You don’t even know what you’re talking about. Diversity in promotions and hiring has lowered standards throughout corporate America as well as in government.

An example: a manufacturing company in the western U.S. needed to replace a mechanical engineer who was leaving. Hiring manager located an excellent candidate, but could not get sign-off to hire, because the candidate was a white male. He was told, “That would hurt our POC metrics.” The departing ME was a south Asian with dark skin, so they counted him as a POC in their ESG reports. After a battle, the manager was able to hire him. True story.

Boeing Corporation has aggressively pursued the hiring of underrepresented minorities, which necessarily has dumbed down what was once the world’s foremost aeronautical engineering company.

NASA same. Whistleblowers and general staff inside the agency have been complaining that the previous leadership was overly focused on racial equity and gender bias training and similar wastes of time. The previous administrator stated that it was NASA’s goal to land “the first woman and the first person of color on the moon”.

Then we could discuss how the FAA has been dumbing down Air Traffic Control. It is rampant.

And no, DEI is not about fairness. It’s about making whites in positions of power feel virtuous.

The Biden Administration sued Tesla for hiring on merit rather than skin color.

What dictator?

A helium leak was reported prior to launch, yet they proceeded with the mission because it was “minor”. Then, it became a major issue and they were forced to scrap the mission. Do I have it right?

The old NASA made occasional mistakes, but they had a culture of must-not-fail; each team had to prove their subsystem was nominal before the mission could proceed. Their dedication was legendary.

Politicization, DEI, and the general decline in American technical standards and work ethic have ruined Boeing and NASA.

I haven't designed for data centers specifically, but in every other cooling application that exists direct liquid exchange is not uncommon.

Many, many cooling systems use direct evaporation. Especially, but not only, in drier environments.

There are maintenance concerns, but the operating and initial capital costs are lower for those systems, so they are attractive on that level.

Reminds me of one of the conflicts represented in Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" regarding centralization of control, though in that case it was about who is in control when nanotechnology can be used to conjure virtually any physical thing you want. In the here and now, we're talking about how computer technology can be used to conjure virtually any digital thing you want. My 1980s perspective, informed by an age of ownership when your computer was your own, hopes for a time when an AI can run on a home computer and open source can give us the power to use it without someone else's guardrails chaining our choices.

I would have thought by now, after 40 years of computerization, that there would be some robust Asian language fonts available in the public domain or perhaps licensed through government agencies to promote their use.

All the way back in the 1980s, I was involved in a Japanese/Chinese/English photo-typesetter project using what I believe were freely available font sets.

Seems like the Japanese game companies should switch to Google or MS fonts. $20K/year in Japan is someone's salary.

The Chinese learn fast and iterate frequently. Likely their future launches will be more robust.

If agentic AI were involved, given sufficient prompts and naivete on the part of Toner-Rogers, the AI could have performed the registration of the false Corning website on its own and even fooled the human researcher into believing the materials were real. Won't be long before we're all questioning whether the answers we get from our computers are legitimate or a tremendously detailed hallucination conjured to match what we appear to want to see.

The whole purpose of trigger warnings is to advise people who already know that they have psychological triggers that can cause an uncontrollable cascade of emotions. It's not to keep the queasy from tossing their cookies. It gives empowered individuals (like those with properly diagnosed PTSD) the information they need to use that power.

Everyone uses VPNs to bypass the Great Wall and get news from the outside world. Sounds like Britain's moving in the same direction. What a sobering thought!

Despite very credible allegations, Biden was never convicted of raping raping Tara Reade. And his daughter's recollections of him inappropriately showering with her outlasted any statute of limitations. But I see where you're going, there. The rest is a good fit, right down to the weaponized government, for sure. The plot twist is that the real kingpins are behind the scenes, using him as a puppet. It's good villain story line material fresh from real life.

The biggest problem with this approach is that no one part of the ATC system exists on its own. All the pieces communicate with each other in an ancient architecture. You can use this approach to upgrade any one piece, but you can never replace the ancient architecture without a much more invasive and risky transition

No. No one knows what's going to happen. That's exactly the problem. Sales taxes, where they exist, inevitably cause prices to be off the 5 cent mark. With no national legislation planned at all and state legislation likely to be slow to have any influence, the effect will be chaos as different vendors, different local jurisdictions, and different states struggle to find an equitable balance.

The best part is that, because nickels cost the US government even more in overhead than pennies do, the whole thing will end up costing the taxpayers far more than it will save them.

But the worst part is that Steven Wright's amazing joke will just disappear:

How come it's a penny for your thoughts but you have to put your two cents in? Somebody's making a penny.