hguant

Dumb answer: because SS and Medicare pay for "real" goods and services and have to interact with the main street economy, whereas FDIC acts in conjunction with the Federal Reserve, and the effects aren't seen by the public - the money isn't "spent" on something, it's just not _not_ there.

Also, the original statement is not quite correct - FDIC is funded by a special levy on all US banks, so while on principle it's backed by the "full faith and credit" of the US government, in actuality the money comes from the banking system itself.

Edit to add: from the article:

>The FDIC is funded by its member institutions through premiums and assessments paid on deposits. And, if ever needed, the FDIC can draw on a line of credit with the U.S. Treasury.

So, if you're a bank, you have to be a member of FDIC, or the banking regulators come and take your bank away. Being an FDIC member means you have to give them money, pretty much according to their whim (or they come and take your bank away). If that's ever not enough to fund a "not bailout", FDIC can get a loan from the Treasury, to be paid back from those premiums and levies on the banks over a period of time.

> IceCube Neutrino Observatory (funny name lol)

It's also an incredibly descriptive and literal name - the observatory is a cubic kilometer of photosensitive detectors frozen in ice at the south pole. When a neutrino interacts with the ice, it produces cherenkov radiation, which can be detected and sent up the chain to a server to classify what was actually detected.

Or in any situation where there's necrotic tissue! They're incredibly selective about only eating dead tissue.

Breaking down the full context of the sentence makes it easier to parse

>notionally hedged against

on paper, SVB had protection from...

>...interest-rate duration risk

the danger that rising interest rates would mean it lost money on long term bonds at the historic (low) rate...

>...by this hold-to-maturity strategy,

using a common financial technique that valued the assets in question at their final value, not their current market value...

>that strategy put those assets outside the circle of those available to meet unexpected withdrawals

however, doing so meant those bonds weren't available if they needed immediate cash

American Protestantism remains heavily influenced by Calvin and early Puritan groups who had very strict ideas of how one should act. One is only _saved_ by grace, but one should _live_ according to the will of God.

...this is an incredibly disingenuous reading of the stated proposal.

#4 alone isn't "covid safety", it includes a reinstatement of COVID benefits and pay. "Protecting pay for store closures...and for workers who leave early or are sick" also doesn't really make sense in an _hourly_ work environment.

>They rise from the core mantle boundary, but they're basically temperature features, not structural features.

my understanding was that this was not actually a settled topic, and there was ongoing debate as to whether or not they were thermochemical structures, with the main evidence against them being "basically temperature features" the fact that they're not a classic plume shape

The argument is that the University, by requiring a DEI statement/commitment, is creating a situation where it's forcing speech. "Forced Speech" is one of those things the First Amendment/government get tetchy about. It's not a "right to not have DEI statements," it's a "right to not have to say things I don't believe."

>I'm not sure how it squares with a university's First Amendment right to freedom of association.

The short answer from the courts is - if you take money from the federal government, in any way, or have students who take money from the federal government, in any way, or distribute funds from the federal government, in any way, as a corporate entity you lose out on many of the rights entailed to a private citizen.

I know some of the Canadian provincial governments were looking at using airships to provide a means of supplying some of the more remote northern towns - because of weather/terrain conditions, you can't build a rail head that far north, and the roads aren't reliable, so light cargo planes are the only reliable means of getting goods around. Airships, even of the good year variety, would be far cheaper for the weight/volume transported, but initial costs were prohibitive, if I recall correctly

So you're changing the goalposts here and asking for defense of a statement the post doesn't make. The statement was that "the US surface Navy has...been deferring maintenance," not that it was cutting the budget for maintenance.

There is no smoking gun of "aha! you cut funds for needed repairs!" here - just a series of operational and organizational priorities that have resulted in ships being at sea for longer and longer deployments, and resources allocated to prestige projects like carriers, instead of resolving the less sexy issue of manpower, and lack of "work horse" destroyers in the fleet.

ProPublica has a good piece going into some of the details of this if you'd like to know more, specifically as it regards the 7th Fleet.

https://features.propublica.org/navy-accidents/us-navy-crash...

