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Comment Re:The only way to fix it is to fix the rewards (Score 1) 72

We don't have to call it communism if it hurts too many snowflake butts. We can call it collective ownership of the means of production or we can say major corporations of a particular size should be majority employee-owned, so as to better include the people who produce the wealth by their labor in the utilization of that wealth for the better of all, rather than it being consumed by the extravagant (and greenhouse gas heavy) lifestyles of the few already morbidly wealthy. Not just RSUs and other tricks of finance to make people think they have real equity in a company, but actual owning, voting shares.

We should definitely shift to renewables and stop looking for more new and harmful ways to get at the last million barrels of oil in a reservoir, etc. The story we're being fed since at least the 80's is that we'd all die without oil. We use it for so many things and processes that we need to continue extracting at such a rate as not to cause a global collapse. So that is what we're doing, exactly as the industry wants to keep profits growing. Capitalism is not democracy. The US and countries that claim to be democracies should keep capital investment out of politics. Capital is short-sighted for the most part, and does not take into account a long-view of what the majority of humans on the planet want, which is to survive as a species. We don't ultimately know how to do that, but we can see what obvious mistakes we're making on the scale of decades and centuries and correct them.

Well, to clarify, since we're. worried about communism versus capitalism, the US is in no way shape or form capitalism. It is a mixture of corporatism and (cover the kid's ears folks!!) socialism. Don't believe it? Tax dollars, quite a few of them in fact, go to things like free laptops and smartphones for the low income, subsidized fuel oil, medicare, medicaid, free food for Women, Infants and Children as well as Food stamps, Section 8 housing, where low income people pay a very small amount per month, while the Government pays the rest. When you are in a 2000 dollar apartment and paying 200 dollars a month, government is picking up the tab. Free or very reduced internet. Free buses for the poor and retired people. If you live in an area without bus service, you can call and get a free ride and return. May older and poor use this service to get back and forth to doctors and other appointments. This even in some very red states.

Doesn't sound much like capitalism to me. I am not opposed to such things. I am not claiming that there are not some economic issues we have. But it creates cognitive dissonance in people that get their facts from our adversaries.

But yeah - there is a middle ground. Collective ownership can work as long as people understand there has a be a group of business savvy people running the business. That said, what I have seen in life is that many to most people don't actually have that savvy.

Comment Re:features a light-up Apple logo (Score 1) 59

I suppose - Apple can't copy that feature from everyone else....

The light-up Apple logo has been around for decades.Back when Jobs was around the Apple logo lit up as well because the white plastic Apple logo would let the LCD backlight spill out causing it to light up.

Of course, with OLED this isn't possible anymore so they actually would need to have LEDs behind it to light it up.

Comment Re:vi is the best editor (Score 3, Interesting) 74

Also vi came out that exact same year: Bill Joy wrote it at Berkeley. So I suppose you could argue that your choice is a bit like early rapper culture: east coast vs west coast!

vi is a patch to ed. Remember most terminals were teletypes that output a line at a time, so you used "ed" to edit lines one line at a time. (And likely an inspiration for the brilliant MS-DOS edlin editor). But fancy new video teletypes were becoming a thing, and it was actually possible to display multiple lines of text on the screen at a time. Bill Joy added visual mode to ed to take advantage of this so you can visually display and edit blocks of text rather than a line at a time.

Tools like grep came about from ed as well.

ed-mode is fundamental to vi when doing commands like search and replace.

Want some fun? Set your terminal to TTY mode and try using vi. Depending on how good the emulation of vi is, it might work in line-at-a-time mode or not at all.

Comment Re:The only way to fix it is to fix the rewards (Score 1) 72

You've tried nothing, dear. You're the epitome of human condition, taking it up the ass and pretending you love it.

Well, how bow the communist revolution? Howbow Chairman Mao, Uncle Joe Stalin, Pol Pot. The revolution of the proletariat. Ha's that workin out for ya Comrade? The were some of teh best humanitarians amirite?

Comment Re:Thermostat (Score 1) 72

First, 'climate' and 'weather' are two very different things. Second, we can't control climate, we can only affect it in very specific ways. Pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere is easy, getting it out is hard (likely impossible).

And we had a very very clear target all along - limit the global temperture increase to no more than 1.5 C above pre-industrial temperatures. We missed that target.

Yeah, that was the target. Doesn't men that 1750 was the sweet spot, the correct amount of CO2.

