If you live in Northern California, perhaps. But pretty much everywhere else, people are being told to get back to the office of find another job. In my area, the job notices are explicit about remote work not being available, and mandating an office presence.

That seems incredibly short-sighted. I could sort of see why there might be issues with some kind of active emissions system at ground level due to sheer noise at ground level, but up in the sky one would expect that any signals would be uncluttered enough to be incredibly reliable.

If they're governed anything like amateur radio antenna masts/towers are, the FAA only gets involved when the structure reaches something like 200'.

And regardless, the drone should not hit things. It needs to detect obstructions and avoid them. That it didn't detect a metal structure that was not moving says some rather bad things about the flight control system of the drone.

Better Ukraine than my crane. *Ba-dmp-Bump!*

Really...

It's Not Just Epstein. MAGA Is Angry About a Lot of Things

I don't know who you're talking to, but while they're generally happy with him, Trump supporters call him out fairly frequently when they think he's getting squishy on something. They were mad at him for the Syrian involvement in the first term, and in just the last few months they've been unhappy about both the strike on Iran and his flip on the Ukraine war, both of which they maintain we shouldn't be involved in at all. There was criticism of the Intel purchase. There was criticism about his vacillation a few months back on H1B's. A cursory glance at any Trump-friendly forum over the post few months will show lots of threads where his supporters are questioning or opposing him on something. They're not the thralls without a will of their own you seem to think they are.

What does Brexit have to do with their debt levels? Debt-to-GDP has been climbing across the EU as well, with the average debt over 88% of GDP now. Germany is the lowball figure among the major powers in the union at 68%, with with the other big boys... France, Spain, Italy... all at well over 100%. High debt is endemic throughout nearly every first world power, especially in the West. Why Britain is being singled out here is strange. The EU members with relatively low levels of debt are, ironically, the ex-Communist states (see the same link above). It's all of Western Europe that's been living it up on credit.

Actually in China significantly more students choose to pursue degrees in technology, engineering,or business than in the US â" degrees which qualify them for specific jobs after graduation. So the process of college education becoming more vocationally oriented and less about training intellectual skills has advanced even more advanced in China than it is here.

China grants very few liberal arts degrees and its vocational degree programs have minimal or no liberal arts content. In the US an engineering or business degree program requires substantial liberal arts content to be degree accredited. So an engineering student graduating from a US program has had many semesters of training in critical reading and thinking, challenging claims with original sources, and crafting persuasive arguments in areas where opinions differ.

These are skills the Chinese government is not eager to put in the hands of its citizens, so we really ought to question just how âoeuselessâ those non-vocational intellectual skills really are. There are clearly people here whose priorities for education are more aligned with Chinaâ(TM)s â" inculcating respect for authority, obedience to tradition as described by authority, and job skills useful to authorities. In other words for them education isnâ(TM)t about empowering the students, itâ(TM)s about forming a class of compliant worker bees.

Accenture Makes Room for AI With Thousands of Layoffs

Salesforce CEO confirms 4,000 job cuts ‘because I need less heads' with AI

Glassdoor and Indeed announce layoffs, reportedly due to AI

AI-driven job cuts may be underreported

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says company will cut jobs amid AI boom. It's already happening at Microsoft.

A cursory Google search in the News column will give you an endless line of links.

You can say "Tis but a flesh wound!" if you like, but I see limbs being hacked off.

I've made three purchases online this week, one of them large, and in every instance, an AI chatbot with "Powered by AI" was the purchase support. If you hated Clippy, you're really going to hate first level support going forward.

Yep.

Businesses: "We're laying off a bunch of people to replace them with AI"

Yale: "AI has no effect on jobs"

Reference yesterday's post about distrust of elite universities. The whole thing got bogged down into a stupid slapfest about politics, but perhaps the biggest driver of that loss of trust is right here: the perception that academics live with their heads in the clouds, out in Theory World, while reality is much different.

No. There are college students that are doing exactly what you say, but there are also college students that know they're broke and can't afford to continually party, or at least not where that partying costs money. There are students that know they're skating on thin ice and they don't want to fail. There are students that are super responsible in college just like they were in high school. There are students that are lost because they had a lot of coddling up through high school that are suddenly having to do everything for themselves. There are students that are actually feeling free because no one is coddling them telling them what not to do. And all other manner.

Societies seem to be fractal in nature, sub-groups reflect a distribution similar to the main group from which they come. I've seen this firsthand in several scenes. There are bullies and wallflowers and know-it-alls and nerds and jocks and tinkerers and artists in small groups that reflect a distribution similarly to the larger group that all are drawn from.

Yeah, the ivy-league and other upper-end schools tend to overperform in their graduates finding work in their fields after graduating, and the now-mostly-defunct ITTs, University of Phoenixes, and other trade schools that don't tend to have as much in in-person education and are there mostly to profit off of the student-loans programs for people who would never be accepted at even state-schools tend to have the worst placement after graduating.

This is admittedly a supposition on my part, but having sat through college courses where very conservative students tried to push their uneducated mentality that was clearly factually wrong and faced pushback from lecturers or professors with actual research behind their instruction, the act of education itself takes a student out of uneducated provinciality and gives them a more complete view. Someone that's uneducated is usually pretty provincial in their attitude and thinking, and if they perceive even learning about the wider world as change, they will attribute that to liberalism same as if a new attitude were brought into their little provincial area, even if it's merely giving them a more complete picture of what's wider than their scope of influence and experience.

The problem is that this is an outright reactionary approach, actively hostile to anything that requires the individual to do more than continue doing the exact same thing that has always been done. It's also foolish because it makes the individual less adaptable when other situations come along that require rolling with the change because it's happening whether or not it's wanted.

The little secret that people who insist on enforcing what they consider to be conservative values fail to get is that even in a society that is generally more permissive in a liberal sense than they want, generally nothing is stopping them from making the choice to live personally conservatively. One can even have incredibly liberal views and can still personally choose to live in a way that a conservative would find to be pretty normal and acceptable.

Mmhmm. Prior to the McDonnell-Douglas takeover, Boeing seemed to have generally been on a track of continuous development/redevelopment, working on new designs and working on revamps of their existing designs for subsequent revs even as in-development revs were approaching final approval.

Looking at the history of McDonnell-Douglas, they basically relied on the legacies of the DC-9 (1965) and DC-10 (1971) until even after the Boeing merger. The DC-9/MD-80 series/MD-90 Series/Boeing-717 and the DC-10/MD-11 were long LONG production, arguably even going back to before McDonnell was in the picture, they were Douglas projects.

The MD mentality of iterating on existing designs when they have to is what put the merged new-Boeing into this position now. It took around 25 years for this mentality shift to truly break the merged company. Arguably even though it was started around the time of the merger, the 787 was the last gasp of old-Boeing, having been kicked off after the MD takeover but before the MD financial attitude towards R&D had fully infected the operating company. After that we only see variants on existing designs in order to maintain type-ratings.