Russians hacking the NY Times should be the least effective way to influence an election if the NY Times is neutral in its reporting and not withholding negative information that would harm Clinton's candidacy.
Or maybe russian hackers understand that US Media outlets actively collaborate and conspire with political campaigns during election seasons to control and direct dissent within the party and defuse potential scandalous or controversial events in an effort to ensure a positive return on their future investment.
I'd say that's just too conspiratorial. The Russians probably realize that the Times' editorial bias favors Clinton. The Russians aren't trying to aid Trump or necessarily defeat Clinton. What they probably want is to minimize Clinton's ability to command some kind of "mandate" sized victory and maintain the fractured domestic political structure.
A non-landslide victory by Clinton will be met with at least as much if not more obstructionism by Republicans and a level of continued division in the public. Distract and divide benefits the Russians because it keeps whoever runs the US from having the political capital to make bold steps.
the fact that mbox is a terrible format for storing email with concurrent read/write access
And that's the weakness of an uncoordinated do one thing model. You're stuck with the common denominator of the uncoordinated legacy component of the system.
If you want to database the email, you break everything but MTAs. You need delivery agents and access daemons and clients that work with the database format.
Fast enough that it's highly usable for more than mobile "data light", so it has inherent value to data consumers, allowing both the carriers to charge for it and for consumers to consume it fast enough that they will pay high fees for large consumption tiers, fat overages when they exhaust their allocation or both.
If 5G pans out anything like the hype, carriers will have to change their pricing strategies. As most Slashdot posters note, you'd burn through current allocations ridiculously fast.
But as much as people like data, there's also a limit as to how much they will consume. I wonder if AT&T is worried that the pricing changes likely necessary with 5G speeds will cross some line on a chart that causes data to be less profitable. A lot of people will end up staying within their plan or find lower end plans usable.
It's too bad the USB consortium can't get their marketing speak right.
As I understand it, what we think of USB 3 is really USB 3.1 gen 1. Gen 2 adds 10 Gbits/sec as the maximum speed.
It's too bad they're marketing speed is so brain damaged, the widespread USB 3 has managed to produce useful high speeds with negligible CPU overhead.
Getting 10 Gbits/sec out that port is pretty decent, and I wish there was better vendor support for devices traditionally connected via SAS for use of 3.1 gen 2 ports.
The "financial pressures" of drug addiction are the result of the risks of drug dealing being built into the price of illegal drugs, not the material price of drugs.
I bought 150 mg (total, 30 x 5 mg) oxycodone for $6.32 when I last had a prescription. That price is so low that the pharmacy doesn't even charge you the copay, they just sell it at the retail price. And that retail price has all the high costs associated with an insane amount of tracking and regulation of a schedule II drug built into it, including profit for the drug maker, distributor and retail outlet. Opiates are trivial drugs to manufacture, pennies per dose at any kind of industrial scale.
Heroin would be less than a dollar a dose if it was legalized, there would be no financially induced crime to support heroin habits if it was legalized. Even if you excise taxed it by 500% to make its self-fund treatment programs and miscellaneous ancillary social programs and there still wouldn't be any wave of property crimes to support habits.
And when I say legalize prostitution, of course it's implied that I'm not talking about prostitution as structured as an illegal transaction but as a voluntary legal trade, which would presumably be likely to have medical coverage as a requirement for any kind of employer running a house of prostitution given the inherent health issues associated with sexual contact.
Of course Obama doesn't take marijuana off Schedule I because he's beholden to the establishment political interests -- police, pharma, and probably some polling-identified bloc of voters Democratic political strategists don't want to offend because they let them win some key state.
I think it is a PR move designed to prevent the line item fees that so many industries love to tack onto bills, like the airlines, cable companies, Ticketmaster, and so on, so they can claim it costs $9.99 but with fees it's really $15.99.
I think some of these are partly protest-inspired to show how much of what you pay has nothing to do with the service (ie, when it's a government fee) but obviously many of these surcharges are invented by the company themselves and tacked on just to make money and make the cost of their service totally opaque and give them the ability to get away with dishonest advertising of a price you can't actually pay.
