a3n

"That's a nice box of cash you used to have there."

Sometimes products are kept artificially rare, to keep their price up. Diamonds. (I suspect) Ozempic and its cousins.

If consumers were a relatively rare commodity, then products would have to work extremely hard to compete for them. For example, perhaps housing prices would come back down to widely affordable levels.

Interesting true story.

It reminds me of this interesting false story, that should never be lost under layers of internet geologic sediment.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/smithsonian-barbie/

On the flip side, The engineers get to spend the budget in any of many reasonable directions.

Hexadecimal?

Slavery accepted by the enslaved.

At 17, I was a lot boy at a motorcycle dealer. Push the bikes out, push the bikes in, gopher this and that.

Sometimes after work the mechanics would get me high, and we'd sit out back and watch the ocean.

It was nice.

It's sounding like Boeing and NASA ignored the most important lesson from Challenger: Don't launch if you know there's a problem.

And for the same reason: political and business pressure.

> Curtis Yarvin has laid out a critique of American democracy: arguing that it’s liberals in elite academic institutions, media outlets, and the permanent bureaucracy who hold true power in this declining country, ...

You know, childless cat ladies.

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

> Yarvin argues for a "neo-cameralist" philosophy based on Frederick the Great of Prussia's cameralism.[31] In Yarvin's view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful and should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose "shareholders" (large owners) elect an executive with total power, but who must serve at their pleasure.

"sovereign joint-stock corporations whose "shareholders" (large owners)"

You know, Elon Musk.

So the guy's a monarchist, but also a libertarian. But only large shareholders get to libertarianate.

Marketer: "But we'll always have the United States."

Just call it "AI2000!"

Proof of concept. They're probably planning and designing something much more lucrative. Why else bother with silly money?

This is why senators give a damn. They see right away it touches them, and they want to do something about it right away.

It seems like "banana" could become the modern version of "rubber duck."

Engineers used to supposedly put some ridiculous feature into a design. A manager would then, supposedly, see the feature, question it, and order that it be removed. The manager would feel useful, and the design team could get on with their work without further molestation.

"What's that?"

"Oh that's our 'rubber duck.' It'll be gone after the review."

...

"What's that?"

"Oh, that's our 'banana.' ..."

Pure speculation: the term "rubber duck" may have come from the its application to fakes and decoys:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_(disambiguation)

To reduce some of the risk, hand injuries while opening the can, you could first put it in a can cozy.

The party of small government created Space Force when we had a perfectly good Air Force, and now wants to create some number of new agencies when we have a perfectly good DARPA.

Can we also teach AI how to avoid nuclear blackmail?

T2 diabetic. Metformin, and Trulicity. Although Trulicty has been hard to find recently, so I'm doing without and working harder on my management practices, which is working well. I am not a doctor and I don't know you.

Interesting range of comments.

I think that whatever you do to manage your diabetes, logging data (meds, food, glucose, weight and bp for me) makes it more effective.

I've found that managing my diabetes and weight is better when I log. Just a text file. It keeps me honest with myself, and keeps my management practices front-of-mind. It's encouraging when I'm doing well, even very slightly exciting. And since I've learned not to beat myself up, it's gently self-corrective.

Going off logging, I slide out of control.

Anyway, that works for me, so it should work for anyone. Right? :-)

Counter-suggestion:

Dive totally into the Windows world.

My background was star-nix, and when i found myself having to use Windows, I always did something like Cygwin, gvim, etc. Which worked fine.

But it necessarily limited my expertise in Windows. Being an expert in Windows, while working in a Windows environment, should make you a more valuable player.

When someone asks you how you do something, you don't want their eyes to glaze over when you say "First you have to install Cygwin." You make yourself a useless resource in their opinion.

Everything that can be done as a user in *nix can be done in Windows, in some Windows way. Be useful to yourself and your colleagues.

I think.

When she worked for free, was it up hill, both ways?

These kids today.

Ah, Firefly fans.

Or carbon butter.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=carbon+butter&t=fpas&ia=web

And some day we'll eat them too.

Two egregiously rich people are getting married.

BFD.

No I don't.

This situation is acute, and will spread.

The only way Germany was stopped in 1945 was by a collective decision to defeat them militarily, by multiple participating countries.

That won't happen this time around, because WWIII is all but unthinkable.

The only thing left is for Russian citizens to be motivated enough to stop it. That's a hard lift, but if they feel it long enough, they might get it.

In any case, after arming Ukraine, it's about all we have.

> “The CEO, COO and CTO were all let go that day. We can only speculate they got packages,” one source said. “But some employees who had been there for 9-10 years and weathered the storm through the former founder, working 15 hour days – they got nothing.”

I use whatever company I'm working at for money, full stop. No delusional loyalty or passion. It's a mutually respectful mindset, grounded in reality.

> “It sometimes seems as if the modern worker spends more time talking about work than actually working.”

I used to quip that various Agile rituals weren't work, they were work about work.

Everyday Russians, including scientists, should feel consequences for their government's murders.

Except for the ISS (complicated, as noted), I'm astounded that anything goes in or out of Russia: people, goods, services, atoms, electrons.

Actually I do mostly work alone, I'm a truck driver. But that has nothing to do with my scepticism.

> I was already using it in that context so I pushed back and it said "Oh yeah you're right, sorry"

Same thing happened to me. I asked for all the Ukrainian noun cases, it listed and described six.

I responded that there are seven. "Oh, right." It then named and described the seventh.

That's no better than me taking an exam, so why should I rely on it, or use it at all?