Fundamentally, you’re never going to be able to compete with the economies of scale of an assembly line with the same people putting together all the parts that were shipped to the same place. If the repairman has to keep an inventory of hundreds of parts for dozens of models, and drive around to where he only has time to diagnose and fix 2 appliances per day, while the factory worker can install a part for 100 appliances per day, there will always be a gap between the price of replacement versus the price of repair.

Plenty of short-lived stuff back then, too. Survivorship bias means that all the stuff that happened to survive to today is not necessarily representative of the typical thing that was manufactured back then.

Crop rotation? You mean bio DIVERSITY?

No, even if tuition and books are free, financial aid still needs to help full time students have food to eat and have a place to live and ordinary day to day expenses. In many places, the aid on room and board is much more money than aid on tuition and fees.

And community colleges tend not to have their own dorms or anything like that, so it comes in the form of a monthly payment that helps the student pay their rent. That’s an incentive for fraud.

Yeah, investing in a company is investing in the whole company and all of its projects. Lies about your company are only fraud when the lies rise to the level of making a material difference to how a typical investor would value that company. If the lies are about a very minor percentage of revenue or profit, then it’s not gonna rise to the level of securities fraud.

I have a watered down version of this, but I’m a lawyer so it’s very very valuable. If I get a question I might not know the answer to, if I’ve read it somewhere I usually know roughly where to go back to get it. And since lawyers mostly look things up instead of trying to memorize everything, a powerful “indexing” memory is valuable in the profession. At least in my practice.

The actual data compromise happened sometime before July 2022, months before Elon’s purchase of Twitter happened. Telling people they shouldn’t have registered their real phone numbers to Twitter in 2015 or whatever isn’t really a helpful argument to make today.

How much coverage do we want? Global or just the continent+ a bit more?

I admit I don’t know much about orbital physics, but I don’t see how you can have consistent coverage of Europe 24 hours per day and low pings comparable to Starlink without also covering the entire globe. Geosynchronous or sun synchronous orbits require a minimum ping of 240ms, round trip.

Eutelsat has geosynchronous orbits, which allows them to provide service over a much larger area per satellite and doesn’t require very many satellites to serve a consistent geographical area as the earth rotates and the satellites orbit the earth.

Problem is, though, geosynchronous orbit is 35,786 km altitude. Light travels at 3.0 x 10^8 m/s. So any signal takes 120ms to get to the satellite, and 120 ms to return. Any signal is going to have a 240ms latency at a minimum, and that’s just physics.

Starlink satellites have an altitude closer to 600 km. Light only takes about 2ms to get to that altitude, and 2ms to return. So the satellites add only about 4ms, which makes for easier and more seamless communication.

In order to compete with starlink for most typical Internet applications, it’ll require a bunch more satellites orbiting at much lower altitudes.

Kinda depends on the fact, right? Plenty of factual things piss me off, but I’d argue I’m correct to be pissed off about them.

Nearly half of U.S. adults

Half of LLM users (49%)

No, about a quarter of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than they are. Only about half of adults are LLM users, and only about half of those users think that.

Yes, there are mid-block crosswalks in some of the walkable parts of Austin. There are also roundabouts with yield signs and crosswalks and no lights.

OP’s neighbor is one of the minority of federal workers who are probationary employees, because that’s the only group Elon has been able to really fire right now

This part isn’t true. At this point, probably over half of the fired workers were permanent, from agencies that are closing or are implementing RIFs. Most are still drawing paychecks, but budgeting does (and should) change once someone is informed that they’ll be out of a job in the next month or two.

For many agencies, these satellite offices often have monopsony power over workers of certain job skills. NOAA and the National Weather Service employ a lot of people who have job functions not really available from another employer, especially without moving. The same is true of NIH and CDC. HHS just announced the closure of several lawyer offices, and those specialists are going to have a bit of a rough time finding replacement jobs. USDA is a big organization, and have a ton of economists and scientists who would basically have to take a big pay cut if they’re laid off in this environment.

You’re downplaying just how devastating some of these job losses are, by ignoring that many of these people moved to these cities in reliance on the job stability they expected, and downplaying the number of people affected and the length of tenure these people have.

I don’t have a strong view of whether this story is literally true of this specific account’s neighbor. But I can tell you that versions of this story have happened to thousands already, and will happen to tens of thousands more.

Oh well I’m sure the cabinet secretary who oversees TSA will get right on that oh wait she loves killing dogs too

A not-insignificant portion of Trump’s base will be in this boat, if they aren’t already. We should be ready with messaging to pull them out of the cult, so that they don’t fall back in.

Actually for federal sentencing, property destruction is punished under the same table as theft. It’s mostly measured from the amount of loss to the victims, whether the person actually profited from it or not.

“Up to 10 years” is the maximum possible for that type of crime. Actual sentencing guidelines for a $500k loss for a first time offender will probably come out to about 2, maybe 3 years.

In order for the recommended sentence to hit 10 years, we’d have to be talking about damage of over $550 million, or something like a long criminal history.

Substantial disruption of critical infrastructure would get someone to around 5 years, as a reference.

People generally aren’t sentenced to the maximum penalty for a crime, so it’s not very useful to compare the maximum potential sentence for a charged crime versus the actual sentence received after conviction on another crime. The Indianapolis hit and run carried potential penalties of more than 15 years. This DVD guy will probably get less than 5.

You are trying to break them into groups but this is irrelevant to voting and why we have the Orange Turd in office.

The article is about veterans who were fired from federal jobs. That particular population, the subject of this article, probably voted for Harris over Trump in greater numbers.

This is a misleading stat, because veterans skew heavily male and old (since Boomers were drafted for Vietnam).

In 2023, Pew published a profile of veteran demographics.

• 72% of veterans were over the age of 50.
• 37% were over the age of 70.
• 74% were white.
• 89% were men.

Polls that have broken up veterans by generation show a clear generational divide as well. This poll from 2020 showed that veterans under the age of 54, and veterans who joined the military after 2001, backed Biden over Trump.

Among veterans young enough to still be working, we’d need more detailed cross tabs to understand whether a majority of employed veterans, much less government employee veterans, voted Trump.

So for the individuals who did vote Trump, yes, this post fits. But for the group as a whole, of veterans who work in the government, I’m skeptical that they voted Trump over Harris.