dandotway

> so diversity officers effectively act as a political role more than serving the intended purpose

Yes.

  "The radiation portals that were deployed in the aftermath
  of 9/11 are essentially fine, except for three problems:
  They won't find a nuclear bomb, they won't find highly
  enriched uranium, and they won't find a shielded dirty
  bomb," says Stephen Flynn, a terrorism expert and
  president of the Center for National Policy. "Other than
  that, they're great pieces of equipment."

In other words, we only have a "security theater" ability to prevent radiological weapons from entering the border. Like the TSA, this theatrical security creates jobs, consumes tax wealth, and enables politicians to say they took action to address the problem while simultaneously giving them someone to blame when an attack occurs.

  Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy[1] states that in any bureaucratic organization
  there will be two kinds of people:

  First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization.
  Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many
  of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some
  agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective
  farming administration.

  Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples
  are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of
  education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff,
  etc.

  The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep
  control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions
  within the organization.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_ir...

> Most homeless people are homeless under a year in the US

Source?

> Many have jobs

Source?

> How did you meet? On the street?

Yes, and a few did indeed have cars and sleep in cars.

Became friends with a number of homeless, bought them meals, gave them money, gave them clothing, heard their life stories in their own words, etc. There used to be a lot near where I used to live.

"I don't know how you got it, James, but you have 107 different venereal diseases."

From the article, "We found evidence for a total of 59 liaisons (mean of 2.4 per film)."

> I’ve rarely seen a normal able-bodied able-minded non-drug-using homeless person who’s just down on their luck

This right here. Nearly all homeless I've worked with were non-neuronormative and/or drug abusers. They're almost never just normal folks who have fallen on hard times. The reason they aren't rooming with a family member or friend is because their behavioral outbursts and/or stealing things to buy drugs has exhausted all the goodwill of those who would help them.

The worst thing about the NotchBook - this union of iPhone notch with MacBook - is that all the other laptop manufacturers have a way of copying Apple's decisions: non-replaceable batteries, soldered in RAM and SSD, fewer ports, near-zero key travel for keyboards, and now a notch. The Dell XPS line has had ultra-thin bezels for ages with no notch but now future XPSes might have a notch just because some Dell suits thought, "Look at how many of these NotchBooks Apple is selling. Consumers must want the notch." But correlations of sales are not causations of sales.

> ...

EDIT: You are right, double quotes around "UnsafeVarint" improve the result. Learned something new just now. : )

I just tried "UnsafeVarint" in DDG and while #1 and #2 were useless COVID hits as you said, DDG #4 was the same as Google's #1 hit which was this GitHub issue:

https://github.com/tensorflow/models/issues/7420

Google's #2 hit for me was blogspam at "bankoftrans [dot] com" that copied the source code for UnsafeVarint in order to game Google search results. (A growing problem others in this discussion have been complaining about.)

So Google isn't stellar for your search, either, though perhaps it was working better for you because you were logged in with your Google Account.

Like I said, I do still use Google via "!g" and "!gi" when DDG's results are garbage, but often in these cases Google's results are also junk.

Do you have recent real examples? 98% of the time for me both DDG and Google pull up the same Wikipedia article or Stack Overflow answer or Github repo or news story. Occasionally I still do "!g" or "!gi" in DDG to see what Google has but less and less.

> Nothing is perfect

If logical thinking is, as you say, imperfect, is it possible that your own conclusion that no perfect things exist is itself an imperfect conclusion? If you use this word perfect, you at least have the Idea of Perfect, even if no perfect things exist. This kind of funny talk I'm using about Ideas of perfect things goes back 2400 years to Plato and his Theory of Forms[1]. According to the philosopher-logician A. N. Whitehead:

  The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition
  is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_forms

> noting Henry VIII's power stance

And also noting the prominent codpiece [1] covering Henry's family jewels in said portrait[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codpiece

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_VIII

But if Harvard declines donations how else are affluent alumni supposed to buy in entrance for their offspring that prefer showing off their exotic vacations on Instagram over studying hard? Harvard exists for children of the ruling class to form strategic lifelong connections that will keep them in the ruling class and keep outsiders out for generations to come. Harvard's recent focus on making admissions more Woke is really only a cover for, "We need an excuse to let more donor children in despite their SAT scores being lower than those of tiger-parented Asians and other groups where parents work hard and sacrifice to get their children ahead."

