tomohawk

Being skeptical of "science" authorities is not the same thing as being skeptical of science.

This is rich. The Universities that caved to student activists engaged in antisemitism and other egregious activities should now fight for their rights to be cowards? Or the Universities that engaged in racist DEI programs are now going to stand on principal?

Give me a break.

Not at all. Mozilla is now controlled by hyper partisan political operatives. There should be zero intersection between partisan politics and my web browser.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubtWZwtJCdw

In the mid 90s, I recall talking to some of the people working on the current scheme to modernize ATC. This was the 3rd or 4th attempt, and billions had already been spent.

Since then, there have been many efforts and many more billions spent. I'm sure all of these efforts went through the proper channels, etc, but all that has shown is that (a) FAA has no clue how to manage these contracts, and (b) the normal way of doing this absolutely doesn't work.

In contrast, this is how civil infrastructure used to get done in the US:

https://www.inventionandtech.com/content/antique-machines-yo...

Elon seems to be the only person really performing at this level anymore in this space.

For political reasons, but that's the least expensive and least technically risky portion. The portion back into LA and the portion back into SF are going to make the prices they're paying for this easy section pale in comparison.

They're hoping the sunk cost fallacy will get them the money they will need on the hard parts.

Having done a lot of Java and Go, Go has much better mechanical sympathy between the language, libraries, and vm than Java does. The JIT GC in Java are marvels of engineering, but they have to be.

As an example, in Java, everything is a pointer, so pointer chasing all the time, which is not good for cpu cache, etc. In Go, there is first class support for composition.

The other main adjustment, if coming from Java, is reduced cognitive overhead. It usually only takes a week or two for an experienced Java dev to be reasonably effective in Go, but it takes a few months to break the mental habits of overthinking everything.

After the Vietnam war, in the 1970s, there was a big RIF (reduction in force) at places like the NSA.

These agencies have not had a reduction since then and are oversized and wrongly sized.

The same issue faced the US Army prior to WWII. Roosevelt's solution was to find a young general (he found Marshal) and have him get rid of the dead wood because it was expected we'd be in a war in a couple of years.

Marshal created the "plucking commission" and got rid of a lot of dead wood. This put the US in a much better position to fight a war.

The context of this was that Zelensky was being asked about corruption in Ukraine, and he was hinting that maybe USAID and State Dept might also have a problem.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukraine-received-less-half-us-083...

> Trump has indeed declared a national emergency at the border. But there is nothing "extraordinary" or "unusual" about either illegal migration or cross-border fentanyl smuggling

Really?

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db522.htm

The #1 cause of death of working age adults during the pandemic was not covid. It was opiods.

https://web.archive.org/web/20211221184714/https://secureser...

The Dept of Defense has failed many audits in a row. No one really has a handle on what money is going for there, or at may other departments.

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4992913-pentagon-fails-7t...

Hundreds of qualified applicants were denied jobs through a "Biographical Assessment" that you can take yourself:

https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/

Spend a bit of time taking it and it's clear what at least one reason for this shortage is.

It's too early to tell, but I would not be surprised if later at least a portion of this is found to be "malicious compliance".

For example, President Truman ordered the US military to be (re)integrated. Through malicious compliance, racist officers put their own spin on the orders.

"Well, he didn't say that black officers would get equal access to the officers club, so we won't let them in."

It too a former 5 star general (President Eisenhower) to stamp out the malicious compliance and make it stick.

There was already a case of malicious compliance with the DEI EO on the part of certain US air force personnel taking down material about the Tuskugee Airmen. The new sec def stomped that out within 4 hours.

Hundreds of qualified applicants were denied jobs through a "Biographical Assessment" that you can take yourself:

https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/

Spend a bit of time taking it and it's clear what at least one reason for this shortage is.

pretty cool, but basically solves a problem caused by one too many layers of abstraction.

    So we met with very senior people in the White House, in the inner core.
    We basically relayed our concerns about A.I., and their response to us was, “Yes, the national agenda on A.I. We will implement it in the Biden administration and in the second term. We are going to make sure that A.I. is going to be a function of two or three large companies. We will directly regulate and control those companies. There will be no start-ups. This whole thing where you guys think you can just start companies and write code and release code on the internet — those days are over. That’s not happening.”

Incredible hubris.

Is there a way to prevent the car from connecting to this service?

Less than 3% of the water reserve was available, as the reservoir for the area had been drained to repair its covering since last Feb. It was not necessary to drain the reservoir to make the repair. The repair should have taken a couple of weeks.

The fire department was not informed of this ahead of time, and so made no preparations in the lead up to this predicted event.

How do you fight a fire with more than 97% of the water unavailable?

