logjammin

Alaska was, before they bought Virgin, famously a Boeing-only airline! (And a 737-only airline at that!)

Were you gonna back any of that up?

Ah okay, good!I'm glad

No yeah I know! It gave it extra punch for some reason. Solid chuckle

I'm not seeing the usual web indications that this is sarcasm or irony, so I wanna say that if you're really just "holding on to life" for whatever single reason, aliens or not, there's good help out there if you want it. You're loved and needed. Be well dude/dudette.

The back and forth in the comments is kinda fun to read, but regardless of what we think these things are, shouldn't we at least be stoked that someone (aliens, Chinese military) may have some cool-ass tekmology, and that the US Navy seems to think so too?

I know HN comments are supposed to be thoughtful etc but all I have on this is fuckin lol well played

It's hard to say for sure on this quote alone. On one hand, I could read it the way you did -- I have my own qualms about what often feels like an arms race about getting offended. On the other hand, though, if I'm trying to be calm about this, I could also read it as pretty mundane bureaucrat-ese for "look, this guy was just being an asshole and we don't want him back".

Being the free speech guy / gal in charge of a classroom is a risky endeavor and requires the same amount of talent, calm, tact, neutrality, and wit that, say, a standup comic needs when trying to get people to laugh at a tough subject, and I can easily imagine an earnest but less than talented (in this specific way) educator losing their cool in a room full of jacked up and emotional undergrads debating Trump, abortion, I/P, pick your hot button issue.

"Could've made students feel more fully heard" could indeed be "sensitive undergrads whining", but it could also be "guy proclaims himself mischievous contrarian view-challenger but reveals himself to be pedantic narcissist / unhinged / aggressive / insert pretty unattractive trait or behavior here".

I see that emphasis on how he handled it and I wonder if if isn't the latter. Commanding a room is a difficult thing with way more art and god-given ability involved than people think, especially when the emotion in said room is running high. There's a reason diplomacy, marriage counseling, and the like aren't easy.

Like I said, who knows from the quote, but I've been in both kinds of room as a student. Neither would surprise me and I think we'd all do well to consider both possibilities.

Seconded on all points. I do branch out to SQL for stuff, too, and I find that R and Python play nicely with it, too. But as long as ggplot exists and Python doesn't have it, R will never really leave my side.

Jumped ship from Apple a couple of years ago and haven't looked back. Thinkpad laptop and homemade PC with mechanical keyboard: they're fast, easy to type on, and I'm lucky enough to be sufficiently savvy to fix most issues on my own.

OSX is still the superior OS - by orders of magnitude, in my mind - but Apple has simply stopped trying. Prices up, quality down. The only exception remains the good ol' iMac - possibly their greatest non-phone achievement. But the design hasn't changed in a billion years, you can't really upgrade it, and there's no decent GPU solution.

Windows-land ain't wonderful, but I'm priced out of Appleworld and I've lost my patience with it. Until something better comes along OS-wise, I'm happy where I am. (I use Linux occasionally too and enjoy it.) With respect to typing, though, man oh man: Thinkpad keyboards? Cherry MX switches? I know which rock I'm dying on.

Proud UC employee here. Bravo.

Never heard of a Bundeskartellamt but I'm rooting for'em

Lol yes

I've had a similar feeling about how our society deals with people who don't fit in in this way (non-productive), and it's a fun thing to play around with in your head because in a loose way it undercuts a key selling point of organizing your society capitalistically like ours: during the cold war, it was like "yeah well you Soviets just give every lazy bastard some meaningless quasi-task in a widget factory or in some faceless ministry and go around telling the rest of the world there's no unemployment and you're building Utopia. We in the West, otoh, have purpose and let our people put themselves to better use!"

So your observation reminded me that our society has plenty of people on a similar sort of hidden dole: vast corporate structures with uncountable layers of non-productive paper pushers, with a very small proportion of employees setting the vision and another small bunch generating most of the value. A social welfare program by any other name ...

So like do large human groups just inevitably have some subset that doesn't quite fit (in terms of work and productivity) but who need taking care of so we semi-deny their existence ("no slackers here!") while we semi-throw'em a bone ("here's a paycheck, go look at Facebook for a few hours and fiddle with PowerPoint while I harass my secretary")?

Came here to say this

Reading thru replies. Thanks for taking the time. I hasten to add that what I meant is more "what can I do with other people, perhaps collectively?"

The focus on our individual behavior is all well and good as far as it goes, but I agree with a commenter below that it can't be the only thing each of us does. I don't own a car, I live in an apartment building, I eat very little red meat, etc. But the hour is getting late, clearly, and it can't just be "let's make sure everyone recycles". Power is real: a small number of people in this world wield vast amounts of it, and they're dead-set on staying the course. My not eating beef will not make a dent in those peoples' behavior, so it's times like these when our/my American focus on "what we can do as individuals" feels maddeningly myopic. I want something more. I guess the good news is a lot of you feel the same way, maybe?

I'm in my thirties. I don't have kids, but want them. I don't want to admit to them that I did nothing about global warming when it counted. The thing is that I don't know what I should do; it seems so big, so intractable.

Articles like these stir me to action, but what action? Where's the mass movement on this? Where's the group, the party, the leadership?