Anime: New Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt.

Book: not from 2025,but I read it this year: "It Didn't Start with You" by Mark Wolynn. PTSD stuff.

Movie: No contenders for this year, it was all uniform Hollyweird shit.

Normally I'd agree with you. M&A usually leaves both weakened, or one dead and one strong.

But, this is already an industry rife with M&A. That's how we got McDonnel-Douglas, who bought Boeing with Boeing's own money. That's how we got Lockheed-Martin, and I have no idea WTF Grumman is at these days, or North American, or.. Chance-Vought, or.. or ... you get the idea.

It pains me to see Boeing floundering like this. That was Douglas' job, not Boeing's. I'd rather Lockheed buy it and sort it out than some foreign company (like Airbus.)

Else, Boeing will wither and nearly die, hanging on by .mil contracts. I don't want that. I want a strong Boeing, like before '97.

there should be an inverse of the corporate raider. Someone who will buy a company in distress, let them keep their name, help un-fuck them (change the culture...) and then enjoy the profits. That's a long game, 10-20 years.. who's got the time for that, right?

Constellation was too much, too late, just like DC-7. The jets had arrived. They still sold many Constellations, and they served well.. except for that nasty habit of coming in with one out of four engines feathered. But, that's really on Pratt, not Lockheed.

L1011 got caught in the Rolls-Royce implosion, caused by delays of the RB211, the engine for the L1011 (and others.)

i imagine Lockheed should by now be "over it," and see an opportunity to slide in and deliver something remarkable again.

There is a rot at boeing, it's cultural (brought in by Douglas), and the fix is probably.. raze and build it again.

Companies have cultural shifts. It can be done to Boeing.

"OK, managers, show of hands! Who here thinks we're doing fan-fucking-tastic? Oh, really! Tell you what, why don't you all step into Room #1 and enjoy a nice lunch."

And then fire Room #1 en masse.

I saw (and survived) a similar mass execution at my 2nd IT job. They razed the billing dept. management due to reasons. No one that made it into that Room #1 made it out still employed.

Lockheed should buy Boeing, and then rip and replace whatever management style Douglas brougt in, with Kelly Johnson's 14 Rules.

Because, goddamn it, Boeing isn't Boeing since the merger. What survived was the worst of both.

https://www.scribd.com/documen...

I swear a good, healthy "just go, you cocksucking CUNT!" will add at least 50 ft-lbs when trying to convince a stubborn fastener to come off.

I don't miss wrenching on stuff that slept outside in the English countryside and was seldom used.

Hear, HEAR!

100% that. Europe, the cradle of the car itself, became the car's graveyard the instant they came up with the 2030 BS.

Oh, and the EU pedestrian safety rules are why cars look like Brutalist buildings on wheels now.

Racist much?

This American considers the current state of the sport a disgrace, and wishes we'd go back to 3-liters run-what-you-brung-regardless-of-cyliner-count, H-gate manual gearbox, and iron brakes.

And if your car can't pass another one due to dirty air from the one in front, tough tits. Design a better, or more clever car.

Furthermore, this American thinks the sport died the instant they put KERS in. And that was a long time ago.

How many here remember Jaques Villueneve being told "We don't know what happens after the 10th push of the push-to-pass boost thing" over the radio? I'm paraphrasing, of course, but it was really "We don't know what happens after press #10"

I'll note KERS had a lot of fires back then.

Hybrid has no place at the top of motorsport. It should be banished from all of it, except for dedicated electric-car-only series.

Only for some brands. Panasonic lamps were ~$400, but they stopped making all their PJs so I abandoned Panasonic.

6 year on Epson now. Epson lamps are $120 and rated to 5000 hrs in eco mode for my model (normal mode is way too loud for my room)

dissipated into the room's air and dealt with by the aircon

Most lifelike / cinemalike display I've yet used. On year 20 of this now, 14 with panasonic and 6 with Epson.

Monumental Waste of Money

No, I will not buy your infernal glorified LCD monitor with tuner and internet added. Just like I wont' get an Echo or a Home Hub or whatever other bullshit the bullshit peddlers are peddling.

I still bitterly cling to my hot-lamp projector, it is as dumb as a fencepost and doesn't sell me out and in my setup throws a picture that's 7 feet side-to-side.

And if I find the AppleTV device I have is doing this sceenshooting business, it'll find out real quick how an Apple TV makes like a hockey puck. No ice, just concrete and blacktop.

Yes, yes I have twice, and one was a CIO.. and lost us the biggest deal we had, and then bailed and joined one of our auditors as their CEO. The company was then purchased and absorbed by a much bigger entity, and I was out on the streets.

A degree from Hah-vahd means shit if you lose us business and then bail out on the mess you made.

I form my own conclusions made on my own experiences. I don't even have a TV, and I get info from many sources. Some online, some real-world, none from Facebook or Twitter or the like.. I"m not plugged into TV and Internet nearly as much as "the young people" are.

My usual reply to any claim is "Bullshit." Until it isn't.

We are not the same. I suppose you take what The View tells you and run with it?

Because certain people get better grades because they're "protected" or "disadvantaged," not because they earned it.

For what purpose? Oh, there's always virtue-signalling, letting people skate while still nailing that football scholarship, and others.

The "meritocracy" of school has been chipped away at all levels since the 90's. Easier to score an A without working for it.

Now it's hitting colleges, and boo-hoo, our students can't read or math, we'll still pass them anyway.

It's similar to interviewing IT people for a job, and the guy with the MSCE lapel pin and the MSCE logo pasted on his resume will invariably do worse than the less-paperworked but better-educated peer.

Anything on-cloud or in-computer can be hacked, your secrets revealed and exploited. Even music.

My record collection will never betray me. Will never spill my secrets, my data.

We gave up freedom for convenience, as a society.

But, you simply can't beat a house stuffed full of books, records and video media. No matter how slick it is that you can carry all that in your pocket.

The words in the books cannot be changed, their purchase data long lost to time. They are of no value but to me, and anyone i pass them on to.

I think they've been scripts ever since dice.com sold it.

Certainly feels that ever since the current "owners" took over, the amount of political ragebait has gone up tenfold.

I suspect at this point this place is an Arab, Russian or ??? psyop or something.

So, like Seiko, Kodak devised their own demise. But, unlike Kodak, Seiko found way to make both the old and the new, and they still do. They didn't just survive, they excelled and grew.

Seiko made the first wearable quartz analog watch in 1969. The year I was born. By 1992 the quartz analog watch had pretty much destroyed the mechanical watch industry, Seiko included.

Yet miraculously Seiko still makes their own quartz and mechanicals, and the top end of theirs is sublime. They've even invented a third kind of movement, a hybrid. Driven by a spring, it has a gear train but not an escapement like you know. It has a wheel that is at once generator and brake, and drives a quartz system that regulates the speed by braking the wheel with electromagnets. The Euros wish they had something as slick as the Spring Drive.

But Kodak.. wtf, Kodak. You let digital -- your own invention -- put you out of business. You barely hang on because of the hobby and what's left of the motion picture industry, the die-hard students and directors who still insist on doing it on film.

Not just Kodak. it's a major miracle we still have Nikon, Canon, Leica, Hasselblad. Look at what was lost. Rollei. ROLLEI! Dammit, their 6x6 was superb, only toppable by Mamiya, really.. and they're both gone.

A price of progress, I suppose. Digital photography destroyed the photography industry as we knew it. How many names went out of business on both the manufacture and sales and development / lab work? How many out of jobs?