kingsuper20

I'm surprised it wasn't Amazon buying them. There's bound to be more than a few people that steal from their warehouses.

I've written software for all three, plus most of the more peculiar TI DSPs and 'graphics' processors.

I dearly miss all of the crazy ecosystems.

I've watched a couple of giant-box openings on youtube where people buy unsold/returned stuff (and feeling my soul draining through my eyeballs) and decided that the landfill is just exactly where most of this stuff needs to go.

Perhaps that can be the model of the New Economy. All of the 'knowledge workers' can design/manage surveillance and all of manufacturing can provide piles of things that go immediately to the dump.

'Best performing assets against inflation'

...here's a list of things that don't work.

I did see a few companies suckered into thinking SGI would amount to anything.

I love this as a business concept.

I wish I had had the foresight to get my own dragon hoard. It seems like anything I was ever interested in (and I'm not young) has become a 'collectors' item' in the last few decades.

It's a bummer to get bid out of everything over time.

A hamster wheel.

I just assume that humans and dogs coevolved.

Additional fun occurs when a government official stops by every year to take an inventory of household items.

Of course, there's always the problem that a lot of nominal asset appreciation is due to inflation.

Plus you get the fun of defining income.

Gross sales of some product? or do you get to deduct it's cost?

Is trading labor (for instance, two independent farmers helping each other) considered income?

A machine intelligence. Just turn yourself off for the trip.

Generally I'd say that the notion of a Von Neumann machine is so obvious and so effective that there's something really wrong in our guesses on how widespread intelligence is.

I expect that trench warfare is a natural side effect of enclosure trench systems used when taking a fortress. Obviously field fortifications are older than that, but I mean the variety that implies firearms and artillery.

I think the French were first.

and yet I think that Germany runs a trade surplus and largely does it selling hard-to-make things rather than digging stuff out of the ground.

Go figure.

It would be interesting to know the mix of degrees produced over time by those schools. My guess is that 100 years ago you largely saw the children of the elite receiving general educations centered around classics, the post-war period would have seen an engineering emphasis, and (perhaps) now a push for finance and law.

It's hard to have an opinion without knowing the product of the system.

It appears to be strong enough that it is expressed in genetics.

>Once you get into the union, it's kinda a cake walk.

Knowing people in the highly unionized film biz, getting your next job always seems to be the order of the day so it seems to depend. It actually sounds pretty tough compared to a 'normal' gig at a company, but you do end up with good stories to tell.

Looking back, I think that one superiority of construction over software is that your work has real permanence.

Now and again I'll see a very expensive thing I worked on on eBay for a penny on the dollar. Maybe it's time to build a Museum of Me in a spare bedroom.

Goats.

Have you? How did it go down?

I think it would be a cool idea on a vintage car, but is still too expensive.

Impossibly high collision repair costs?

How much of that is due to faster ambulance/helicopter service, improved emergency room practices?

Fun fact. On export first gen Camaro you could save a few bucks by ordering them with seat belt delete (A48 option).

regarding simple cars.

I think it's a damn shame that the opportunity for truly simple cars isn't occurring with the advent of mass market EVs. I suppose that ever-increasing safety concerns will push for cars that are more complex.

I was going to say something like this, that products (like a lot of things) are a combination of multiple users' wants, but I'd say that the main problem here is that the implementations themselves are becoming more monolithic.

The extreme case (as you mention) is the moment you stick in a touch screen and a fair amount of intelligence. You might as well put a jillion features in there plus you save money on physical controls.

They used to be capable of building cars with numerous option packages in the 1960's and 1970's, it's pretty remarkable. The 1969 Camaro alone had probably a dozen different engines available from 3 families.

They use treated sewage.

vs. a pair of shoes, an acre of farmland, food.

I think that Peter Turchin has done long term analysis on this sort of thing. A related article.

https://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/more-on-labor-supply-w...

I think I'd rather have them in the backyard on some sort of human-accessible bracketry.

Unless they're fairly near to a city in the desert.

Of course, you could argue that cities shouldn't be in deserts.