Rollover protection is part of why A pillars are so much thicker now. The first time I drove one of them, it amazed me how much I had to keep moving my head just to keep track of what was across the intersection.

Companies always have hated sw developers guts because they are: 1) indispensable for modern companies, 2) pricey 3) hard to train.

It's not the "hard to train" part which bothers them. The first two, yes. The well-paid important people in any hierarchy are all supposed to be managers, people who get people to do things. It offends the natural order (in the eyes of management) when mere doers are so highly paid.

Most of my job isn't typing lines of code into a computer screen. It's gathering requirements from the real world (and the people in it) and then inventing/designing a system (or a modification to an existing system) that will actually accomplish the goal.

Congratulations. Are you allowed to expense your red stapler?

Of Programming, Coding, ICs, PCB, and the Electronics manufacturing process under your belt... Lateral moves are effortless

Except they aren't, because the employers will always want you to be buzzword-compliant and have 5 years of experience in whatever tech stack they most recently deployed or will want to deploy (often even if it's only 2 years old). See the guy above insisting on Angular and C# and Go for example. Embedded people want you to know their particular RTOS. PCB and Electronics industry people insist you know their HDL (down to the version number) and SPICE flavor, not to mention Mandarin.

If they could make methamphetamine, diacetylmorphine, or alprazolam, not only would this be a much larger volume of drugs, there'd be an instant industry competing to make the most of them from such easily-obtained precursors.

Making some process using a polymer membrane work for industrial volumes currently handled by fractionating columns is almost certainly going to be impractical. The membrane won't hold up long enough, and to get the separation to happen fast enough you're going to have to heat it anyway.

Yeah, if Meta was offering $100M signing bonuses, it wouldn't be an "attempt" to poach, it would be a very successful poaching.

Half a million from heat... ">4.6 million from cold. Or is there some reason the insurance industry doesn't have to cover cold?

Good point. I'd never thought of it that way.

The problem you miss is that some of us would rather not even pay for the addled video. Prime didn't change its fee when they added video, so give me a video-free alternative at a lower price. I resent paying for something I don't use.

I wonder if anyone has ever done studies of ad effectiveness vs frequency. If they had half the ads which were twice as effective, they could charge twice as much and have the same revenue and happier customers. There must be some sort of Laffer curve. No ads == no revenue but more watchers. 100% ads == no watchers and no revenue. Where is the sweet spot? Some old TV shows were 55 minutes long with 5 minutes of ads, then they switched to 50 minutes and 10 minutes, so they have to chop out 5 minutes to syndicate them.

I bet the broadcasters have done the studies, and 10 minutes must produce more revenue, but I'd really like to see those studies.

When they first bundled video with Prime, I figured it wouldn't be too long before it went south. It did. Series would include the first season only, they dropped a few I was in the middle of watching, they shifted some shows to Britbox and others which had been included.

Then they announced the ads, and I stopped watching. You're going to charge me for something I didn't ask for and can't get a reduction for not using, AND you're going to interrupt it with ads? No thanks. Stopped watching. Well, I was probably watching only one or two shows a week.

But it still annoys me that I'm paying for something I don't want which is supported by ads. I've been watching how much free shipping I get and comparing to Walmart and others. It's close enough that one more screwup and I might dump Prime.

Tee Hee, I'm just a girl canned audio about to become therapists for thousands of teen aged girls everywhere. Hey barbie, what is the roots of the following equation, 3x^2+2xy+7x

AI or no AI, Barbie's answer will still be "Math is hard. Let's go shopping!".

Right, so you pay $10M in programmer salaries, make $5M in revenue, and have to pay tax on your $3M in profit. Kinda puts a wet blanket on things. And every time you grow you go through the same thing -- expenses now, taxes now, deductions later.

I wouldn't be surprised if the multiplicity of keyboards does contribute. I learned in keypunch days, on cards, and they all had the same keyboards. Probably the first 10 or 20 years after were on desktop machines with builtin keyboards and they were all the same, or PCs where I could supply my own keyboards. Then came the world of laptops. It seems like every one has a different feel and different layouts for functions keys, numeric keypad, and CTRL/SHIFT etc. Right now, I have several laptops, all from the same manufacturer, and yet they have annoying little differences (half size arrow keys vs full size, ESC and ~/` subtly different) which always slow me down when switching. I could plug in my own keyboard, but then they wouldn't be laptops any more, and I'd probably have to buy a dozen keyboards before finding one I liked.