So, way, way back in the day, the Air Force (might have still been the Army Air Force - that's how old this anecdote is) decided to standardize cockpits. Making them highly adjustable is a huge pain in the ass, and very expensive.

So, they brought in thousands of volunteers for measurement. They measured torso lengths, the lengths of shinbones, the lengths of upper arms, the lengths of fingers, etc. Virtually every body part that had a length was measured.

They compiled tables of statistics for all of these data sets. As expected, each measurement had approximately a normal distribution - a bell curve. The plan was to build a cockpit with minimal adjustment that was still able to fit the vast majority of people in the wide middles of these bell curves.

Punchline: Their new cockpit didn't fit anyone.

That's an exaggeration, of course. It fit a few people. But not many, and certainly not the majority of pilot applicants like they hoped it would.

It turns out that even though almost everyone is basically normal in most measurements, almost everyone is also highly abnormal in at least a few measurements. You have stubby fingers. Joe has unusually long thigs. Bob has short forearms.

The moral of the story - and the way it ties in to the article - is that if you have enough dimensions, it is very normal for everyone to be abnormal in some way.

Rare earth metals aren't rare, they were called that only because they were difficult to refine when someone was thinking up a name for them

Rare can also mean "dispersed" or "low density". This usage is still common when talking about air. For example, sound is a train of alternating compression and rarefication of air. Jet aircraft are more efficient when flying in the rarefied air at high altitude. It is also still somewhat common when talking about social status, basically by metaphor. But it was once fairly common in other contexts too.

Also, by comparison to things like iron, rare earth elements are rare by both definitions.

On your main point, the part that I find most tragic is that battery electric vehicles would be unambiguously great if we had spent the last 50 years making electricity cheaper instead of making it more expensive. And by "we", I mean the fucking morons who destroyed our ability to reprocess uranium and build thorium reactors.

You probably don't want to drop all the way down to a dumb phone. You probably really want to keep a few key features. For me, I'd want to keep my TOTP app. I still want to provide internet access to my GPS device over bluetooth tethering. I still need my bank's app for uploading checks.

You probably have a few other things that you really want to keep too. Go ahead and pause now to make your list.

Now that you have your list: Delete all of the other shit on your phone

If you were thinking about buying a dumb phone to reduce distractions in your life, following my two step plan probably reduced your notification load by about 95%. And it still provides the essential communication services that you've come to rely on.

A new record, I think. Every part of the headline needs scare quotes.

Oh, sorry, I didn't realize that you are a complete retard.

You said that unemployment is at historic lows, as a rebuttal to the idea that assembly of cars destined for sale in America being moved to Mexico has hurt American workers.

But that's not what the unemployment rate means. If this had happened within the last 6 months, rather than over the last 30 years, sure. But the long term harm to American workers isn't captured by the short term unemployment rate.

It actually varies. FedEx sent me an invoice in February for tariffs that they paid on my behalf when Prusa shipped a 3D printer to me.

I'm guessing that places like Temu are going to work something out and pre-pay the tariffs (rolled into the cost of shipping), otherwise they'll lose 99% of their market as people get surprise tariff bills in the mail.

It turns out that the name of a thing is not necessarily an honest description of the thing. In this case, "unemployment rate" is not the rate of people who are unemployed, and a low unemployment rate does not imply that the number of people who are out of work is low.

The unemployment rate is actually the rate of people collecting unemployment benefits while they try to find a job. It does not count people who have given up looking for jobs. It does not count people who are just scraping by with some sort of gig work/hustle.

Windows 11 offers few compelling features that justify an upgrade

Worse than that. Windows 11 offers anti-features that no one wants. These anti-features justify avoiding it entirely.

I wanted to like Libre Office. I tried really hard.

Unfortunately, there is a 15+ year old bug that no one wants to fix, regarding the way it handles localization. Your options are 1) accept every aspect of your country's localization, including, in my case, the retarded American date format that I detest. 2) accept every aspect of some other country's localization. 3) figure out where the hell the localization settings are, edit them, and compile the Windows binaries yourself.

There have been numerous tickets about this in the bug tracker over the years, and the response is always basically "fuck you".

Meanwhile, Excel perfectly handles dates in YYYY-MM-DD format after changing one setting in Windows, including in my hundreds of spreadsheets that have dates stored in various formats.

The classic example is pogo.

Pogo isn't a problem any more, because we know about it and know how to deal with it during the design phase so that it doesn't become a problem during the flight phase.

But when you design something new, you always run the risk of discovering some new failure mode that no one has ever found before. In addition to all of the other failure modes that are known, but not conclusively defeated yet. And all of the failure modes that have been defeated, but by humans who aren't perfect.

The Executive has always been completely in control of the executive branch of government. There are three branches of the federal government - executive, legislative and judicial. There is no "independent" fourth branch of government. If you want one, pass an amendment. Until then, stop pretending that one can be made by statute.

I too was excited by how the headline started, and disappointed by the way it finished.

Been a long time since a modem was headline news on slashdot.

CFPB, established in 2011. Going to get around to looking out for consumers any day now. Yup. Any day now...

I'm up north. Most of our infrastructure is underground. I believe that all of the aboveground stuff here is legacy, grandfathered stuff. I've seen existing poles repaired and replaced. I've seen them get converted to underground. I've seen new underground installations. In 20+ years, I haven't seen any new poles installed in my area, unless you count massive 100kv+ transmission lines, which you can't use for fiber anyway.

There certainly are lots of places with aboveground power lines and/or telephone poles. Those places already have fiber (often gigabit) - not surprisingly, since it only costs a few hundred dollars to bring fiber to a house when the fiber is already at the street.

Follow those poles back to the highway, drive a mile or two and take the next turn onto a different country road, and you could easily be in DSL territory.

If we started today, we are about 2 decades away from something similar to universal fiber access. You basically need a country-wide policy that every time a public road is dug up, fiber gets installed under it. And then wait 20 years for all of the roads to get dug up.

Until then, there are millions of houses where the cost of fiber install will be $100,000+.

I've attended many meetings of local organizations trying to write grant requests to get this money. I've read the proposals. I've seen the quotes from the trenching and horizontal boring companies. If there is already fiber under the road, it costs a few hundred dollars up to maybe a few thousand to fiber up a rural house. If there isn't, the cost goes up more or less linearly with the distance to the nearest highway. A couple of country miles might cost a few million dollars and cover 12 to 20 homes.

And in the grand scheme of things, my area isn't super rural. I've driven through much worse terrain for fiber on recent road trips.