Honestly, I think Uber's success is at least partly owed to the flat-rate nature of the service charge and without the cab-style "airport fee, toll fee, congestion fee" type charges that get tacked onto the meter amount. It's hard to see Uber *wanting* change their billing structure in pure protest to show a nickel of tax. I think they would rather just hike the price a nickel internally. Uber prices vary so much that nobody would notice anyway if went up that small of an amount.
That's great when the larger system was designed by a single entity and the atomic components were designed to be part of a very well defined standard and system.
But taking email as an example, there's this design architecture of MTA, MUA, local delivery but on many Unix systems you have a whole bunch of parts that were designed against this general architecture but were really designed to work specifically with each other. POP/IMAP daemons, MTAs, local delivery agents (some of which do filtering, some of which don't), the whole concept of directory lookup, web mail (which brings a ton of other baggage to the table).
It doesn't feel like a system comprised of components designed to do one thing, it feels fragmented, with different components requiring unique configurations to match which bit you have installed for a specific role.
My take is the "do one thing" doctrine worked for Unix in an older era of CLI interfaces and generally less complex environments. In the more modern era, we've gotten into more complex systems where "one thing" really is many different things but we expect them to mostly integrate and act like one thing rather than actually being different things from different vendors that require a lot of user glue to get them to work together in addition to some developer awareness.
In your mail system example, we kind of expect a mail system to be one thing -- MTA, local delivery, web client, directory interface, and one more client interface protocols, all well integrated and functionally aware of the other.
Ironically, since 2007, Exchange has grown more modular (CAS, Mailbox Server, Hub Transport) but has the benefit of being a single source system which has all the parts depending on how you structure your environment. They also have the maze of services that handle this job with no obvious service-level delineation in many cases among server roles. But most people just install all the roles on one system.
IMHO, the desktop environment is another place where the "one thing" mantra kind of falls apart.
The Windows 10 forced upgrade GWX thing was a pain in the ass, but from my perspective the Windows Update train has long left the station.
We've been thrown a dozen or more updates every month for how many OS revisions via Windows updates? The summaries are at best links to a web of Microsoft KB articles, one of which might have some useful information about what the patch does.
Maybe some desktop operations teams at bigger companies with the manpower, time and resources to check and test all of them before rolling them out dig into each and every one to find out what they do.
But everyone else? It's just not even remotely practical to figure out what every single patch does, let alone try to understand the precedence angle on patches that require other patches first. There's just too many, the documentation is more or less written with the idea that nobody really reads it.
So you basically just suck it up, assume that the majority of the time the patches work, do what they're supposed to do and improve security.
Once you eliminate victimless crimes (drugs and prostitution), what exactly are small crimes? I'd say legalize drugs and prostitution, enforcement of prohibition on those items has been a disaster for civil liberties.
Is the cluster of "civil order" crimes, like not blocking the sidewalk, lurking, panhandling, loitering? I can sort of agree, seeing as they can (and probably are) highly selectively enforced. But having been in downtown areas where they were actually happening, I find myself wishing they were being vigorously enforced. People who crowd the sidewalk basically looking for a confrontation, aggressive panhandling, and so on make being in urban areas unpleasant. I want to be able to walk on the public sidewalk unimpeded by people loitering, especially people who use hostility and aggressive behavior to claim the space or challenge passersby.
After that, I don't know what you'd consider a small crime. Most crimes involving private properly may be small by some dollar-denominated measure, but to the people involved they were real hassles -- a bike stolen, sunglasses stolen from a car, etc.
On the whole, though, I'd say broken windows policing makes some kind of common sense by enforcing laws that mandate good civil public behavior and respect for private property. Not doing so seems to breed a lack of respect for civil order and make enforcement seem more selective than it already does.
I don't know about pork rinds and ice cream, but I suspect a major reason that many psychotropic medications are used in pain relief isn't only due to their direct effect on pain receptors, but also because they are euphoriants which produce a mood elevation which reduces the anxiety and mental anguish associated with pain.
People don't just feel less pain, they feel better emotionally, too, which reduces a lot of mental perception of pain and improves their overall feeling of well being.
I think modern medicine could address a lot of their pain management issues by not looking to just address some root cause of pain or medications which address pain receptors, but by figuring out how to deal with the mental anguish associated with pain. It's kind of funny how successful dentistry is with nitrous oxide, which really doesn't prevent pain but produces a hypnotic state (IMHO, anyway) not all that different than marijuana -- it's almost as if dentists are offering to get you high while they do something unpleasant in your mouth so you just don't mind.
