The Fry's stores in my area have had nothing of interest for years. So yeah if you needed a parallel port cable for your ancient printer, they had that. But if you needed a network cable, well all they sold was hideous looking junk. (They used to have descent networking cable, but they cheaped out more recently.) You need RAM for your antique 486, they still have that, but not for your still somewhat relevant PC using DDR4 RAM. You want to liquid cool your PC and needed some quick parts and coolant, well they have some liquid cooled rigs on display, but on the shelves only some junk leaky parts you don't need, all their cases are junk now, and the coolant looks like curdled milk. You want to return something, they are going to give you some song and dance about how that part is not returnable, sorry, when they used to take anything back within 15 days. The last I checked they still advertising they take stuff back, but at least where I live it is a lie. So then you just go onto Amazon and everything is a lot better, usually is not plastered with multiple returned stickers on it, instead you look at reviews to figure out what is junk, and shows up in a day or two. Why would you ever go to Fry's again? They are done for. The old candy store is no more.

I have talked to a number of taxi drivers as well as Uber drivers and such to get an idea of what is happening on the ground and why they don't use electric cars. The most common answers are:

1. Range anxiety - They want to be able to drive around all day an not worry about will they be able to keep their vehicles fueled and ready to go. Tesla has banned rideshare and taxi drivers from using the public supercharging network. The rideshare drivers I have talked to flat out rejected the idea of a Tesla due to range anxiety and lack of ability to use public superchargers and other EVs are not even worth mentioning because they take too long to recharge and have too short of a range.

2. Repairability - Something I especially came across in Mexico is those taxis are rolling around the clock or at least sitting at common pickup points hoping to be the one to get the next rider instead of somebody else. Any time the car is out of service is considered lost revenue. There are very specific cars used as taxis in Mexico, primary because as a taxi driver put it to me, the car gets into an accident one day, within 8 hours it is back on the road making money. There is simply no infrastructure in Mexico to repair a Tesla and especially when it comes to taxi companies and ride share, they need that guarantee that the car is going to be fixed and back on the road very quickly so they can continue to use it to make money. Just giving them some car that can't be used as their taxi / rideshare vehicle due to not being equipped / various restrictions is a non starter.

The crazy thing about all of this is a good electric car would be a hell of a lot cheaper to operate due to less expensive fuel (electricity) and much lower running maintenance and so if some things were corrected about this whole deal, there would be a mass shift over to using EVs. Just doing something like taxing ICE vehicles is not going to do the trick because the problem is not that ICE vehicles are more expensive to operate as they already are, it is the ICE vehicles used meet basic needs that EVs right now don't.

My 2c on what actually needs to happen if cities / states / countries want to go electric for taxis and rideshares is to work with the EV producers such as Tesla on making EVs taxi / rideshare friendly. A city for example could for example work with Tesla to put up taxi / rideshare specific supercharging stalls that meet Tesla's requirement to charge these vehicles at a lower rate (probably so the batteries last longer) at locations helpful to taxi / rideshare drivers. A city could also work with other EV makers to setup more CHAdeMO chargers in general and have some marked for taxis and rideshare so they have guaranteed places to stop and recharge. There could also be an ordinance to reduce taxis / rideshare vehicles in service during off peak hours so they don't feel like they have to be in position waiting to get the next customer so instead they can go back to a charger and charge up with the confidence they are not missing out. Also work with EV makers to make sure taxis / rideshare vehicles can be quickly repaired and put back on the road so they are not worried about something goes wrong, I am broke sleeping on the streets because I can't make money.

While I am 40 now and have the first child on the way, I was sat in front of a TI-99 computer when I was 3 years old. My wife apparently read a publication saying any screen time is bad and so now doesn't want our kid to have any screen time until he is at least 5.

