I mean, it depends on exactly how fast the water is moving (as well as how deep it is; both things matter). If we're talking normal river current (say, 1 foot per second), most adults can stand in eighteen inches and be fine, if it doesn't catch them off guard. If the current is faster, then it doesn't have to be as deep to have essentially the same effect, or if it's deeper, it doesn't have to be as fast.

There are of course some caveats to the above. One is, once you get past about 4-5 feet deep (depending on the person), you're floating or swimming anyway, so additional depth doesn't matter very much at that point; but additional velocity still makes a difference.

Yeah, I'd call that sentence more... vapid and awkward, like much corporate speech, than tortured. It's not like it's unparseable; the meaning is fairly clear -- it's just pointless in the context presented. It serves no constructive purpose for the reader, being a vague attempt to invoke a nonspecific sense of nostalgia, likely to distract people from the frustration of the shop being closed? Corporations churn this slop out with or without LLMs

no problem.

I'm actually responding to the AC above you. He is arguing that the attack wouldn't make any sense for either country to make, based on *national* interest. I'm pointing out that's not the only framework in which *regimes* make decisions.

Oh, forgot to mention I'm from the Midwest. There's no room in the garage for a _car_ of all things, haha, that would be ridiculous. No, the garage is where we keep the garage stuff. You know, the lawn mower, snow blower, garden tools, step ladder, extension ladder, bicycles, sawhorses, sports gear, extra bricks left over from when the patio was put in, spare pieces of plywood, hedge trimmers, mattocks, old paint buckets, hula hoops, bungee cords, antifreeze, grill, charcoal, lighter fluid, and so on and so forth. There are four people in this household, so the garage is pretty much full. It think there might be a cheap plastic imitation of the Amulet of Yendor out there.

Sure, but if we're going to gatekeep employment and advancement behind a system that rigidly demands that you work well under time pressure, a lot of people never get to find something suited to their abilities.

I myself barely made it through university because I'm terrible at taking tests. I've been successful in my industry for almost 30 years now. But I was gated by the same tests as everyone else.

Some parts of the working world are a lot more forgiving than you're giving them credit for, especially now that remote work is a thing. Over the last few years I've watched companies drop the programming test from their hiring process—including Epic—because it didn't get them the results they wanted. They accidentally selected for people who worked well under stress, but 99% of our jobs aren't like that. They got better results with interviews that involve a lot of talking to reveal the things that you know.

In Canada, someone did a study of how much it cost to administer NSERC grants (a very prestigious, large grant for doing science research) vs. how much it would cost to just give every applicant what they asked for, and it was CHEAPER to give out the money than scrutinize each grant for its worthiness. Where's the value in withholding the money? There's good science that doesn't get funded and instead bureaucrats shuffling papers eat it all up trying to understand grant applications that they're not qualified to inspect.

You will definitely get people working the system in these cases, but there's an argument to be made that more accommodation will just give better results overall. Just give EVERYONE more time on the test. 100% of people get 6 hours to write the test. The people that are now trying to 'take advantage' of the system are returned to a level playing field. The people that need that time because they're neurodivergent don't have to ask for it. You get to see if people actually learned the material. There's little practical downside.

I'm a lead programmer in the games industry, and I did not show up to meetings with low value. But that said, 50% of my time was spent on meetings and managerial duties.

Critically, I consider it my job to go to meetings so the other programmers on my team DON'T. We need to talk about the state of the game. We need to discuss mechanics and timelines and all sorts of things. But I don't want other programmers in more than a few hours of meetings a week, and most of those meeting hours should be just in our team giving and getting updates.

We were aggressive about cutting meetings that people felt had little or diminishing value. Sometimes meetings are useful for a time and then they're not. I never went to a meeting that I was invited to where I didn't feel like I needed to hear the information or present something useful. Guard your own time, no matter what level of worker you are.

But yeah, useless meetings feel terrible. I didn't feel bad about the meetings I went to because we often accomplished a lot.

Nah, the deals on used EVs are great right now; I think more people are going to start buying them up. They have low maintenance and running costs, and for around town, they're great.

There are so many goddamn F-150s on the road belonging to people that never tow a single thing or load the bed up. They're commuter cars for accountants with masculinity issues. Don't tell me that we shouldn't get these dipshits into normal cars or EVs both for the sake of the environment and road safety.

Autism is a much broader category than it used to be.

There's actually some evidence now that ADHD and Autism are on the SAME SPECTRUM, they're just different manifestations of slightly different brain wiring. For some people, it's more of an impediment, but fundamentally, the impediment is that we don't allow those people to be themselves. They might stim by flapping their hands a bit or moving around (I have ADHD, and I ALWAYS have to have something in my hands during meetings; I also 'pain stim', where I might press the tip of a paperclip against my finger. It doesn't HURT hurt and I don't break the skin, but the stimulation is something that I do basically unconciously).

