PorterDuff

It's probably best to view government as simply the largest corporation, and a monopoly at that.

I'm sitting at the ER right now wondering what sort of ads I'll get. Truth is you can't count on government to restrict itself so you have to buy your own privacy.

I take it that scarcely anyone here has written software for video switchers, routers, DVEs, linear editors, audio mixers, glue products, master control systems, character generators, etc. etc. Missing a RT schedule rarely results in death, but you'd think so given the attitude from the customer. That's a silly definition for it.

There's a whole world out there of hard real time, the world is not simply made up of streaming video and cell phones.

The cool thing on HN is you can get down voted for simply making that observation. It's a sign of the times I'm afraid.

I admit that the correlations appear pretty vague:

https://asset.barrons.com/public/resources/images/ON-BS188_C...

""soft" real-time (e.g. games, or audio/video) "

Hah. Who sez that audio and video products have 'soft' real time? Go on now.

"I'm more curious about the state of that yurt in 5, 10, 15 years."

It's a good question and I've always wanted to see postmortems on alternative building methods generally. I suppose that we could always take on the Japanese philosophy of building homes anew every few decades.

'Round these parts, I'm afraid that a yurt would be crushed by the first real snowfall, but the build isn't in these parts so no harm, no foul.

Personally, I'd think twice about building over an old blackberry patch. There's a reason that the plants like that place and the word 'swamp' comes to mind. It's already hard enough to deal with moisture in a dwelling as it is.

In any case, it sure looks cool and I like the builder's spirit.

I'm always in favor of homebuilt OS projects, I've worked on several in-house OSs and they seem to have good ideas salted around them.

If it were me, I'd write an open source RTOS (yet another one) and cast around for clever notions to stick in the thing, for the mental exercise if nothing else. Perhaps carve out a niche in quality/safety and not so much in performance.

So who decides what the DJIA and S&P 500 stocks actually are? A random number generator?

lol. Good point. I would like to see everyone's list on what a 'skill' really means. It would make a good basis for a discussion.

a quick edit: It's a question that really began gnawing at my mind over the last few minutes. What is a skill?

To tell you the (highly likely) truth, I could probably take on the jobs the authors hold and do a perfectly acceptable professional job given a desk, a library, a phone, a web browser, and a five minute head start. Are they 'skilled'?

Perhaps the general hope is that we can replace all wealth due to manufacturing, resource extraction, food production, with that produced via internet advertising.

Both?

My guess is that the dividing line between 'Red' and 'Blue' is being renegotiated as we speak. The post-WWI political arguments, largely about economics, are being replaced by something new. Trump obviously has a good nose for these matters.

At least in the case of California, the web abounds with statistics showing net domestic outflow. My guess is that any population increase in CA is due to foreign nationals.

" indexing outperforms actively managed funds"

Most index funds are actively managed.

"huge marketing campaign advertising a car that doesn't exist"

Perhaps they are trying to gauge the likely success of the car before some final production decisions are made.

You do have to wonder how Tesla is going to survive the first surge of practical mass-market electric cars. They definitely are riding some sort of tiger while trying to build out marketshare, technology, infrastructure.

My money is on Toyota but would be thrilled to be wrong.

Trump's account is a beautiful example of how useless Twitter is.

Typically it goes...

Trump: CONGRATULATIONS ON FIREFIGHTERS FOR MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. THIS ADMINISTRATION IS FOR FIREFIGHTERS!

Followed by 1k responses of YAY TRUMP! and 50k responses of people vomiting up any old thing that's just as insulting as they can cook up. Why on Earth do people waste their time on this sort of thing? It has evolved from keyboard warriorhood to some sort of internet Tourette's.

/end old man rant.

"I remember seeing a program that claimed this is because soldiers today are trained to kill against their natural instinct. So traditionally only 20% of soldiers could actually kill, which would explain the low casualty rates in older battles pre-ww2."

