Get your kid a kindle unlimited subscription. Books may not be the top1%, but they are good and can inspire a love for reading for cheap.

Also, to those naming good books, try:

The Vorkosogian books by Lois McMaster Bujold.

Or my personal one, '"You are free to speak as long as it respectful to the politicians currently in charge."

As quoted from a sherriff trying to arrest someone at a public hearing

Good Jargon is created for specificity between professionals.

Doctors need to talk about the left Tibia not the leg bone, nor even the left long.lower leg bone. Lawyers need to say Habeas Corpus not the legal order from a judge requiring the immediate release of someone illegally arrested.

The problem is that when talking to a child, the doctor should say leg bone, not Tibia. In fact, there is little reason to say Tibia even to an adult. Same with Habeas Corpus.

Similarly most of the time, business jargon is a bad idea. It should NEVER appear on a company's public website. If you are in a technical meeting with ONLY technical people it can make sense, but even then it is overused.

Good jargon is for highly technical discussions intended to only be heard/read by highly skilled professionals. Not anyone else.

Bad Jargon is used to convince morons that you are 'a highly skilled professional', and obviously know more than they do - see all the big words I used?

Examples of horrendous, UNPROFESSIONAL business words and their professional English definitions.

Synergize - work together
Solution - product for sale
Enterprise - anything people do, including business, government, charity, or even hobby.
Circle Back/touch back - talk later
Cloud - network of computers
Offline - anything not on the internet.
Agile - adaptable, flexible, reactive
bandwidth - capacity
pivot - change
110% - all out effort, I'm not kidding, I really mean all out effort
KPI/Key Performance Indicators - objectives that people measure and therefore care about.
AI/artificial intelligence - mathematical formulas used by computers.

Note that most of these terms do not add anything to the conversation. Most of the time the specificity they add is negligible. In normal conversation/websites there is often a single, normal every day English word that can be used. But if you avoid the jargon idiots will not think you are a super-genius that definitely knows what you are talking about. But normal people will think you are not a douchebag trying to trick people.

Because that is what I think every time I hear some moron using two or more those words in a sentence.

If you disagree, well lets circle back on that offline, see if we can find a solution that synergizes with our enterprises' agile KPI. Because my bandwidth is low right now I need to pivot, and check out what the AI hallucinated so I can give 110%.

What a bunch of Shmucks.

You sound like AI propaganda to me.

For most of computer history, the easiest way to gain illegal access to a computer is to hack the weakest part of the system - the human. You use social hacking to deceive the human into giving you passwords and rights to places you have no business going.

Have you heard of spam? More words.

Phishing emails? More words.

Sticks and Stones can only break my bones, words can bankrupt you, send you to jail, and destroy your reputation so badly that people will ostracize you despite a court finding you Not Guilty (they never call you innocent)

Well, that's the point where they get totaled by the insurance company, sure, but then they get sold as salvage. Somebody buys them. If they're recent enough, chances are they still fix them up and sell them, and if they can't fix them, then they get turned into parts for repairing other cars. It's not like those cars suddenly become scrap metal at that point, with the exception of the damaged body panels.

I mean, I can still buy a remanufactured battery for a 2012 Tesla thirteen years later. Arguably, you could say that the model is still in production, by some definition of "model", or you could say that a remanufactured battery isn't being manufactured, but the fact of the matter is that this is where those salvage vehicles' parts often end up.

The real question is whether it makes sense to do so. And at some point, it doesn't. The battery is a big enough expense that a lot of folks won't bother to replace it when it fails. That number isn't zero, though. And a lot of car dealers will do so when they take them in on trade.

Correct, though if new packs exist for that model, you can likely pay the difference and get one. You can even upgrade to a larger battery in some cases. For example, probably every Model S or X from 2012 through 2020 or so has a battery with the same frame, connector (give or take swapping a plastic plate with the one from the old pack), mounting (give or take swapping out a plate), etc. Some folks have actually put a 100D pack into a 2015 Model S 70D.

Android tries to attract high-end customers, and they do attract some, but the fact remains that Apple is a prestige brand, and tends to own the lion's share of the high-end market. Blaming a company for being unable to hold enough of the high end is a much weaker argument than blaming a company for using (or, arguably, abusing) its market position to limit competition in a related market.

