If the long press isn't working, pull the plug. HTH, HAND.

Also, people who aren't good at negotiating also deserve fair wages.

I'm not saying that they don't. And that's why sports figures have agents so that they don't have to be good negotiators themselves. My point is that being in a union doesn't stop you from negotiating if you think you can do better.

Why, then, does Major League Baseball have a union? These are very high skilled jobs, very well paid. The highest performers make FAR more money than the middling ones - having a union doesn't prevent that.

My father spent most of his working life in union supermarkets in Los Angles, most of the time in management. Except when he was just starting out, he never worked for union scale, but negotiated a higher rate because he was known to be good enough to deserve it. No matter what the unions say, you can always get more if you can make the boss believe that you deserve it.

That is the completely-unfounded religious axiom of every scientist: that the universe is as it (roughly) appears to be, so that the nature of reality can be inferred from observation.

There is one objective fact that supports that axiom: no matter who makes the observations, what direction they look and when, they get the same results. This strongly suggests that what we are observing is objective reality, not some subjective vision that can vary from one observer to another.

...you have functional illiterates like Trump.

Functional Illiteracy means that somebody is barely able to read, not that they can read fairly well but don't like to or don't bother. Do you have any citable evidence that Mr. Trump is functionally illiterate, or is it just your TDS getting the better of you again?

In that case, you'll be pleased to know that that site is now 404 compliant.

That's a chicken and egg thing.

Not completely, I can imagine potential customers telling the factory owner that they need to get their prices down and in the long run, building a rail line is the best way. Of course, I'm assuming that the auto part factories aren't the only ones using it so that the costs get spread around.

If they had to truck parts back and forth to/from the middle of Africa, that would be different.

If there were that much trade, there'd soon be a railroad to take the product from the factories to the nearest port.

Whoosh!
Get your mind back into the gutter where it belongs!

Doing it discretely is a a piecewise approximation of that curve.

And what do you get if you do it indiscreetly?

About 4 years? No. Try ~6 instead. It started when Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and ended when Japan surrendered in 1945.

...I don't think anyone at CERN has their particle accelerator control system plugged directly into their ISP's router.

I wouldn't be a bit surprised to learn that systems like that are completely air gapped and that updates/updates are administered via removable media.

Actually, Trump is not a singular cause. He was not the first. Back under reagan, he killed a great deal of our civilian oriented R&D saying that private business can do it , while moving some to DARPA. Thankfully, DARPA still funded basic science.
Then W did more cuts, but pushed a lot of DARPA spending in UNI over to companies and forced cuts in basic science.
Biden also did major changes and pushed funding to go from merit based to DEI.
Trump is just a continuation of this and not even the worst ( reagan or W were the worst ).

That's the type of meter the VA issues to me. And, I send my readings to my Diabetes Coach about once a month and we discuss how I'm doing and adjust things if needed. I've been doing this for about 20 years, and am very well controlled.

Much better then finger sticks 20 times a day leaving the tips of your fingers covered in bruises, pin pricks or just numb.

Man, you must have some seriously major case of diabetes if you need 20 sticks per day! I take 22 units of Lantus every morning and Novolog on a sliding scale with each meal and only four sticks per day. One before each meal and one at bedtime.