That's a good observation, and not one that I thought of, but it does bring up the question of organized combat in the other 95% of human history. It would surprise me if a Roman got much choice in the matter from his friendly local Centurion.

The result is pretty simple. The intelligence agencies become a fourth branch of government and likely the dominant one.

It would be interesting to better understand the dynamics between the military and the NSA/CIA/FBI/etc..

I suppose that one good thing that came out of the 2016 election was that it become more obvious that the intelligence services run their own domestic policy, what I don't understand is how monolithic that newish branch of government is.

French was spoken by the educated classes in much of the Western world for some time, had a largish colonial empire. Holy Roman Empire (neither Roman or Holy or an Empire) had German as a primary language.

I'm waiting for the 3270 version.

Hasn't there been a large increase in non-tenured faculty, teaching assistants, etc?

Is there some reason for all neutron stars to have the same physical make-up and internal behavior? or could they fall into types?

I would think that primaries would vastly favor incumbents, to a greater degree than a general.

Very cool, I'm impressed. This guy knows how to do all the stuff I don't know how to do and it actually works well.

Just to play grumpy old guy for a sec., I can't say that I've ever seen this in action. In my experience.

. Line managers rarely make the leap, if anything they jump laterally or go into 'new opportunities'.

. Actually escaping the gig and advancing, and I'd say that being a manager manager is a far more desirable line of work, seems to be more tied to selling yourself and to being associated with high visibility/profitable/successful projects which often has little to do with your own personal skills.

The article sounds quite plausible though.

I think that the EFI argument is something of a red herring, no one is suggesting a return to the Quadrajet.

OTOH, EFI can be done as a modular (and replaceable) product rather than as part of monolithic whole-vehicle design, but that last bit of goodness or regulatory need is likely not met.

I just think of it all as being Peak ICE. The last generation of piston engines is going to be crazy complex and probably deserve to be usurped by it's battery-powered successors.

"where a single chip can cost 300$ and has to be shipped from mainland America..."

that assumes that the failed part is even available.

I'd sure be irritated to have the controller board for a Cadillac XLR convertible top fail and have to shop junk yards, no doubt the wrecking yards are hip to small things of value that they can store on a shelf somewhere.

To be fair, I know more than one purchasing guy, usually in boutique electronic product companies, who spend a fair amount of their time tracking down obsoleted parts on eBay to repair or build one last batch of a metal box with circuit boards inside. It's just the nature of modern times I guess, but luckily we can often pick the era we want to live in in our personal lives.

I just need to stock up on old Thinkpads, avoid home automation, and carefully choose any car purchases.

"Vehicle manufacturers are just giving customers what they want."

...and they're giving it to them good and hard.

All of the ones around here do. Used DVD racks still exist. Soft drink vending machines. Seasonal items. Newspaper racks.

In the case of items actually run through the register, I'm not sure how that's dealt with from an accounting standpoint. I do know that the stores have the ability to return 100% of unsold goods in those cases.

I would argue that a grocery store is a combination store and marketplace in that case. Stores have plenty of in-house brands, they also have racks of goods that are stocked and sold by third parties wherein they get a cut.

To be fair, I think I would be more comfortable comparing Amazon to Sears in it's heyday.

"Isn't conservatism basically forcing people to not progress? Some might see that as a nearly violent act against their freedom. But really, what else is there to conservatism than "do not change"?"

To some degree I suppose. Given the natural tendency in politics to produce two opposing groups the monikers always become overloaded. In eras where 'conservatives' represented the mercantile class, change went hand-in-hand with building the huge trading companies, the industrial revolution, modernization and 'rightsizing' of farming practices, etc. so it depends.

If, 20 years ago or before, you had told me that the West was practically going to civil war over the question of the value vs harm of mass third world immigration, I'd have laughed at you. The rest of the disagreements are window dressing at this point I think.

No doubt it's all very confusing to the Chinese.