I suspect that when big pharma produces a new class of painkillers that lack "addiction potential" by hitting pain receptors but not producing much in the way of euphoria, they're going to be widely adopted by doctors. But soon after we will hear a lot of clinical complaints bubbling up that patients find them "less effective" than opioids because they lack a mood-enhancing effect, reducing the perception of effectiveness.
Or, maybe the service was initially turned off but was reinstated when I switched phones, renewed my plan, etc.
I suspect it works like Windows 10 default browser settings. You can ask them to turn it off, but they turn in back on at random, with the semi-malicious intent of snagging international roaming fees.
I can't tell you the number of problems I run into trying to fill in the answers to those question when dealing with login security.
I went to two elementary schools, had 3 pets as a kid, etc. Even when I know the right one, I forget exactly how I might have filled it in, capitalized it, etc.
I want to run Powershell commands within a bash shell and be able to pipe their output to Unix utils, and I want to be able to run Unix utils in Powershell and pipe their output to Powershell commands.
I want to be able to mix and match them somehow.
Mostly, I think, the Powershell commands would be most useful paired with a bash shell and Unix utils, at least how I end up needing/wanting to use Powershell most of them time -- which I freely admit is biased by much more experience at a Bash prompt than a Powershell one, and mostly using Powershell commands to generate some kind of output that I want to work with Bash-style.
I recognize that merging them would be complex in some ways, as many Powershell commands return objects not output and the shell is just doing basic formatting of the object as textual output.
But maybe there could be some kind of hydbrid mode pipe operator that would just do the basic console output it would normally do, but send it to an instance of a Bash environment, or some way to access Powershell cmdlets from within bash as if they were normal programs that provided output.
I think the lesson is don't think you can cut cute deals with big corporations where the "deal" isn't in a written contract signed by someone with officer-level signatory approval and backed by a surety bond.
The flunky who "agrees" to your terms just checking checkboxes in CRM that sign you up for whatever "deals" are in their system that day. When you finally discover your deal isn't in place (days, weeks, months, years) later, it won't really matter. They'll call you a liar, will claim the deal never existed and toss your debt to a collections agent.
You have more negotiating power caught with a pound of reefer by a dishonest cop on an abandoned stretch of highway at midnight than you do with a consumer-facing corporation.
I think you can narrow the list of reality denial by the political establishment down to a fairly short list, and to many extents, both establishment parties participate.
1) Mass immigration -- there's a lot of denial on this topic. It's financial impact is only positive, it doesn't displace US workers, it doesn't create cultural friction.
2) Race -- there isn't a crime epidemic among African Americans, said crime isn't the prime mover of policing policies, all of the problems facing African Americans are principally due to racism, which is an exclusively white-driven phenomenon.
3) Islamic Terrorism -- This one is a double-edged sword; the security state seems to buy into it as it enhances their power and influence, but the political establishment on the left consistently wants to downplay the cultural and ideological aspects of it because it exposes inconsistencies with their racial and immigration policies.
4) I'd even add in the economy. I think both sides push an economic agenda which denies the material reality for much of the population. Globalism helps the average worker, corporate and banking interests promote policies that are worker friendly, vertical movement in the economy is only a matter of effort.
Uhh, it was an alternate history treatment that supposed the rail interests managed to suppress the automobile. The figures I had were totally made up -- I was trying to make the national underinvestment in automobiles seem remotely plausible.
I would imagine that without the interstate highway system and with a chaotic and underbuilt state highway system, a cross-country trip from NYC to LA would take much longer. A 300 mile trip I've made from Minneapolis to Baudette actually takes about 6 hours (Google's estimate of 5:20 is wildly optimistic) as the trip is about 85% state highways -- simple math suggests its about 4:30 at 70 mph on interstates, so it kind of reinforces the idea that a cross country trip without interstates and with low quality mutli-use state and county highways would take far longer than it does now.
The flip side to national underinvestment in autos is that you might presume greater investment in rail systems, both to make automobiles appear impractical and possibly to fend off air travel as an alternative. Existing passenger rail travel sucks now -- the schedules are mostly suggestions, my mother in law comes down from Devil's Lake and the train is hours late at least half the time, so it doesn't surprise me that the schedules for train travel currently are ridiculously slow. They're using ancient rolling stock on freight tracks, often bending the schedule for freight traffic.