Looking back at my experience being sat in front of a TI-99 at the age of 3, well a big part of being in front of the computer was text. It motivated me to learn reading much faster than if I did not have a computer in front of me because I had to up my reading skills to use the computer. I look at how I ended up developing compared to people around me who were not computer users from a young age and most of them became drug addicts as I lived in a high crime, drug infested neighborhood. I saw them getting all stupid and all they wanted to talk about is their next high while I was sitting their with my calculator calculating out BRE (Barron Realms Elite) strategies. So now I am a successful software engineer and a lot of my peers while growing up are dead from drug overdoses, lost contact and figure they are probably dead or in jail, or just not going anywhere in their life and have medical problems from their drug addictions, alcohol abuse, and chain smoking. In contrast I am a successful software engineer who does not do any of that crap. At this even the people around me who are not drug addicts (at least not that I know of) I am finding often I can reason through a lot of stuff and see why it is a bad idea and can think of much better ways of handling things (and I have built up a body of proof over the years) while they can't. I attribute this to a combination of learning reasoning skills in school and exercising my brain with video games. Also even though some have bashed my playing of FPS games later on once computers could do it that I could get my hands on, I have laser quick reflexes and a lot of things don't get broken or harmed because I can react fast enough to prevent it from happening. I know a lot of other people who are breaking stuff all the time. Especially with a kid on the way I will be holding, I have some confidence I am not going to be the parent who drops their kid on their head.

So yeah, I hear all of this FUD, but in my personal experience, I don't think I turned out bad. With that said even with my limits lower than my wife's, I still have some clear goals on how I would want the kid exposed to electronic devices. These goals are:
1. Learn basic interactions with the world first. It seems we learn basically everything from scratch. The first thing you need to know is basic interaction with the physical world. How long this takes probably depends on the kid, but I would think screen time starts when the kid starts reading. The notion I have is if their brain has developed to the point where they can pick out words on a screen, there is both that on the screen and other things on the screen that will ultimately develop their mind.
2. Make sure there are other things going on besides screen time. I think some level of moderation needs to be taught from the get go. I sometimes think my ability to balance things better than others is I was introduced at an early age and learned moderation skills with technology at an early age where other people were exposed later and could not moderate and so became trapped in a virtual world.
3. Try to get more educational material delivered to the kid - Growing up and even in college, one of my frustrations is even though we know how to make educational material for computers (and one of my graduate level CS courses focused heavily on this), the general mentality seemed to be some sort of computer hardware supplied, job done. Now if you want educational material, well read a book. It's was like no, there is so much we could be doing to enhance the educational experience if we just invested in the making the right software. Just apparently nobody in the educational system understood or wanted to pay for it for some reason. I hope things have changed sense then; just been tied up with other things (pregnant wife keeps me really busy and the kid is not even out yet) and haven't been able to do the deep dive I really want to do.

and it has always been due to human error. HAL 9000 While the computers largely made through Y2k and beyond us humans still managed to mess it all up. Give us some hanging chads and we go into deception mode, start endless wars, shut off power to the state doing most of this Y2k stuff and in general have been in a downward spiral. Things looked so much more promising before 2000 with all of these people thinking about how close to the Star Trek idealism and technology we may reach, but since I think we have all lowered our expectations out of humanity and now we even have Biff as president / king while living the worst time line and our scientists are even pointing to signs we are going over the tipping point while Biff is busy fanning the climate change flames.

I am somebody who was around and in the field when $50k+ workstations were normal and my workplace had these workstations along with a bunch of somewhat expensive Macs. People loved their reliable $50k+ workstations for a few years until they started using them as doorstops. Did they work after a few years? Nobody knows and nobody was interested in finding out as there was a new generation of workstations that blew them away capability wise. The Mac people loved their Macs and used to go on about how they just worked. What happened were cheap and buggy Wintel PCs got to the point where pretty much all of the managers were like we gotta switch over to these dramatically cheaper PCs. At the same time Steve Jobs wasn't there to make Apple great, so whole bulk orders of Apple computers failed due to Apple churning out expensive crap and even when they did turn on, they just locked up and crashed right and left. So with this being the experience, it was extra fuel on the fire for management to brand all of the Macs as "not Y2k compliant" even though they tested to handle Y2k just fine and were replaced with PCs. The UNIX workstations hung around for a while, but were then largely replaced with Windows PCs because it was a lot cheaper. Eventually Linux grew into this space and in shops all around the country. Ever since it seems like Microsoft has been the more expensive, though still dramatically cheaper than the workstation days, major known brand, Mac has in general been the niche brand the cool kids use (but are increasingly grumbling about how broken it has gotten), and Linux has been doing most of the heavy lifting and behind the scenes work and is the cheap / free deal.

