wharvle

If it's like iOS devices, I'd assume less than a second to interactive, potentially so fast that most people don't notice it isn't instant.

If it's like macOS, maybe 2-3 seconds to interactive.

There's either got to be a big generational gap on preference for this, or a lot of folks out there have developed mousing ambidexterity.

What's booting?

Nothing I use with any frequency gets rebooted except for updates, more or less.

Exception: non-Apple stuff. Because those things tend to die while "sleeping" and unplugged, very quickly (my secondary work Windows laptop, which burns almost half its battery per 12 hours in "sleep mode"; my Steamdeck, which is barely better than that; the Switch though it's almost always on the dock anyway so that's rarely an issue)

Like so many Apple things, I thought AirPods were dumb until I got some (as a gift). I'd tried some Logitech wireless earbuds just a couple months before first trying AirPods. Those were dumb. God they sucked.

I've avoided the Watch for that reason. The little conveniences of various Apple-thingies are the sort of stuff you can't un-experience, and then you're stuck buying the damn things forever.

The good news is that addressing this kind of thing is the hot topic in gifted education, and has been for some time. The “I suddenly got very dumb” story’s nigh-universality has been noticed, and they’re working on fixing it.

The bad news is that you may have been too early for that. Well, and also that I’m not sure how effective efforts to address it have actually been.

I’m pretty sure the entire premise is more than a little facetious, and the author already knows this.

This is everywhere. We made everyone their own secretary but gave them crappy tools and no training. Also they’re never gonna be doing it more than very part-time, so will always tend to be bad at it and find it a distraction from the work they’re actually good at.

I’m skeptical computerization has even been a net benefit for productivity for most jobs, for that and other reasons. I think it’s been such a huge boost in a few areas that it looks productive overall, but actually it’s been a step back in most jobs. The high of eliminating positions and of centralized command-economy-style technocratic visibility into everything keeps management hooked on it anyway.

First Dorf on Golf, now Dorf on Dwarf Fortress. What’ll that little guy do next?

For those who aren’t old enough to be familiar with Dorf:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorf_(character)

I could have this figured as more of an exponential curve when it’s really as S-curve with your E-8s and your mid-scale officers on roughly the same flattish (but fairly high!) part. Could be I’ve got that bit wrong.

I do think the really high paid ones usually require living in one of a few areas (NOVA, say) and some travel, which isn’t in a lot of folks’ life plan for their 40s and 50s. But yeah, I may just have the “graph” wrong.

[edit] my more narrow point was just that an ex-officer with enough money to safely invest in a real estate business that might plausibly grow to $11m value under even moderate success, isn’t that weird a notion.

At the time I used it, it was almost worth it just to use RN for Android even if you did iOS in Swift, just because styling on Android was so hellish ("There must be some non-crazy way to set a default typeface for my app. Right?" LOL wrong; "setting this color on this Material input field must be easy" LOL nope, welcome to Java metaprogramming just to set a goddamn color), the documentation-suggested way to structure apps was so bad that you'd be reaching for other solutions anyway if you valued your sanity (I wanna say Square was at the forefront, here? It was some company like that. Like your best bet was just to find their libraries and blog posts and do exactly what they did, ignore the official docs), and in some cases the native libraries for Google APIs were less-capable than the Javascript ones anyway (Maps was one, I remember—god, what a surprise that was to find out).

But that was like 5 years ago so maybe it's gotten better.

I'd say $200k is about the floor, including enlisted, not just officers. Assuming they did 20 years in, they should be able to land at least that much for a boring office job in the US and if they didn't have something notable working for them (good network, what kinds of work they did, that sort of thing). That'll mean an NCO rank of some sort, for enlisted, and probably at least a bachelor's degree (it's strongly encouraged past a certain point) plus the all-important clearance. It goes up from there—way up, at the higher officer's ranks (O-6 and up, say), where whole new tiers of job open up, like high-level lobbying jobs, think tanks, C-suite positions, and even media.

Details of your service, who you know, what you're willing to do (travel, say) can start adding fives and even sixes of figures to your comp in a hurry (each!), from there.

[EDIT] This is for post-"retirement" former military folks in general, not that specific case. You're probably not getting one at all for under $200k/yr unless they just don't want to do one of the kinds of jobs that pay a premium for retired military. And that's, again, way on the low end.

[EDIT EDIT] Also if you account for all benefits, the multiplier on military comp may not be as large. These places tend to offer good bennies, too, but not... you know, housing and such.

Getting to watch things like Mormonism (and, to some extent, Scientology, though that's a bit of a different beast) develop under conditions that provide pretty good records and a variety of disinterested accounts, has definitely been instructive for interpreting plausible courses of development of older religions. "Why would all these people lie?" "Why would so many people attest to having seen something that was actually bullshit? It must have happened!"