I understand that a target is needed, but that target was seriously unrealistic, requiring zero emissions from humans, and a concentrated effort of re-sequestering every bit of Carbon release of over 200 years of release. Even when the concept of radiative forcing was known, we were never going to return to 1750 levels

Comment Re:AI Can't Solve It (Score 1) 72

I was having a serious conversation about this exact issue with AI a few weeks back. The energy is already in the system on earth, how can we reduce that energy, or reverse the effect of climate change. We can't.

That is correct. All we can do is wait it out as the methane degrades to CO2, and the CO2 cycle does its work We're on a roller coaster ride at this point.

This planet is doomed to failure, either like so many before it, or the first in the universe, it doesn't matter at this point.

No, it isn't. It is a human aided change. There have been times in the past when there was much more CO2 in the air. Carbon was sequestered in various times like the Carboniferous, and where the final age, the Pennsylvanian, enough Carbon had been sequestered that the average temperatures on earth cooled enough to stop the large scale forest growth. Humans ended up de-sequestering much of the stored carbon, and that's why we are returning to something like earlier times.

There is a lot of proper concern over the rate of de-sequstering, and we face serious issues. And unless we do something stupid, humanity isn't likely in danger of extinction. But the planet isn't going to fail.

Comment Re:New Nuclear Please (Score 2) 72

Many of the nuclear fanatics want it because they think it means they don't have to change their lifestyle, or because they are NIMBYs and fear wind turbines and solar farms appearing near them (but don't care about nuclear plants near someone else).

Very good point. One of the issues with changing lifestyles is that a "better" lifestyle is a natural goal for humans. We're hardwired for comfort. How that can be circumvented is a real issue.

As well, here we are, around 80 years into nuc plant power, and I question if we are any closer to getting it right. The Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station scandal, AKA NukeGate, shows that there is a certain contempt about nuc power advocates, with unqualified people making critical infrastructure without engineers signing off on them, parts not fitting, coupled with the Baseload Review Act, a law passed that made customers responsible for every cent of the construction. The people of South Carolina are still paying for the billions of dollars lost, without getting a single milliwatt of energy.

So in the modern age, a nuc power plant was being constructed with dangerous controls, and never generated power, although all of the sunk cost is being extracted from the customers.

Renewables and storage are by far the cheapest and fastest option now.

Another thing not often mentioned is scalability. On any centralized power plant, nuc, gas, or coal, you have to design the plant to some maximum capacity. You go over that, and you need a new plant, or at least the equivalent of one with massive re-fitting.

With solar or wind, you can add more as you need more. Here in PA, we have a lot of places mapped out, and if we need more wind turbines in teh future, we know where to place them.

Side notes, solar installs turn out to be a haven for animals, especially birds.

Comment Re:The only way to fix it is to fix the rewards (Score 1) 72

Yes, I completely agree. That requires one more factor that's undermining democracy worldwide to be solved - the eternal problem of the asymmetry of rewards and costs that makes public action by the many hard, as explained even here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

We've tried making the many the boss. Turns out it doesn't work so well. Just enables the not-so-good guys rise to the top more easily.

Welcome to the human condition. People can go reeee about the governments they hate, and lay all the problems at "capitalism" a dog whistle for the USA, but that shows you are more worried about governance than the actual problem. Especially when the big four are China, US, India, and Russia. Laying this at the feet of the USA is pointless and simply wrong. We are part of the problem, not the actual problem.

And the problem is that we have a pretty big problem. We are in a bit of a positive feedback loop now, de-sequestering methane. The time to speak of tipping points is long gone. IMR&IO, the actual tipping point was some time in the mid 1980's.

So what should we do? We should understand that we have a rough ride ahead of us. We should shift to renewables, we should consider the environmental impact of the "data centers" we should stop de-sequestering greenhouse gases. We should not try quick-fixes like aerosol injection, which will simply create as many problems as CO2 and Methane, and likely be worse. A thousand years of acid rain is not good for living beings or infrastructure.

We should work to preserve as many species as possible What will we do? Probably not much of anything. People will bring their favorite axes to grind, just like we see here. The US will get blamed, and the other polluting countries will pat themselves on the back.

What will happen? Despite the political rhetoric, we are all in this mess together, and we'll be pointing fingers at each other as we have hundreds of years (at the very least) of adaptation.

