In case you never took that course, the classical economist David Ricardo figured out that if you were a tenant farmer choosing between two lots of land, the difference in the productivity of the lands makes no difference to you. Thatâ(TM)s because if a piece of land yielded, say, ten thousand dollars more revenue per year, the landlord would simply be able to charge ten thousand more in rent. In essence landlords can demand all these economic advantages their land offers to the tenant.

All these tech companies are fighting to create platforms which you, in essence, rent from them. Why do you want to use these platforms? Because they promise convenience, to save you time. Why do the tech companies want to be in the business of renting platforms deeply embedded in peopleâ(TM)s lives? Because they see the time theyâ(TM)re supposedly saving you as theirs, not yours.

Sure, the technology *could* save you time, thatâ(TM)s what youâ(TM)d want it for, but the technology companies will inevitably enshittify their service to point itâ(TM)s barely worth using, or even beyond that if they can make it hard enough for customers to extract themselves.

Calling Belgium 3rd world isn't fair at all. It's a fledging 3rd world country at worst, nothing at all similar to the imminent 3rd world country that (say) the UK is.

You spend a lot of time on X, huh?

but I don't really consider women with 20% bodyfat in their 50s overweight..or men with 15% bodyfat at any age.

Well, you'd be wrong. BF% of >15% for men and >20% is overweight.

The reality is that most women over 50 are closer to 40%, and for any age it's >30%. Over half of women over 30 are obese. (Men aren't great but it's nothing as dire as this.)

This is even with our greatly-loosened criteria for what is considered obese - it used to be even more strict. People today are disgustingly unfit.

Coal isn't 'dirty energy'. Particularly with EPA regulation, it's considered "green" now. It's overall ecological impact (that is, in terms of total lifecycle cost) is significantly lower than wind.

Saying "wind is green" is myopic and short sighted, and doesn't include the massively disproportional material and ecological cost of producing the disposable steel and concrete towers with large, easily damaged fiberglass resin blades.

Wind isn't the lowest cost for baseload - if it isn't subsidized. It's not even competitive with natural gas, and is markedly less reliable.

It's subsidization which makes it cost competitive. And even then, it's only competitive per kwh, it's not competitive for primary base load (which is 100% what a datacenter needs) because wind is cyclical and periodic. It isn't always windy in WY, and it's often too windy for wind power (35mph+ winds). I'm really tired of the tripe propaganda about wind/solar. I LIKE wind and solar, conceptually (and for the ability to run it off-grid), but let's be real.

The solution here, long term, is likely SMR generation at-scale. You've got many datacenters, and the capacity scales rapidly. A single large reactor doesn't make fiscal sense, but a national program to produce industrialized SMRs at scale which could be deployed as needed over a period of years would, enabling cheap power generation. When you build at scale, you're able to drastically drive costs down.

Fission is also now on the horizon.

But in the interim, green coal and NG are likely to be the thing.

(I'm not looking forward to the massive impact that this is going to have on the regional NG market; NG has already gotten significantly more expensive, and so many people use it for heating.)

You should be careful of taking the claims of the Chinese Communist Party at face value. China has universal health insurance, but it is administered in a way that many people canâ(TM)t access critical care *services*.

For example if you are a rural guest worker in a city, you have health insurance which covers cancer treatment, but it requires you to go back to your home village to get that treatment, which probably isnâ(TM)t available there. If you are unemployed you have a different health insurance program, but its reimbursement rate is so low that most unemployed people canâ(TM)t afford treatment.

Authoritarian governments work hard to manage appearances, not substance. This is a clear example. It sounds egalitarian to say everyone has the same health insurance, but the way they got there was to engineer a system that didnâ(TM)t require them to do the hard work of making medical care available to everyone.

If you want an example of universal healthcare, go across the strait to Taiwan, which instituted universal healthcare in the 90s and now has what many regard as the best system in the world.

I do accept it. CO2 is 0.042% of our atmosphere. It has not been shown that CO2 is primarily or even significantly contributory to the greenhouse effect, however.

Even if it would, an increase of 500ppm (which would make the atmosphere itself terminally toxic to most mammal life) would only increase the global temperature 0.18C (according to original calculations I had chatgpt just do), which is hardly consequential in and of itself. And CO2 isn't going to increase that much from human action alone.

Nothingburger.

Almost all of them are deceit through omission, deception, or outright fabrication. So much of their data is falsifiable, particularly when it gets to the media as some sensational datapoint - like "The Gulf of Mexico is 110F! Climate change disaster!" or some such nonsense - when they're getting the data from the reading from one buoy inside a single marina. Happens all the time.

The thing is, there hasn't actually been an increase in extreme climate events. There's actually been a decrease.

Our infrastructure has simply become more intolerant of them, because we haven't been maintaining it or building it towards the possibility of exceptional weather. The result is more damage and more death, but it isn't caused by an increase in either the frequency or the severity.

You can quite quickly see there's a strong correlation between solar activity and the status of our severe weather events, too - it's well known and established fact - so I'm unclear how this in any way relates to (human-caused) climate change. Someone explain this to me?

