is to allow software companies to charge whatever the market will bear, but publish the protocol specification for anyone who chooses to implement it.

No mod points to offer, but I agree. Facebook is designed to empower those who are most committed to pushing their point of view on others using the most abhorrent language.

Facebook's engagement algorithms, intentionally or not, reward rapid spread of compelling stories/comments/memes independent of their value or accuracy. Throughout history lies move far more quickly than truth. Facebook's management knows that and has been willfully negligent in empowering spreaders of chaos.

Right to Repair is related to "right to own". Devices with software content can be disabled by the manufacturer unless their "owners" cave in to new restrictions imposed by the manufacturers. Failure to pay the ransom reduces device functionality long after the original purcuase that they paid for originally.

Several of the devices that I bought years ago are no longer functional until I submit to the manufacturers' new requirements for "setting up an account", for "improved customer experience". That is a nonstarter.

Imagine buying a cell phone with pulse oxy / heartrate sensor, only to lose access to the functionality until setting up an account. Next step: Taking your pulse more than <n> times per day is a wonderful improvement for which you need to pay only a small monthly fee!

You write as if you know what the X-15 could do, and compare it with the SS2. Then you fail to recognize some important differences:

1) The X-15 was extremely difficult to fly, barely controllable in any of its various flight envelopes (airdrop, under power, max alt, return to atmosphere, glide, final approach, landing).
2) X-15 carried one pilot requiring a spacesuit for life support
3) X-15 cockpit was *very* tight for that pilot, much less having room for passengers to exit their seats for microgravity at apogee
4) The shuttlecock technique and carbon fiber construction allows the SS2 to be far more manufacturable

One might argue that the rubber/LOX hybrid engine in SS2 either is, or is not, a significant enabling technology. I claim that while such an engine could have been built for the X-15, other technological improvements reduced vehicle weight to a point where the hybird could produce the specific impulse needed to achive SS2 mission goals.

The X-15 was one of the wonders of the aero/astro world in its time, and those of us around at the time lived for news of it. Second most beautiful air vehicle IMHO (behind only the SR-71...).

You know very well that between 1959 (or 196x for subsequent X-15 revisions) and 201x a whole shitload of improvements make SS2 possible, and very different from the best available technology 60 years ago.

Thievery none the less.

"I am altering the deal, pray that I don't alter it further." Works for the autocrat.

We need to stop buying products from corporate fraudsters.

They waited until the transaction was complete before imposing their ransom demands, transforming an informed decision (verifying no account required) into a grand screwing (submit to our demands to continue using the product).

Repeating part of an earlier comment: These devices were functional without subscription, a condition that I verified before purchase. Years after the transaction was completed, the manufacturers took away my ability to use my purchased hardware unless I pay their ransom.

"Caveat emptor" did not work with these fraudulent transactions, and the sacks of shit that made those decisions fully understand what they are doing and why. Too many people are preoccupied with their busy lives to get a master's degree in internet-connected corporate fraud, and need to choose between paying the ransom or losing the functionalitty that they bought originally.

Now we know who owns what we thought were our purchased products.