In British English, a physician's or dentist's office is called a surgery. Thus, for Britons, going to the surgery just means visiting the doc; it does not have the same connotations of going under a knife that it has for Americans.

This article says Big Energy corps drill methane wells and then cheat the cost of plugging them by selling them to smaller companies that can't afford the plugging cost, thereby abandoning these wells to leak the potent greenhouse gas methane. I just tried to research how much methane is leaked and found this EPA report saying unplugged wells leak an average of 10.02 grams/hour of methane compared to 0.002 grams/hour for plugged:

https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2018-04/documents/gh...

But 10.02 grams doesn't seem like very much, considering livestock methane emissions (like cow farts and burps) were estimated in 2011 to produce 120 trillion grams of methane per year:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/samlemonick/2017/09/29/scientis...

So it certainly is a Big Energy sin, but there are graver stakes (involving gravy and steaks).

Android Web Audio latency is over 200-300ms on many devices and is deliberately introduced to kill WebGL browser games that could otherwise bypass the Play Store and its 30% tax. Google has plenty of engineers smart of enough to fix such a glaring latency issue that so many of us have been complaining about for so long but Play Store game profits are in the billions and Google isn't going to let a frictionless browser game experience kill that.

The Superpowered Latency Database[1] has many measurements showing just how bad Android latency is. (A select few devices do OK.) Note that Apple latency measurements look pretty good, because Apple uses different strategies to kill WebGL browser games: (1) Make WebGL slow and lacking features; (2) Prevent browser apps from going fullscreen; (3) Don't even let browser games ask if they can use gyro/tilt control, just block this outright because "Privacy". After all, if Epic Games could just put Fortnite inside mobile Safari their case against Apple wouldn't be so desperate. There's a demo version of Minecraft for the browser that I've never seen work on mobile browsers[2].

[1] https://superpowered.com/latency

[2] https://classic.minecraft.net/

It's counterintuitive to logical-thinking programmers, but you almost never want to tell a grieving person any of the following:

1. "Things will get better."

2. "I understand your loss."

3. "Here's how we can fix the problem."

Some insight into why can be gained by watching the short video, It's Not About the Nail:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4EDhdAHrOg

In many (but not all) cases, if the grieving are willing to communicate at all, they want their cries of pain heard and listened to. They would rather that you cried with them instead of trying to tell them that there is light at the end of the tunnel or that there is a 'fix' for their 'problem' or that we must accept that life is hard and unfair and suck it up.

Using Brave right now and no stupid popups. Make sure you turn off "Brave ads" or whatever causes popups. Always scan through every option in Settings at least once and turn all the junk off. The only mild annoyance left after doing this is that sometimes the new tab page has a little box shilling some Crypto coin biz which you can then silence. If this is all I have to suffer in order to fund a solid de-googled Chromium it's not too bad.

Boom. "Mozilla Firefox Usage Down 85% but why are Exec’s Salary Up 400%?"

https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-e...

> Governments want to tax profits rather than revenues

Yes, but Hollywood Accounting[1] transforms taxable profits into untaxable expenses. (Search this discussion for 'Hollywood Accounting' for a longer post I made.) A revenue tax is more difficult to game with creative accounting methods.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

With Hollywood Accounting[1], you make taxable profits transform into untaxable expenses that you pay to yourself for services you rendered to yourself, and Ireland has been a common destination for this sort of money to flow.

  Hollywood accounting can take several forms. In one form,
  a subsidiary is formed to perform a given activity and the
  parent entity will extract money out of the film's revenue
  in the form of charges for certain "services". For example,
  a film studio has a distribution arm as a sub-entity, which
  will then charge the studio a "distribution fee" — essentially,
  the studio charging itself a sum it has total control over and
  hence control the profitability report of a project.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

Essentially, Apple USA makes billions selling iPhones in the USA, then pays those billions to Apple Ireland for the right to put little Apple logos on iPhones. Likewise, Google USA pays billions in US ad sales profits to Google Ireland for the right to use Google tech for Google search.

When the Irish loophole closes I'm sure they'll think up another "One Weird Trick" to make taxable profits mystically transmute into untaxable expenses.

US could lose all SLBM nuclear missile subs and still assure destruction, because of the triad.

Land based ICBMs are more accurate than SLBMs and would launch in retaliation.

The US has stealth cruise missiles it can launch from bombers.

