I was going to say the same thing. We have some amazing weapons systems. I mean when you think about it, it is down right stunning what a systems like Patriot Interceptors, AIM-9 air to air missile, or even a Phalanx CIWS, actually do and with such efficacy.

Yet these are 40-60 year old systems, at least their fundamental designs are.

All of it is undone though by swarms of cheap drones, which are marvels of technology themselves in terms of position identification and the digital logic to deliver simple stable flight be it fixed wing or multiple rotor aircraft.

Its funny in some ways it seems we are back to castle walls and archers. You can bead a horse to be strong and fast, put a bunch of fancy Armour on the riders, but if the enemy your are approaching can throw a lot of cheap shafts at you (which just as now were actually not all that cheap to manufacture) all the expensive super weapons become as much liabilities as assets.

I don't know. All the same arguments could be applied to not acting upon a non-responsive passenger while the taxis is traveling as well. It isn't as if cardiac events or respiratory failures are just going to wait until the vehicle is parked!

Yet traditional cab drivers don't monitor their passengers to make sure they are awake and alert and not reporting any distress the entire trip, as matter of fact neither do bus lines, railroads, airlines, passenger ships, and so on. Neither do these business require everyone to wear a pulse-ox for the duration. Would we hold a motel accountable if you expire from natural causes in your rented room overnight?

Liability usually follows from either expectation of concern/care or causation and I am not sure there is either here. I am not a fan of Waymo but if I am on the jury and they are the defendant in your case against them because they did not do enough to prevent your whomevers death by self inflicted alcohol poisoning where we have video that simply shows them appearing to be sleeping peacefully in the back seat most of the ride; I am going to need to hear a lot of compelling argument. I can't currently imagine what that would be to get me to go along with the idea you have any claim against them.

This is what everyone needs to understand when they say "we should have a public..." or "why did we privatize this".

If you have actual experience doing any work from the government you know that huge portion of it is compliance costs, realistically it absolutely is something like 40% probably.

First there is the upfront bits of doing an RFP that looks like nobody else's

then there is proving you have the required mix of ethic and gender representation (if you actually want to win)

after that comes the recording and reporting on different metrics than anyone else in industry uses because someone has to follow a rule from 1943 or some public employee who does not understand anything about the process decided they needed to CYA and wrote up some report templates, because they all believe (possibly rightly) that if they make the haystack big enough none of them can ever be identified and faulted for ordering the wrong thing or given the wrong instruction.

Next unlike the business world where the incentive is usually to accept the deliverable, if it meets the spec and functions well under test, because the customer wants to put that asset into operation and either start making or saving money money with it, the public folks are incentivized to nit pick and play lawyer about every word because again CYA, in case anything ever goes wrong in the future. So you got 15% in rework or dispute resolution right there whichever path you chose; again all the fix things any reasonable persons would find no fault with.

So the private sector responds to this in a couple ways.

First - dramatically over charge because it is government. In competitive markets there is a wink a nod and nobody offers the tax payer a far price

Second - in smaller less understood tenders they dramatically under bid to win, then insert some time and materials language somewhere that lets the go 30X over budget. The people evaluating the responses know this and don't care because it is not their money after all and the vendor will let them play victim in the court of public opinion. Oracle, SAP, Blackwater, Core-Civics types don't care what "people" think about them because they don't have "consumers", the Amazon's and Microsoft's of the world have figured out consumers are not informed enough or don't seem mind them abusing Uncle Sam or the local yokels on their county board..

Well yeah. I mean come on we know about IT stuff around here. If you are trying to back up vary large transnational systems two axis on the chart or granularity, and cost on the operational side, and granularity and time to restore on the recovery side. Sometimes you can mix them, ie a not vary granular operational backup, but if you are willing to put enough time an engery you can restore individual records or groups there of by say restoring a whole partition (as in database) querying the data you need and injecting it back into the transaction environment.

It does not surprise me that Microsoft can't wont do individualized account operations for just anybody from a technical perspective or from a customer service perspective in terms of customer rep time and engineering time to deal with one persons issues.