Anyway, when we talk about neurodivergence, some people need little to no accommodation and some people need lots. I actually don't think having tight time limits on tests makes any sense. In my work, I get lots of time to research and figure out answers, and if I do it enough, the answers become easier to come up with. Are we trying to test whether people know things, or whether they deal with time pressure the way we think is necessary (again, for no good reason).

You gotta pay people to monitor the exams anyway, just let people have the time they need. If they get 100%, great, they know their stuff. What's the issue?

Just put it in context: Today Russia struck the Pechenihy Reservoir dam in Kharkiv.
Russia launched the war because they thought it would be a quick and easy win, a step towards reestablishing a Russian empire and sphere of influence, because Putin thinks in 19th century terms. Russia is continuing the war, not because it's good for Russia. I'd argue that winning and then having to rebuild and pacify Ukraine would be a catastrophe. Russia is continuing the war because *losing* the war would be catastrophic for the *regime*. It's not that they want to win a smoldering ruin, it's that winning a smoldering ruin is more favorable to them and losing an intact country.

Your conclusion isn't wrong, but your supporting argument suffers from selection bias, confirmation bias, and a really small sample size.

Among other things, young people are overwhelmingly more likely to be interested in academic topics if their parents also were (and you can spend arbitrary amounts of time arguing nature-vs-nurture on this; my conclusion is that it's both, and they're usually in synergy with one another on this issue), and statistically that means they are overwhelmingly more likely to be interested in academic topics, if their parents have enough money to *buy* their kids things like books, magazines, and subscriptions to learning-related services (CrunchLabs, Curiosity Stream, Brilliant, etc.) Statistically, the majority of public-library users are below median income, and they're in the public library because it's affordable. Children from lower-income households, statistically, are more likely to check out a video game or a movie, than a book, unless they need the book for a project that someone (usually a teacher) is _requiring_ them to complete (and sometimes they don't even bother then). The kids who enjoy learning, *tend* an awful lot of the time to have access to information that is not dependent on the public library. Though of course there are exceptions. And sometimes there are people who *prefer* to use the public library for ideological reasons, even if they could afford to be independent of it; but such people are in the minority.

For what it's worth, I'm in the same camp as you, someone with a fairly academic bent who grew up relying heavily on public, free sources of information, especially public libraries. My dad had a graduate degree, but it was in a field not known for large salaries; my mom, who is no dummy but doesn't have a bachelor's degree, was actually the primary bread-winner throughout my childhood. (She attended a hospital-run nursing school, back when those were a thing, and so was a registered nurse.) But, statistically, we are in the minority on this.

With that said, it's absolutely true that lack of interest in information, is a much bigger problem than lack of access to information, in the modern world, especially in the developed world.

You:
> I need my system administration routine down around 30 minutes per month.

Also you:
> I want GUIs for all common tasks

Yeah, those are *fundamentally* incompatible goals. Doing system administrative tasks using GUI tools is always going to take a lot of extra time, because GUIs aren't really scriptable. I mean, yes, you can use fancy window-manager features and macro toolkits (like xdotool or whatever) up to a point, to recognize certain windows and automatically click certain things, but this is inherently brittle and high-maintenance, in addition to taking a *lot* longer to set up, than throwing a handful of commands in a script and calling it a day.

If you're doing system administration in a GUI, it's going to be more like 30 minutes per month *per major service* that you administer. So 30 minutes a month for the web server, 30 minutes a month for the RDBMS, 30 a month and sometimes more for the mail server, 30 minutes a month for the firewall, and so on and so forth. If you want 30 minutes a month total, you need something you can easily script and run on cron jobs, and that means command-line tools.

GUI tools seem attractive when you're new, because the learning curve is lower. But it's a trap. In the long run, they will continue demanding large amounts of your time month after month, year after year, decade after decade, until you finally get fed up and kick them to the curb.

Am I the only person on the planet who still opens the garage door with, you know, my hands? Is that completely crazy? Am *I* crazy?

Sure, I get that, but iPad? Laptop? PC?

Is your phone the thing you're going to be doing it on? And if it is, I guess it's nice that they're making $2500 morning news devices, but it still seems a bit crazy for the price.

I like a nice big screen as much as anyone, but after years and years of owning an iPad I'm using it less and less. And I honestly can't figure out why you'd want to tote around something that big all the time. Flights, I guess? A lot of traveling? I don't begrudge anyone buying one if they want it or they actually do have a day to day use for it, but I want my phone to get SMALLER.

The only folding phone I'll consider is the flip style, to reduce the carrying size. That would be handy to me, even if the folded dimensions are much thicker than my current phone. It'll still fit in a lot more pockets than the current form factor.