Sorry Mr Pedant. This is 2025, not 1937. Can you show me where one of these hydrogen jet engines is for sale today?

Not enough, and not at night or on cloudy days.

I remember reading about this and electric planes in Aviation Week and other media long ago. Hydrogen takes up something like 5 times the volume of jet fuel; there's no room for it. Hydrogen jet engines don't exist, and using fuel cells to spin electric motors is going backwards. Batteries might some day be energy-dense enough to be useful, but their weight doesn't diminish during flight like liquid fuel does.

The basic arithmetic just doesn't add up. Short range electric airplanes are not only short range, but their payload is limited. They're solutions in search of a problem.

Think of it from the other end. Assume I am telling the truth, and that the audience did give a standing ovation. Instead of just saying unpossible, think what it would take for you to do so, or people you know.

How about if you had seen nothing but silent movies with an organ accompaniment for years? Then you see a new movie with spoken dialogue and no dialogue cards. Would that not be astounding enough?

What about the first color movie? The Wizard of Oz was one of the first big releases in color, but starts in black and white and switches.

Star Wars was not quite on those levels, but it had a huge impact. That is why people stood and applauded.

I was in Japan in August or September 1978, 15+ months since its release in the US, and Star Wars was showing there. I met a couple of Mormon missionaries who had been in Japan when it was released in the US so had not seen it, and when it showed up in Japan, they were not allowed to see it. But they sure wanted to talk about it.

Nobody. But that crowd did. Remember, this was before CGI, when 2001 was still the gold standard for science fiction movies.

I got out of the Navy in 1976, in San Francisco. A kid at the corner grocery kept going on about this fantastic new sci-fi movie coming out, and I just scoffed. Nothing could beat 2001. As May got closer, there was some "world preview" announced for a Thursday, so I took the bus out to the theater on Arguello and Geary (?), and wondered what all the lines were for. No one stands in line for science fiction movies! But they were for this. So I stood in line. Someone came down the line announcing this line was for ticket holders only, and I wondered what the heck was going on; no one buys tickets in advance for science fiction movies!

Then someone else came down the line, announced they had a few more tickets for sale, and I rocketed up, got my ticket, and was in the third row, looking up at the screen, scrunched down so I didn't have to bend my neck so much. Someone came out on stage, or maybe just on the floor in front of the screen, and gave a little speech about being the world premier. No idea who it was now.

And then the movie started, oh holy mackerel! That weird scrolling introduction "In a galaxy far far away" and then that huge spaceship, laser blasts all around it, theater rumbling, and then the REALLY HUGE spaceship came chasing it, firing all those laser blasts, theater felt like an earthquake compared to all my experiences with theaters, especially watching 16mm movies on the ship mess deck, holy holy mackerel!

And when it ended, nobody left. Well, I was third row, couldn't see the whole theater. And when the credits got to "modelers" everyone stood up and gave them a standing ovation.

Wikipedia says the world premiere was at a different theater and not on a Thursday. So I don't know what I saw. But I do know Hans shot first, screw Lucas.

Ummmmm, whatchew got, some kind of 54 minutes per hour clock, eh?

"The average American workday now concludes at 4:39 p.m., a notable 36 minutes earlier than it did just two years ago when the clock-out time hovered around 5:21 p.m"

The point in responding is that not all trolls are created equally. It's easy to dismiss the one-word, obscene, or spam rolls, but too many naive and gullible people treat plausible trolls as wise and true because no one counters them. They need a counter-argument now, not years later after they've wised up on their own.

No. By your standards, everybody takes advantage of everybody else. By normal standards, a voluntary trade makes both parties better off.

Considering how malleable bureaucrats' work load is in every company, and how much more so in government, I don't think I'll put much credence in government bureaucrats bragging about their own analysis of their own experiment.

On the other hand, everyone would probably be better off if more government workers worked less, even if they got paid for 40 hours.

And I did load different add and multiply tables. It was a great machine for learning.

Yes! Some of the most frustrating and ultimately rewarding work has been decoding programs, whether from machine language or sources, to figure out what they do, what they were supposed to do, and the simplest and least disruptive ways to fix them. There's real satisfaction in finding a bug in two hours that a team of your "betters" couldn't find in two weeks.

I learned to program on some funky decimal machines (IBM 1620, Univac SS 90) in machine language, CDC 6400 assembler, graduated to 8 bit assembler, M68K assembler, then C, a bunch of Java, Perl, and who knows what. The farther it got from machine code, the more the fun changed. That Univac SS 90 had a drum for main memory, and 1+1 addressing where every instruction included the address of the next instruction, and optimization could make it hum. The CDC 6400 had all sorts of different kinds of optimization tricks. So did the M68K. The 68020 had some many optimization strategies that the fun shifted to solving puzzles. Compilers always had their own tricks, and tricking them into doing the right thing was fun.

The major fun was not optimization but solving puzzles. I've never used an AI to help, never put up with any of that agile pairing nonsense. I expect I would find AIs to just be another tool to expand the puzzles to solve.

If someone were to pay me to go back to programming the IBM 1620, Univac SS90, or CDC 6400, I would not take them up on it. It sure was fun, but it's a lot more fun to solve puzzles, and I solved more puzzles the better the tools got. I think AI would be just the same.

If someone were to tell me AIs take the fun out of programming, I'd say only in the same way compilers took the fun out of optimizing fro a drum machine. There will always be new tools and new ways to use them. Don't stagnate. Don't refuse to try the new tools. Concentrate on the puzzles, and solving bigger ones faster.

Sadly, this is considered normal for governments rigging the game, and for judicial systems which favor ritual over justice.