downerending

Well, indeed, maybe it was an easy mark. But still, "fish and chips" was a thing here in the US in the 1970s to 1990s at least, and I still remember "Long John Silver's" with great nostalgia. (Not sure a Brit would care for it, but at least it was freshly fried.)

Mushy peas, on the other hand, are probably unsalvageable. Except, maybe, with a nice curry sauce... :-)

So again, I wasn't there. I will say, having grown up in the sticks, I love hearing the accents of foreign people and sometimes ask them about theirs. I know they might take it wrong, but it's hard to resist doing so.

And indeed, when I see someone in pain or anxiety, I'm often tempted to just make small talk on any subject I can think of, to distract them. I usually don't, to avoid offense. But I think they'd suffer less if I did, no matter how stupid my words.

It does seem like the main point of H1Bs would be to make use of highly-skilled workers. We have plenty of low-skill workers already--we don't need more.

Pretty sure they've been "weapons free" since election day 2016.

Flipping that around, if a company can hire someone for less in a foreign country and get the same result, why bother going through the H1B process? Why the drama? Just do it.

I wasn't there, but this sounds more like cluelessness than anything else. I could imagine making small talk like this to keep someone's mind off of their pain or anxieties. Did it really seem like the gal or guy was hating on you?

Here's a frank answer. I've worked with various foreigners and H1Bs over a long career and always enjoyed it. I worry sometimes that they're being seriously abused by their employers, but I figure that's for them to decide.

I feel less positive about the program these days given that a number of companies have made it a point of pride to emphasize hiring of "diverse" employees, which seems in reality to be a pretext for H1B hiring that would not otherwise happen. This stings a little bit for me personally, as it's become clear that I'm losing some jobs to H1Bs. And I'm sure it really stings for native techies that can't find work during this incipient economic depression. (I'm old enough that being whacked by H1Bs just means unexpected early retirement.)

For whatever reasons, I suspect the American base will continue to hollow out and turn into something different. It's a bit like British cuisine, which has (in my impression) been essentially overrun by Indian cuisine and that of other countries. Is that bad? I guess it depends on your point of view.

Anyway, as long as the hiring is legal, I'm good with it. Certainly I've never met a colleague from another country that I didn't enjoy working with.

Same here, although within the last 24 hours, my neighborhood's chat is starting to look like a Twitter-ish hate-fest. If they don't stop, I'm going to chuck it in the same dumpster as Twitter.

Not sure why this is getting downvoted--it's a fundamental truth. Especially given how truly little we understand about biology.

IME as an American, London British can be quite hard to understand, especially at a high word rate (which was my experience). Yes.. it.. turns.. out.. that.. speaking.. slowly.. does.. make.. it.. easier.. to.. understand.

There's a good reason why the kernel is a single "binary". It's far less clear why the init system needs to be, especially since it wasn't for decades.

Yeah, I'm not crazy about the various init scripts that have been produced over the years. But at least when they're broken, I can usually just glance at them and see that. With systemd, mostly one just gives up.

My math says 60x increase, which is a lot considering that the liability of each added source line is superlinear.

And it's also a lot considering that most (?) of those lines of source are compiled into a single inscrutable binary. One of the great boons of init.d shell scripts is that you can just look at them when something is going wrong, and quickly realize that they have a bug.

If something's wrong with a unit file (and/or systemd itself) it can be extremely difficult to debug. The unit file for a reasonably common piece of software (ganglia) is broken, and apparently still is after years. I've no real idea of how to debug this, and certainly don't have time to fuck with it. At least in this regard, systemd sucks.

It certainly sounds crazy, compared to the maybe 10KB of init.d scripts on a typical older Unix system.

Yeah, I realize that isn't quite apples-to-apples, but still, systemd is a ridiculous beast. We used to mock Windows for this sort of thing, and now we've become them.

I thought you were going to link them to the brownshirts. Certainly they seem similar in many regards. I can't think of anything good to say about someone who thinks vigilante violence is a noble act.

tldr: The symbol is a point-down red equilateral triangle. Seriously, does anyone recognize this symbol? (without googling)

EDIT: Just found it in a news story. It's a symbol used by Antifa in Spain, which is why it was in the ad. Fake news strikes again. (Don't hold your breath for an apology.)

Essentially everyone is against Nazis/etc. Antifa has rather different goals--otherwise we'd just call them people.

I think society should focus on the root issues that lead to crime. That said, there are a lot of people in the world who we cannot allow to walk the streets without being quite cruel to the law-abiding rest of us. Making amends is great, but it should not lead to release.

At least in the US, far more people should be removed from society, yes. Even a brief search will turn up large numbers of rapists and murderers (for example) that are sentenced and released over and over again. This is indeed arbitrarily cruel to law-abiding citizens.

As far as it goes, I think conditions in prisons should be far nicer than they are now. In these days of videoconferencing, it needn't be very different than lockdown. I don't believe in punishment; I believe in permanent removal from society.

I've done nothing like this. Nor have most people.

Scientifically interesting. A lot of people that have acquired the wisdom of experience would probably shudder at the thought of living 500 years, though.

> it bares repeating

it bears repeating

(Sometimes you get the bare, and sometimes the bare gets you.)

No, it doesn't. As far as I'm concerned, violence or shit like this should draw life. The law-abiding public doesn't need to be exposed to people like this.

I haven't. But the idiot in me wants to ask whether I could just drink loads of albumin in water and "dilute" myself that way, without all of this weird dialysis, etc. Presumably not, but why not, exactly?

This is getting flagged down as a dumb joke, but for those in the cheap seats, it's not entirely clear exactly how this differs. Presumably adding "adding albumin and water" is different than just "adding water". But why, exactly? And so on.

When you realize that your data is going to take 24 months to copy elsewhere (e.g., the cloud or another DC) over the fastest link you have, you have a real need for something like this.

Or these days, micro flash cards.

If alt-right has any meaning at all, I agree that it ought to refer to rather extreme beliefs. In practice, the left uses it as an all-purpose slur to refer to the half of the country that voted for the current President. (Hence my quotes.) These days, the only thing the word means is that the one uttering it is being an ass.

As a more specific example, though, Hillary Clinton was considered a moderate in the 90s. Back then she notably referred to Black youths as "superpredators". I think anyone doing so today would be seen as pretty far right. That's an example of the ground shifting.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/aug/28/reince-pri...

You're saying that anyone who gets beaten for their opinion had it coming?

Truly we live in evil times.

The ground has shifted. Someone who was a moderate in 1995 would be considered "alt-right" today.

To have an opposing view in 2020 is to risk being beaten. Advise keeping your head down and your mouth shut.