But hey - maybe the archenemy of Capitalism, which is Communism, can take over and lead us to a glorious future, just like it always has. It has a perfect track record so far. And I put that sentence together to show just how silly the political axe grinding is.

Comment Re:It's funny (Score 1) 130

A presentation in Excel? That's incredible. "Computer skills" are somewhat of an unwritten requirement when hiring these days, maybe we need to make it more explicit after all?

You use the tools you know to get the job done. That's a real computer skill. Sidenote: Powerpoint is a better image drafting tool than word or Excel,

You're correct, butThat's a pretty low bar. We used to get a lot of posters in PowerPoint form. You can make a decent poster from PP, but it would fall apart between the person originating the poster and our office that had a large format inkjet, where it was printed Seems the file kept track of the printer used while creating it. That wreaked havoc. If the aspect ratio was different, between the two, it would summarily stretch or squeeze. Plus some people liked using the obscure fonts coming from those cheap font sets. Never knew how those would show up. We often ended up just completely re-doing the thing. I was pressed into service doing them after we had a couple people leave in short order. I told people who wanted to make posters to just come sit with me, and I could save them a lot of time by just doing the job once instead of twice.

Point is, you can make some decent poster images with PP, but it had so many quirks that it could be a nuisance.

Comment Re:The only way to fix it is to fix the rewards (Score 2) 72

If we don't fix our economic system to reword behavior that prioritizes people and the environment, I don't think humanity has a chance. With capitalism we are rushing off the side of a cliff.

Sigh, Yes, it is all due to capitalism, even in countries without capitalism. Top four are China, US, India, and Russia. Thanks for letting us know that they are all capitalist countries.

Axe grinding and trying to turn every discussion into your axe to grind is silly. Can we get anyone to claim it is internalized misogyny? How about Joe Biden, or Barack O'Blama?

You aren't helping.

Comment Re:Not What You Hoped For (Score 2) 61

So this is a Snapdragon CPU laptop that will be targeted at the military. This is not a replacement for a Dell XPS or a Lenovo Yoga, if that's what you hoped.

But, this is a start in the right direction with regard to the U.S. on-shoring computer manufacture.

Not really. It's a military thing, so it's more like the military is paying $10,000 for a laptop with specs that cost $2000. Sure, there's ruggedization and all that, but most of it is just profit as well.

As much as on-shoring is, I don't think the American public will be amenable to paying twice as much for a laptop as they used to, even with the increased RAM costs driving prices even higher.

Sure, for military use, fine, it makes a lot of sense, and paying way too much for goods has been the MO for the military since forever. But for the consumer, not so much - especially when the costs of everything is so high already.

And never forget that these Snapdragon laptops haven't generally reviewed that well either - usually along the lines of "sluggish", which is why they haven't really taken over the market with the exception of Apple.

It's on-shoring as much as tariffs have on-shored everything else. It just raised the prices of everything you're paying for, and nothing new is happening.

Comment Re:It's funny (Score 1) 130

a quick search shows it is an online app.

Then don't do a quick search. Do a proper search. That way you can have an informed opinion.

Thanks for the suggestion. Good to know.

I searched, got what I needed to know, and stopped. Why? because I have other things to do beside an in-depth, experience based opinion of the workings of Collabra. I saw enough to make my opinion.

If that's not enough for you, well - sorry, not sorry.

Comment Re:It's funny (Score 1) 130

Whoa, I was expecting you to be a jerk to her. You have really impressive people skills to meet her half way and give her guidance on the way forward. I'm glad she apologised, was clearly in over her head though that doesn't excuse her behaviour towards you at first.

One of my skills is working well with difficult people - or highly stressed people. It slowly incorporated itself into my whole workflow. In the job I retired from, it was mostly difficult people, a few stressed like her.. My present work is often dealing with stressed out people.

In this case, the poor young woman was about ready to piss herself. She was about ready to truly freak. Just about to the point where she was ready to stop taking input. So I got her calmed down to the point of at least just crying. Then slowly relaxing after I told her we could fix it, then got her prepped for her talk.

Her real issue with being difficult was insecurity masked by being rude - she was actually an okay person.

One time I caught a guy (literally) who became faint right when his presentation started. Took a small break, I told him that everyone there wanted him to do well. Once again the breathing exercises, and I hung out right by him when he finally gave his talk. I stood at the podium, running his powerpoint while he talked.

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