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Comment Re:Why stay in Seattle? (Score 1) 50

Not so easy once your kids have friends and school in Seattle.

As a child, I had to move with my parents a number of times as Dad progressed through his career....

Hell,, military brats do it all the time still....but it wasn't that long ago this was pretty common....grow up, leave the nest....it's ok and natural....

Comment Re:Why stay in Seattle? (Score 1) 50

I guess you must be single or young....Reasons not to leave your area: owning a house, family, friends, not wanting to pull kids from school during critical times (or mid year), established connections, and a lot more tech jobs in Seattle than 99% of the rest of america, outside silicon valley? "Sell your house" and then you pick up a house that is also overpriced but pay much higher property taxes. Income tax is *zero* in Washington...Also, this is actually Redmond, not Seattle proper.

When did people get to be such pussies about moving?

Hell, when I grew up, this was a common thing....you moved to where the best job or new opportunity was.

Fun? No.

PITA? Yes

But families did it as a matter of how life is/was....

I remember as a kid moving a number of times

...as my Dad career progressed.

I myself have moved....

Do people today believe that as grown adults they STILL have to live near Mommy and Daddy?

Friends? Well hell, there's a TON of ways to stay in touch that weren't there when I was young....you only had phone calls and snail mail growing up and if they were real friends....you stayed in touch.

Today it's a piece of cake to keep in touch.

When I grew up, most people I knew hit the road at 18yrs or so and often it was to a different state for college and jobs....no one had to stay in same town as Mommy....but then again, we never too "Mommy" out on job interviews like they apparently do today...

Comment Re:\o/ (Score 1) 51

I guess if this is true....

Then I regularly shorten my neighbors lives (and mine) whenever I fire up my log burning offset smoker for BBQ.

I don't generally have any complaints....quite the opposite reaction in general (I share and offer to throw things on for them too, since it is large and I often have extra room).

Comment Re:What's the difference between tablet and phone? (Score 1) 122

A USB-C connection can be anything from USB-2 (480 Mbit), various USB-3's (5, 10 or 20 Gbit), Thunderbolt (40 Gbit), . . .

A USB-C connector is the same physically as a Thunderbolt 3/4 connector. That does not mean you can always run Thunderbolt over the connector. This is the a problem with a universal connector that has wildly different capabilities. However in this context, I know of no mobile phone that has a Thunderbolt connector unlike what the OP and the people who replied have said.

Submission + - AI Praise is No Recommendation: Code.org Touts Article by 'AI-Powered Strategist

theodp writes: "The future of learning is digital," tech giant backed-and-led nonprofit Code.org posted Friday on LinkedIn. "A new report highlights how youth-focused coding platforms like Code.org are driving growth, opportunity, and access to essential skills for the next generation."

Sounds great, but the article linked to by Code.org — who Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently told the White House Task Force on AI Education is being given $3M by Google to transform its K-12 CS curriculum to make schoolchildren AI-savvy — is apparently AI-generated. The Future of Learning: Unlocking Long-Term Growth in Youth-Focused Coding Platforms is credited by AInvest.com to "Henry Rivers", who is described as "an AI-powered strategist designed for professionals and economically curious readers seeking investigative financial insight" who is "backed by a 32-billion-parameter hybrid model."

It's been long said that "Self-praise is no recommendation." How about AI praise?

Comment Competition? (Score 1) 43

We have W+ and Prime and these are probably the main 2 sites I cross-shop these days. They don't overlap entirely; Amazon sells a lot more variety under its own return policies etc, while Walmart is better for things like motor oil that they have locally (if you wanted to go into a Superstore). But there's enough overlap that it's worth cross-shopping, for now.

Comment Re:Can you imagine needing government permission (Score 1) 105

I dunno. China is a "market socialist" system -- which is a contradiction in terms. If China is socialist, then for practical purposes Norway and Sweden have to be even *more* socialist because they have a comprehensive public welfare system which China lacks. And those Nordic countries are rated quite high on global measures of political and personal freedom, and very low on corruption. In general they outperform the US on most of those measures, although the US is better on measures of business deregulation.

