Yep. "I can take this $11 million, turn it into $17 million really quick, then pocket the extra and make that series.". Then when the $11 million becomes $4 million the spiral begins.

I'll be surprised if I find out EOs have any authority outside the executive branch of the federal government. Otherwise a presnit could just unilaterally ban abortion, change federal, state, and locals laws and tax rates, disband Congress...

So join ANTIFAI - anti-f*-ai.

Though it might get you labeled as a ter'ist. Especially if you don't buy the products they're pushing.

What's the point of having a national military if you can't use it to pump taxpayer dollars into corporate coffers?

*scenario*

"Fox company, we'll airdrop a licensed mechanic and a licensed parts salesman onto your position around 0930, as soon as they finish repairing some stuff the enemy captured last year and make their way back to our side of the lines. Division says hold your position as best you can until then -- and remind the riflemen not to use their weapons as clubs, as that will void their warranty. It would be better for the overall war effort to let you position be overrun."

"No, Davies can't fix the autocannon even if your lives depend on it. Division says to shoot him in the arse if he so much as touches it."

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.

They're dragging buzzwords through the water, so see whether they get any nibbles.

Your MBA/PHB eats this shit right up.

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.

I'll need to test it (its been a while) - I'm using an Intel Arc A310 on my rig where I encode. I've got an AMD 9070 XT in my gaming machine but I haven't really tested encoding on that one.

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?

AV1 seems like a good codec - I'm always happy to use it though, even hardware assisted encoding is still a bit slow for me. If I'm reencoding videos for my own use I usually will encode to x265 instead, which has a good balance between file size/quality and compression speed.

Look, I'm not above using a bit of AI when I'm coding, but that's limited to asking chat GPT to bang out a short function or something that I don't feel like coding myself (ie, most recently "Give me a bit of TSQL to determine if a date falls on Thanksgiving"). There is no way in hell I'd turn it loose with the ability to actually modify files on my system.

They tried to do Jesus, but passengers kept calling security about a hippy boarding the plane.