If by "fine", you mean manually switching between networks, then yes, it is "fine". You could kind of do that with Google Fi on an iPhone, too, IIRC. But that's hardly comparable to what the experience should be, which involves seamless switching based on signal strength, GPS location, possibly whether there are critical long-running network connections open, etc., and maybe even tunneling via a VPN over top of those networks so you don't drop connections when you switch. I mean, doing it right involves a metric f**kton of OS support that Apple hasn't shown a willingness to provide.

Android is a fragmented pile of dozens of companies, the largest of which has maybe a little over half of Apple's marketshare, and they go down from there. As long as Apple owns roughly half the market and refuses to allow seamless network switching software, the situation likely won't improve much. If they had an eighth of the market, things would be different, because they wouldn't be particularly relevant. If they loosened up their grip on apps, things would be different, because the tools would exist. But the status quo leaves a lot to be desired, IMO.

And let me be clear, I use an iPhone every day, and I use a Mac every day. I'm not saying this because I hate Apple. I'm saying this because I think Apple is doing something stupid, and they need a course correction.

I'm not convinced five is enough unless all five have solid nationwide coverage, or unless the carriers are forbidden from owning towers. In any situation where you have only a couple of nationwide carriers, the weaker carriers quickly degrade and consolidate, and then you're back to one or two usable carriers.

The problem is that building a good nationwide network is expensive, and the carriers are too busy competing with each other in the densest areas for anybody to bother providing good service everywhere. So you have good service on Verizon in one spot, good service on AT&T in another spot, and good service on T-Mobile in another spot, but none of them have good service everywhere. This is why infrastructure is best handled by a giant nonprofit monopoly, ideally as a joint venture among all the service providers, or as a government-run nonprofit, or some other similar form, with access leased to anybody who wants to pay for it.

If our phones could transparently roam on every network, we'd have amazing service everywhere. There's solid coverage for pretty much the entire U.S., with the exception of a few areas up in the mountains and maybe some large national parks. But because you can't, you're stuck with crap. And because the phone networks have to all have high levels of coverage in the densest areas, there's an incredible amount of wasted redundant infrastructure in those places, and damn near none in other places. It's grossly inefficient.

If you really want to know who I blame for this mess, it's Apple. You see, Google tried to do a really great thing with Google Fi. It could roam between multiple carriers. That never worked on iOS. Apple wouldn't make it possible for such things to happen, which pretty much killed any chance of Google Fi branching out to more networks, because the folks who would be willing to pay a premium for that would mostly be iPhone users. And so after Sprint, T-Mobile and U.S. Cellular merged, Google Fi became a single-carrier network again, and nobody is even trying to do anything like that anymore.

If Apple had made it possible for carriers to do those sorts of complex roaming setups on the fly, then other companies probably would have followed in the footsteps of Google Fi, and we'd have more true un-carriers that roam across multiple networks. You'd pay a bit more, but they'd work so much better. And at some point, you'd likely reach a point where nobody is still using the carriers directly, instead choosing to buy from resellers that provide a better value, and the carriers would start reducing service redundancy and start improving service in lower-density areas.

Unfortunately, as long as Apple has such a stranglehold on the U.S. cell phone hardware market and refuses to play ball with MVNOs that want to do carrier switching, we'll continue to have to put up with the sh*tty oligopoly mess that we have now.

Mind you, Apple isn't the only entity to blame, but IMO they definitely played a big role in propping up the big megacorp carriers in a negative way. Trump's thoroughly regulatory-captured FCC also deserves a lot of blame for allowing the Sprint/T-Mobile merger to happen, and Biden's still-too-weak FCC for allowing the T-Mobile/U.S. Cellular deal as well, though at least the tower operations and most of the spectrum remained in a separate entity in the latter merger, which is to say that they didn't botch things up as badly.

Humans do things for strangers and get nothing in return all the time. It's actually a big part of what makes us human.

I never said that. That's one of a very large number of disadvantages to a workplace that is almost all men. Treating the women in the workplace badly is a second disadvantage. Not having the female voice in product design is a third. There are lots of other reasons. But you're kidding yourself if you think that not being able to socialize with people who might actually become more than colleagues isn't harmful psychologically, particularly in the tech world, where folks are often pressured to spend way more time on the clock than people in most other industries.

That's because your understanding of the issue is superficial. Lots of those programs begin in high school, which is way too late.

It has worked. Over twenty-five years, we've gone from tech being 90% men to 70% men. If you don't call that "working", then I'd love to know what metrics you consider relevant.

