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Comment Why mass transit works (Score 0) 19

The reason why a lot of European cities still have mass transit that functions is because these are still mostly homogenous, high trust societies when it was deployed. That means things like accosting passengers, random violence, theft and other antisocial behaviors that normal passengers can't escape (because you're in a metal/plastic/glass box trapped with the murderer/thief/etc).

In US, a lot of public transit is useless because of cases like Irina Zarutska. You can have the busses, the metro, etc, and it's used only if utterly necessary because the risk of "another crazy freak will just stab you in the neck" is relevant.

Essentially, successful build out of mass transit is a marker of high trust society that has purged lowest 1-2% of its people from commons.

Comment Headline should read... (Score 1) 51

... "Canada declined to interfere with Darwisnism", with the story going on to lament the fact that unfortunately by the time of Stocton's fatal stupidity he'd already passed on his genes.

To call it a "missed opportunity" is a little extreme.

Call me a troll, but both his daredevil idiocy and the fact that other people were stupid enough to get on were and are self solving problems. Both solved by the predictable outcome. An outcome that, I'll add, wasn't merely predictable in hindsight. One hopes that people will ask more questions before getting on a submersible vehicle designed to protect the occupants with pencil lead.

I would be in favour of a law that makes many if not most liability waivers unenforceable. A company that invites people on board a vehicle not type certified as fit for purpose should not be able to enjoy any litigation protection. I would also be in favour of requiring a company that so takes passengers to prove it can cover its liability, through insurance or bond.

But none of this falls on Canada.

Comment Doesn't surprise me it took this long... (Score 4, Interesting) 2

Savannah likes to advertise its thousands of projects and call itself an incubator. I have a small open source project I wanted to move off of Github a couple years ago, and the pain I went through to try and get hosting there was immeasurable. The arrogance they displayed, like they were God's gift to hosting. And the "advertising" requirements they had. Not just the project licensing, which I can understand them wanting to be GPL and which I had no problems with. But the wording in the documentation, needing it to talk up GNU. The changes I had to make in actual functionality too were not insignificant. And the sheer arrogance with which they made these demands. Not all at once in a list. One. By. One. Always in a "Ya, your reply to our last request wasn't good enough... because what about this?" way.

I kept the whole painful email exchange in a separate email folder just in case I ever get tempted to go back. I ended up going with Codeberg, which was simple, easy, and very philosophically compatible.

So it doesn't surprise me they have unpatched problems. Savannah itself is ancient and primitive. The kind of thing a couple hackers whip up in a day which suits them so doesn't need polish. They are far too interested in resting on decades-old laurels than in actually doing good work today.

How long before GNU realizes that its entire code base has been static so long that it's irrelevant and that "GNU/Linux" just isn't a think because there is very little left that hasn't been replaced.

Comment Re:Listen we are a nation of 12-year-old so it's (Score 1) 51

I don't care how much of an idiot you are, you're simply too stupid to respond to further. I don't want things to be as they were in my childhood. Back then, things were a mess. BECAUSE government tried either to micromanage everything or manage nothing at all. The idea of a third way, where governing is about just that, placing control mechanisms in place but not do the management, is obviously far beyond your pea-brain.

Comment Re:3D printing whole rockets was such a dumb idea. (Score 1) 47

Oh god. If I spent enough time digging through my ancient Slashdot posts, somewhere back there there are posts of me going, "While I loved the strategy behind Falcon 9, I'm really not keen on this plan to make Starship out of huge carbon fibre tanks, that sounds like a really failure-prone solution..." I'm glad they only spent like a year on that idea before deciding it was dumb; somewhere back there there's also a bunch of posts of me cheering their switch to steel ;) . SpaceX still keep having random COPV problems (most of which they don't even make themselves). Not too encouraging for the notion of the cold gas thruster add-on to the Roadster, where the plan is to replace the back seat with COPVs, so you have a COPV right behind your head.

Electron has been getting by on CF, and honestly I'm impressed, but they've also been only working with very small launch vehicles thusfar. We'll see how neutron goes...