Some outlets originally blamed Tesla, but it apparently has nothing to do with Tesla.

https://x.com/SawyerMerritt/status/1880154231232962777

During the civil rights movement, racist businesses and other associations hid behind this excuse. Some restaurants famously refused to serve people who were black, Italian, or Jewish.

But it is now pretty much settled law that people cannot weaponize their freedom of association to discriminate on these grounds. If you offer a service, you have to provide the service to the classes of people that you could be reasonably expected to serve.

I agree that it is grossly negligent to subsidize the building of a major city in a desert or semi-arid area, and then not invest in sufficient infrastructure to take care of easily forseable issues such as this.

But, come on!

The hydrants, which are fed from smallish tanks, which are fed from the reservoir, did not run out of water because the reservoir was offline?

What magic pixie dust was going to feed those hydrants with the reservoir empty? They could pump water up to those tanks, but we already know that just isn't going to work at any kind of scale. It's barely adequate to meet normal domestic water needs.

I guess we should just throw up our hands and not hold people accountable for basic maintenance of basic systems, or taking systems completely offline to do ancilliary repairs to things like a covering tarp. Or making massive cuts at the state and local level to fire prevention and fighting efforts.

Doesn't that depend on when the firefighters started attacking the fire? You don't have to put out the full extend of the fire if you can stop it.

Example: a grease fire starts in my kitchen and burns down my house. I don't need the water required to stop a full bore house fire to put out the grease fire in my kitchen and save my house.

The hydrants ran out of water very quickly, because the reservour feeding them was taken out of commission because there was a tear in its cover. It's been offline since last February. The cover is only needed to prevent evaporation. They could have had water in it, which very well may have been enough to stop the full spread of the fire.

This is gross negligence.

Replace H-1B with greencards. New arrivals to our country with valuable skills should be welcomed with a good path to citizenship, not beholden to whoever got the H-1B for them, and subject to being pushed out once it expires.

This mayor seems really interested in advancing the interests of Africa, rather than where she actually has a job.

https://youtu.be/u8c_3YEosk4

It's why Scotty was always giving longer estimates that Kirk wanted, but Kirk was also able to require an emergency fix to save the ship.

The estimate was building in the time to get it done without breaking too much other stuff. For emergency things, Scotty would be dealing with that after the emergency.

If your captain is always requiring everything be done as an emergency with no recovery time, you've got bigger problems.

One of main uses of H1B is to offshore jobs. Bring in people on the H1B, get them trained, then send them back 'home'. Disney and many other companies have done this. Just look at the leaderboard and see how many offshoring companies are there.

Instead of H1B, we should provide green cards to people who want to come here and start a new life. This would put workers on a better footing in employment than H1B.

The government we pay for should not be enabling the offshoring of jobs.

As president, Carter gave the green light for Doo-hwan Chun to use force against the pro-democracy protests in Gwangju, S Korea.

Later, sent to N Korea by president Clinton, he massively exceeded his authority and made a sweetheart deal that guaranteed N Korea would eventually build nukes. President Clinton found out about the deal on CNN with everyone else and never used Carter again.

He also sandbagged president Reagan by taking a trip to the Soviet Union and convincing the leaders there that Reagan was not serious about reducing or eliminating nuclear weapons. This set back progress on reducing nuclear weapons for several years. In the end, Reagan was finally able to get them back to the table and eliminated a class of nukes, reducing others.

A key difference between Turkey and Finland is that Turkey has the largest army in Europe and can unilaterally take action.

Finland can only take action if backed by many other NATO members, and most especially by the US.

Dealing with this as a policing activity tells you all you need to know about the current leadership of the US and other NATO countries.

After they were shot at, they were not allowed by Russian authorities to land in Grozny or any of the other nearby Russian airports, but were told to divert across the Caspian Sea to another country.

During the crossing, they were subjected to GPS jamming by Russia, and damage from the missile caused them to lose most controls.

The heroic efforts of the pilots got them almost to the airport, but at least some people survived.

Even worse, it requires establishing new policies and staffing enforcement. They'll need to throw bodies at this effort, and so people building sytems will have even more pesky forms and policies and permissions to deal with. This will add cost and have very little, if any, positive impact.

The brain is the most powerful tool, so whatever you need to do to minimize data entry and data management is the best thing.

A room set aside for the purpose, with lots of marker boards. Add sticky notes. It doesn't get any simpler or smoother than that.

For digital, I've found gitlab and redmine to have far simpler and smoother tooling than anything from Atlassian (jira, confluence, ...), but initial setup and ensuring everything is smooth is key.

For digital, be lazy about data entry. Instead of making a ticket for every little thing, try to capture clumps of things on a wiki page, jumbo ticket, or something, deferring ticket creation until you have to. The more tickets you have, the more time you'll spend managing them. A wiki page with a bulletized list is way easier to manage than a ticket for each bullet on that list.