2,747 karma · joined August 14, 2024
ghost at stackgho dot st
The USA is speed running a destruction of trust in public institutions, supported by two thirds of the electorate and a majority of large American tech firms.
Somehow, inexplicably, people seem to think this will all go back to normal when Trump leaves office.
I would be shocked if IC-engined vehicles were no longer being produced in 2050.
I assure you I am not.
>The Nasdaq 100 is just a fund. Its existence doesn't force you or anyone else to do anything. People can choose to buy stocks, and people can choose to buy the Nasdaq 100. Or not. Nobody is making you.
This is irrelevant. QQQ is the one that's forced to buy all the constituents of the index, including SpaceX. This has been pointed out to you several times, but you seem unwilling to accept that fact.
EV proponents have a strong propensity to gloss over the very real drawbacks of battery-only vehicles:
- Towing anything outside of charging infrastructure/away from the highway rest stops is not feasible because of the range reduction, which in USA/Canada is a major reason to buy an SUV/pickup. Why buy an electric vehicle that can't tow your boat to the lake where there's no charger?
- Mileage goes down in the summer and way down in the winter, because the battery packs need to be cooled/warmed.
- Mileage evaporates slowly, even when the vehicle is "off", making these vehicles fundamentally unsuitable for, again, going pretty much anywhere you can't plug it in. When I was a teen we used to take week-long canoe trips into Algonquin Park. Imagine trying to get the kids home from camping on Sunday afternoon, you're an hour's drive away from the nearest city but oops the battery pack is dead because it's been self-discharging and cooling itself the whole time you've been camping. No thanks.
- Venturing far away from the charging infrastructure (camping, rural road tripping, jobsites/camp) is risky. If you run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, you can get a ride into town, fill up a jerrycan with gas, and then extricate your vehicle. If your battery-only EV runs out of charge in the middle of nowhere, you are completely fucked.
EVs are great, and when my 2013 TDI finally quits I will likely purchase an EV, but they're just fundamentally unsuitable for some use cases.
Start one?
There's definitely a market for software that doesn't give off the corporate, mass-produced, one-size-fits-all energy. 37signals famously made quite a business out of it.
Disclaimer: I used to work in airworthiness certification as well as maintenance and design modification engineering for the C-130, but not for any of the Boeing products.
You're generally correct. In layperson's terms, the Type Certificate is like the blueprint or the spec, and the individual airworthiness certificates are a certification that each aircraft coming off the assembly line is in conformance with the approved type design.
When the MCAS debacle happened, the FAA mandated a change to the type design, and further mandated embodiment of that design change through an Airworthiness Directive. This is the part that addressed the MCAS hazard condition. When they withheld Boeing's authority to issue certificates what that really gave them was, at the airframe serial number level, the ability to ensure that the modifications had been embodied correctly.
You're right that that final certification has little to do with correcting the underlying MCAS design flaw on the 737, but there were also quality issues with the 787, and because Boeing's in-house ODA issues those certificates acting as the FAA itself, and those certifications are essentially the last hurdle before delivery of the aircraft (and thus the last hurdle before revenue coming into Boeing's coffers), the FAA withheld that authority so that Boeing employees could not be unduly pressured by management's perverse incentives. Somebody elsewhere in these comments posted the OIG report that briefly touches on this pressure.
In fewer words, it was about ensuring independence in final airworthiness release, and ensuring Boeing's ODA could not be pressured by management who subscribe to the Jack Welch school of ethics.
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Edited to add:
There is a valid argument to be made that the FAA didn't handle this situation correctly/adequately. For context, in aerospace when we identify that a hazard condition exists we classify both the severity and the likelihood of occurrence. So for example depending on the organization's risk acceptance matrix, one might have a hazard with high severity but extremely low chance of occurrence, and that might be considered acceptably safe (or not!).
The FAA now says that the back-and-forth they have been doing over the last however many months produced comparable production-quality findings regardless of which organization issued the certificates (Boeing's ODA or the FAA itself).
As best I could tell at the time this issue was a hot topic, when it withheld Boeing's issuance authority the FAA never clearly articulated:
- Which risks it was controlling,
- How much risk reduction it expected,
- What data would demonstrate effectiveness, and
- What objective conditions would permit termination of the withholding
So again, there's an argument that the FAA just sort of decided that they now have that Warm Fuzzy and everything is fine.
Hmm, I wasn't trying to imply anyone is an asshole for enjoying things. Is that how it came off?
In days of yore you'd look at the fundamentals like:
- ability of the firm to service its debt
- profitability ratios
- revenue growth
- total addressable market
- competition
- market dynamics
etc.
You'd also pore over their quarterly and annual regulatory findings and see what's in the MD&A sections, assess the competency of senior leadership, look at how they view themselves, etc.
Then you'd look at comparable firms, i.e. companies doing the same or materially-similar things. Some of those are "pure plays", i.e. companies selling exactly the same product/service (e.g. TSMC, UMC, GFS) and some are not pure (e.g. red bull sells energy drinks but it also has a bunch of other stuff like a formula 1 team).
You compare your target company's fundamentals to those of its comparables, see what prices those comps are trading at, look at discounted cash flows, and then you pull a semi-informed number more or less out of your ass for the target as a forecast, based on your analysis.
These days, though, valuations are more or less completely disconnected from fundamentals. This is why Warren Buffett-style value investing is commonly said to be dead in today's market.
Fuck, doesn't everyone? The future we were promised is one where machines did all the work leaving humans free to pursue a richer existence, whether that's creative pastimes or just laying on a beach.
Instead of democratizing the future, essentially every technological advance since the printing press has served only to increase the concentration of wealth and power at the top.
I can't imagine actually wanting to work if you didn't have to.
We crossed that threshold at least a year ago.
Complete non sequitur. Can you explain what you mean? Did you accidentally reply to the wrong comment?
Asked and answered. Whatever cute point you're trying to make is rendered moot by real market dynamics and index inclusion rules.
QQQ tracks the Nasdaq 100. It's an index fund. If the index includes a new ticker, then QQQ has to buy it.
Buying QQQ doesn't seem like going out of one's way. I don't understand your comment. "ETFs and chill" is a very common investment strategy.
It's completely feasible to build a webapp that is lightweight. I have done it several times.
My wife's sister did an art degree, for example, and she and her friends wouldn't stop gushing about purposefully-inscrutable postmodern nonsense like Derrida, who was an absolute hack.
All that aside, N+1 sounds like it's the sort of thing I would enjoy read. I didn't get the sense that it was written to be exclusionary, but maybe I just didn't get the full picture from TFA.
Don't threaten me with a good time.
I'm so tired of tech companies shoving AI into everything, everywhere.
No kidding. I have a few personal services running on Internet-facing servers and they get hammered 24/7.
One of my projects is written in Rails and I had left the server on the default verbosity during development. It accumulated several GB of systemd/journald logs in a matter of weeks.
50 packets a day sounds like a dream.
This situation currently describes the USA.
You're going to need to back that claim up with statistics
If you want a DIYish handheld for gaming there are much better options on the market.
I have a hard time finding these communities
I'd be interested to know how much progress she made/lost due to drifting overnight. I feel like that alone would have a drastic impact. It would really suck to check your GPS track in the morning to discover you'd lost a day's progress overnight.
RMS is a visionary but as an actual software developer he's pretty mid.