(citation needed()

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..

in the free market businesses form and compete for consumer money with other businesses, it is the competition that is pro consumer. Unions, like any other political formation, exists to protect special interests, preventing businesses from competing to the best of their ability and pushing prices up - anti consumer.

Businesses are pro-consumer by definition, unless they are government subsidized. Being anti-union (as I am) is being as pro-consumer as possible. Unions push prices up, consumers want lower prices, unions are anti-consumer.

I love manual transmissions. I love the feeling of using all four limbs to control the vehicle. But that's because I love driving. A manual transmission keeps me mroe involved with the act of driving, and it's part of what turns driving from a passive into an active activity for me. And no, I don't drive a sports car (2012 Outback, the last manual in Canada was sold in 2018 here).

There is no conceivable scenario today in which a modern automatic transmission will be outperformed by a manual. Automatics are faster, more fuel efficient (have been for at least ten years now), and even cheaper now, and that one was a long time coming. Their reliability and dependability is at least on par now, and that too took a long time to achieve. There's just no reason to make manuals anymore, aside from a select few enthusiast cars (case in point the Mustang; the Miata is another example).

But the real reasons? It's twofold:

1: Fuel efficiency targets. Car manufacturers need to meet efficiency targets based on the entire fleet, and automatics are more efficient. They help bring the entire lineup's fuel mileage up.

2: Safety features and self driving. Lane assist (for the most part), traffic jam assist, and park assist are all highly requested features that come to mind that simply cannot be offered with a manual transmission. Self drive is right out. Even emergency braking would be considerably tougher with a manual.

But more than that, because they're more cost effective nowadays, almost nobody, outside of a very few people like myself who take pleasure in their daily drive, actually wants a manual any longer.

Come, all ye young fellows that are learning to read, / (WITH A WAY, HEY, ROT YER BRAINS OUT!) / please pay attention and listen to me. / (GIVE ME SOME TIME TO ROT YER BRAINS OUT!)

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..

Although, from my two second check just now, Venus is technically considered within the Goldilocks zone for this solar system it is right on the very inner edge of it. This finding differs from Venus in that respect, making it more interesting as a possibility.

All highly speculative of course, but to be fair that's exactly what the article says. Atmosphere detected, everything else speculative.

No, it doesn't.

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.

LOOK AT ALL THE LONELY PEOPLE

Sherlock has managed to highlight the already well documented fact that the US has under-invested in its power grid. For their next trick, there will be a page-turner on the sky being blue.

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?