wakawaka28

Station batteries are an additional toxic inextinguishable fire hazard and expense to consider. I wonder what is the efficiency loss in charging one battery to turn around and charge another too. But you are generally right: stationary batteries do not need to be lightweight like the ones in cars.

>Are there any real examples of a government entity in the US competing with a private enterprise in which it genuinely would have been better for the government entity not to compete?

Probably everything the government touches outside of keeping the peace and helping businesses function. Government schools suck. Government insurance sucks. Law enforcement often leaves a lot to be desired. I think one could make an argument that we'd be better off with a toll road system too, but for the convenience and privacy of not having to pay tolls.

It's easier to argue for government management when a service involves practically monopolizing space, such as a road, or if the project is especially dangerous or expensive (such as utilities or the military). But the fundamental forces of competition are still beneficial even in huge and monolithic projects. Even in cases of projects commonly run by governments, the competition emerges as being between governments instead of being between companies.

>contractors complain when the military fixes their own gear, and this is asinine

I agree, it sucks. I am very pro-market but I think the government should lay down the law in these cases and say that it won't tolerate abusive prices and it demands all the technical data necessary for routine maintenance, if not the entire product.

>It could just be incompetence. I read the construction contract. If I were a contractor, I would not have agreed to the fixed price and the steep late completion penalties without charging two arms and a leg and quoting a very long timeframe.

If credible businesses are putting in lower bids and they get passed up for a stupidly expensive alternative, that reeks of corruption. But there could be requirements or assurances that we don't know about. That's up to you to find out if you are interested in that case.

Two different issues... On one hand, government should not compete with private enterprise because it has many unfair advantages. Imagine paying taxes to subsidize your competition, who is also exempt from regulations that apply to you. That is the kind of corruption that comes from government-run businesses.

As for this one:

>I’m currently watching an 8-figure park remodeling project happening near home. Instead of hiring one or two competent construction managers for a few hundred thousand dollars, the city seems to be spending several million dollars for outside management to oversee this one project.

Every time the government touches any money, there is an opportunity for corruption. I'm betting that there are kickbacks, nepotism, or some other bullshit involved in the case you mention here. There are countless fraud schemes. California is trying to pass a law against people like Nick Shirley investigating and reporting on widespread fraud, because they know where their bread is buttered.

Are you kidding? Republicans never cut anything meaningfully. They are only a shade more fiscally responsible than Democrats. Your comment totally blames Republicans and does not put any blame on Democrats who are at least 50% responsible for where we are today.

Not everything. Specifically things where the government is involved. That includes government-subsidized private enterprise.

>coming in and saying "A is better in these other circumstances" isn't saying anything that people aren't already aware of.

Oh so you're a psychic now too? I think all kinds of people read these threads. Most of them probably aren't as aware as you're claiming, even the ones actively commenting on the topic.

>Doubtful you will find life safety and automation equipment on the shelves of your local retailer.

Nevertheless most of this gear is made overseas. When it is made in the US it depends heavily on foreign components.

>USA excels at manufacturing complex solutions versus simple ones. Well for now, since number of US States are pushing for de-education.

I don't think this is true. But we as a society have royally fucked up by funding so many useless degrees. Most educated people know nothing that could contribute to anything we actually need urgently.

>I do look at the labels and check where products are manufactured. Anything from Texas and Florida are put back on the shelves because I choose not fund those politically corrupt states and support treating immigrants and sub human.

Oh, so you're one of those people who thinks enforcing the law and resisting the destruction of US society and culture is morally wrong. Perhaps you deserve to have your society die around you, but the rest of us are fighting to keep it together anyway. And we won't let you run away from this mess either.

There are many concrete disadvantages to writing things in Rust too, not to mention rewriting. But you are right, these are different solutions and they thus have different characteristics.

As for your "as if it disproves their point" stuff is wrong. The fact is, the reply to a comment in a thread is not a reply to a different one. You are implicitly setting up a straw man like "See, you are saying there are NO advantages to using Rust over Fil-C" and I never said that at any point. I also didn't say that you said that there was no advantage to using Fil-C.

That's actually not a bad idea, since apparently it can be used for whole operating systems. But certainly, if you started doing that, any code using the exception would need to be exclusive to Fil-C to benefit from that.

They do wear out...

Sure, it's not implemented in Fil-C because it is very new and the point of it is to improve things without extensive rewrites.

Generally, I think one could want to recover from errors. But error recovery is something that needs to be designed in. You probably don't want to catch all errors, even in a loop handling requests for an application. If your application isn't designed to handle the same kinds of memory access issues as we're talking about here, the whole thing turns into non-existent-apples to non-existent-apples lol.

>And inability to prove correctness does NOT imply incorrectness.

