frezik @ frezik @lemmy.blahaj.zone

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3 wk. ago

It's not hard to find actual instances of food standards problems. This just isn't one of them.

Tell people you're a natural sprinter. Very deadly over short distances.

And the most important advice is to leave the money the fuck alone.

I got lucky in that I started having enough money to invest after the 2008 crash. Those years had crazy good gains. The real test comes when the market crashes 30% in a few days. Can you stick to the plan? That happened in 2020 when lockdowns started, and if you stuck to the plan, you still did very, very well that year.

They aren't worth the money they're being paid. It's really not hard to do the most long time proven plan, which is to balance a portfolio between higher risk things like an SP500 index, and lower risk things like bonds. You weight it towards the index when you're young to get high average returns, then back it off into lower risk as you get older to lock it in.

"A Random Walk Down Wall Street" goes into how this strategy has been proven out over decades when so many others have failed. You technically can beat the SP500 (and be sure to include transaction costs), but only by taking on even higher risk.

The best investment advice for most people is really, really boring and not particularly difficult. Shouldn't even try anything else until you're maxing out all of 401k, HSA, and IRA and then have some leftover to try the riskier strategies.

I could see your perception of it changing based on how you watched the movies. If your first time watching the movies was in numerical order, you might come away thinking the Jedi mind trick doesn't work very well. It's not really explained until episode 4. IIRC, it's shown two times in the prequels, once against Watto (which fails) and once against a rando drug dealer in a bar (which works). It later works against Bib Fortuna but not Jabba.

The explanation of "works against the weak minded" doesn't come until you're several hours in. If the movies were produced in that order, it would almost come off like a cop out explanation.

It has nothing to do with legal issues. There is no practical way to impose martial law on NYC. The US military and ICE together are not big enough.

Trump can't take NYC. Even a military/ICE takeover is off the table. Even with a 20x increase in the ICE budget. There are just too many people and not enough random masked ICE "agents".

Just like with tariff negotiations, Trump thinks he has all the cards when he doesn't. He wants you to think he does, though. Fascism is always weaker than it looks.

The issue is putting power back onto the grid. If power is out otherwise, the guys who come out to fix it want to assume there's no power on it. If someone's solar panels are still putting power into the local connection, it can be dangerous for those workers.

It is possible to have an automatic disconnection so that in a grid outage, your house will still be powered, but nothing is going out to the grid. They usually don't put those in unless you also have a battery backup. You may be able to ask your contractor to put one in, anyway.

This goes for generators, too. You're supposed to use a power transfer switch with those.

Technically, yes, but we're all supposed to be smart enough to understand context.

Yes, and fecal matter on food (meat or otherwise) has been the norm for all of human history. We just have ways of measuring it now and make rules about it.

It's more successful than "invoice-based".

It's unsustainable to keep prices lower than costs. The Amazon example didn't have low prices forever.

The flip side of that is entire classes of bugs being removed from modern software.

The differences are primarily languages. A GUI in the 90s was likely programmed with C/C++. Increasingly, it's now done in languages that have complex runtime environments like dotnet, or what is effectively a browser tab written with browser languages.

Those C/C++ programs almost always had buffer overflows. Which were taken off of the OWASP Top 10 back in 2007, meaning the industry no longer considers it a primary threat. This should be considered a huge success. Related issues, like dynamic memory mismanagement, are also almost gone.

There are ways to take care of buffer overflows without languages in complex managed runtimes, such as what Go and Rust do. You can have the compiler produce ASM that does array bounds checking every time while only being a smidge slower than C/C++. With SSDs all but removing the excuse that disk IO is the limiting factor, this is increasingly the way to go.

The industry had good reasons to use complex runtimes, though some of the reasons are now changing.

Oh, and look at what old games did to optimize things, too. The Minus World glitch in Super Mario Bros--rooted in uninitialized values of a data structure that needed to be a consistent shape--would be unlikely to happen if it were written in Python, and almost certainly wouldn't happen in Rust. Optimizations tend to make bugs all their own.

That might be why, then. Nobody wants to buy office buildings right now.

How many people is that going to employ?

Remember, this thread started by saying "smart people" got sidetracked into IT rather than building rockets. There are a lot of problems with that claim, but at the very least, it has to assume that these less important items would be able to employ lots and lots of programmers.

Metal is the best stuff to recycle. Glass takes a lot of energy to melt into new shapes, so if possible, it's better to reuse it as is. Paper products are OK. Anything plastic is somewhere between bad and no.

Maybe if they could get in-orbit refueling to work on the Falcon? IIRC, Starship would require that for trips out of LEO, anyway. Nobody has done it before with a crewed rocket, and there's been some criticism that Starship's plan relies on this thing that hasn't been proven.

The Lunar Gateway is supposed to have a final assembled mass of 63 metric tons. May or may not be able to make that work at all with Falcon.

Incidentally, that mission was one of those surprising successes. The drone they sent was really barebones so it could tag along on another mission. Lots of people thought even doing that was a waste of launch mass. Nobody expected it to work all that well. It ended up working incredibly well and got used far beyond its planned mission until its rotor blades broke.

Now the team gets to build a real one.

Forget the moon. We're all within a few generations of the first people who had access to indoor toilets on a mass scale.

The Falcon series would be very limited for a moon mission. The Saturn V could get 47 metric tons into a trans lunar injection. Falcon 9 can get about 27 metric tons into GTO--not even to TLI (which isn't even listed in public information I could find, though one random Reddit post claims 3 metric tons). The Apollo lander was 17 metric tons, and it could take two people and a rover for a little tour on the surface. We can maybe shave some of that weight off with a new design, but probably not by half or anything really significant like that.

If we want to go back to the moon, it should be for more than taking pictures and picking up some rocks. You may not even be able to do that with a Falcon rocket.

NASA doesn't exactly rely on Starship for this, though. SLS does technically exist. It's just expensive, took far too long to build, and should probably be written off. Bezos might have something coming up, but who knows. Still relying on another space billionaire either way.