A good article, and part of what turned me onto this issue a few years back, is this piece by ProPublica investigating the USS Fitzgerald and McCain crashes

https://features.propublica.org/navy-accidents/us-navy-crash...

A quick break down:

* chronic understaffing - ships have a certain number of billets. 7th Fleet in particular has been sending ships to sea without all their billets filled, particularly in the junior officer ranks. This means that you're not just doing your job, but also doing the job of the person who isn't there

* deferred maintenance - there's a lot of redundancy on these ships (warships tend to like that) so if something breaks it's not catastrophic - you can just use the back up until the sophisticated main system is repaired in port. However, after years of "just using the back up," those systems are failing, and HAVE to be repaired, often at sea. So, in addition to your job, and the job of the person who isn't there, you might also have to go help fix the HVAC or some weapon system or what have you.

* aggressive operational tempo - the Navy has said they need X number of boats to do the tasks required of them. They are funded for/have X-N boats. In order to make up the deficit, the ships they have are deployed on longer cruises, with less time to fix things. This is the core issue that's the root cause of these other failure cases, in my opinion.

This is an ongoing issue with the US Navy, and mirrors similar post hoc justifications from organizations that use political[1] justifications to rationalize slipping standards - NASA changing their go/no-go criteria in order to achieve a Shuttle launch cadence that upper management had promised comes to mind.

The simple truth of the matter is that the US surface Navy has, for the last 20 some years, been deferring maintenance and training of its core assets in order to fund prestige projects like the super carriers. 7th fleet is particularly egregious on this front, but this comes down to a resource allocation issue. Congress and the admiralty have shrunk the surface Navy, and forced the existing fleet to "do more with less." What this means is a higher operational tempo, with no down time, no repair schedule, and no training. In the investigation into the most recent destroyer crash, the board found that the bridge crew hadn't been trained on the basics of navigation, but rather on the basics of how to operate the computer system that navigated for them. Additionally, because of man power constraints, where junior officers would once spend the first few months of their career shadowing a senior officer, now they're thrown into command of a watch with no physical training, just a stack of DVDs they're supposed to go through before deployments.

It's an embarrassment, but it's an embarrassment of command, not to the sailors who are trying to make do with no time to do their jobs.

[1] whenever money and mission are involved, so is politics

Because gold is incredibly non-reactive?

It's part of the standard nomenclature, and has its origins in mountaineering - there's a point climbing a mountain where the altitude is thin enough that there's not enough atmospheric oxygen to sustain human life. The idea of an environment at the heights of a webpage that's inimical to "untrusted" life is a good analogy, in my opinion.

And it has the benefit of being dramatic and attention grabby!

*Edited for grammar and clarity

I'd be more for this if Mozilla didn't have a habit of sneaking in actively privacy hostile "updates" and enabling them by default.

I view these less as actionable items, and more as character hallmarks. No you don't need to actively be making sure you're doing All The Things by iterating through this every day. Yes these are things that should be captured by your company's best practices, and your own professional integrity.

Churchill's Second World War books are an incredibly easy read for how information dense they are, as is his "History Of the English Speaking People."

>People have lived in Death Valley for millennium, not sure why that one would be at all interesting.

_Lived_ in Death Valley is not _self contained and perpetually self reliant_ in Death Valley. My understanding is that those peoples who lived in the region were migratory and relied on resources from other areas, either carried with them, or traded for, to survive.

>Senior devs are nowhere to be found through regular applicant pipelines. They seem to be leaving as a result of reaching out to friends/former colleagues.

Anecdotal, and I wouldn't call myself senior dev (though, with 10 years in industry, I'm not a junior any more), but apart from my actual first job, I've never "applied" anywhere that I haven't already been offered a position, and I know that's true for everyone I've hired/recruited. The need for engineers/developers with hands on skillsets who have actually delivered something is ridiculous, and I'm not even in the Bay area. Hell, the last time I had a technical interview it was in a pool at DEFCON, and that was only so the company could tell their board that they'd had a "rigorous and competitive interview process" (their founders words).

It's to the point where I'm a little cautious about how I talk about work outside of it, because if someone thinks you're unhappy, they'll set up a lunch in a heartbeat.

>Looks like rockets were invented before a global war broke out with peaceful intentions, then the military used that invention for violence, as a global war broke out.