It's relying on LLMs being able to search the internet for things. It goes somethign like this:

LLM searches for something, ends up on a site.
Site has multiple links embedded in it with said DNS payloads.
DNS lookup occurs.
LLM 'reads' said payload.

It actually is that hard, sometimes.

Often, jobs have a culture which have become structured so that you must be responsive, if not 24/7, then at the least during your work hours, to IMs. Step away from your desk for 30m to eat lunch or whatever? People are going to start calling you in many of these (IMO toxic) environments.

And frankly, it's required for some jobs (like in support roles). You've got to be available and IM is used for coordinating on the ground.

I've told people I am simply not available on IM platforms on my phone, I won't even install them if I can avoid it. This has caused some backlash, admittedly, but it's sanity worth preserving. If it's important, think it out a bit more and send me an email.

There's no good solution for this, unfortunately, particularly when everyone's set on using Slack for everything.

Technologies like OAUTH 2.0 have been around for a long, long time, and their purpose is to provide a verifiable audit-trail for users.

And it works! Although there have been (and will always be) security issues, the reality is that technologies like SAML and OAUTH do provide a very useful level of trust.

Except that, although these technologies do allow for a useful transfer of identity, the agents widely used to provide this identity (the IDP) is never an entity that provides a uniformly useful level of identity.

Here I am: Bill Jones (not my real name) citizen of the UK (not my real country, either) and I have no way to properly assert that to, say, Bank of the West (not my real bank, either) or Northern Airlines. (not my real airline)

If I have to assert my true identity, I have a state-issued driver's license or passport. Why do I have no way to assert either of these identification documents electronically?

Why can't I use my passport ID to assert myself to the bank, or the airline?

Seems to me that it would be HIGHLY USEFUL if I could. And it seems to be self-evident and proper that the agencies that issue drivers licenses or passports could offer electronic identification, even if it's sourced out to a tech company with a good reputation.

In the US, it's now become increasingly common to have a unified electronic ID to interact with agencies: see id.me. This is a start, and I know government agencies work GLACIALLY SLOWLY so maybe by the time my grandkids are having babies this could be a thing.

Eh?

> At some point you have to ask why you're using RAID at all. If it's for always-on, avoiding data loss due to hardware failures, and speed, then RAID 6 isn't really am great solution for avoiding data loss when disks get to these kinds of sizes, the chances of getting more than one disk fail simultaneously is approaching one, and obviously it was never great for speed.

If you're at this point, then using drives at all is probably already off the table. But I think this position is probably ridiculous.

I have many years of experience managing file clusters in scopes ranging from SOHO to serving up to 15,000 people at a time in a single cluster. In a cluster of 24 drives under these constant, enterprise-level loads, I saw maybe 1 drive fail in a year.

I've heard this trope about "failure rate approaching 1" since 500GB drives were new. From my own experience, it wasn't really true then, any more than it's true now.

Yes, HDDs have failure rates to keep in mind, but outside the occasional "bad batch", they are still shockingly reliable. Failure rates per unit haven't changed much, even though with rising capacities, that makes the failure rate per GB rise. It still doesn't matter as much as you think.

You can have a great time if you follow a few rules, in my experience:

1) Engineer your system so that any drive cluster going truly offline is survivable. AKA "DR" or "Disaster Recovery". What happens if your data center gets flooded or burns to the ground? And once you have solid DR plans, TRUMPET THE HECK OUT OF IT and tell all your customers. Let them know that they really are safe! It can be a HUGE selling point.

2) Engineer your system so that likely failures are casually survivable. For me, this was ZFS/RAIDZ2, with 6 or 8 drive vdevs, on "white box" 24 bay SuperMicro servers with redundant power.

3) If 24x7x36* uptime is really critical, have 3 levels of redundancy, so even in a failure condition, you fail to a redundant state. For me engineering at "enterprise" level, we used application-layer logic so there were always at least 2 independent drive clusters containing full copies of all data. We had 3 drive clusters using different filesystem technologies (ZFS, XFS/LVM) and sometimes we chose to take one offline to do filesystem level processing or analysis.

4) Backups: You *do* have backups, and you do adhere to the 3-2-1 rule, right? In our case, we used ZFS replication and merged backups and DR. This combined with automated monitoring ensured that we were ready for emergencies, which did happen and were always managed in a satisfactory way.

The only rational extension of this, then, is to get into that business.

Get experience welding/fabricating/cement work/construction, and figure out where that tech is going. Build a small nestegg as you rent and be intentionally poor.

Start a business doing what you now know, but automated - and ask your parents to help with collateral. Get investments and funding. Buy into a franchise making future-looking technology that can do the trade you now know.

The 3d printed structure equipment is one such vertical I can think of. Being able to run cable in those structures? You're going to need to learn how to do that, or hire someone to do it, because that's sometime off from being automated. There are still human elements which will remain such for the foreseeable future.

This will, unfortunately, undercut most people who do not have a combination of an IQ over 110-120, drive, and grit - which includes most of the people who are currently "programmers", unfortunately.