MBAs are "highly polished turds" because we've lost the ability (legally and culturally) to assess people on merit. You end up with a poor surrogate, which has become gameified to produce people who make the metric the measurement of work instead of basing metrics on the value of the outcome.

Where have you been? You couldn't be more wrong.

This entire culture has been bent around the idea of quarterly profits for decades. "Stocks are up!" Short term gain at the cost of long term employees and innovation. Ship faster!

While, yes, the trend to seek short term profits has slowed and even in some small ways reversed, we are a good number of years from being focused on incremental innovation and experience, again.

While the entire world moved to bugtrackers, Linux seems to have stuck with the venerable yet antiquated mailing list for tracking its bugs.

Except, it's worse than that. It's not even the exclusive source, they also use bugzilla - one preferentially over the other, depending on preference of the maintainers (and presumably, the submitters).

That's not scalable. While it's nice for a small team, perhaps, to continue using email, particularly since it's been the convention for a long many years, it's clearly not working anymore.

The purpose of the system is what the system does. Email has largely fallen out of utility due to everything/everybody trying to use it for... everything.

The problem here isn't the AI generated content, it's the mechanism used for reporting bugs. They (the kernel maintainers) need to use a proper modern bug reporting and tracking system, and probably one at this point which runs automatic regression/integration tests + LLM/SLM evaluation (classification and categorization) of submitted materials. I'd wager a great number of the bugs found are indeed real, and now they're just noise.

This is a relatively dire situation, given the events of the past week: significant, frequent exploits require a more attentive approach to this than free form email can provide.

I download all my books DRM-free from bittorrent.

My ebook reader is an ancient Sony PRS-650, it still works fine and it has no trouble reading files that haven't been messed up by Amazon. What a concept eh?

"What about the book's authors who aren't getting paid when you download their stuff for free?" I hear you say:

Yes, I wish I could pay for what I downloaded. But I can't. The best option I could find was to buy the paperback as well, so some of my money would trickle back to them. But that's mighty stupid and totally not environmentally-friendly.

I did try to pay an author directly once (the late Ian M. Banks) but he send me an angry email back saying even if he got money from me, I was robbing his editor and distributor, and I should just buy his book normally - which I would, if that didn't entail leaving an undeserved cut to effing Amazon.

So there we are: there's no mechanism to legally buy books that aren't hamstrung by DRM. So honest people who value their consumer rights can't be honest.

Calculations based on average price of fuel + average household fuel use - public data. Those figures matched my experience of having an 1800sqft house with an oil burner heater in upstate NY some years ago when heating oil was about half as much as it is now (actually, a bit lower, but then my furnace was old - not that you can really fudge much efficiency out of these things, they're pretty efficient).

Wood burning is very much alive - both old-stylee polluting open-fires and stoves, and ultra-efficient pellet, wood-chip and wood dust burning in power stations. And it's renewable. Try visiting any nordic country some day...

Also, just because burning wood has downsides doesn't mean it has to be ditcheds it entirely. Solve the downsides instead...

Bet this is modded something like +4 Troll the next time I look.

Perspective is important. It's an extrapolated figure, based on trace-element factors for Cd, Cr, Mn, Ni, but not lead. That seems incredibly dishonest.

What's more, they report 0.86–1.70 ng/m ambient lead level... which upon brief examination, is about 1/4th the average urban ambient lead level, and from what I'm able to determine, about 20% of the EPA 2022–2024 non-source Pb-TSP daily mean. In other words, it's significantly lower than sources with known lead. (Similarly, it's about ~20% of historic ambient national levels - couldn't find date later than 2019 for this.)

Looks like they played very Orwellian with their data interpretation. "The use of wood as an energy source is a relic of the past, one that should not be relived if given a choice." is... well. This is "let them eat cake" level hubris. Whoever said this either has a disdain for the people they're's studying, or have zero economic understanding.... and based on the actual study findings, I can't say it appears to be truthful, either.

The people who burn wood are not doing it out of personal preference. They're doing because they can afford it: they have no other choice. Chopping, splitting, drying, and burning wood is a labor intensive activity. It's done out of fiscal/economic necessity: fuel prices for heating are extremely high, and in the area they sampled, they rely primarily on heating oil (basically: diesel fuel). Even last winter, the average household heating cost was about $1800/month, about twice what it was in 2015. With fuel prices surging? You can effectively expect twice that cost (or more) this coming winter due to the conflict with Iran.

Musing: Were the lead actually higher in the area (from what I can tell, it's not), I wonder if the "high" lead in the air would be representative of "carbon sequestration" of the trees over the past 70 odd years: as they grew, they absorbed the lead in the air?

What are you, a commiebot? You're spamming multiple threads with this nonsense.

Why don't you just propose burning the corporate facilities and the farms of people who don't eagerly comply, too?

The result is the same.

Sure, if you're building them to 1970s common practice.

A modern DC uses as much water as a Super Walmart, and a modern nuclear facility is passively cooled and recycles its water (as in, uses it repeatedly).

That's a symptom of economies of scale, and excessive de-industrializing regulation. Nuke plants have been a one-off, unique design with little reproduced between them. When they have been built in recent memory, it's been with 1950s technology.

If we instead institutionally embraced newer (safer, cheaper) reactor designs and built them at scale (with industrialized QA), we'd have safe, clean nuclear power for 200 years+ in the US, just using the existing nuclear waste.

There are enough public instances of people losing their Google account due to Google's policy and automation that this is likely a very bad idea.

I've got less than a year of email locally in Thunderbird for one mail account and it tops 10GB.

I think you underestimate the amount of space files can take: attached files take up a lot. What do I do with that email, delete it? That's not a workable solution if I want to retain the metadata associated with the files (which I do).