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Comment Re:Recovery time of "several months to three years (Score 1) 73

NASA will have to throw significant amount of money to SpaceX, Northrup Grumman or Boeing to make an adopter to dock to Soviet Standardized Vehicle Port Zvezda has. They also need to figure how to transfer hypergolic propellant from the vehicle to Zvezda. Both are non-trivial amount of redesign and fab.

Comment Re:They are objectively wrong (Score 1) 193

It's simple economics.

Degrees, undergrad or grad, have to be measured in terms of:

1. Raw cost
2. Opportunity cost during the time you go for the degree
3. Time left in your working life in order to recoup #1 and #2.

Once upon a time, for the cost of a few summers working, and a part time job during the school year, you could afford to get a college degree at a public university. The cost was reasonable, and the boost in career opportunities outweighed the lost income during the 4(ish) years you spent in school. If school suited you, this was a slam dunk.

Then at a certain point you needed loans in addition to working to get through undergrad. Rather expensive ones too. However, if you were in state, you'd get a discount. The cost went up, but the boost in career opportunities outweighed the higher cost and the lost income during the time you spent in school. Again, if school suited you, it would take longer for the benefit to show in your life, but if you expected to work for a few decades, the difference in earning power and job opportunity (especially during an era where the US was hollowing out alternatives to white collar jobs), would pay off.

At some point, the raw cost and the opportunity cost reached an equilibrium point with your ability to recoup the cost over your working life... and people started noticing that the bet that they were taking - that they'd remain employed long enough post-higher education, at a rate of pay better than what they would have had without the degree, was not as solid as they would have liked.

One wonders if during this time period, if there had been a competitive alternative to higher education tracked in US schools, such as apprenticeships (normally starting at the start of high school), whether we would have hit this "crisis" of higher education. I think with viable non-college career paths, which would have paid from the onset, and provided an applied pathway for schooling (you still need an education even as a plumber or welder, it's just not credentialed as a college degree), there would have been checks against runaway college costs. The lack of competition, coupled with railroading students K-12 onto a college track, allowed colleges and universities to respond to increased demand by... raising prices.

Comment Re: Drives the speed limit? (Score 1) 15

While drunk driving happens in Dubai, as a Muslim nation they have exactly zero humor about it.
I figure the rate of bad driving from other things like just being an absurdly entitled citizen or part of the royalty is more common.

I've actually been in Dubai, deployed there once. Visited the city a few times. It's "interesting".

Comment CO2 as an indicator of air quality. (Score 4, Informative) 49

Indeed. My thought was that CO2 levels could roughly correspond to the number of people in the specific room, offset by actual ventilation levels.

IE more CO2 = more risk because it means more people with inadequate ventilation.

Conference crud is really simple. Hacker or not. You bring in hundreds/thousands of people from around the country and world, exposing most of them to even more potential disease carriers on airplanes, trains, busses, and more, then disrupt people's sleep and disgestive tracts with unfamiliar locations, schedules and food and you have the perfect melting pot to get people sick.

What can be done to help prevent it? Mask wearing might help some, along with sanitary other stuff - improve the ventilation in such buildings, including good filters, UV lights and such helping to sterilize the air. At the same time, improve air quality otherwise, because harsh cleaning chemicals can also make people sick.

Comment Arduino "commitment to open-source is unwavering" (Score 1, Informative) 45

Arduino responded to this recent drama just a few days ago, saying "Our 20-year commitment to open-source is unwavering" with a good explanation of the new T&C.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fblog.arduino.cc%2F2025%2F1...

I believe Arduino is sincere with their statement.

One man speaking with Adafruit's social media accounts seems to feel otherwise. He probably believes he's doing good by raising the alarm. Maybe some of the points have some merit? But the tone really looks like an attempt to stir up drama and harm Arduino's reputation.

Adafruit does have history with Arduino. In 2015 when Arduino had serious internal division and conflict, Adafruit was manufacturing brand name Arduino Uno under some sort of license deal. That arrangement ended sometime in 2016. Adafruit quickly launched a product line of essentially Arduino clone boards named "Metro". Does any of that matter? Maybe, maybe not. But when reading what really looks like an attack on Arduino's long-established reputation coming from official Adafruit channels, best to keep in mind those 2 companies have a history.

I also have some history with Arduino, having made an Arduino-compatible board and contributed code and help over the years. I've personally met the Arduino developers and Arduino leadership folks several times at conferences. They are genuinely good people who've poured a lot of effort into trying to good in the world.

Maybe Arduino change for the better or for the worse with Qualcomm. I don't have a crystal ball. But I'm trying to keep an open mind and not get caught up in fear over basically boilerplate legalese.

Comment Re:Learned something today (Score 1) 52

Looking into the sources and tracing a bit:

The city has assessed the vast majority of the fines—more than 85 percent—against owners of Asian descent. A SMUD analyst avoided searching homes in a predominantly white neighborhood, while a police official removed non-Asian names from one of the lists generated by SMUD before forwarding the information on for further investigation.

source.

If they actually did this, well, that's like how the NRA forced most "may issue" states to be effectively "shall issue" for various weapon permits.

When the police can't come up with a good reason for denying the black woman's permit request when she has letters from a ex-boyfriend stalker threatening to kill her, who is due to be released from prison soon, but the white doctor living in a gated community gets it first thing, there are questions to be asked. Especially when permits for black people have a 99% reject rate while whites get them 90% of the time.

Comment Re: Indonesia also (Score 2) 134

Just to be clear, I believe that part of the problem was that the city government was broke and basically in receivership. Ergo, the politicians in Flint were not actually in control of the water contracts, it was an emergency manager appointed by Governor Rick Snyder(R).

I remembered the broke part and not in control, looked up the specifics.

Basically, to cut costs, the manager stopped the practice of piping water from Detroit and started using the historically very polluted and corrosive Flint River, without adequate testing and treatment (itself actually a violation of federal law).
Because many of the homes still had lead service pipes, going from basic to acidic caused the protective oxidization on the pipes to dissolve, putting excessive lead into the water.

It eventually made national news, but by all measures, this is still a far better situation than what Tehran is facing.

Switching back to the old water source or adding more controls like running the water through a filter of crushed limestone to correct the PH fixes the issues in Flint. No such easy solution is possible for Tehran.

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