Comment Murdercars (Score 2) 26

Every time I see a story like this, I think about Daniel Suarez's book Daemon.

It isn't a great book - fairly disposable scifi that requires TV-style disbelief-suspension and eventually devolves into weird techno-utopianism. But has great bits of scene-setting mind candy that is frighteningly believable.

Like the fleets of robot cars used as weapons.

Comment Re: 200 million angry, single disaffected young m (Score 1) 105

It makes no sense to claim Chinese courts have a lot of power, although it may seem that way â" itâ(TM)s supposed to seem that way. One of the foundational principles of Chinese jurisprudence is party supremacy. Every judge is supervised by a PLC â" party legal committee â" which oversees budgets, discipline and assignments in the judiciary. They consult with the judges in sensitive trials to ensure a politically acceptable outcome.

So it would be more accurate to characterize the courts as an instrument of party power rather than an independent power center.

From time to time Chinese court decisions become politically inconvenient, either through the supervisors in the PLC missing something or through changing circumstances. In those cases there is no formal process for the party to make the courts revisit the decision. Instead the normal procedure is for the inconvenient decision to quietly disappear from the legal databases, as if it never happened. When there is party supremacy, the party can simply rewrite judicial history to its current needs.

An independent judiciary seems like such a minor point; and frankly it is often an impediment to common sense. But without an independent judiciary you canâ(TM)t have rule of law, just rule by law.

Comment Re: 200 million angry, single disaffected young me (Score 1) 105

Hereâ(TM)s the problem with that scenario: court rulings donâ(TM)t mean much in a state ruled by one party. China has plenty of progressive looking laws that donâ(TM)t get enforced if it is inconvenient to the party. There are emission standards for trucks and cars that should help with their pollution problems, but there are no enforcement mechanisms and officials have no interest in creating any if it would interfere with their economic targets or their private interests.

China is a country of strict rules and lax enforcement, which suits authoritarian rulers very well. It means laws are flouted routinely by virtually everyone, which gives the party leverage. Displease the party, and they have plenty of material to punish you, under color of enforcing laws. It sounds so benign, at least theyâ(TM)re enforcing the law part of the time, right? Wrong. Laws selectively enforced donâ(TM)t serve any public purpose; theyâ(TM)re just instruments of personal power.

Americans often donâ(TM)t seem to understand the difference between rule of law and rule *by* law. Itâ(TM)s ironic because the American Revolution and constitution were historically important in establishing the practicality of rule of law, in which political leaders were not only expected to obey the laws themselves, but had a duty to enforce the law impartially regardless of their personal opinions or interests.

Rule *by* law isnâ(TM)t a Chinese innovation, it was the operating principle for every government before 1789. A government that rules *by* law is only as good as the men wielding power, and since power corrupts, itâ(TM)s never very good for long.

Comment Re:Stop with the be gay, do crime stuff (Score 0) 137

I think anyone saying that the shooter clearly belongs to one party or the other at this point is lying. And I've seen plenty of it on both sides, including you, right now.

If you can't see the shooter is FAR LEFT...then you are either willingly blind or not listening at all.

His notes, his relatives telling his history, FFS he's fucking a gay furry guy trans.....

If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck....

Submission + - Austria's armed forces switch to LibreOffice (heise.de)

alternative_right writes: Austria's armed forces have switched from Microsoft's Office programs to the open-source LibreOffice package. The reason for this is not to save on software license fees for around 16,000 workstations. "It was very important for us to show that we are doing this primarily (...) to strengthen our digital sovereignty, to maintain our independence in terms of ICT infrastructure and (...) to ensure that data is only processed in-house," emphasizes Michael Hillebrand from the Austrian Armed Forces' Directorate 6 ICT and Cyber.

This is because processing data in external clouds is out of the question for the Austrian Armed Forces, as Hillebrand explained on ORF radio station Ö1. It was already apparent five years ago that Microsoft Office would move to the cloud. Back then, in 2020, the decision-making process for the switch began and was completed in 2021.

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