One of the problems America currently faces, is that we're still getting far too much science done, it's not costing us enough money, and the money it does cost is being wasted on paying the salaries of scientists instead of personally paying whoever contracts to kick back the most to political appointees.

I believe this will help solve all three problems.

Is that really a bad thing? There are certainly plenty of examples of old things that suck; either because genuine improvements became available after they had already solidified or because they were always broken and are now running purely on denial-fueled risk tolerance; but, in principle, it seems like it should be a bad thing that age is seen as a bad thing. Especially when software is more like math than like civil engineering in terms of the tendency of its materials toward corrosion, embrittlement, and fatigue. (and when so many 'modernization' projects turn into expensive failures or go way behind schedule and over budget to eventually death march toward feature parity, sometimes even achieving it in time to be declared legacy themselves.)

I'm not calling for a crusade against 'fast fashion' software; if people want to bang out an app on the fast and cheap to catch the moment when people care they can do that; fine, whatever; but it seems like software built on real long term service timescales should get a lot more credit than it does. Absent specific criticisms; it's not "eww, there are people who weren't even born then", it's "the software has been in service for a generation".

All the more if there are a lot of outfits doing the same thing: having some unique oddball legacy thing means having potentially crushing maintenance requirements unless everything was gloriously secure from day 1, which it probably wasn't; but if there is some big mass of enterprise Java 8 why should we call it all eol and scramble rather than just maintaining java 8? Especially when we can do so in software, without some of the vendor and hardware inflexibility you see with things like old school mainframe applications where there's an implied commitment to a single old school mainframe vendor in perpetuity.

It's not elegant; but realistically we are far enough both into the history of computer science and the history of computers-as-hardware-you-can-buy that there's a lot less obvious, low-hanging, progress to be had by going 'modern' relative to the amount of fashion and fad chasing. Especially if (as is the case for a great many people and organizations) the scale of your problem has grown at or below the rate at which hardware advances have made systems not particularly well designed for scalability faster.

Obviously this would require coordinated action, and some people likely have other reasons to want to either poke at or kill legacy applications; but(since all those java versions are solidly post openjdk) I'd be very curious to know how the cost and risk associated with "modernize because java 18 is going eol!" would compare to just...not...having java 18 go eol. Unsexy maintenance project that you'd need to pay to have done, sure; but very plausibly better characterized and lower risk than trying to deal with a lot of the oddball internal accretions that would otherwise need updating; and, depending on how much people have running on java 18, certainly possible that they'll individually spend a fair bit more running the treadmill than it would cost to just keep kicking java 18 down the road until (almost) nobody cares.

Similar problems here. It's just all so pointless. It caused staffing problems for us too.

Boris started grifting when he was a journalist and publishing lies about the EU, but his Brexit campaigning was a pure power play. Self interest, nothing more.

It is not. Freedom of movement covers four things: Goods, services, capital, and labour. The labour part means that people can move to another EU country, and are treated like any citizen. They have the right to live there permanently, with the only caveat being that because it's freedom of movement of labour, they can be turfed out if they aren't actually working for a few months, but in practice I don't think any country really bothers with that.

It's good, it helps push up wages and means you can live in one country and work in another if they are both in Schengen or the Ireland/UK common travel area. You can also move your money around easily and take advantage of the best deals.

Can confirm. I get a lot of push-back from people who are convinced that the UK isn't a racist country, but I experience it in my life on a regular basis.

I look white, but I'm only half white. People treat me as white until they find out, and then in a disturbing percentage of cases their attitude immediately changes. It's like a switch was flipped, and I think they are usually not even consciously aware of it. It seems to be a mix of fear, distrust, and a pile of assumptions and stereotypes that they instantly apply to me.

Any reasonable analysis shows that there has been a significant, permanent hit to the UK economy and people's general prosperity.

https://www.theguardian.com/po...

It would be extremely weird if buggering up your biggest trading relationship didn't have any negative effects. We also put some of the least competent people in the country in charge of making new trade deals, which it turned out we could have made inside the EU anyway.

There are some small advantages to driving on the left, the main one being that Japan does too so we get native versions of Japanese cars and can import used vehicles with minimal changes required.

Arguably operating the gear shift with your left hand is better, but we are moving away from manual cars finally anyway.

We took one for the team.

It's worse than that. There was no agreed upon plan for what leaving actually meant, and what the official Vote Leave campaign was promoting bore little resemblance to what was actually negotiated. Every brexiter had their own fantasy version of it, and they were all fantasies where the UK somehow shot itself in the dick and the EU came begging for a sweet deal that gave the UK extra special and highly preferential access to the Single Market.

It wasn't helped by the Tory Party ripping itself apart, and by Theresa May spouting literal nonsense like "Brexit means Brexit".

This tech has been in use in Europe for years, and the way it works is to tell the car you need X% by Y time, and the system makes sure you have it. Typically the amount sent to the grid is maximum about 10% of the battery anyway.

There is a similar system where you get lower charging costs by allowing the energy company to decide when you car charges. Again, you tell it you need X% by Y time, and it selects charging slots to make sure you have that in the morning. You can also override it manually whenever you want, although you don't get the lower rate energy if you do.

And if you are really into it, you can have your own system using open source software to play the market and charge when energy is cheapest, even negatively priced, with a minimum of X% by Y time. People with solar often do it because they get paid more to export the solar than it costs to charge from the grid overnight.

At least in Europe there is actually a market for repairing or replacing Leaf batteries now, although to be cost effective it helps to DIY it. While they aren't great batteries, the do have the advantage of being simple. Just a couple of power cables and some bolts. You can swap one out on your driveway with a trolley if you really want to.

They are also easy to fix, and the most common failure mode is one or two cells go bad. So you get a scrap one for next to nothing and swap some good cells in, which again is easy enough to do with just some bolts between you and the cells.

It's far from ideal, but some people like those cars or want to keep them going cheaply.

There was an episode of Question Time (a QA session with politicians and the public), and a woman said, on national TV, that she voted for Brexit because of bendy bananas.

Bendy bananas is one of the oldest, most frequently debunked myths about the EU. The claim is there is a crazy EU law that costs retailers money, regulating the curvature of bananas. There are actually rules about bananas... But they were written by the UK. They became a de facto standard, and the EU adopted them FROM US.

The level of ignorance was headache inducing. People knew less than nothing about the EU - what they did know was mostly lies, negative knowledge.

We won't get the old deal back, but I see that as a benefit. As for the Euro, I'd join but the reality is that the requirement to join is not at all enforced. If a country does nothing to actually adopt it, nothing happens. Several other countries haven't bothered.