"getting rid of the bottom 10% every year" is a corporate buzz these days. The idea is that you continuously improve the org by always trimming the bottom 10% of performers. While it sounds good in a CEO seminar, this strategy seriously falls down at multiple levels in practice. I watched it unfold in a company I worked for and it was painful to watch. Eventually I quit, which further upset their strategy since I was one of their top performers. Lets hit the high points...

1. Replacements are many times worse. The strategy assumes that you will end up hiring new people with better skills than the "bottom 10%" you laid off. Finding good talent is difficult and expensive and often the replacements are worse performers than the people you arbitrarily laid off.
2. Continuity problems are rife. While the people you laid off might not be as performant as many of their peers, at least they knew their job. By firing them, you throw away their business knowledge and now have to train new people who will inevitably have to "reinvent the wheel" in many areas where knowledge was lost with the outgoing crew. Beyond that, everyone has to learn to work with the new people.
3. Churn is very expensive. It costs money to lay people off. It costs money to recruit new talent. Once you get the new talent, it costs money to train them. Most successful businesses have programs to reduce churn, not encourage it, for this reason alone.
4. Arbitrarily firing people is bad for team morale. Ultimately, many of the "good" employees (including myself) chose to voluntarily find other employment because we didn't want to work in that kind of environment.

In the end, instead of building the "best possible team", you find yourself mired in mediocrity. Your best talent leaves because they can easily find a different job with an employer that values their employees. You fired the bottom 10%. So all that is left is the people in the middle...good enough to not get cut, but not good enough to readily get a job elsewhere.

None of this makes any sense. If the death and hospitalization rates were that high, at least some of the dozens of people I know over 65 should have been hospitalized or died. Yet I don't know anybody who has been hospitalized or died at any age, even those with severe preexisting conditions. Something is wrong with the numbers somewhere.

Yeah, this. Pull off all the Russian owned modules, replace Zvezda with a new US built service module, and the ISS can live on with minimal loss of functionality. There would of course be a lot of details to work out along with that, including redundancy in human rated vehicles, but most of that is already in the works anyway and should be quite achievable by 2024. None of this should be surprising, the Russians were talking about pulling off their modules to make their own station years ago.

Now if Ford can just keep their Mustang Es from bricking themselves, they might have a decent product... https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theverge.com%2F2021%2F...

The description of what happened sounds more like a defective munition than the plane "shooting itself". Lots of drama, little substance.

This makes me want to go back to Mexico. I can't tell you how refreshing it was to walk into a hospital and have a menu of common treatments and services prominently displayed at the front desk. And funny thing, competition keeps prices reasonable. The US system is so broken that it's still cheaper for me to fly to Mexico and get treatment for any major issue than to use my US "insurance" to get treatment here.

This^^^^
The whole premise of the product is that "we are all too acid and that is why we have health problems". Maybe that's generally true, but it is not going to be true for everybody. And "treating" for a condition you don't actually have is obviously dangerous. The only way to really know if you have the condition is testing. As far as I am concerned, anybody who blindly consumes products that claim to treat a disease/condition without consulting a doctor or at least doing some independent research to understand if it's an appropriate treatment deserves whatever happens to them. Natural selection and all that.

Zuck: *buys Whatsapp*
Everyone: Well, it was good while it lasted.
Zuck: Don't worry! We will keep your data separate and secure.
Everyone: OKkkkk (trying to be optimistic but wondering if Zuck can really depart that far from his nature)
Zuck: Just kidding!
Everyone: Aaaand there it is.

Idontspyonyastan. I think its one of the former soviet republics.

DST isn't about science and never was. Even back in the early days of DST discussion when there was some scientific basis for implementing it, the science was sketchy at best. And we know that technology changes rendered DST a completely obsolete concept a hundred years ago. But in the circles of politics, it still does exactly what it's supposed to do: give politicians the "appearance" of doing something important, and giving government a reason to exist. And also why it's so hard to get rid of: the politicians would have to admit that their crowning achievement of energy efficiency has in reality cost untold billions of dollars, megawatts of electricity, pollution, injuries and even deaths over the past 50 years.

Well, it's just batteries. Batteries don't generate power, they only store it. So the assumption would have to be 100MWh. Which means it can power 20,000 homes for one hour. Something like this can smooth out power spikes, but will not help when there is sustained exceptional draw on the grid like Texas recently experienced. You actually have to expand the generation capacity for that.

Musk didn't have to "find a loophole in the laws of physics". The fact is that the physics involved are more favorable for satellites in LEO than those in GEO. First of all, given the MUCH shorter distance to cover, it is within the realm of possibility to overcome some rain fade with a simple power boost. Secondly, the angle factor of the equation is different. With a GEO bird, you are sending the signal through the atmosphere at an acute angle most of the time, which leads to bad situations for rain fade. Starlink is passing more or less directly overhead and enjoys much better angles even in the edge case circumstances. As more satellites are deployed, they will enjoy even more ability to minimize rain fade by having the user terminals be able to pick the satellite with the best angle to "talk" to. In the end, the effects are not significant. I was using my Dishy during a rain storm that brought 1.6" of rain in one day, along with high winds that were pushing on the dish and did not notice any degradation of speed or responsiveness. Users in more snowy regions report no significant problems during heavy snow storms. It can't see through trees...but we don't expect it to so that is not really a problem, just a normal part of "clear line of sight". Mount the dish according to the instructions and you will be happy.

I thought paper containers were the least harmful to the planet since they are made from renewable resources and typically break down in in a matter of weeks when put in a landfill. But what do I know?

Coverage is quickly becoming global already so more satellites are needed mostly for capacity. Musk understands the engineering concept of redundancy well and wields it like a medieval war hammer. The Starlink sats are intentionally designed to be as small and cheap as possible so the network could be started quickly, ramp up capacity over time and if some fail, it has no noticeable effect on the overall network and costs to replace are minimal. SpaceX has the ability to manufacture 6 Starlink sats per day if needed, so having one fail is barely an inconvenience in the schedule. On top of all that, by not having to be overly concerned with having the most reliable components that can last for many years, Starlink engineers can use much more cutting edge technology in the hardware. Regulatory filings say current generation starlink sats have a throughput of 20gbps each, and the technology in the pipeline will be increasing that rapidly. By contrast, Viasat for instance has all their eggs in a few very large and expensive baskets. ViaSat-1 cost them about $1 Billion to build, launch and operate and only has a total throughput of 140gps. If that sat were to fail, it would take them years to build and launch a replacement. Starlink really does make traditional geosynchronous satellite internet providers hopelessly obsolete. But going back to the capacity issue, at the current 20gbps throughput and figuring the typical oversubscription ratio for an ISP, each Starlink sat would have a theoretical maximum capacity of about 5,000 users based on current bandwidth promises. Obviously the number of users served per sat will increase as the technology in them is upgraded, but for now, if you want to have more than 5,000 customers in a single coverage cell, you have to have enough sats flying around the earth to duplicate the coverage to that cell 24/7...which is alot. Consequently, the Starlink team has to be careful about not overselling their product in high population areas until more sats are in the air to increase capacity.

Same here. I think there was only one or two instances in the past 10 years that I went into a Frys and actually found what I was looking for...and then it was still a waste of time because I ended up having to return the things that didn't work right. Other trips were just a waste of time from the get go and I ended up having to order what I needed online anyway and wait, or found what I needed at other stores in the area. Eventually I just stopped even bothering to waste time trying to get stuff from them. Frankly I am surprised they survived this long.