I'm in a rural area, density 31/sq.mi. (12/km2).

* Viasat $70/mo lowest tier (40GB traffic then some degradation). Same old sat pricing model rural people are familiar with: 2 year commitment, service call to install equipment, $75+. Monthly discount for low income ($30), tribal lands ($75), paid for BY THE FCC. Story time, a lightning strike on one of these rigs, HughesNet, burned through its modem, and later fried my laptop because I thought ethernet was more secure than WiFi for a job I was doing. The rural franchise installers are not always the best, and back then sat was the only game available, and everybody wants internet. Lots of roadside flappy signs. If you listen to the news out of the recent Eastern Kentucky floods, they list internet, cellular and electricity as the utility losses (water is usually via an electric well).

* Starlink $110/mo. Equipment self-install, $683.

* DSL $75/mo, speed 512Kbps. The bottleneck here is distance to the station, about 3 miles. The phone company, not one of the big ones, has put the squeeze on in the last few years in its doom: offshore service, higher charges for equipment, very high late fees.

* Cellular, only Verizon works, 2 bars, about the speed of the DSL above.

* Broadband over Powerline, defunct. The electric co-op offered this through a 3rd party vendor, but it never worked well. It was subsidized by the successor to FDR's Rural Electrification Administration (REA), housed in the Agriculture Dept.

* Fiber, $50/mo, by the end of the year. Also from the electric co-op. Subsidized by the REA successor, or in some nearby areas not on the co-op, by a fairly wealthy and denser county.

All about the benjamins, and throw in the archaic structure of university medical research labs.

The Anil Potti scandal at Duke was eye-opening. Briefly, personalized medicine for cancer diagnosis was a Theranos-level hot topic, and a mid-level researcher faked his data. A third-year med student who knew stats raised a red flag and was pressured to keep quiet by numerous high-ranking people at Duke, including the late-career lead researcher, who knew nothing about stats but held god-like status in the department (a common problem). Two statisticians at MD Anderson in Houston published the proof of fraud. NIH levied heavy penalties on all Duke medical research, a med school that was once ranked third in the nation, maybe still is for all I know. The NIH sanctions were judged too lenient by the critics. Under scrutiny another high-profile scandal arose at Duke, by Erin Potts-Kant. Two key breaks in the Potti case came from a specialized newsletter in Washington: https://cancerletter.com/free/... CBS 60 minutes ran a story, and NYT on page A1, and the patients settled out of court. This all took years, with Duke lying about internal affairs well into the investigation. Along the way a fraudulent DMCA takedown notice was issued against https://retractionwatch.com/ca... and Wordpress's parent company.

Retraction Watch and other do-gooders have hundreds of these cases, but they're up against a Mt. Everest of money structuring the system. At any major university with a med school, the hospital and med research dominate the cash flow of the whole institution. It's often said a losing football schedule can take down a university president in the SEC, but med money adjacent shenanigans almost did in the ACC (the attempt to oust Teresa Sullivan and replace her with a JHU med admin). Even non-university hospitals are getting into the game. Inova Health, the main hospital chain in Northern Virginia, bought Exxon/Mobil's big research building on the Beltway to start harvesting grants.

Compare and contrast the Ted Talk formula. The google results on that topic are both comedic parodies and sincere advice, with much overlap. So I'll skip the boring description!

The 3, 5, 7 were good shit well before the M3, but the kool kats ran around in used 2002's.

Sometimes German engineering gets confused. I had mid-70s VW lug bolts (not lug nuts) that self-tightened on one side of the car, requiring a five-foot breaker bar in the trunk. In more recent days, Japanese Lexi and Avalons were no-brainers when Deutschland went south. But Japanese marketing can get ahead of itself. I know mechanics that object to Nissan ways, weird bolt placements, or the early Infinitis that had beautiful styling but a low-hanging "harmonic balancer" triple belt gear that is chipped up by corrosion at every junkyard.

This is a drama of companies consolidating and getting too big (with nearly government-scale bureaucracies) and screwing up. There's not enough capital to fix it and we've been extracting value by squeezing the supply chain and optimizing labor for short-term profits. We fired medical staff (other than ICU's) during the pandemic and expected them to come back! I doubt we have increased surge beds. We barely pay election workers and jurors. But the power of delusion is we must all be smooth and happy.

Speaking of GUI, I have a friend devoted to Wordperfect. Editing in Reveal Codes was a pleasure, that much is true, and the function keys were sensible. MS Word made everything difficult.

On Unix terminal I just use vi. The text files I edit are simple enough, and the commands haven't changed. Yank!