But in an alternate history, if the auto industry is much smaller and the general economy stays the same, then maybe that economic activity and investment is shifted to rail developments that would have made high speed rail an actual reality far earlier than in real life, which is what drove the made up numbers I used for high speed rail travel.
Overall, though, as much as I love alternate history, I find the idea that you could have boxed up the automobile kind of hard to buy into. I think automobiles have an extremely high utility value that would have always made them wildly popular in a country as relatively large and sparsely populated as most of the US was in the first part of the 20th century. Even NYC is filled with cars today, despite the extreme costs associated with them and the near ubiquity of rail access of various types. Rail in Europe is much more common, but the population is denser and I'd wager that the economics of postwar development made rail investment more appealing, too, as the population had less to spend on cars, the cities were less car friendly, and rail provided more bang for limited bucks in that environment.
I don't know about planes, but marine autopilot seems much more sophisticated than Tesla's at high levels of integration.
Dumb systems will simply hold heading to a specific compass bearing. Sightly smarter ones will hold heading to a bearing and maintain a desired speed (and in dumb systems usually only throttle position).
Smarter systems integrated with a chartplotter will pilot an entire trip based on waypoints, maintaining course and speed the entire way with no input. Even smarter systems integrate radar for avoiding static and moving objects and can even incorporate sonar devices to avoid shallow areas in areas where water levels may vary or where charts are poor.
Now, you can't really go take a nap in a busy area, bad weather or while docking, but a modern marine autopilot can cover long distances and complex courses with near zero input. I don't think you can input waypoints into a Tesla and sit back for 8 hours while it does all the work.
Slashdot Mirror
She say you too beaucoup.
Russians hacking the NY Times should be the least effective way to influence an election if the NY Times is neutral in its reporting and not withholding negative information that would harm Clinton's candidacy.
Or maybe russian hackers understand that US Media outlets actively collaborate and conspire with political campaigns during election seasons to control and direct dissent within the party and defuse potential scandalous or controversial events in an effort to ensure a positive return on their future investment.
I'd say that's just too conspiratorial. The Russians probably realize that the Times' editorial bias favors Clinton. The Russians aren't trying to aid Trump or necessarily defeat Clinton. What they probably want is to minimize Clinton's ability to command some kind of "mandate" sized victory and maintain the fractured domestic political structure.
A non-landslide victory by Clinton will be met with at least as much if not more obstructionism by Republicans and a level of continued division in the public. Distract and divide benefits the Russians because it keeps whoever runs the US from having the political capital to make bold steps.
How much is to have nice girl love you long time? Fucky sucky?
the fact that mbox is a terrible format for storing email with concurrent read/write access
And that's the weakness of an uncoordinated do one thing model. You're stuck with the common denominator of the uncoordinated legacy component of the system.
If you want to database the email, you break everything but MTAs. You need delivery agents and access daemons and clients that work with the database format.
Fast enough that it's highly usable for more than mobile "data light", so it has inherent value to data consumers, allowing both the carriers to charge for it and for consumers to consume it fast enough that they will pay high fees for large consumption tiers, fat overages when they exhaust their allocation or both.
If 5G pans out anything like the hype, carriers will have to change their pricing strategies. As most Slashdot posters note, you'd burn through current allocations ridiculously fast.
But as much as people like data, there's also a limit as to how much they will consume. I wonder if AT&T is worried that the pricing changes likely necessary with 5G speeds will cross some line on a chart that causes data to be less profitable. A lot of people will end up staying within their plan or find lower end plans usable.
I'd love to know how this was enforced or failed to be enforced.
I can see something like:
"Clause 69: The Telecommunications Widget Freedom Tax may not be identified or listed as a line item on any telecommunications bill."
Telecom Bill: Government Freedom Tax For Widgets...$1.97
Regulator: You can't list that on the bill.
Telco: We don't list the tax by its actual name, just a tax of a similar sounding name. Oh, and First Amendment protects our speech to our customers.
It's too bad the USB consortium can't get their marketing speak right.
As I understand it, what we think of USB 3 is really USB 3.1 gen 1. Gen 2 adds 10 Gbits/sec as the maximum speed.
It's too bad they're marketing speed is so brain damaged, the widespread USB 3 has managed to produce useful high speeds with negligible CPU overhead.
