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Comment Re:Great but (Score 1) 6

Yup, moved to NZ from the UK and I went from 80Mbit fibre-to-the-cabinet in the UK (and only getting around 50MBit to the house in reality) to getting gigabit fibre to the premises in NZ - and the NZ offering had no caps, got on average 950MBit plus sustained, and was half the price of the UK offering.

Comment Re:40x income is still 40x paid to gov't (Score 1) 151

Other countries have solved these problems.

In the UK, most people dont have to file taxes - there are no deductions for the vast majority of people, you dont get to deduct your mortgage costs, healthcare costs or anything else. You pay your tax in monthly instalments taken from your wage by your employer, based on well known tax codes and your level of earning, and at the end of the year you get a piece of paper saying how much you paid. If you switched jobs and earned more but underpaid tax, your tax code is adjusted for the next financial year and you pay more tax per month to cover both the previous years shortfall and your new tax requirement.

If you run a business, then the business does file returns, and does have deductions - so that covers your business, Uber driver, travel expenses and everything else. People travelling for business claim expenses through the company, and the company deals with the tax implications.

A businesses accounts and the accounts of the business owner are very very strictly separate - the business owner does not get to dip into the business for their own usage, they get paid a wage or dividend, which is taxed like everyone else as income.

Comment Re:Unsubscribe (Score 2) 29

Don’t unsubscribe, mark it as junk. And if it gives you the option to block the sender, do it.

Gmail has such an inconsistent behaviour here it’s unbelievable - how the web ui works is very different to the apps.

Gmail also is terrible at spotting obvious spam, and im regularly marking actual spam as such.

Comment Re:but what about the kickbacks on the $20K tech f (Score 2) 52

You joke but a lot of suppliers to the US government, including the military, works on a two-contract basis - the initial acquisition of the item, and then the support contract for the item.

A lot of suppliers bid low on the initial acquisition contract, because they know they can make up losses on the support side later on. The supplier is also more willing to take on more risk as part of the supply, again because they can make money back on the support.

If the support contract becomes uncertain because the military can go elsewhere to support the item, then expect the supply contracts to get a lot more expensive, and a lot fewer contractors willing to undertake fixed price deliveries for anything.

The US government did try something similar to this in the late 1980s and early 1990s - they split the procurement of new items into two contracts, the first being the development of the item, and the second being the delivery of the item. Whomever won the development contract had to hand over everything needed to produce the item to whomever won the delivery contract. The problem is, all the risk exists in the development contract, and all the profit exists in the delivery contract.

It did not go well and after a couple of very bad outcomes for development contract winners, they stopped bidding. So the approach was dropped.

Comment Re:Fuel or electrical? (Score 2) 106

Another greater possibility is that one engine failed for some reason and the pilots reacted incorrectly causing the good engine to be shut down. This is the most likely and there have been other crashes caused by this kind of mistake. Pilots spend their whole careers maintaining equal thrust between a plane's engines, but then when an engine failure happens they have to go for maximum unequal thrust.

This is unlikely because its been shown that the time it takes to go through the 787 engine-out checklist, to get to the point where you do anything that could conceivably turn the good engine off, is longer than the time between when the aircraft took off and crashed.

If this was the case, it would have been done by a crew member not going through the checklist.

Comment Even USAs own rating agencies ... (Score 3, Informative) 249

... are having a hard time justifying their favorable ratings. With one the US has moved from AAA to AA a few years back and even that was seen as being nice and kind. I hope the US doesn't squander trust beyond the Trump era, lest you guys be sitting on a pile of money that the world has finally noticed not being worth the paper it's printed on.

It is my opinion that you could have a true revolution, a bottom-up redo of the US constitution and fixes for the most glaring broken parts of the US system up and running within months without even a single bullet fired. AFAICT from across the pond basically _everyone_ agrees that the current state of things has become untenable. You don't need to be a bunch of Trumpists storming the Capitol to see this.

Comment Going bust soon. (Score 1) 27

Disclaimer: This is a repost from a while back and I'm a senior webdev and part of the target customers.
>>>>

Figma barely has a business case. Anything still left is being snacked up by AI or will eventually be replaced by open source software.

With UI design tools it's just like with Editors or Web Toolkits. There is always some hype-cycle that pushes the tool that then quickly gets replaced by the next fad: Sketch - Adobe XD - Invision - Figma ... whatever. Meanwhile folks who have chosen and stayed with Inkscape and Object Libraries or Penpot will do so until the end of their days and save the money and hassle.

I don't even use UI designers anymore, I build right in the web these days. The UI libs are all there already and you can integrate them just as quick as drawing the element. I might copy the occasional SVG object into my components, but that's because Inkscape is a neat vector drawing tool for the custom stuff. For everything else I don't even need it anymore.

Comment Re:"Up and Down" vs. "Around the World" (Score 1) 39

The only person bringing SpaceX into this is you.

Why does there have to be any comparison at all? Why does there have to be a perceived competition between what Blue Origin are doing here and what SpaceX are doing over there?

There is something broken in western news media and social media, in that everything simply *must* be a race or a competition, and if one entity in the perceived competition is behind then they shouldn't even bother - it doesn't matter that none of the actual entities themselves see themselves as being in a competition or race, they dont matter, its an external thing being forced on them by observers.

The concept that an entity can be entirely about their own milestones, rather than judging their progress by measuring against another entity, is rapidly becoming an impossibility in many peoples minds.

You see it all the time, with SpaceX being used as the thing to measure against - someone hops a rocket, oh but they are a decade behind SpaceX so why are they even bothering. Someone launches a new rocket but its not reusable, doesn't matter than it meets all the internal requirements of the project and the project sponsors, its not reusable so they are so far behind SpaceX so why are they even bothering. Blue Origin launches a sub-orbital rocket, entirely meeting their own internal goals, but its not orbital so they are so behind SpaceX, so why are they even bothering...

Not everything has to be a competition.

Comment You missed out. Watch it. (Score 2) 29

"The Social Network" is to a notable extent a work of fiction and construes a Zuckerberg that doesn't really resemble the real one rather than an amalgamation of nerd-rage projected on to a fictional Mark Zuckerberg.

The movie is ever so slightly flawed in that way and does stretch the one or other trope a little too hard when observed in isolation ("crazy bitch", "angry wounded nerd", "loudmouth silicon valley investor" etc.) but those are _all_ placed and played in service of the story and its telling and that is flat-out epic. Every single part right down to single-scene appearances are cast to the T and deliver an unbelievable performance, the pacing is flawless, the character dynamic is a masterpiece, every single word of dialog punches above its weight, the score is breathtaking and the camera-work is top tier.

It's definitely a masterpiece of a movie and Fincher (and Sorkin) knocked this one out of the park and into geo-stationary orbit, there is no two ways about that.

One of the penultimate scenes is a rage scene that Fincher shot 99 (ninetynine!) times and edited it out of 114 different adjacent takes. It's flat-out epic and one of the iconic scenes in movie history and generally regarded as the "best rage scene ever". This just to illustrate the obnoxious attention to detail and borderline autistic aim for perfection by Fincher. It shows in the entire movie.

It only won two oscars because the reviewers where overwelmed by the topic, otherwise it would've scored higher.

You definitely missed out. Watch it. As a special occasion. You won't be disappointed, that's a promise.

Comment Sorkins scripts are the best ... (Score 2) 29

... but I'd rather have movie itself directed by Fincher. They both collaborate very closely and AFAIK are good friends, but I don't see _anyone_ coming close to dialog movies directed by Fincher. He's basically his own league as a film director and just about anybody who knows anything about films agrees on that.

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