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Comment Re:"Trade issue" my ass (Score 1) 209

When dealing with trump it is was always going to be a lose-lose situation.

I'm not in the business of shilling for Trump. That said, I always want this to be what the opposite side has to say about my negotiator(s).

Why? "lose-lose" means your side is losing too. Many of us would want our negotiators to establish "wins" for us, and would not be specifically opposed to the "opposite side" also gaining something potentially. Often that's the best win in a transaction.

As for referring to Canada as the "opposite side," that's a very transactional view of things and I guess it's the position you'd have to take if you're going to shill for Trump. The Trump administration is not renowned for being strategic in their negotiations or their communications. But strategically the fact is that Canada is a ally, a friendly border, and an economic partner, not to mention the social, political, and cultural connection. Shitting on them and creating "lose-lose" situations is hardly laudable. It's not good business or politics.

Comment Re:will the former OSS employee be protected from (Score 2) 67

Sure, I'll pay you $200 annually to map out and implement a DR plan with 3-2-1 backups and a contracted third party on the hook to go through the runbook when the earthquake hits.

It's not practical for us to try to solution here but a contingency backup of 50 TB of digital assets might be as simple as making a second copy and dumping it onto media in a box somewhere. It's an archive not a live system. Or whatever. Point is, it's not that hard to have *something* beyond just blind faith that a vendor will keep their end of the bargain.

Other non-technical contingency plans would include making sure the contracts have provisions for this common-enough scenario so you don't have to litigate in court to get your stuff back from Iron Mountain.

It's impossible to plan for every obscure scenario but this is not an obscure scenario. Business partners go out of business all the time.

Here's another hint: When was the last time you contributed to your local PBS station's pledge drive?

Just this spring. Anything for my Professor T.

If you're suggesting that the mismanagement of this contract and related contingency is just due to lack of resources, well, maybe that contributed, we don't know. If so, it would be fair to take that into account when deciding whether to fire the managers. It doesn't change my point though, which is that this type of planning is standard management activity, and you generally can blame managers when they have zero contingency plans on the loss of such an important asset.

Comment Re:will the former OSS employee be protected from (Score 2, Insightful) 67

You can't blame Nine PBS for their data handling partner to go belly up

Actually we can and we do. You need to plan for contingencies. If you've got an asset that's vital for your business and want to store it with someone else, you need to figure out up front what you're going to do if they disappear, or damage the asset, etc. If the Nine PBS management didn't do this then they should be canned.

Similarly, if you put your money in a bank, you need to know what will happen if that bank fails. In many places, there is government-backed insurance for exactly that. If that didn't exist, we'd all need to manage our money differently. (And likely in a way that is not generally advantageous to the economy. That's why the government provides the insurance.)

This is just victim blaming.

The point isn't victim blaming. Rather, I strongly recommend that you take a lesson from this incident if you're ever going to be in charge of anything important.

Comment Re:Removing it will never be (Score 1) 44

What's wrong with the original definition?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The term robot came from the Czech language in 1923. The word was coined by Czech author Karel Capek, first used in his play R.U.R. (translated as Rossum's Universal Robots). The term comes from the Czech word robotník ('forced worker'), from robota 'forced labor, compulsory service, drudgery,' from robotiti 'to work, drudge', from an Old Czech source akin to Old Church Slavonic rabota () 'servitude,' from rabu 'slave'. From Old Slavic *orbu-, from PIE *orbh- 'pass from one status to another'.

Comment Re:Choice? This guy's a hack. (Score 1) 108

Interesting because I googled it and multiple sources say a few hundred a month is typical. Sources vary but I don't see anything remotely close to $1800/month. Anecdotally, I live in a similar sized house as you and also in the great lakes, a 120-year old house with spotty insulation and we broke a window frame this winter which I have yet to fully repair. Still it didn't cost us $1800 for the whole winter let alone a month.

Comment Re: relevance? (Score 2) 59

Like how Musk pretended he wanted to save the planet with electric vehicles to get government grants?

I don't know about saving the planet, but Tesla currently has more than half of US EV market share, so no, it would be more like if Tesla took a bunch of EV seed money and spent it on gas SUVs.

Anyway trials aren't generally about whether the defendant is a better person than the plaintiff or witnesses.

Comment Re:Do the home owners (Score 1) 162

Yes, and then the situation repeats outside with the friendly neighborhood transformer. I'm looking at the pole right now and it says 75kVA. That's effectively what, about 500 A of capacity at 120V? There are a bunch of houses attached to it. If everybody turns everything on at once there's going to be free fireworks.

Of course they know this. Yet they're marketing to investors with the pitch "the average American home only uses about 40 percent of its electrical capacity." Feels scammy to me.

Comment fortunately that's not what "conscious" means (Score 4, Insightful) 403

The evolutionary biologist said he had the "overwhelming feeling" of talking to a human during conversations with Claude, and said it was hard not to treat the program as "a genuine friend."

The scam victim said he had the "overhelming feeling" of talking to a higher power during conversations with the fortune teller, and said it was hard not to hand over bank account numbers to "a genuine friend."

Comment Re:Trump Iran Crisis (Score 1) 122

Were they? Maybe they think that, I don't know. I don't see anywhere on this thread where PCM2 points out anything like that. Maybe you mean ArchieBunker? How many accounts do people have around here?

It's a sweeping statement. Zero tolerance, throughout the entirety of the western media, really? The kind of statement that would require evidence to be taken seriously. The use of "war in" instead of "war with" isn't good evidence. It has a mundane explanation, which is all I pointed out.

Comment Re:Efficiency Boost (Score 1) 59

For a healthy business, there are always lots of things they would like to develop but can't due to limits in capacity.

This sounds nice in theory... Let's use a great go-to example... bookkeeping

There are few businesses whose development relies specifically on advances in bookkeeping. You still have to do it, but the less spent on it the better. The state of the art of bookkeeping is generally not a limit to the capacity of business development.

For some companies, this is true of software as well, but obviously there are many companies whose business development relies significantly on advances in technology. I'm afraid your example just doesn't apply to GP's point.

You'd be hard-pressed to grab a hundred people at random, have them think of the software they use regularly...and point to a time in the past decade where their software got an update and they were HAPPY

I don't know about a hundred people at random but examples abound. I'm sure the folks at SpaceX are pleased that they are not running the exact same software they were a decade ago. You seriously underestimate how pervasive software is in the world and how much development goes into it.

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