Aloha

I thought by 72 they were using the electronic ignition module instead of points? I thought MY72 was the year it was introduced even?

I think it made sense as a tactical choice at the moment, just like censorship during wartime - I dont think it should go on forever, because doing so is incompatible with a free society.

At that age, are you sure its not plasma?

I have, I even have one on the shelf waiting for the occasion to make it.

I can second this - my parents were good friends after their divorce, as all of the issues of contention were related to sharing a house and relationship.

How do you figure?

I can buy an electric car now, I can buy an ICE Car whats the difference?

I presumed both included a speakerphone tbh.

1 hour phone calls for me are about as common as they always have been

I have 4 clock radios at home, and 2 tabletop radios that are clearly derived from a clock radio - they sound decent, and have reasonably good audio quality.

I've been an avid FM radio listener most of my adult life (NPR mostly), while I can really no longer stand most of NPR programming, when I wanted to do whole house music, I did so with an small sound mixer fed into FM Modulator which in turn fed into coax and an small antenna.

So my broad comment is, yes, your iPhone will replace all of these things, with some compromises. Its just like the things I see with with UI/UX design in my day job - I can make an app that does three unrelated things, but you lose something for each functionality you're adding in.

* All weather personal stereo, $11.88. I now use my iPhone with an Otter Box

Sort of, but not exactly, yes it does all of the things my portable radio does, but not as well - mostly audio fidelity.

* AM/FM clock radio, $13.88. iPhone.

Again, sort of, but not exactly, yes it does all of the things my clock radio does, but not as well - mostly audio fidelity.

* In-Ear Stereo Phones, $7.88. Came with iPhone.

This is a place with notable improvements from then.

* Microthin calculator, $4.88. Swipe up on iPhone.

This is a place with notable improvements from then.

* Tandy 1000 TL/3, $1599. I actually owned a Tandy 1000, and I used it for games and word processing. I now do most of both of those things on my phone.

If this was an iPad I would agree, but it's the same thing as the others - sort of but not exactly. It can do those things, but not as well.

* VHS Camcorder, $799. iPhone.

Again, yes if I squint at it - but it's the same thing as the others - sort of but not exactly. It can do those things, but not always as well without additional accessories.

* Mobile Cellular Telephone, $199. Obvs.

This is a place of clear improvement, todays cell phones are a world better in both audio quality and coverage.

* Mobile CB, $49.95. Ad says “You’ll never drive ‘alone’ again!” iPhone.

Yes, iPhone can do these things, but not as well as a dedicated device (no PTT button for a start)

* 20-Memory Speed-Dial phone, $29.95.

Yes, a clear win for replacement.

* Deluxe Portable CD Player, $159.95. 80 minutes of music, or 80 hours of music? iPhone.

Yes, a clear win for replacement.

* 10-Channel Desktop Scanner, $99.55. I still have a scanner, but I have a scanner app, too. iPhone.

Not much of an improvement over a dedicated device.

* Easiest-to-Use Phone Answerer, $49.95. iPhone voicemail.

Voicemail (which you could get in 1991), is a clear winner over an answering machine.

* Handheld Cassette Tape Recorder, $29.95. I use the Voice Memo app almost daily.

Also a clear improvement.

* BONUS REPLACEMENT: It’s not an item for sale, but at the bottom of the ad, you’re instructed to ‘check your phone book for the Radio Shack Store nearest you.’ Do you even know how to use a phone book?

The internet replaced the phonebook before ubiquitous mobile data, I do miss phonebooks however.

WW1 in a way was special, because you had modern weaponry with 19th century medicine (and arguably 19th century tactics - meaning an army that wasn't mechanized).

The fact that the war was effectively stalemate for 2ish years also contributed to both the medical issues involved and the psychological impact of combat too.

They did have fairly strong and comprehensive landline field phone networks, wireless wasn't really needed.

The B-29 was a fantastically unreliable aircraft until almost after the war was over - https://theaviationgeekclub.com/heres-why-the-b-29-could-hav...

The ME109 could also reach the service ceiling of the B-29

The difference between a 2WD model and a 4WD model is about 10% (4k) on a base model 40,000 dollar truck.

They're all available with 4WD however.

They're highly resilient - as in the hardware/OS itself is, so the applications dont have to be.

That and IOPS are the primary advantage of mainframe systems.

Bentonville is quite nice all things said

I would just configure a VPS outside the country and tunnel thru that

Chase has a decent private banking operation, which you might consider (so does BofA, and most large banks) which can give you the best of both worlds.

Agreed - This is essentially the corner stone of systems failure analysis - something I wish architects thought about more in the software space.

I'm a product manager for an old (and if I'm being honest somewhat crusty) system of software, the software is buggy, all of it is, but its also self healing and resilient, so while yes, it fails with somewhat alarming regularity, with very lots and lots concerning looking error messages in the logs, but it never causes an outage because it self heals.

Good systems design isn't making bug free software or a bug free system, but rather a system where a total outage requires N+1 (maybe even N+N) things to fail before the end user notices. Failures should be driven by at most, edge cases - basically where the system is being operated outside of its design parameters, and those parameters need to reflect the real world and be known by most stakeholders in the system.

My gripe with software engineers sometimes, they're often too divorced from real users and real use cases, and too devoted to the written spec over what their users actually need to do with the software - I've seen some very elegant (and on paper, well designed) systems fall apart because if simple things like intermittent packet jitter, or latency swings (say between 10ms and 70ms) - these are real world conditions, often encountered by real world systems, but these spec driven systems fall apart once confronted with reality.

I'd actually argue that 25" was the sweet spot, 27" was just a little nicer.

I suspect this is a "because I can" project ;-)

I enjoyed greatly my unemployment, and have decided to live in states where things are generous

This is so important I put mine on, and avoid taking it off until I'm on the ground again.

Back then it would have given them a competitive advantage over their peers because of faster end to end performance.

Other than some of your head office folks (accounting, HR, etc) there wasnt much of a greater operating efficiency to be gained, nor do I think they would have gotten significantly lower costs (but for maybe fuel) by squeezing their vendors either.

I think that rationale holds true today too.

When we allowed the UP-SP and BN-SF lashups, we created two western colossuses, if we still had four roads in the west, and had they encouraged east/west mergers at that time, things would be better off today.

The rail industry has been trying to complete and end to end lashup merger since the 50's - had that been allowed in the 50's we might not have needed to spend billions on Conrail in the 70's and 80's.

A different regulatory attitude in the 50's, not just towards M&A but rates and routes, and mandatory services, would have prevented the bailouts we had to do in the aftermath of the Penn Central. Nearly every Class I carrier was in poor financial shape by the time the industry was deregulated in the late 70's, much of the 'capacity crunch' we have today in the rail industry is related to the contraction the industry went thru in that period, where they shed assets and lines in an attempt to resize their cost structure to the amount of revenue they were allowed to realize from their route networks.

Notably most of the BN part of BNSF was not built with land grants.

They built the railroads, often on their own dime, and paid taxes by the fistful for them.

Their competition was subsidized by the general government, and continues to be every year.

If you want to argue that nationalizing railroads should be done for the public good, do that - dont just demonize them, because its not a fully winning argument.

NS and UP do not meaningfully compete today, their networks have very little overlap.

I think the odds of ending birthright citizenship is near zero, its not zero, just very near to zero.

I'm not a fan of this court - but what thing that was 100's of years of precedent was torn down by this court?

Yes, they've refused to do certain things until lower courts rule, but I dont see that as a huge incongruence.