I'm not. I'm saying that a lot of people aren't comfortable with things because they didn't start getting used to them at a young enough age, and that if more young girls got the same level of tech experience that boys have, the outcomes would likely be different.

Wow. And you're calling me sexist. Rolling my eyes here.

Having the same opportunity to play video games doesn't make them want to play video games. And this assumes the opportunity is the same, which probably isn't true. Either way, that has nothing whatsoever to do with whether they could become interested in tech in other ways that don't involve video games, which makes it entirely moot.

And this comment in the context of an article where a CEO is literally saying that people should go to the office for more social interaction... priceless.

Never said that, nor anything like that.

I have a lot of family who are nurses, and there's actually quite a bit.

I never said they had to go to work. I said that they had to find women. I mean, I guess they could adopt, but...

Correct. But show me how a man can have a baby without a woman, and I'll show you a miracle.

Sorry, but there is ample evidence. You just aren't willing to listen to anything that disagrees with your preconceived notion of how the world works. You're still wrong.

Other than a brief period when T-Mobile was really shaking things up, we haven't had much competition in the cellular phone market. Service now on T-Mobile is worse than it was on Sprint before the merger. AT&T is and has always been a disaster. This leaves Verizon as the de facto major carrier outside of major cities, and even in many parts of major cities.

Calling this competition is a joke. There's Verizon, and then there's everybody else eating the scraps that fall off the table.

But the neat thing is that there are apparently so many business phones and car entertainment systems out there that there are about one third more subscribers than there are people over age 10 in the United States:

• Verizon: 146.1 million
• AT&T: 118.2 million
• T-Mobile post-merger with Sprint: 132.8 million
• Total: 397.1 million

These numbers should lead one to question... well, everything, really.

EVs break even after something like 15,000 miles, on average. So unless you only drive your car 3 miles per day on average, you're gonna pass the break-even point within 15 years.

That said, either their analysis or the Slashdot summary thereof must be at least slightly flawed, IMO, because otherwise, they could not come to this conclusion:

That's simply not the case when you factor in the harsh reality that a majority of owners won't replace the battery when it eventually fails unless it is still under warranty. To do the math, if you have a car that has a 300-mile battery and a second car that has a 150-mile battery, if you drive it until the battery fails, assuming cycle count is a strong indication of failure rate (and I believe that it is), the car with the 300-mile battery will have gone twice as many miles, on average.

There's just no way that the environmental impact of the 300-mile car is twice that of the car with the 150-mile battery, because that would basically mean that the rest of the car must have zero material that gets mined, zero manufacturing effort, zero mass causing increased tire wear, etc. This is a nonsensical theory.

IMO, encouraging the use of smaller batteries is counterproductive, at least until we get to the point where the batteries outlive the cars.

Of course it will. If their kids didn't have porn to look at, they'd have to look at each other.

Oh, wait, they wanted the teen pregnancy rate to get *lower*?

One of my friends commented, "Oh, look. Dollar General is selling food now." It's a silly logo change that IMO weakens the brand. But I'm not going to get all hysterical about it. It's their company, their decision, and it has exactly zero impact on my life.

No, not yet.

Innovation still largely happens in the West. China and others are rapidly catching up, but they're not there quite yet. And their disadvantage of cheap labour is slowly diminishing as well as the Chinese people demand that they benefit from the whole thing as well.

That is all smoke & mirrors. How many companies from Europe do you see outsourcing to the USA because of the lower minimum wage and the weaker unions? None. Because those are just bullshit arguments they've been peddling for decades because they work. Sadly, our politicians these days are (in general, a few exceptions nonwithstanding) both incompetent and corrupt, so it's working even better now.

I've been involved in a few location decisions on the company level. Pay is a factor. But language is a huge one (what good is cheap work if they don't understand what you want them to do?), logistics is another (how far is it from our current location, and how easy to get to?), surrounding infrastructure, availability of qualified people nearby, options for additional space to expand, heck I've seen a company move HQ because the new location was closer to the CEOs home.

Yupp, the Silicon Valley style of solving everything. Companies buying into that soon learn that manufacturing is a lot more than a couple people/robots doing stuff.

That's what I said. Assume for your example that you need not just a few techs, but also at least one or two people who actually understand how manufacturing works. Where do you get these people when there are no more manufacturing jobs?

Let's force all the decision makers (politicians and CEOs) to make a month-long "vacation" in Detroit. Drop them off with nothing but their clothes in the city center. They all got where they are because they're so smart and successful, so shouldn't be a problem, right?