I remember seeing photos and video of the highway they tore through the rain forest so attendees could get from airports to the conference site. Massive wildlife disruption, native tribe dislocation, etc. Kind of interesting to destroy and disrupt the thing you're allegedly trying to save.

Back in the '90s I worked for a major police department as a civilian in IT. They set up their first computer investigation unit while I was there. They were quite meticulous about custody of seized hard drives and how they were examined, and the attorneys of whoever owned that computer could have easily gotten that evidence, if not the whole case, thrown out over how they had you examine it.

That, along with other things like the rise of Faux Newts, seems like a possible explanation for the increase in conspiracy theory believers. Critical thinking has certainly suffered over the last 20-30 years. I remember being shocked when Dubya said in an interview that he doesn't read books, and now that seems to be the norm.

I don't blame it all on the smart phone. I think part of it is also availability. Amazon and the big-box book store destroyed the local book store: within 75 miles of me right now the only place to buy books is Walmart and the local public library's Friends Of store. That's not much for selection or getting good recommendations. I work at a university (branch campus) library and happily make recommendations whenever possible, including encouraging people to buy the Hugo bundle if they have an interest in science fiction and fantasy.

Interestingly, I've already broken a book a week for this year, a record that I haven't exceeded in a long time. Currently re-reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy, apparently Peter Jackson completely overwrote my memory of it!

Just yesterday I saw an article - didn't read it - purporting that Macs basically had no reason to exist anymore. I wish I'd read it to see what idiocy they were pruporting.

I remember back about '08 I was working as a SQL Server administrator for a city and the IT director came during the lunch hour to give me all sorts of shit about my MacBook Pro sitting on my desk. I used it as a music player and for surfing when I wanted multiple screens to do my job. I was really getting mad at him interrupting my quiet time, so I turned to my Mac and ran uptime then turned back to him.

I said, "Yeah, they're garbage. This one has only been up for 59 days since its last reboot."

He huffed and left. One of my wife's Mac laptops has over 200 days on it. She's an astronomer and most of their entire infrastructure is Linux VMs, Macs make great front end workstations for them. She converted me shortly after we got married as I was getting so angry over the constant OS reinstallations for Windows machines to fix problems. Right now I have a '15 27" iMac, M2 Max MacBook Pro, a '14 Mini, plus iPhone, Watch, and a couple of iPads. Considering a M2 or M3 Mini in the not distant future to replace the '15 iMac.

But I'm sure they're going to be paying their workers 32 hours of overtime, thus creating extra zeroes in their bank accounts! That's what, 48 hours of straight time, so getting paid 88 hours of wages a week. That's not bad compensation, double the salary for quadruple the burnout!

/s

We had two consultant companies in to write a major, state-wide MIS system for us: let's call them Deloitte-Touche and KPMG to maintain their privacy. Any time we needed a change to the spec, they RESET THE ENTIRE PROJECT TO STEP ZERO. No progress was ever made on the project, they just kept siphoning funds. This went on for a couple of years, starting before I was there.

Finally we got a new IT director who cancelled the project, we took it over and developed it in-house in two years and it worked great. It did exactly what we wanted and was very reliable. After I left the state, I was working for the police dept (through the '90s) who had an insanely complicated SQL Server payroll pre-process system, it crunched our OT and leave forms into standardized input for the city payroll mainframe process. Every rank it seemed had a different union contract and different rules for how they could be paid overtime or hold the pay for comp time off. The city wanted us to scrap that system and use their Peoplesoft system that they'd implemented city-wide.

We agreed to a meeting with their sales rep and one of their consulting programmers who knew the city system. We had 2-3" of documentation to present. My boss started describing how if you were a basic officer and didn't get your lunch, and elected to get paid for it, you got a code X, but if you wanted that to be held as comp time off, it was a code Y. Programmer smiles 'We can do that'. My boss continues 'But if you're a sergeant, that's a B or an F'. Programmer starts looking a little concerned. 'And if you're a lieutenant, that's a D or a Z.' Programmer starts looking a little twitchy. And then we started talking about getting called back out after the end of a shift, and all sorts of weird things that police do because it is a job with strange demands on your time. My boss did a brilliant job of designing his presentation to steeply ramp up the complexity of how our system worked.

Eventually the programmer's response became 'We can't do that' and for over a decade after I left, as long as I remained in contact with people there, that payroll system was still in use.

And let's not forget Lotus Symphony! I knew a guy who furiously programmed in that thing all day, and I think he was the only one who could make that package work. I wrote a package in dBase III+ for printing 1099s that did micro-line spacing on an Okidata that had huge comment blocks that said 'DO NOT TOUCH THIS CODE OR YOU'LL BREAK THE PROGRAM!'. Idiot boss's husband 'who was a programmer' from Honeywell, obviously knew so much more than I did, punk 20-something kid, touched the code after I left and broke it. :-) It really made my day when I heard about it.

I also programmed a bar code parser in dBase 3+, that was pretty cool. I was working at an actuary/pension plan company, and client files moved around the office with great rapidity. A secretary would go around the office every Monday morning and scan then office ID and every file in the office, then we'd dump them into the DB, so at that point in time we knew where a file was and had a fair chance of tracking it down if needed.

I remember dBase. I did a lot of work in FoxPro and also some in rBase, though I can't say I liked it. I also have a terrifying amount of experience in Dataflex! Gods, that system sucked!

From what I've read, you use a pair of tin snips to cut out the bar code of the original filter and tape it over the third-party replacement filters to trick the sensor, and apparently that works quite nicely and saves a bundle over GE filters.

Contact AOL's scrap agent, I understand they recently made a big deal.

Double-plus not good! Their level of richness is definitely a bane on society.

But Larry is now richer than Leon, so that's good?

And this reinforces my plan to not use Plex.

One number that people don't recognize is that the top 1% of college graduates in China is larger than the entire college graduate body in the USA for a given year. The numbers are just so lopsided against the USA or any given country that it's not funny. Arguments about quality of grads and infrastructure can be made, but overall there's no doubt that they're winning.

Even with the first organ transplant, you're on immune suppressants from that point forward, though they're trying to improve the tech. This is not a viable path to life extension. China recently did a lung transplant from a pig to a brain-dead person, it didn't go well.