The US has the B1 and B2 bombers that can deliver nukes.

Many Navy ships can launch nuclear cruise missiles.

The USA is the only superpower that has such robust nuclear weapons delivery via a triad (land, air, sea). With Russian SLBM subs it is said they are so noisy that US attack subs are always silently tailing them after they leave port and can take them out before they can launch. Russia and China really only have robust land-based ICBMs. If all of those could be preemptively attacked (by stealth strikes and commando raids) then the US could potentially win a nuclear war. Not that we'd want to try.

Presumably COVID also saves the government money, then? It mostly kills the old who have already paid into the tax system their whole working lives and are now drawing from it. And it mostly kills the chronically ill who need more tax support than they contribute. It seems terribly cold and callous to look at it this way though, e.g. when a son is holding his mom's hand in the hospital who is dying of lung cancer, to go up to the son and tap his shoulder and whisper, "Hey kid, cheer up, uncle Sam saved $8 bil on medicaid nursing home costs 'cus mommy here couldn't stop sucking nicotine sticks."

Wikipedia says,

  Porpoises range in size from the vaquita, at 1.4 metres
  (4 feet 7 inches) in length and 54 kilograms (119 pounds)
  in weight, to the Dall's porpoise, at 2.3 m (7 ft 7 in)
  and 220 kg (490 lb).

Doesn't say what is most common, though, so if 30-70 kg is more common, I'll take your word for it.

Ahh, so if the monster exists then it must, like the porpoises, only rarely travel to Loch Ness from the ocean, so that few sightings per century can be expected.

I thought all alien craft sightings were BS until four separate Navy pilots came forward to say they all saw that white tic tac in 2004. And three of the four pilots have done television interviews, most recently this 60 Minutes one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygB4EZ7ggig

If not for the link between Loch Ness and the ocean I'd think the existence of the monster could probably be ruled out as attention seeking liars. But now that we know porpoises sometimes make the rare trip from the ocean, we can't 100% rule out the monster never does. Does Dochfour Weir have 24/7 thermal and sonar monitoring and recording? Would Dochfour Weir capture on video and count every single porpoise that passes through at 3am, 365 days per year?

Using a language suitable for rocket-science level computer science doesn't mean you are forced to do rocket-science level stuff, though. (I sure don't!) The barrier to entry is pretty much typing "OCaml tutorial" into your browser and then finishing the hello world program about 60 seconds later. Although the procrastination power of HN is perhaps a more formidable barrier to entry. ;-)

> There were porpoises in the loch in 1914. They had entered from the Moray Firth along the River Ness and were a rare spectacle

I never knew Loch Ness was connected to the ocean at large, and this helps keep a bit of the mystery alive. I had read that detailed sonar and biomass surveys of Loch Ness concluded there could be no large monster there, because there's not enough food to feed something the size of a whale and anything the size of a whale would have been seen by sonar. But the monster could have a lifecycle like salmon, where it is born in freshwater, goes out to the ocean, and eventually returns to freshwater only to reproduce and then die. Porpoises are kinda like mini-whales (they're air-breathing mammals with voracious appetites which can weigh over 200kg), and a school of porpoises wouldn't travel to Loch Ness unless there was a lot of good eatin' there.

OCaml is becoming a must learn language for those who want to take their C programming to the highest levels, because:

1. Frama-C, which enables writing bug-free C programs, is implemented using a combination of OCaml and the Coq proof assistant (which is itself implemented in OCaml):

https://frama-c.com/

2. CompCert, a formally verified C compiler, is implemented using OCaml and Coq:

https://github.com/AbsInt/CompCert

Nothing at this level yet exists in the Rust and Zig ecosystems, for example. Rust is a very complicated language with many features which makes formalization much harder than with C and OCaml, which both had mathematical ideas of simplicity, analyzability, and minimalism inspire their designs, even if they continue to grow into more complicated monsters, which, incidentally this OCaml 5.0 release will contribute towards. :-)

One way to look at it though is how easily many consumers are migrating to Chromebooks from Windows PCs (Chromebooks sales have increased over 600% during the pandemic). Since so much can be done in a web browser now, the migration isn't too hard for a considerable number of users. I think the strongest point on your list is the security migration. Hardened Linux has become a preferred OS for militaries and intelligence agencies, but there certainly is a great deal of training and certification involved with setting up SELinux, AppArmor, etc.