It's on Wayback (link in grandfather comment). The navigation links didn't work for me, but by clicking around I got to the full archive.

(Of course 2001 is always compared to Solaris, a very different take.)

Also, the speeches by Roy Batty are not that great. If Dick wrote them, he probably did them as a joke.

Yes, I immediately thought of the corporations in Metropolis when the summary mentioned Tyrell Corp. as foundational. TFA also ignores previous literature and film, aside from the quoted mention of Chinatown. But our comments are late enough they will only be read by robots!

So while neither I nor, apparently, the author are Blade Runner experts, seems we have a few new things going on beyond other sci-fi: the lively street life below the Metropolis-like evil corporation, and the film-noirish government assassin. Evil corp has a precedent before Metropolis in the play that invented the word robot, R.U.R. by Capek. The automaton damsel in distress is like Olympia in the 1881 opera Tales of Hoffmann, based on a story Sandman from 1816! I love the 1951 film by those British scamps, Powell and Pressburger.

But the government assassin program is not even a film noir idea, since those guys were outside the system. It's a crazy cold-war thing from Dick I guess. You do have Apocalypse Now / Heart of Darkness (1899), but that's just capping off a single rogue.

The BBC apparently deleted that part later. The World Meteorological Organization press release still has it. The paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society says this:

This megaflash was produced by an MCS that originated over the Great Plains and moved southward before migrating offshore over the Gulf of Mexico. The megaflash occurred after the storm had moved offshore and it extended throughout the trailing stratiform region stretching along the Gulf Coast between Texas and Mississippi...

It should be noted that the sizes reported by GLM are only a minimum estimate for the true extent and duration of these flashes and the actual flashes may exceed these accepted values.

And since MBA programs are only two years, the crackpot level is fairly high. As well as students just punching tickets for a degree - we've had a few of them come through the door to write a term paper (they use another name) on our business. They come in teams of three.

Anybody remember Door to Door Organics? It closed in November 2017 after taking Thanksgiving orders. After 20 years of I guess successful operation in Denver, it went on a nationwide expansion spree, buying a startup in my area. Many startups here come out of projects from the local university's MBA program, along with money from wherever. We watch them fly and burn usually, but the one Door to Door eventually bought lasted a few years, always seeming to spend more than made sense. You had to pick up the groceries at various parking lots or pay more for home delivery.

Grocery store profit margins are notoriously thin. Only Amazon or another cash-rich company have the money to burn, and even then it may only make sense for Whole Foods customers. Unless people decide they want to pay for service. See: Uber.

And how many single-item startups, advertising heavily, are jobs programs for the children of billionaires? Looking at entrepreneurship from the jobs-at-the-top perspective makes a lot of sense. I've been reading about the Stylite ascetics ascetics of the 5th century, named after the columns they stood on all day, contemplating religion. It was a fervid time in theology, with lots of innovation, donations from urban worthies, and political implications to every nuance of biblical interpretation . For all the apparently sincerity of the ascetics, you have to wonder if it was a scam to keep from working in the fields.

The last (in both senses of the word) Dell laptop I got had a BIOS update available, when I checked the Dell website when I first ran it. Back then I always did those on new equipment, and periodically thereafter. Downloaded it from Dell and ran it, totally normal procedure. Bricked. Went online and found other people had the same problem with that version and hardware. The two possible suggested fixes from the keyboard did not work. Luckily it was just barely still under warranty and I sent it to Texas. When it came back they had not re-installed the keyboard film correctly, so I ended up having to use an external keyboard. By that point, I wasn't interested in sending it back to Texas.

Just in the medical field, we have the Purdue Pharma family, whose net worth is projected to increase despite making annual payments to the federal court.

And a quick Google search gives: "Sep 2, 2009 — This is the largest civil fraud settlement in history against a pharmaceutical company. As part of the settlement, Pfizer also has agreed to..."

The circus attention to the Theranos trial, and having George Shultz and the like on her board, notwithstanding, she did the crime, and patients suffered. This time it's criminal, but two civil wrongs (Pfizer, Purdue for example) don't make this criminally right.

Ellen Pao and her Dakota-apartment-gobbling husband look pretty bad, but they get a smidgen of leeway for breaking in as parvenus. The Aspen Institute should get whatever amount of equal egg on its face for fostering them.

Aspen is not the only church preaching the new gospel of virtuous enthusiasm and creative destruction, of course. Heck, all Trump needed besides his inbred genetics was Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale, Roy Cohn, Russian oligarchs, and allegedly a book of Hitler's speeches by his bedside. Ugliness does not make his path that different than a good old A-list confab in the mountains. We're all responsible for our own nonsense.

NY real estate laws saved a few others.