Comment Re: So, are they driving American cars now? (Score 1) 109
So which lie is it? Nobody buying US, or USA USA ?
Go away, troll.
Comment Re: So, are they driving American cars now? (Score 1) 109
Nope, try again.
The Big Three have also been pushed aside by the Germans, BMW and Mercedes at the middle and top, Volkswagen at all levels of the market. Chrysler has so badly failed that they were taken over by Italians! And the Italians are not really renowned for organizational efficiency or precision engineering.
ALL those companies are unionized from the top down and also partly owned by their local governments. Imagine the incessant interference by non-C-suite stakeholders!
The failure is at the top, not elsewhere. And Tesla, which really did own the EV market at some point less than a decade ago, is already going down the drain because of the CEO's personal hubris. It also is getting it's pie eaten by everyone, a pie GM had all to itself at the beginning of the 90's but just abandoned on the window sill.
The failure is at the top, and it really seems like it's a USA management culture problem.
Comment Re: So, are they driving American cars now? (Score 1) 109
No, it's not what happened.
What happened is the C-suites were lazy and they were both undercut and out-performed by foreign upstarts, TWO TIMES: the Japanese and then Hyundai. They are also complacent and so were hard-hit when fuel prices went up quickly, TWO TIMES.
The US automotive companies are led by lazy, short-sighted, incompetent fools that cannot even prevent getting destroyed by the same event a second time. They are, however, excellent at getting bailouts when bankruptcy is close.
None of that is related to unions or the people engineering, designing or building the vehicles. In fact, many of the big wins of those companies happened when somebody successfully hid their innovative product from the higher-ups until it was out in the public.
Comment Re: And yet, this has been discussed a century ago (Score 1) 169
There is a huge jump from letting people say their opinions about the Republic of their form of government and hate speech, slander and other reasonable restrictions on speech.
That's why the first amendment is not an absolute free pass, and has never been meant so. Many supreme Court decisions around that.
Also, life is a lot wider and more diverse than the application of current US laws. That's where philosophy comes in - you think about things from basic principles.
Comment Re:And yet, this has been discussed a century ago (Score 1) 169
Just like we are re-living play-by-play the rise of the Nazis, this exact philosophical question has been debated a century ago. It even has it's own name: "the paradox of tolerance".
tl;dr: Tolerating intolerance leads to intolerance taking over.
Read the Wikipedia blurb: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Or take the time to read Karl Popper's full book "The open society and its enemies" here: https://archive.org/details/in...
And it's second volume with sources here: https://archive.org/details/in...
Comment Re:Creators of technology (Score 2) 111
I believe that they DO understand the fiction.
They justify themselves to themselves in a few ways:
1) "I'm just creating the gadget, nothing to do with the context"
2) In those dystopias people on top have it really good, I am/will be on top, ergo: let's do this.
3) The dystopias are bad on the "small people", f*** that [immigrant/white] trash it's going to make me a buck.
Comment Pikachu surprised face? (Score 4, Informative) 11
An off-regulation "market" seeing rampant manipulation? I am shocked! Shocked, I tell you!
They are playing the "we're not a financial market" and "we're not online gambling" at the same time to get out of all regulation, like all good scammers. And like all good scammers, they have buddies scamming the marks/"clients" so their hands stay clean.
Any person dumb enough to put a dollar in there should just go to Vegas instead, at least those guys have to tell you the rules and the odds and then pay out when you win.
Comment The solution is not to scap, it's to correct (Score 1) 102
This is a shill using the moment to scrap a regulation they don't like.
The solution to the annoyance of banners is making mandatory the presence of a "no consent" button, and making it the default choice if the user does not act. The banner should also not be shown more than once per session, so you don't have those popups repeatedly trying you to reverse your "no" decision.
And then, make ad-blocker-excluding websites illegal, and mandate the banners to accept the ad-blocker saying "no consent" automatically.
Comment Re:Such a shame (Score 1) 48
No, because this site is dead.
It's corpse still festers with the slime of trolls, parasites, incels and MAGA. Those do not understand C, or even the interest of obfuscated code.
Comment Re:Post-secondary should be free, as in beer (Score 1) 122
This is a stupid take, so stupid even the current US education system contradicts it. Is primary and secondary education "rationed" around you? No. Every child gets it, and is mandated to attend it. There are enough schools for everyone, because the government is mandated to provide them.
And then, in civilized countries university is free or almost-free in the beer sense. The only programs that have limited space are the ones where the available jobs are few (like art conservators), or the academic requirements are high (like medicine). Any person can enter, as long as they have the prerequisite knowledge.
As for the "decided by 14" bit, you are also completely wrong. There is no entrance age limit, even for very hard to get courses. So if at the first occasion (around 17 or 18) you do not make the cut, you can try again later. Some go into a related program, work hard, get the high marks, then get back in their preferred program. This diversion is also good for society in two ways: some discover that they love the related stuff, and the ones that get back to their first choice are better-rounded professionals.
Submission + - Another large Black hole in "our" Galaxy (arxiv.org)
RockDoctor writes: A recent paper on ArXiv reports a novel idea about the central regions of "our" galaxy.
Remember the hoopla a few years ago about radio-astronomical observations producing an "image" of our central black hole — or rather, an image of the accretion disc around the black hole — long designated by astronomers as "Sagittarius A*" (or SGR-A*)? If you remember the image published then, one thing should be striking — it's not very symmetrical. If you think about viewing a spinning object, then you'd expect to see something with a "mirror" symmetry plane where we would see the rotation axis (if someone had marked it). If anything, that published image has three bright spots on a fainter ring. And the spots are not even approximately the same brightness.