So now many years after the $50k+ workstation died and the founders of Nvidia killed off SGI, the workstation maker they came from, with much cheaper hardware, Apple without Steve Jobs to make them great, somehow thinks they can have a great, super expensive workstation comeback? So maybe a few die hard Mac fans will blow all of their money on these overpriced pieces of junk and lose their shirts over it and then the people who didn't throw away their money for no reason will take over and there won't be any more of these sold similar to what happened last time around. Except this time pretty much none of the big shops have any reason to buy in the first place, so it will get off to a poor start and then whither and die with Tim Cook the mastermind of this whole fiasco. It is just a question of will Apple have so much money in their war chest they they laugh off this failure or will the whole deal where they are majorly messing up other stuff lead to Tim Cook's ouster?

The first medium sized company I worked for that switched over to Linux throughout (they were an Internet based company) went from 2 full time techs handling Windows problems on ~270 desktops to one 1/2 time tech installing and managing ~270 Linux desktops. A big part of this was security issues plaguing the Windows machines requiring their time to handle where Linux just worked and was not getting compromised.

At my current shop I am one of the few Linux on desktop users, though the place has lots of Linux servers and there are significant investments in both Windows desktops and MacOS desktops (and as in desktop I also am referring to laptops). The Windows machines keep getting crudded up with stuff, hauled off by the techs, examined by the security team, and then re-imaged. The MacOS machines keep getting corrupted by Apple dropping the ball and also have been having a lot of hardware issues / failures and it has been getting exponentially worse over the past couple of years. While I have had some problems with bit flipping in RAM as they did not provide me with an ECC memory system, for the most part my Linux desktop system just hums along.

I have penciled it out and if you drive more than 15,000 miles a year, then the Tesla Model 3 should be the current cheapest car on the planet, beating out the Prius and beating out other electric cars. When you look at the Tesla Model 3 basically there is the running costs of charging, rotating and changing the tires, and a few small maintenance things. Then the car goes 300,000 - 500,000 miles before you need to swap the battery at which point most people dump their EV overboard. If you do pay for the battery replacement, the drive train should go for 1,000,000 miles or more, especially if you are doing 30,000 miles or more a year. The Tesla Model 3 also has an excellent safety record for multiple reasons, so something to factor into TCO is average money spent on accident related medical bills, loss of productivity due to injures when driving a non Tesla, and potential loss of life. Then I think the Tesla has a good resale value.

The Prius is the best of the primarily petrol cars because its fuel economy is pretty good, the hybrid system makes the car very low maintenance (I have a Prius and love this aspect of the car), and it is a car that can go hundreds of thousands of miles before it is really worn out. At this the battery can make it 200,000 to 300,000 miles from what I have read. At this my battery is getting pretty up there on the miles and is still kicking strong. The Prius also has a really good resale value, which makes a difference in its TCO factoring.

Most every pure petrol car out there chugs down expensive gas, which adds up over time, especially as it gets more expensive, needs lots of regular planned maintenance, and has lots of unplanned maintenance due to the mechanically complex drive train breaking down. While I have seen a petrol car go over 500,000 miles due to a really good mechanic owning and maintaining the car, really they tend to go 150,000 to 200,000 before it is just not worth keeping them going anymore, so then it is time to plunk down the money for a new one. My last petrol car passed the $400/mo in unplanned maintenance around the 140,000 mile mark and then needed thousands of $ of more unplanned maintenance all at once just passed the 150,000 mark, most of the work I did myself so I could get the car ready to sell off and then got rid of it wondering why I bothered because it still sold for a really low amount, barely worth more running than scrap metal due to how Kelly Blue Book rated its value in a running state.