Well... I mean, you'd think so, but not so much, it turns out.

The real monsters, and with the most dangerous beliefs and mythology, which are just as much beliefs and mythology as the religious despite their protests that claiming they have beliefs or mythology or even are anything is nonsensical, are the [whatever the word is for not believing in the reality of Russell's Teapot]-ists. You'd be shocked how many horrible people were part of that movement!

Don't get me started on the non-IPUists.

Yeah, the "+" is doing some heavy lifting there :-) 3x is what you can basically just fall into after military retirement without trying very hard, with a bad network, and with poor luck.

Another factor is that your expenses can be quite low while you're in, even with a family. Put an officer's salary on top of that—which isn't amazing, but isn't terrible either—and you can save a fair bit of cash even before you even start the contractor + retirement double-dipping.

Though there are real costs—the schools are generally very good, but you may have to move every couple years. The bureaucracy is hellish (though, for all their dysfunction, they've got a lot of shit figured out way better than your average bigco). You'll probably serve under and with some real assholes at some point. And there's ever the temptation to get out early and start taking those sweet contractor dollars before you secure the government retirement check. Plus, you know, you may have to go kill people or get killed or what have you.

[EDIT] Oh, another downside: it can be really hard for your spouse to have a career, due to all the moving and often living in places without much economic opportunity.

20 years in + take retirement + also work for a government contractor at 3x+ your former pay rate (while collecting retirement!), can equal a lot of money in a hurry at a relatively young age (say, money to fund a real estate investment venture without risking being penniless in old age).

We have three kids.

When two are gone for some reason (sleepover, staying with family, whatever) we're always like "holy shit, one kid is barely harder than no kids!"

Maybe. Looks to be a bit (... by Pacific standards, so, hundreds of miles) off the Easternmost part of the Pacific that would have seen lots of air traffic in the war, which should leave it relatively clear, but I may be wrong.

[EDIT] I still doubt it's the plane, but this area may be far less-cluttered with 1930s-40s aircraft wreckage than others, is all I mean.

A lot of the truly-good actors get called character actors and are considered less important than less-versatile leads. And of course sometimes (often, perhaps) leads are good, versatile actors but every director keeps demanding the same, proven-bankable performance out of them. You see this with someone like Adam Sandler, who plays the same couple easy-to-play characters in most of his movies that make him serious money, but can absolutely act when he needs to (which is mostly in movies that don't make him serious money).

IMO Brad Pitt is an example of a "leading man" who's actually at his best in character-actor type roles. He never quite developed that reliable-draw narrow tyepcasting that defines a lot of leads (Reynolds and Pratt are prime examples—you cast them in a big-budget movie for a specific reason, like, there's little question what sort of character they're gonna play) and seems more at ease as a rather offbeat lead or as a supporting character.

You can expect whatever you want.

Meanwhile, one policy may result in what you want actually happening, and another may not.

The collaborative-working-environment, potentially on the go (from your hotel room, not a dedicated space or something) stuff looks really cool, but also very niche (and is only cool if it actually works well, obviously).

They may find enough of a market to prove out and further-develop the tech. I'm pessimistic about AR in general until/unless the hardware develops a lot further, but it's possible they'll carve out enough of a market with this to use it as a testbed and proving ground for later, lower-priced (and/or far more capable) versions.

Decent PCs used to cost this much or more, inflation adjusted.

I love transcripts because I basically can’t both take notes and actively pay attention (this was a huge problem with my trig and calc teacher in high school who insisted everyone take notes the entire class period and would get mad at you if she saw you not taking notes—I’d end the class with a bunch of pages of writing and no clue WTF any of it was about)

Comparing “up to” with median is setting off my bullshit alarm.

House roofs in the US are often quite steep, and typically asphalt shingles over plywood. Terra cotta exists but is rare outside certain regions (and not that common even in those). Wood shingles exist but most are terrible, most still around now were installed after we ran out of wood good enough to give them their supposed 50+ year lifespan (we ran out in the 70s or 80s), so people tend to replace them with asphalt when they go to shit in 20-30ish years rather than paying a large premium to replace them with more (bad) wood. Slate, copper, et c., exist, but are basically "exotic"—no normal person has those on their house unless they bought a very old house in a bad neighborhood (a house with a roof like that's likely to be crazy-expensive if it's not in a bad neighborhood).

Most people in the US don't work on their own roofs. You need safety equipment most people don't own, plus protective equipment to keep from damaging the shingles, and to be proficient with it you need to use the stuff more than once every couple decades. And even then, it's pretty dangerous.

1) The time it takes for the panels to recoup their costs is already long.

2) Now the panels have to be removed and re-installed any time those parts of the roof are worked on. That's expensive. Roofing companies tend not to like solar. You'll have trouble getting a warranty on the work if you've got solar, and likely pay a premium for a company that'll provide one (on top of the much higher labor costs) by finding a company that does both solar and roofing.