Getting 10 Gbits/sec out that port is pretty decent, and I wish there was better vendor support for devices traditionally connected via SAS for use of 3.1 gen 2 ports.
The "financial pressures" of drug addiction are the result of the risks of drug dealing being built into the price of illegal drugs, not the material price of drugs.
I bought 150 mg (total, 30 x 5 mg) oxycodone for $6.32 when I last had a prescription. That price is so low that the pharmacy doesn't even charge you the copay, they just sell it at the retail price. And that retail price has all the high costs associated with an insane amount of tracking and regulation of a schedule II drug built into it, including profit for the drug maker, distributor and retail outlet. Opiates are trivial drugs to manufacture, pennies per dose at any kind of industrial scale.
Heroin would be less than a dollar a dose if it was legalized, there would be no financially induced crime to support heroin habits if it was legalized. Even if you excise taxed it by 500% to make its self-fund treatment programs and miscellaneous ancillary social programs and there still wouldn't be any wave of property crimes to support habits.
And when I say legalize prostitution, of course it's implied that I'm not talking about prostitution as structured as an illegal transaction but as a voluntary legal trade, which would presumably be likely to have medical coverage as a requirement for any kind of employer running a house of prostitution given the inherent health issues associated with sexual contact.
Of course Obama doesn't take marijuana off Schedule I because he's beholden to the establishment political interests -- police, pharma, and probably some polling-identified bloc of voters Democratic political strategists don't want to offend because they let them win some key state.
I think it is a PR move designed to prevent the line item fees that so many industries love to tack onto bills, like the airlines, cable companies, Ticketmaster, and so on, so they can claim it costs $9.99 but with fees it's really $15.99.
I think some of these are partly protest-inspired to show how much of what you pay has nothing to do with the service (ie, when it's a government fee) but obviously many of these surcharges are invented by the company themselves and tacked on just to make money and make the cost of their service totally opaque and give them the ability to get away with dishonest advertising of a price you can't actually pay.
Honestly, I think Uber's success is at least partly owed to the flat-rate nature of the service charge and without the cab-style "airport fee, toll fee, congestion fee" type charges that get tacked onto the meter amount. It's hard to see Uber *wanting* change their billing structure in pure protest to show a nickel of tax. I think they would rather just hike the price a nickel internally. Uber prices vary so much that nobody would notice anyway if went up that small of an amount.
That's great when the larger system was designed by a single entity and the atomic components were designed to be part of a very well defined standard and system.
But taking email as an example, there's this design architecture of MTA, MUA, local delivery but on many Unix systems you have a whole bunch of parts that were designed against this general architecture but were really designed to work specifically with each other. POP/IMAP daemons, MTAs, local delivery agents (some of which do filtering, some of which don't), the whole concept of directory lookup, web mail (which brings a ton of other baggage to the table).
It doesn't feel like a system comprised of components designed to do one thing, it feels fragmented, with different components requiring unique configurations to match which bit you have installed for a specific role.
My take is the "do one thing" doctrine worked for Unix in an older era of CLI interfaces and generally less complex environments. In the more modern era, we've gotten into more complex systems where "one thing" really is many different things but we expect them to mostly integrate and act like one thing rather than actually being different things from different vendors that require a lot of user glue to get them to work together in addition to some developer awareness.
In your mail system example, we kind of expect a mail system to be one thing -- MTA, local delivery, web client, directory interface, and one more client interface protocols, all well integrated and functionally aware of the other.
Ironically, since 2007, Exchange has grown more modular (CAS, Mailbox Server, Hub Transport) but has the benefit of being a single source system which has all the parts depending on how you structure your environment. They also have the maze of services that handle this job with no obvious service-level delineation in many cases among server roles. But most people just install all the roles on one system.
IMHO, the desktop environment is another place where the "one thing" mantra kind of falls apart.
The Windows 10 forced upgrade GWX thing was a pain in the ass, but from my perspective the Windows Update train has long left the station.
We've been thrown a dozen or more updates every month for how many OS revisions via Windows updates? The summaries are at best links to a web of Microsoft KB articles, one of which might have some useful information about what the patch does.
Maybe some desktop operations teams at bigger companies with the manpower, time and resources to check and test all of them before rolling them out dig into each and every one to find out what they do.