So yeah a petrol car will give you a lower up front cost, but if you do a significant amount of driving, really a petrol car make no sense over electric or even hybrid electric today. The equation for electric cars only gets better over time. While I am not providing numbers above, I have done some comparisons. For example by the 200,000 mile mark the calc I had for the Tesla Model 3 over a similar petrol car was over $25,000 less in total costs. By the 300,000 mark, which the Tesla Model 3 should make it fine, it should be more like $60,000 in savings as the original Model 3 is still going while with pure petrol it is a different car with anywhere from 100,000 to 150,000 miles on it because it just wasn't worth trying to keep the original petrol only car going.

It seems reality is shaping up to a future heavy in satellites and some new fiber like ZBLAN fiber along with traditional silica based fiber. C band is important for more than just cell phones and makes a lot more sense than millimeter wave. Millimeter wave should be for satellites, not 5G as there are no obstructions between space and ground for much of your service area and millimeter usually makes it through the atmosphere, though around 24 GHz you interact with water molecules, which is bad, and completely blinds weather satellites, which is really super bad and deadly. Other uses for millimeter wave are airport body scanners and directed beam crowd dispersal weapons, which makes one wonder why would they want to use this for cell sites that literally have to be placed everywhere and why do they need so much super expensive ground station hardware for each site, plus even how do you even make money off of so many densely packed sites with so much and such expensive hardware? Especially when only maybe a couple of people can get a good signal if they hold up their phone and directly face the antenna within their line of site, no obstructions in-between? I mean 5G spectrum allocation so far has made no sense at all for anybody who is not the DHS looking for backscatter 'naked' imaging of people and not hoping to do crowd dispersal by causing people to feel like their skin is on fire.

At least the C band could be used in crowded venues where say antennas are above people and so antennuations through bodies to phones will be acceptable, however you could say the same thing about wanting to make WiFi work better in crowded areas. Plus some level of penetration would be really good for drone operators looking to do FPV (first person view) flying as there is not much spectrum usable for this task, especially if you want to bump up the resolution to actually see where you are flying instead of feeling your way around.

Elon Musk is now actively blanketing the planet in satellites in order to blanket the world in high speed Internet in order to make tonnes of money. This can still only do somewhat large receiving sites, not tiny ones like your cell phone.

Fiber is still the most reliable way to get data around, especially if you need to go long distances and you need ultra high speed. More radios is not going to change this, especially if you are talking high density places. Instead fiber and Starlink will probably go hand in had to get Internet everywhere and fast. Then both wired and short range wireless completes the last hop to device. One debate around fiber is will ZBLAN fiber also take off for long haul, especially undersea cables, or will Starlink cause it to fizzle? Either way space will be in our future mix of high speed personal communications. Also I find it astonishing that my end of a FTTH (fiber to the home) setup using Ethernet based fiber devices should be less than $100 of equipment and cabling while the ISP side should not be that much more, however I don't have access to it where I live nor do almost everyone in the US still to this day. At best maybe you have ATM based fiber with a ridiculously expensive, power hungry, and overall pointless OTN in your closet where a $26 media converter could do the job and do it better and faster.

Even the small WiFi setup I have at home, it works out a lot better when I wire in what I can, especially streaming devices, and then only use WiFi for devices that are truly mobile or just can't be plugged in. Whenever something saturates the limited spectrum, everything else suffers, especially if it is real time UDP. Wired in thoughtfully and contention is basically eliminated. Then again I probably go further than most with a couple of the switches managed, real time traffic prioritized over bulk data, and all of the small unmanaged switches in the house feed into a big managed switch. Plus the firewall does sophisticated packet prioritization. Just can't get this kind of total bandwidth and conflict resolution for smooth operation with wireless. Plus with the walls of this place blocking WiFi signals, which isn't an uncommon issue, I have to use wired backhaul through the house, which then feeds all of the WiFi APs (access points). So yeah, you give me C-band 5G and well I am back to hyper localized WiFi APs inside the home to actually get a signal on my cell phone.