This presupposes that the V2 is the first use of rocketry in history which...well, it's just not true. You conveniently skipped over the bit about Congreve rockets, which were invented in the late 18th/early 19th century, explicitly for war, or the growing evidence about the use of gunpowder rocketry in Imperial China. Both of these uses were explicitly NOT peaceful. (not hargreve, I misremembered in the OP post).

Also, if you bother to read the article you referenced, it makes it clear that literally nothing came of the experiments apart from that book. It took a war to get the funding and manufacturing resources available to actually _do the work_ of advancing rocketry.

EDIT: to sound less like an asshole and engage with the comment on its face value.

I believe you're misreading the breakdown - I read that as "23% of budget goes to personnel costs, which include paychecks (for active duty), healthcare (for military and their dependents until 26), and retirement for vets"

I fully believe that only 5% of the budget goes to Veterans Affairs, at least in the US. The system is not very good at taking care of vets/

>Those breakthroughs you mention, you think they wouldn't have been made if it wasn't for the military? Some of those things are also borderline not invented by the military at all, but lets disregard that for now.

The list:

>>rockets, jets, computers, encryption, RADAR, SONAR, internets, canning/food preservation, weather prediction

* Rockets are an entirely military invention - the Hargrave rocket invented for the British Royal Navy in the Napoleonic Wars, the chinese pseudo-rockets used as artillery, the V2 rocket used in WW2 Germany, etc. I think one of the only non-military rocket scientists known to history is Goddard.

* Jets - also an entirely military invention. I'm assuming you mean "jet air craft" here - WW2 was the first use of jets to power an airplane. The Soviets and Americans quickly followed suit.

* Encryption - encryption has been in use in militaries since at least the roman era; another name for a substitution cypher is a "Ceaser Cypher." To be fair, this isn't exclusive to military use, as states have an interest in keeping their communications secure, as do banks, but in terms of "money invested in development of cryptography as we know it," the field was effectively invented whole hog during WW2 (again), as (military led and funded) analysis of how codes could be broken lead to the need for new encryption methods that were more secure. See also: the NSA. (note - I'm being sloppy with codes/cyphers/encryption here)

* RADAR/SONAR - literally developed during WW2 by the British using US funds in order to detect submarines and the Luftwaffe terror attacks. The germans had a very sophisticated RADAR tech at the beginning of the war (directed radar for night defense), but failed to develop it any further.

* Internets - the internet, as a system of interconnected computer networks, was funded by ARPA/DARPA, the DEFENSE Advanced Research Projects Agency. ARPA-net was first used by the Pentagon. Pretty much the entire US software and hardware industry was built off of US defense contracting, and this is no exception.

* Canning/Food preservation - the biggest advances in canning/food preservation were the result of studies/competitions funded by the British Royal Navy in the 18/19th centuries. The British defense industry funded the development of canned goods as we understand them today. Interestingly, this is where a lot of our understanding about vitamins started to be learned by (heavy) trial and error, as the RN tried to figure out how to combat scurvy.

* Weather prediction - meteorology as a science got tons of money from (you guessed it) the British Royal Navy, who understandable wanted to better predict conditions for their large navy that was made of wood and canvas. in the 20th century, meteorology got huge infusions of cash from the USAF, because planes care about weather and storms to a huge degree. This was a scientific field outside of the military, but even then, it was a matter of State security to predict the weather so you could understand crop growth patterns etc.

So, to answer your question, no, I don't believe any of those technologies would have developed organically.

>Being a Disney aficionado, I have to note: the price in the 60s was only to get in the park. You had to buy separate tickets for each attraction once you were in

The article literally covers this, both in their infographic for Disney, and in the paragraph preceding.

>(One important clarifying note: Back in 1960, you paid for the park admission ticket and the rides separately. We’ve combined those costs below.)

Maybe read the article before you comment about its faults...

The approach Stranger Things (at least, in the first, best, season) uses to suspend disbelief is to invoke a sense of child-like wonder, AND terror. Our protagonists are, by and large, children, or emerging from childhood into the lived body-horror of being a teenager. We see the world (primarily) through their lens, a lens that magnifies AND simplifies things. They don't understand what's going on, they just _know_ things are happening. Their credibility is established on the basis of "are these things a kid could conceivably think/believe."