This paper suggests that the image we see is the result of the light (radio waves) from SGR-A* being "lensed" by another black hole, near (but not quite on) the line of sight between SGR-A* and us. By various modelling approaches, they then refine this idea to a "best-fit" of a black hole with mass around 1000 times the Sun, orbiting between the distance of the closest-observed star to SGR-A* ("S2" — most imaginative name, ever!), and around 10 times that distance. That's far enough to make a strong interaction with "S2" unlikely within the lifetime of S2 before it's accretion onto SGR-A*.)
The region around SGR-A* is crowded. Within 25 parsecs (~80 light years, the distance to Regulus [in the constellation Leo] or Merak [in the Great Bear]) there is around 4 times more mass in several millions of "normal" stars than in the SGR-A* black hole. Finding a large (not "super massive") black hole in such a concentration of matter shouldn't surprise anyone.
This proposed black hole is larger than anything which has been detected by gravitational waves (yet) ; but not immensely larger — only a factor of 15 or so. (The authors also anticipate the "what about these big black holes spiralling together?" question : quote "and the amplitude of gravitational waves generated by the binary black holes is negligible.")
Being so close to SGR-A*, the proposed black hole is likely to be moving rapidly across our line of sight. At the distance of "S2" it's orbital period would be around 26 years (but the "new" black hole is probably further out than than that). Which might be an explanation for some of the variability and "flickering" reported for SGR-A* ever since it's discovery.
As always, more observations are needed. Which, for SGR-A* are frequently being taken, so improving (or ruling out) this explanation should happen fairly quickly. But it's a very interesting, and fun, idea.
Remember the hoopla a few years ago about radio-astronomical observations producing an "image" of our central black hole — or rather, an image of the accretion disc around the black hole — long designated by astronomers as "Sagittarius A*" (or SGR-A*)? If you remember the image published then, one thing should be striking — it's not very symmetrical. If you think about viewing a spinning object, then you'd expect to see something with a "mirror" symmetry plane where we would see the rotation axis (if someone had marked it). If anything, that published image has three bright spots on a fainter ring. And the spots are not even approximately the same brightness.
This paper suggests that the image we see is the result of the light (radio waves) from SGR-A* being "lensed" by another black hole, near (but not quite on) the line of sight between SGR-A* and us. By various modelling approaches, they then refine this idea to a "best-fit" of a black hole with mass around 1000 times the Sun, orbiting between the distance of the closest-observed star to SGR-A* ("S2" — most imaginative name, ever!), and around 10 times that distance. That's far enough to make a strong interaction with "S2" unlikely within the lifetime of S2 before it's accretion onto SGR-A*.)
The region around SGR-A* is crowded. Within 25 parsecs (~80 light years, the distance to Regulus [in the constellation Leo] or Merak [in the Great Bear]) there is around 4 times more mass in several millions of "normal" stars than in the SGR-A* black hole. Finding a large (not "super massive") black hole in such a concentration of matter shouldn't surprise anyone.
This proposed black hole is larger than anything which has been detected by gravitational waves (yet) ; but not immensely larger — only a factor of 15 or so. (The authors also anticipate the "what about these big black holes spiralling together?" question : quote "and the amplitude of gravitational waves generated by the binary black holes is negligible.")
Being so close to SGR-A*, the proposed black hole is likely to be moving rapidly across our line of sight. At the distance of "S2" it's orbital period would be around 26 years (but the "new" black hole is probably further out than than that). Which might be an explanation for some of the variability and "flickering" reported for SGR-A* ever since it's discovery.
As always, more observations are needed. Which, for SGR-A* are frequently being taken, so improving (or ruling out) this explanation should happen fairly quickly. But it's a very interesting, and fun, idea.
Submission + - Surado, formerly Slashdot Japan, is closing at the end of the month. (srad.jp) 1
AmiMoJo writes: Slashdot Japan was launched on May 28, 2001. On 2025/03/31, it will finally close. Since starting the site separated from the main Slashdot one, and eventually rebranded as "Surado", which was it's Japanese nickname.
Last year the site stopped posting new stories, and was subsequently unable to find a buyer. In a final story announcing the end, many users expressed their sadness and gratitude for all the years of service.
Last year the site stopped posting new stories, and was subsequently unable to find a buyer. In a final story announcing the end, many users expressed their sadness and gratitude for all the years of service.
Comment Re: Real reason (Score 1) 185
Oh but that ship has long sailed away for Google. Google does a lot apart from search like television (YouTube) and advertising.
Worse: Google search results are heavily edited by Google for their own purposes - advertising and paid results. In fact, since before the pandemic one of the best ways to not find something has been to use the goog.
So they have no leg to stand on when they say "when people search they want to find relevant info and we relentlessly work to give them only that!"
Comment Re: Net Zero is insufficient anyway (Score 1) 155
Nice strawman, but no.
Preparing for a hiccup - say a few days or weeks - is feasible and useful. Great for storms and other events that happen everywhere all the time.
What is impossible is what preppers sell: permanent total self-sufficiency.
Comment Re: Net Zero is insufficient anyway (Score 2) 155
Whatever you go get at the store got there by ICE truck. Your seed and fertilizer came to you the same way.
Your tires are made of fuel and have a shelf life of a decade at most before they dry rot.
Your heat pump is filled with a hydrocarbon refrigerant, maybe even straight propane (R-290, HC-12a or HC-22a), which you won't be able to refill without a petrochemical plant.
Your solar installation probably shuts down if the power lines go dead, and is probably not powerful enough to charge your car, heat the house and power your fridge and hot water at the same time, because it's not economical to do so.
Don't misunderstand: you having made those investments is fantastic, but it does not make you self-sufficient, just at best net-zero energy wise.