What they are charging for these services does not allow for that. The other reality of these SaaS service is cheap does not therefore translate to good individual value. As we have seen with the Sony article yesterday, IP in your account like a movie or video game title reality is its a rental for as long as they feel like it no matter how the terms sounded, and if it is data pictures, videos, personal files, you better damn well have copies elsewhere because while the causes might be different your data is just as likely to vanish one morning as it was back in 1988 when the ST506 MFM disk in your PC AT suddenly refused to read, but curiously was fine after a new low level format..

Never mind all those DVDs from the mid 2000s that rotted on the shelf. Good luck getting anyone to replace those..

Physical media does not provide any sort of certainty you'll be able to enjoy it a decade from now and don't say "but make backups" the value proposition of making a backup as in a real redundant copy to sit on self somewhere (or hardisk ... whatever) vs for piracy just isn't there. The time plus the cost of the media does not let that make sense for something you paid less than $20 for in the first place.

There are already provisions for 'hair cuts' and similar theft.

Dodd-Frank gave the FDIC the ability to treat similar seniority creditors differently in resolutions, for 'systemic stability' which is not well defined. So if you have a bond in a failing bank and the current administration does not like you... to bad....

Temporary though it might be the pandemic legislation (cares act? I think it was) also created force majeure where if you'd owner financed a residence and the buy decided to just not pay, dear old Uncle Sam say to bad, you can't foreclose and get your property back.

I for one don't think if the shit really hits the fan and gold buried in the yard or bitcoin wallets on USB keys will do anyone holding it much good but rest assured, 'they' will absolutely steal your money. They already demoed this now twice in as many decades, and things did not even have to get that all that real.

The thing about doing this nationally though, is nobody is a bigger customer than the federal government. If by statue federal agencies move'd to 7-4, big business with federal contracts and small business with federal contracts absolutely would follow; and everyone else would follow them.

It makes zero f'ing sense to not have noon be when the sun is directly overhead. I realize that timezones are geographically to large and if you live at the edges noon is never really noon. Still FFS the middle of the day should be the middle of the day at least near the center of our given timezones.

The other thing DST means is the earths rotational day does not align to the calendar day, that just means more goofiness around local observations, and recording.

Given this is entirely a political thing if people WANT DST from a life style perspective, why don't we collectively agree start the morning news at 5a instead of 6a and open the office at 7 rather than 8 on the same day we set the clocks for the last time?

Well, they do say the Universe is expanding... now we know why - Galactic Sugar is everywhere.

We can't understand why you can't understand basic fundamental realities that these twelve year-olds you speak of are able to plainly see.

Dude Biden has been out of office for almost two full years. He is to feeble to sexually harass most women now and probably needs help getting in and out of the shower, so even his daughter is mostly safe.

Allow me Fix the headline!

Over 200 Economists Embrace Sensationalism To Drive Ad Impressions on Blogs and Substack Subscriptions.

The problem here is the loss of trust. I have migrated almost everything I used to still use Windows for (at work left Windows at home behind a long time ago), to either MacOS natively or a Linux VM.

Microsoft made the experience of using Windows 11 so bad it was worth it abandon workflows with a decade or more of use to avoid it!

The very idea the find/search feature on the desktop should have ever searched for, let alone returned results from the internet prior to those found on the local machine and maybe possibly maybe some user identified data sources like attached network volumes and associated sharepoint / intranet resources in business environments was both stupid and malevolent.

Windows from at least 22h2 on through now is basically malware, by any reasonable definition and identification of characteristics. It literally does everything out of the box people once objected to BonziBuddy doing!

Sometimes I wonder if this is all a grand conspiracy to destroy federalism and make us 50 nifty little states..

I hope so

Anytime you convert from one time of power to another you usually incur a ton of loss. Charging the battery with the engine or running the motors with the generator output, mechanical -> electric only to go back to mechanical pretty much destroys any advantage you get from running the engine more optimally.

Yes rail roads do this, but it is not about (fuel) efficiency, it is about torque / tractive effort (not a rail way engineer so I don't understand all the details differences )

With automotive hybrids it is more sensible to capture waste energy regen breaking, and help the engine when it is outside its power band, use the motor to provide the extra power needed for acceleration etc.
Use the motor more as the prime mover in situations like stop/go where engine power is hard to manage effectively at all, and there is otherwise lots of idling.