The department of education and various retardations like implicit and systemic bias being enshrined in the education system in the 90's are the two ways in which our education system was dumped in the shitter. When you refuse to suspend or expel the students who constantly disrupt class and intimidate other students and make fun of them for wanting to learn, the learning by students goes waaaayyyy down. Then of course there was, and in some districts still is the complete idiocy the composes common core math and whole word learning, which has utterly tanked reading and math ability with second order effects impacting everything else.

In this case, a bunch of postal workers are going to get a serious side hustle.

I've been using Claude to both understand and assist in writing new code in DB/C, an obscure dialect of another pretty obscure language called PL/B or DATABUS -- all of which are descendants of (or highly influenced by) COBOL. It's pretty fantastic. It's a codebase that is ~50 years old, hundreds of thousands of lines, with code spread throughout modules, with jump tables and gotos everywhere. The code itself is easy to read and understand, but the flow is not!

That laptop screen has got to be less than a foot from his eyes given where the heating pattern is. How does he even type?

When the stereotype fits conditions in over 80% percent of the landmass...

Make that 'and so should good ones.' I really need to proofread better after editing things mid-sentence.

South Africa is about two steps away from total collapse due to the mismanagement of infrastructure and water resources since the ANC came to power with the population increase over the past 30 years and the reduced rain in 2016, 2019 and 2020 exposing just how bad the situation is. The 'official' estimate is they currently lose 30% of their drinkable water due to leaks and theft, which means the actual amount is almost certainly higher*.

*Poor government numbers should always be assumed to be worse than they are, and good ones better absent oddball situations. The magnitude of the amount depending on the local corruption and the significance of the effect on the government workers if they provide numbers their superiors don't like.

That's certainly an interesting way of saying that Democrats are more likely to engage often with things that make them angry.

Also, to preempt any pedantic response, yes, I'm aware that Cray computers are still very much a thing. But, using the phrase "Cray computers" as the epitome of computing power is very much a thing of the 1990s and before.

Hah, now see, I left some keywords in my last post you would have picked up on if had done national security work (at least connected to one of the bigger players).

That Wikipedia page is severely out of date. For instance, it quotes Hayden as NSA director talking about "Cray" computers. Hayden hasn't held a position in maybe 20 years, and his last position was as DCIA! US Intel is very, very aware of the computational and hacking abilities of China, North Korea, and others.

A level playing field would for the vast majority of positions be blind hiring based entirely on the established work product with all sources used triple checked and any and all appeals to emotion in the portfolio grounds for disqualification.

> Indeed. The Chinese also know that publishing a story about a found backdoor in their software would be a great exploit for the US and hence they know that the US is looking. Strangely, nothing has been found so far. Or rather very obviously, nothing has been found and the whole thing is nothing but lies.

Or maybe, just maybe, when the Chinese AND the Americans IC agencies find exploits and backdoors in the other's countries, they keep them quiet and monitor, save for later, watch other people exploit, etc.

Maybe, when 3-letter agencies in McClean and elsewhere catch incursions, they monitor them closely, analyze their tactics and techniques, and contain. It's a pretty Byzantine system, but that's modern spycraft.

I'll believe they're serious when they start living the lifestyles they claim we'll need to curve the trend. Tons of posts about Trump but none about the supposed environmentalists who are still living the same lifestyles of the average Trump supporter. Where is the low-hanging fruit? Why aren't these people changing their ways? Why ask those who oppose your agenda when your own "believers" can't be bothered?

If these people were serious we'd see EV adaption in the double digits and be able to walk into any restaurant and get a vegetarian meal without having to double guess what may or may not be used to create it. We're not seeing that. We're not going to see that because environmentalism is only an issue when it comes down to politics and not lifestyle in the minds of these people. They want to weaponize environmentalisms as a political tool, not as a practical guide for end-user consumption.

But, you know, fOlLoW tHe ScIeNcE!!!

Family member who lives there is a Environmental Studies professor. He uses his own trash/garbage pickup as a case study for students to calculate vehicle wear+tear, ROAD wear+tear, impact on traffic through the area, transportation-related CO2 emissions, and so forth.

Not that it's a shocker, but yeah, tl;dr, privatizing garbage is a ridiculously bad idea.

Hah--funny! No, needless to say, they do not. I have had a sticker put on my rolling recycle bin before saying that it was picked for a random inspection to make sure we're only putting recyclables in there, and threatening fines and penalties, but that's it.

I also read up on my city's solid waste quarterly reports, and the vast majority of what goes in recycle bins ends up going to a landful. It's a pitiful fraction, especially for plastics. So, I just through those away. I do dispose of some kinds of batteries and other ewaste specially.

Single stream recycling is about 90% performative theater. Other kids of recycling are like 80% performative.