Comment Re:That's 12-year-old thinking (Score 1) 51

The problem is that you can ALWAYS get around rules. It isn't possible to make perfect rules for anything above a minimal level of complexity - that's just a variant of the Turing-Church Halting Problem.

So you are forced to invert the dynamics. There's no real alternative. Instead of you creating a high level of complexity that the departments will work their arses off to avoid, you force the departments themselves to create the regimens that they're prepared to live with. But you have to do so cleverly. They will always create regimens that mean they do the least work necessary (because that's cheap on resources and they will ALWAYS consider this sort of extra work to be an imposition) and have the least amount of culpability.

So you need to meet three conditions:
1. The department can't evade the bits they're actually able to do
2. The department CAN pass on work they're not equipt to do, but ONLY if it's their responsibility to oversee the department they pass it onto
3. The department IS inescapably culpable for failure to either do the work OR ensure that others do it

You do NOT need the frameworks for each department, and should not attempt to draw those up. Those will be departmentally-specific and timeframe-specific. Far, far better have people who actually know the specific context do that work. No department likes to look like it's being forced to do anything, so making the actual detailed specifics internal, you're utilising their psychology. They're not being "forced", they're defining their additional responsibilities and duties. From a psychological angle, they're much more likely to be receptive to this perspective.

But because the departments are all internally writing their own management protocols, YOU DON'T HAVE TO. You only need to have a framework which obliges them to write up what they will request. This is MUCH lighter and, because it is much lighter, it is far less prone to have failure points where generic ideas don't work for a specific type of work.

If we want to look at this in software terms, only an idiot would write an overly-restrictive langauge that imposes a strict model of thought regardless of the type of work. If you want to provide a high level of confidence in correctness, you don't try to impose it through a myriad of complex hurdles and rigorously controlled APIs. You achieve it by incorporating contracts (function X is guaranteed to take in data meeting these requirements, and is guaranteed to deliver data meeting these other requirements). Contract programming is much, much lighter on the development process, doesn't impose on the programmer, and yet creates a very high level of assurance. Mostly because programmers aren't working to try and cheat with irritating APIs.

In Linux terms, you want a lightweight virtual layer handling filesystems in general, the filesystem policies should be handled by the filesystem not the main kernel. You want the main kernel to be doing as little of the work as possible. As soon as it is heavy and micromanaging everything, you're going to end up with something slow and unstable, that really can't do a whole lot.

You want to push the complexity to the edges, that's where complexity belongs. The bit that changes slowly, can't handle special cases, has least visibility into what is needed, and is really a very blunt instrument wants to be lightweight. One reason for having things like Common Law and Case Law is precisely because the legal system figured all this out centuries ago.

Comment Re: Sojust like every other tech growth story (Score 1) 219

Tesla took 17 years to reach profitablity. They all got significant state support to the tune of many billions

Are we calling $7,500 tax incentives for the buyer 'subsidies'?

I'm not saying that's wrong, but that's a different kind of subsidy than the ones a company like BYD gets from the Chinese gov't... (Tesla sold the cars at a higher price, the buyer got the subsidy, in BYD the cars are sold at a lower price and the gov't just gives them money.)

As a reminder, it was "climate conscious" politicians, largely in one party, that used the gov't checkbook to prop up certain companies in industries they liked, all with great big press conferences and running for re-election on those generous handouts to 'green industries'.

Comment Re:How about no? (Score -1, Troll) 104

Fact check actually said "it was a crocodile enclosure". It was so stupid, it short circuited my brain when typing it out.

Also headlines are epic, going along the lines of "child ended up in the croc cage". How? No one knows, but they arrested "a man". What kind of man? No one knows, but he's not a straight white one, because that would've been all over the news.

Best part is that now there's reporting that this mystery man was so mentally retarded, they couldn't interview him. So they released him on bail until september. Guess there's more kid chucking coming up.

Just kidding. This nonsense made it to X, so they're probably going to have to arrest the poor bastard before he gets to try to see if he can chuck the next one into a lion enclosure, and then get fact checked that it's actually a tiger enclosure.

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