But everyone else? It's just not even remotely practical to figure out what every single patch does, let alone try to understand the precedence angle on patches that require other patches first. There's just too many, the documentation is more or less written with the idea that nobody really reads it.
So you basically just suck it up, assume that the majority of the time the patches work, do what they're supposed to do and improve security.
The actual solution is to not have small crimes.
Once you eliminate victimless crimes (drugs and prostitution), what exactly are small crimes? I'd say legalize drugs and prostitution, enforcement of prohibition on those items has been a disaster for civil liberties.
Is the cluster of "civil order" crimes, like not blocking the sidewalk, lurking, panhandling, loitering? I can sort of agree, seeing as they can (and probably are) highly selectively enforced. But having been in downtown areas where they were actually happening, I find myself wishing they were being vigorously enforced. People who crowd the sidewalk basically looking for a confrontation, aggressive panhandling, and so on make being in urban areas unpleasant. I want to be able to walk on the public sidewalk unimpeded by people loitering, especially people who use hostility and aggressive behavior to claim the space or challenge passersby.
After that, I don't know what you'd consider a small crime. Most crimes involving private properly may be small by some dollar-denominated measure, but to the people involved they were real hassles -- a bike stolen, sunglasses stolen from a car, etc.
On the whole, though, I'd say broken windows policing makes some kind of common sense by enforcing laws that mandate good civil public behavior and respect for private property. Not doing so seems to breed a lack of respect for civil order and make enforcement seem more selective than it already does.
I don't know about pork rinds and ice cream, but I suspect a major reason that many psychotropic medications are used in pain relief isn't only due to their direct effect on pain receptors, but also because they are euphoriants which produce a mood elevation which reduces the anxiety and mental anguish associated with pain.
People don't just feel less pain, they feel better emotionally, too, which reduces a lot of mental perception of pain and improves their overall feeling of well being.
I think modern medicine could address a lot of their pain management issues by not looking to just address some root cause of pain or medications which address pain receptors, but by figuring out how to deal with the mental anguish associated with pain. It's kind of funny how successful dentistry is with nitrous oxide, which really doesn't prevent pain but produces a hypnotic state (IMHO, anyway) not all that different than marijuana -- it's almost as if dentists are offering to get you high while they do something unpleasant in your mouth so you just don't mind.
I suspect that when big pharma produces a new class of painkillers that lack "addiction potential" by hitting pain receptors but not producing much in the way of euphoria, they're going to be widely adopted by doctors. But soon after we will hear a lot of clinical complaints bubbling up that patients find them "less effective" than opioids because they lack a mood-enhancing effect, reducing the perception of effectiveness.
I always figured that the best way to fund black programs was just to back a truck up to the bureau of engraving and take a few pallets of $100s.
Or, maybe the service was initially turned off but was reinstated when I switched phones, renewed my plan, etc.
I suspect it works like Windows 10 default browser settings. You can ask them to turn it off, but they turn in back on at random, with the semi-malicious intent of snagging international roaming fees.
I can't tell you the number of problems I run into trying to fill in the answers to those question when dealing with login security.
I went to two elementary schools, had 3 pets as a kid, etc. Even when I know the right one, I forget exactly how I might have filled it in, capitalized it, etc.
I want to run Powershell commands within a bash shell and be able to pipe their output to Unix utils, and I want to be able to run Unix utils in Powershell and pipe their output to Powershell commands.
I want to be able to mix and match them somehow.
Mostly, I think, the Powershell commands would be most useful paired with a bash shell and Unix utils, at least how I end up needing/wanting to use Powershell most of them time -- which I freely admit is biased by much more experience at a Bash prompt than a Powershell one, and mostly using Powershell commands to generate some kind of output that I want to work with Bash-style.
I recognize that merging them would be complex in some ways, as many Powershell commands return objects not output and the shell is just doing basic formatting of the object as textual output.
But maybe there could be some kind of hydbrid mode pipe operator that would just do the basic console output it would normally do, but send it to an instance of a Bash environment, or some way to access Powershell cmdlets from within bash as if they were normal programs that provided output.
I think the lesson is don't think you can cut cute deals with big corporations where the "deal" isn't in a written contract signed by someone with officer-level signatory approval and backed by a surety bond.