The thing is it is scary and dangerous to blow the whistle. Especially considering how screwed up the 737 is with the Max known for diving like crazy and all of the 737's going back to the 1990's at risk of the wings breaking off due to cracking of key parts to the point where a whole 737 mechanics union want the plane grounded until they can get all of the cracking parts replaced and seeing this manufacturing plant was specifically put up to stick it to the unions and cut costs by "any means", this sounds especially credible. Don't forgot that the 737 'Dive' Max planes actually dived due to a combination of Boeing did not want to invest in designing a new plane to replace the obsolete 737 design (the A320 blows the 737 away in every way and yeah I have boarded an A320 from the tarmac, it is fine, just a little taller and everyone has machines to help load the cargo hold these days), they intentionally designed it to not use two (or more) sensors to avoid regulation as opposed to doing the right thing, they knowingly installed faulty sensors on planes in an effort to cut costs, and they knowingly left hazardous debris in the planes while building them where the cabling for the sensors and other sensitive components go. In other words the 737 Max diving problem was completely setup by Boeing to happen from doing it wrong from all angles in an interest of cutting costs at the expense of safety. Planes don't normally crash from a single problem, but instead of a multitude of things coming together to ultimately cause the crash. By the same token emergency systems don't normally fail in an unpredictable manner, but instead were never done right in the first place. It is just with emergency systems usually only the people working on it know while the end users have no idea until it fails to work in an emergency situation. This is why you need both quality engineers and technical QA who can do the proper planning and testing and management more interested in the big picture than greedily stuffing their pockets at every turn. One would have hoped Boeing learned from McDonald Douglas, which they bought out after the DC 10 debacle, but apparently that old guard is gone so now Boeing in a more naked capitalist environment is taking the McDonald Douglas slot and Airbus, which is built in more socialist countries, is taking over the old Boeing slot in terms of making the quality plane. However losing Boeing to Airbus would have a major impact on our economy.

Your example is crap. I work on climate science. We don't make stuff up. We gather data, process through it, cross validate, refine our models, and process again with more information. Basic trends were noticed long ago and heavily cross checked and validated. We are just refining the details and trying to gather more information with whatever instruments get approved to fly. Also the planet changes over time, we as a species change how we do things over time, and the technology to gather and process this information improves over time, so it is critical to keep gathering this information, launching new instruments, and seeing where we are actually at as time moves forward. Knowing saves lives. Even right now anybody paying attention might have noticed the European models for paths of hurricanes is a lot better than the US model. This is not coincidence. The EU has invested a lot more into this in a much more coherent program and with a lot better instruments, so it is no coincidence their models are better. Also you may have noticed it is Europe who is really freaking out about what we are doing to the planet. This is also not coincidence because when you can see in so much detail what we are doing to this planet as a global species through advanced instrumentation and modeling, it gets pretty real.

There is a basic monopoly problem where Facebook controls a whole segment of speech on the Internet. Even in the more fringe places, entities like 8chan have popped up with its notion of let anything fly and it has gotten so bad even the original creator of 8chan wants 8chan to die, especially as the body counts have amassed. If Facebook cared at all about its platform, they would fact check the 'officials' in this country. If you are an 'official' or running for high office, what you say should be true or not allowed as the notion of ever getting the chance of knowing the truth is increasingly under attack. Even the peanut gallery, well it has already been shown with lots of blood spilled and the mass shooting every other week tied to social media, the wild west needs to be tamed a bit. For ideologues it kind of sucks, but reality is stranger than fiction. We need to enforce some level of integrity and checks and balances or the whole thing comes crumbling down. I sit in a place where I can see a few things at a high level and scientifically heavily validated and cross checked and it is clear we are heading in a direction we cannot recover from with the status quo. We have to change and lies and 'spin' spread by dishonest politicians is preventing this adaptation to our actual reality from happening. If you don't mind the whole planet going extinct then yeah let the politicians say whatever they want, no fact checking. However as the physicist who oversaw the aftermath of Chernobyl found the lies harm a lot more than the truth hurts to say. This is pretty basic do you want to either die in a mass shooting or die as the planet dies or die in some senseless war or are you going to out of your way to make sure those with the most influence are not using your platform to spread lies and misinformation? Some Facebook employees have already been shot because of misinformation spread online. That is probably why they feel so compelled to speak up.