3) If work ever needs to be done on the panels, and it doesn't fall under a warranty, it'll be more expensive than ground-level.

4) There's a greater chance of something going wrong with all the above because solar adds more components to the whole system of the roof, aside from punching a bunch of holes in it.

The higher costs and risks plus naturally long pay-off period mean I don't plan to ever pay for rooftop solar again. Wish I hadn't this time.

Future maintenance now has to involve removing the panels, then installing them again afterward. That's a lot of extra work (so, money). Lots of roofers hate solar and won't touch it (they've worked on many roofs solar installers fucked up—talk to some). So now you need two companies involved. You'll have to take great care with the whole arrangement if you want the usual warranty you get with roof work from any decent roofing company (again, many hate solar and will be reluctant to guarantee work that has solar touching it, especially if another company has to do that part, which is often the case). The coordination effort means roofing projects are longer now.

It's just not worth it once you factor in the period to recoup investment on the panels. The extra headache and risk plus long period before you're in the black anyway, just nowhere near being worth it. And all that assumes nothing goes wrong with the panels

We got some. I'd been skeptical that screwing with your roof that much was a good idea, but so many people do it and seem happy about it... it must be OK?

TL;DR never again. Way too expensive for what it gains you, way too much risk (to your roof, of future costs for roof maintenance, et c.) Installing on a roof is crazy-expensive compared to ground. If we have enough room at our next house I'll self-install panels at ground level and have an electrician do the rest. It's just not favorable enough a move, otherwise, to be worth the risk and hassle. Ground-level's way cheaper, even if you don't self-install parts of it, and won't make your roof more complicated. It's technically saving us a little money, but no, not worth it, the peace of mind is worth the tens of dollars a month or whatever.

Part of the shift to a large standing army is probably the MIC milking the taxpayer, as many suppose.

Another part, however, is that the pace of war is so high and the minimum required level of training and military organizational capability to be able to go toe to toe with a top-tier foreign power is so great that it's not been clear, since the end of WWII, that the US would again be able to take so very long to get rolling as it did in that war, if it wants to be able to project power abroad at all in a meaningful way against strong enemies.

IOW scaling back our military too much might well be the equivalent of bowing out of the first stage or two of the next great conflict, even more so than it was in WWII, and it's less clear all the time that our historical gigantic advantage of the two-ocean moat will give us so much leisure to prepare, or that we'd quite so easily be able to wrest back control of vital supply lines if another world war breaks out, having allowed the enemy to take them in the first place (even if it stays non-nuclear—if it goes that way, of course, we're in totally uncharted and very bad territory, for all concerned)

Then there's the domestic concerns: the military is the only jobs program with bipartisan support. College, free housing (including for a family!), free healthcare (ditto!), good education for your kids. Retirement! Why, it's practically a way for a blue collar American kid to opt into European-level social support (though with some, ah, significant costs). There are social-stability interests in keeping recruitment levels high.

Kind... of. Both won by having enormously higher stakes and will to fight. Plus a ton of foreign aid. And neighboring friendly or at least too-disorganized-to-resist countries the US was reluctant (but not always wholly unwilling) to engage.

Both got badly stomped on a sheer damage-and-casualties-inflicted front, but didn't give up and had relatively safe space to retreat into and carry on logistics through (and foreign aid) that kept them from being counted out no matter how many times we punched them. But they were getting punched a lot, and hard, and weren't landing a ton of blows in return.

If one expects to be on the historical US side of an encounter like that, it's not clear to me that shifting to less-educated troops is going to help. The current approach kicks absolute ass—from a sheer military perspective. Especially against non-modern militaries (and there are very few fully modern ones—the training and equipment requirements to field a modern army are immense, expensive, and require a level of delegation of power that many kinds of states can't securely achieve). Uneducated farmers may have won those fights (while doing a hell of a lot of dying, and delivering rather poor damage in return) but I don't think it follows that the US military would be well-served by poorly-educated soldiers.

Folks also complain about modern movies being bad while only being aware of like 1% of fairly major ones that came out in the most recent year. There are so many likely-to-be-good movies every year that I can’t keep up, personally. Or they have very narrow tastes, and it’s like… ok yes since you dismiss 95% of all film for one reason or another (“I don’t like subtitles”, “I don’t like horror”, “this is too artsy”, et c), that only left a couple good movies for you this year.

I found the nonlinearity thing overhyped. It was fine, but on par with, like, Fallout 2. But not quite on that level, even. Not some revelation.

Actually, kinda worse than that, because good and evil are more-explicit in BG3.

It presents an illusion of much greater depth than it actually has.

(I did enjoy it, and finished it, but have found much of the praise for it more confusing than something I can relate to)