The flunky who "agrees" to your terms just checking checkboxes in CRM that sign you up for whatever "deals" are in their system that day. When you finally discover your deal isn't in place (days, weeks, months, years) later, it won't really matter. They'll call you a liar, will claim the deal never existed and toss your debt to a collections agent.
You have more negotiating power caught with a pound of reefer by a dishonest cop on an abandoned stretch of highway at midnight than you do with a consumer-facing corporation.
They just plain charge too much for too little and their support is appallingly expensive.
A Dell N2048 is like 40% less than a 2960x and damn near .cfg file compatible.
And unlike the Powerconnect line, this one seems to get it right.
Verizon get $5 instead of $2 per install if it is a rootkit.
I think you can narrow the list of reality denial by the political establishment down to a fairly short list, and to many extents, both establishment parties participate.
1) Mass immigration -- there's a lot of denial on this topic. It's financial impact is only positive, it doesn't displace US workers, it doesn't create cultural friction.
2) Race -- there isn't a crime epidemic among African Americans, said crime isn't the prime mover of policing policies, all of the problems facing African Americans are principally due to racism, which is an exclusively white-driven phenomenon.
3) Islamic Terrorism -- This one is a double-edged sword; the security state seems to buy into it as it enhances their power and influence, but the political establishment on the left consistently wants to downplay the cultural and ideological aspects of it because it exposes inconsistencies with their racial and immigration policies.
4) I'd even add in the economy. I think both sides push an economic agenda which denies the material reality for much of the population. Globalism helps the average worker, corporate and banking interests promote policies that are worker friendly, vertical movement in the economy is only a matter of effort.
Uhh, it was an alternate history treatment that supposed the rail interests managed to suppress the automobile. The figures I had were totally made up -- I was trying to make the national underinvestment in automobiles seem remotely plausible.
I would imagine that without the interstate highway system and with a chaotic and underbuilt state highway system, a cross-country trip from NYC to LA would take much longer. A 300 mile trip I've made from Minneapolis to Baudette actually takes about 6 hours (Google's estimate of 5:20 is wildly optimistic) as the trip is about 85% state highways -- simple math suggests its about 4:30 at 70 mph on interstates, so it kind of reinforces the idea that a cross country trip without interstates and with low quality mutli-use state and county highways would take far longer than it does now.
The flip side to national underinvestment in autos is that you might presume greater investment in rail systems, both to make automobiles appear impractical and possibly to fend off air travel as an alternative. Existing passenger rail travel sucks now -- the schedules are mostly suggestions, my mother in law comes down from Devil's Lake and the train is hours late at least half the time, so it doesn't surprise me that the schedules for train travel currently are ridiculously slow. They're using ancient rolling stock on freight tracks, often bending the schedule for freight traffic.
But in an alternate history, if the auto industry is much smaller and the general economy stays the same, then maybe that economic activity and investment is shifted to rail developments that would have made high speed rail an actual reality far earlier than in real life, which is what drove the made up numbers I used for high speed rail travel.
Overall, though, as much as I love alternate history, I find the idea that you could have boxed up the automobile kind of hard to buy into. I think automobiles have an extremely high utility value that would have always made them wildly popular in a country as relatively large and sparsely populated as most of the US was in the first part of the 20th century. Even NYC is filled with cars today, despite the extreme costs associated with them and the near ubiquity of rail access of various types. Rail in Europe is much more common, but the population is denser and I'd wager that the economics of postwar development made rail investment more appealing, too, as the population had less to spend on cars, the cities were less car friendly, and rail provided more bang for limited bucks in that environment.
I don't know about planes, but marine autopilot seems much more sophisticated than Tesla's at high levels of integration.
Dumb systems will simply hold heading to a specific compass bearing. Sightly smarter ones will hold heading to a bearing and maintain a desired speed (and in dumb systems usually only throttle position).
Smarter systems integrated with a chartplotter will pilot an entire trip based on waypoints, maintaining course and speed the entire way with no input. Even smarter systems integrate radar for avoiding static and moving objects and can even incorporate sonar devices to avoid shallow areas in areas where water levels may vary or where charts are poor.
Now, you can't really go take a nap in a busy area, bad weather or while docking, but a modern marine autopilot can cover long distances and complex courses with near zero input. I don't think you can input waypoints into a Tesla and sit back for 8 hours while it does all the work.