And inability to prove incorrectness does NOT imply correctness. I think most Rust users don't understand either, because of the hype.

Seems like a niche use case. If it needs code to handle, it's also not apples to apples...

I don't think runtime error handling is impossible in Fil-C, at least in theory. But the use cases for that are fairly limited. Most errors like this are not anticipated, and if you did encounter them then there's little or nothing you can do useful in response. Furthermore, runtime handling to continue means code changes, thus coupling to the runtime environment. All of these things are bad. It is usually acceptable to fail fast and restart, or at least report the error.

Every EULA already covers this basically. The real problems are: people agree to it, and the government can do an end-run around the constitution by simply purchasing data or hiring contractors.

So, no videos of festivals or politicians speaking? How about legally recorded conversations or anything else exposing corruption? Body cam footage? Harassment is already a crime. Take care not to come up with oppressive laws to deal with a nuisance.

It's not the rhetoric that should convince you, it's the logic. The rhetoric here is purely to liven it up.

Oh yeah? Go try to buy anything at any store not made abroad. Go try to buy a car not reliant on foreign parts. Or a computer, or a phone, or medicine, or clothes... It's not easy.

It's the best deal they are gonna get from anyone and it comes with implied US protection against Chinese aggression.

China didn't manufacture all the world's stuff back then. A Chinese official has literally responded to complaints from the Philippines over fishing outside their territory or something with something very close to "China is a big country, and the Philippines is not. Deal with it."

China could easily invade the Philippines too, presumably.

Some people really need shit spelled out to them. This does a great job of doing that in a small package.

I'm not saying it's math-heavy, but it's not necessarily simple. Also, just because something has math, doesn't mean it's more complicated than everything else.

>x doubt...

Ah so you are an academic. I have been in both places. Industry people have to not only think of ideas but implement them with real computers. In some cases the computers must be built specifically to solve the problems. Millions of lines of code, broken shit, backward compatibility, stuff that can only be found through years of use. I suppose one can try to make an academic problem out of any industry concern, and therefore appear to be "more sophisticated" but inferior, partial, and broken proposals are regularly published. To get published, even a sketch of a possible solution with no implementation often flies. In industry, a lot of inferior stuff is accepted out of necessity, but it's often do or die with deadlines and real budgets to be concerned about.

Software engineering is not necessarily shallow in any sense. Reasoning about large and imperfect systems can be so much harder than finding average publishable CS results. But the difficulties are often so particular to the software and situations that it isn't of interest to academics.

You just described a bunch of hard and continuous work, and oversell the "almost guaranteed" part. Nothing is guaranteed in life, except death and taxes. Entrepreneurship can be harder or easier than working for someone else. Some entrepreneurs just show up with a bunch of money and hire other people to do the bulk of the work. That's a different kind of stress.

It definitely was oversold, but I don't think it's right to fault people for picking CS because of the money. That is essentially the point of getting a job, and most people do not actually get to live their "passion" -- even those of us who DO truly have a passion for programming. Most careers are only as good as the jobs you get, and most jobs are not amazing. If I have to do something I'm not crazy about, we're talking about degrees of misery and cost/benefit ratios, and that is very personal.

I think you can find something bad in every state, even "rich" ones.

Edit: Who the hell would downvote this?

Perhaps, but solar panels will NOT get cheaper as a result of oil becoming more expensive, even if the price hike is somehow permanent. They are manufactured through an energy-intensive process. Unlike the solar manufacturing cost problem, there are solutions to the oil shortage issue for the rest of our lifetimes, most likely. We depend on oil and gas for our existence in many ways, not just for energy.

In the very long run we need to find alternative sources of energy but I think solar is not going to be that solution. Solar is most likely going to be a fringe backup alternative to nuclear power. Batteries have tremendous disadvantages. In the long run some kind of biofuel or synthetic hydrocarbon might win over batteries.

>Weird that it took way less than 20 years for that to hit.

No, it's not weird. It hit in the 70s and is an actual avoidable problem. Don't kick the hornets nest. The issue of the Strait of Hormuz was known to nearly everyone for decades, and we got a bunch of leaders all over the West who are collectively batshit crazy.

Suggestible people follow instructions and (sometimes) take fewer risks. It is simply infeasible to logically convince people of every single thing that they ought to know. I hate to infantilize people in this way, but even the most capable and inquisitive minds among us cannot reasonably investigate everything.

People socially align over a lot of things, not just ideas. They develop shared tastes and preferences.

Even very undesirable characteristics such as sociopathy have a function in society. It is sometimes necessary to emotionally detach oneself from situations to make the right decisions. These are not good for every role, but they are primitive survival mechanisms and still have a useful function in keeping the peace.