Contrast that to media like Moonfall, where the characters are supposed to understand what's happening AND convey that to the audience. That's a much bigger lift. Their credibility is established according to "does this correspond to things an engineer would plausibly say/believe," which not many films get entirely right.

Stranger Things also has one more screenwriting technique going for it - it shows, instead of telling. We are _shown_ 11 being submerged into a tank and transported to the Other, we aren't told that that's whats happening. We are _shown_ the terrors of a mother who's lost her child, we aren't told "oh she's so sad." Show, don't tell, is THE big rule of storytelling, and it's ignored because it's hard to achieve.

EDIT for grammar

07

Oh sure, the in-universe explanation is that the fallen Valar Melkor, who became known as Morgoth the Black after his destruction of the Trees of the Valar, used his might to pervert and destroy the works of the other 11/12 Valar and "brought forth fire and leveled mountains and raised valleys" to create hellscapes out of their work, such that the Earth, instead of a garden, became discordant and all the plans of the Valar were marred. After the end of the First Age, when the host of the Valar came to the aid of Middle Earth and destroyed Melkor's fortress, and brought him to judgement to be cast into the Outer Dark, there was further geologic destruction as the powers of the hosts basically destroyed the continent/region of Middle Earth known as Beleriand.

After THAT there was a further catastrophe as the Numenoreans, corrupted into the Dark Arts by Sauron, who was their captive, decided to wage war on the Valar, who they believed were keeping the secret of immortality from them. The Valar were in a pickle, and abdicated their powers and called on Eru to judge, because this was outside their mandate. He Atlantis'd Numenor and destroyed the majority of their people (who had turned to worshiping Morgoth) - the Numenoreans who founded Gondor and Arnor and who created the political landscape of the Third and Fourth Ages were the remnant of that fallen civilization, who were warned of the destruction of the isle of Numenor and escaped on boats.

Also it can be supposed that Mordor was a partial creation of Sauron, who fled there after the fall of Numenor as a spirit (could be wrong about that)

>geology science explaining why it's impossible.

Mordor is...it just doesn't work. It's a hard scrabble plain with a large inland sea bounded on 3 sides by jagged, abrupt mountains that are entirely isolated from any other ranges, and form right angles with each other...oh and the surround a cone volcano that just emerges from the ground.

Any one of these things (minus the, I repeat, NEAR PERFECT RIGHT ANGLES formed by the mountain range around Mordor) can be explained, but the conditions that lead to one preclude the other.

Critiquing the Cultural Revolution has been acceptable since 1981 when Deng published/authorized the party's second "Resolution on History," which laid out officially that there were "excesses" during the Cultural Revolution, and that they were primarily Mao's fault.

This is in line with a lot of Chinese/Communist political thought in general - the Party is never wrong. If the Party endorsed what is later viewed as a "wrong action," then it must be the fault of an individual who erred or was corrupted in some way.

>Eyes Wide Shut?

Tangent about this:

There was a very interesting Roger Ebert review of Eyes Wide Shut that addressed some of the criticism of Tom Cruise's acting in that film. Cruise had been described as "wooden" and Ebert came to his defense. Kubrick - who is on record as being a perfectionist who believes that actors are best when they're meat puppets for the director - made Cruise go through 97 takes of walking through a door. Either that's just sadism on part of the director's ego (and there may be something to that, Kubrick is notorious for playing psychological games with actors to get the performance he wants - or Kubrick working to get exactly what he wants on the screen.

There are general guides to the first two weeks - FEMA has several publications about this [0]. You don't need to go full prepper or SERE for that period of time - just get a water filter and some freeze fried meals, or have a pantry with beans and rice on hand - they keep for ~1 human half-life, so you don't really have to worry about them going bad.

I wouldn't view SERE as a useful resource, if only because the assumptions SERE makes (hostile territory, woodland survival, etc) aren't really applicable to someone living in an urban or suburban environment, which is what I assume most users of this website are.

[0] PDF warning! https://www.fema.gov/pdf/library/f&web.pdf