Something I found beneficial to going to college when I did is I have worked with all of these code monkeys who either did not go to college long enough to learn anything, at least nothing beyond recursion or went through a degree program in a particular H1-B worker source country or now with recent grads in the US and they don't know anything while I learned all kinds of useful stuff to build on and model both what I need to do on the job and the world in general. I did not go to the best college; actually they kind of underperformed a bit, but at the time the big ticket CS program in my state was super impacted and I had this flaw called foreign language on my report card making me ineligible for the program I was always a straight A student in at the top rated school even though that university did not require foreign language beyond what I did in high school while the suckier school did. While there has always been a fair amount of BS that goes on in academia, I look at what I produce and what some of my peers who did go to college when they taught at least a few good things in my state and wow, it is night and day how crappy and dysfunctional things get with people who either have no higher education, were an early dropout, went to school in a country where the bar is super duper low apparently, or just graduated with how screwed up the education system seems to be now in the US compared to how dysfunctional it was when I went through. And it is kind of funny in a way it seems the people who are really bad screw up everything on a descent path to totally screwed are the people who think they are the best.
In short while the university system seems to have never taught latest and greatest tech, at least at one point in at least some places they taught some good skills to build on and weeded out some people who just drown and take everyone around them down with them in the real world. Then again the university system just randomly kicks down people because the professor is tenured and is bent on screwing all of the students in that class because there are no consequences for screwing over the whole class (and I have been in plenty of classes where 100% of the students in the class either dropped or failed).

Huh, so Java is finally doing the thing I could do in shell scripts decades ago? They are even doing it just the way I do it in Python. Trendy. So when are they are going to have garbage collection that works instead of hogging up all of your precious RAM like the hoarders who wrote it probably do to their homes and then freezing up the whole application to do house cleaning on a modern multiple hardware threaded system because we say we understand threading, but in a practical sense they really don't?

Some major institutions are still sitting on class A network address ranges because back in the day they were given out like candy. However the people at those institutions who acquired them retired / died and the institutions sitting on them have no idea the gold mine in sellable excess IPv4 address space they are sitting on is worth. The thing is this situation is unlikely to change because like you are thinking you can get bureaucratic wheels to turn or something. So instead the only thing you can do is to turn your own wheels and get IPv6 going for you and try to get everyone you know to turn it on and stop their whining.

There have been times where I have IMed people in the same room with no separators between us to the point where they complained I should just talk to them, so I IMed my response. I was trying to make the point I work better when I can respond at good break points and their constant interruptions mid stream was negatively affecting my productivity while just giving me a little time to get to a stopping point to respond to an IM was far more productive. Anyways often times it seems when someone gives you an impromptu response, they say the wrong thing away and lead you down the wrong path and then try to go back to whatever they were doing. I suppose it depends a bit what you are doing, but usually when you get into the software development realm at least, need to find both a balance between uninterrupted work time and communication time and constructive, structured interactions. So often what I see are meetings where nothing of relevance is said to the people 'invited' to the meeting, little to no communication on the important things, and then frequent interruptions when actually trying to get something done. More recently when demanded I be at work, I just wear noise cancelling headphones when I am trying to get stuff done and at first management was critical, but now more and more it seems everyone at the office is wearing headphones. It seems at least for teams I have been on what helps is a day or two where everyone is at the office and then the rest of the time at home because people just don't bother you and you can get stuff done where the shared day at the office everyone yabbers on the good, bad, important, and useless distracting stuff. Even if you have a noisy home environment during the work day, if everyone else is at home then they are not bothering you, at least not as much as in the office. Another common trend is when you are new to a project, a lot of time is spent at the office communicating with others on the team, but after a while you know what is expected of you and it is best if you go into your cubby hole and get the work done, just don't do it to the point where everyone is going off into a different and incongruent direction. While I think you could be successful working remotely 100% on a wide variety of things, it is best if the team has a good communication plan for handling 100% remote work. Or else people are going to be doing the wrong things or quite literally wandering off into the woods. Then again the normal thing is to want 100% at the office and the communication plan is exceedingly dysfunctional, so it is like what is the point of actually being at work?