You're assuming that somebody made the decision that a choice was made to spend the money on the Iraq war instead of science, and had the Iraq war not been fought the money would have went towards something else and that on that list of something elses, science was next on the list.
I'd argue that the total public science spending is more zero sum in the short and near term, that over any given period of time there was only a relatively fixed amount of money to spend on science. My guess is, though, that the zero sum nature of budgeting probably extends down through the sciences, too, so that money may have just been spent on other physics projects and not on some other science.
I think it's generally more secure to have a personal email server at home than to rely on a third party system. It does raise the question as to how physically secure your home is, though.
And of course it raises the question as to who you exchange email with and how secure they treat your emails.
The NS Savannah in the late 1950s/early 1960s was built as a combined cargo/passenger vessel as something of a demonstration of nuclear power in civilian maritime service. It had a pretty short career and was decommissioned in 1971, never quite successful as either a passenger ship (probably too late in that mode of travel's era) or as a cargo ship (the passenger component of the design compromising the cargo carrying nature).
The remainder of passenger ships use diesel or bunker fuel. I think most contemporary designs are diesel-electric with diesel electric generators powering electric motor propulsion (pods or direct-shaft driven). Older designs used diesel or bunker fired boilers feeding multiple-reduction steam turbines driving the prop shafts.
I haven't run across the use of gas turbines electric generator as power sources. Probably not fuel efficient enough for most use cases, although I'd wonder if there would be a use case in a modern mega cruiseliner which used both electric prop drive and had a giant baseload electric demand for passenger facilities.
How the hell do you get LTSB edition for Enterprise? Is it a unique SKU or some configuration preference applied to vanilla Enterprise?
LTSB Enterprise actually seems to be the desirable edition for any business, not just POS terminals. I know of no business customer I work with that has any interest in Cortana and the Windows store or its "apps". I guess I wouldn't put Edge quite in those same categories, since it seems to be just a replacement for IE, which, if MS has managed to kill some of the glaring deficiencies of IE, isn't a bad thing.
I'll admit that my Win 10 experience has been limited, but I don't find there to be much difference between Enterprise and Pro in terms of general experience. Both are plagued by annoying injections of Cortana and the Store and its Apps.
I'm continually amazed that the broader economics supports so much forced branching of Windows 10. I guess I can buy into a single Home/non-home branching, with Home oriented towards cheap, pre-installed retail devices and a unified non-home branch oriented towards any business/professional focused device.
But otherwise I think MS would save big money on support and engineering costs by having a single unified non-home version and that the market wouldn't support so many branches, leaving the investment of their creation not producing the return to justify the cost of creating and supporting it. It seems like the market will solidify on 1-2 releases anyway based on IT familiarity and developer support, much in the way that smartphones seem to only really support two operating systems.
It was a pretty amazing design overall for any ship -- wood wasn't allowed in the framing or decoration and there was extensive use of aluminium. The top speed was kept something of a secret and the power to weight ratio is still the best for any commercial ocean liner.
The cruising speed of 32 knots (37 mph) is still amazing for a vessel of this size and impressive even in comparison to nuclear powered military vessels. I've got a small speedboat that will do slightly over 40 mph on a calm inland lake, the notion that this can cruise at a similar speed is astonishing giving its size and open ocean conditions. The wind conditions on open decks would have been pretty harsh westbound -- I'd guess combined air speeds of 60 mph wouldn't be unlikely considering combined surface speed with wind speeds.
It's an amazing design although I'm not at all surprised that return to service has been abandoned. IIRC, a lot has been stripped from the interior and the level of refit and refurbishment required is probably vast. They also used a lot of asbestos building it and dealing with that is probably a huge headache even if much of it could just be sealed and kept in place.
Any private company would probably would be facing costs that wouldn't provide a ship that could produce the same return on investment as new construction. A new cruise ship would probably cost the same and provide a layout and accommodations far more in tune with modern expectations as well as much more passenger capacity.
What market there is for long-haul passenger service is probably better served by smaller ships at higher levels of luxury that match the costs and number of people interested in and capable of the fares required, and they are probably not time sensitive enough to need speeds in excess of 25 knots.
You're right, the carriers have a huge moral hazard in that they collect interconnect fees from VoIP providers. They can identify any call origin, but the question is do they want to give up that provider's payments.
It always galls me that law enforcement wants unmitigated hacking power for communications systems and devices, but never use it to go after fraudulent businesses.
Call routing on the PSTN is a pretty well-tracked thing by telcos as they charge for access, so they could pretty easily trace these back to specific VoIP providers bridging robocalls onto the PSTN.
It's a double-edged sword, though, as some may charge per call bridged. This creates a moral hazard for telcos, as they end up making money on robocalls by bridging them onto PSTN.
What would make it harder, though, are the number of hackable or open VoIP/PSTN bridges out there they may be terminating robocalls without knowing it. At that point it becomes kind of like spam and open relays.
Proportional representation usually works differently and only really works for legislative bodies where you vote for a party instead of a candidate, and the legislature is filled proportional to the party votes. The party lists candidates in the order they would be seated. And there are various hacks that balance proportionality against geographic representation, so that proportionality reflects geography.
So while third parties do better, the party hacks are higher on the list and destined to gain seats no matter what.
You really can't do proportional representation for offices with a single officeholder, though. Those offices are winner-take-all no matter what you do. And the parties end up warping the system so that general elections are always contests between two top parties. Even in proportionally elected parliamentary systems you end up with majority party domination of offices held by parliament members.
When you lack a majority party in a proportional system, you get coalition governments with power sharing, but these end up being fragile, tepid and fraught with conflict.
IMHO, part of the blame in the US falls on third parties who are very focused on pushing party ideology versus specific solutions for specific problems and the leadership qualities of their candidates. I'd guess that candidate selection for these parties ends up being very ideologically driven given their small size and the ideological affiliation of their members, so the leadership ends up being ideologically-driven, too.
It's reasonable research. The equipment may cost $90k now, but that doesn't mean that the techniques developed couldn't be refined, specialized and miniaturized for cheap in the future.
Guns and bricks and home made spike strips work, but they have difficult limitations that make them limited use techniques. Jamming autopilot in some way may be something extremely hard to detect, possible to do at distance, more selectively or more en mass without much risk of detection.
I think it's reasonable to think about what it takes to jam autopilot and at least as important whether the car could detect a jamming attempt and how it should respond.
Party affiliation only matters for states with closed primaries where only those with a stated party affiliation can vote in that party's primary election. Which is sort of reasonable if you accept that political parties are private organizations that can regulate who votes in their primary.
Of course, there are larger problems with this process -- like why does the state sponsor an election for a private organization's leadership? Why do the winners on the Democratic and Republican side automatically advance to the general election?
I'd like to see a primary election that was party neutral and where the top 3-4 polling candidates advanced to the general election, regardless of party. In many cases, the runner-up in one party is actually a more desirable candidate than the winning candidate in the other. In districts (municipal all the way to state level), a single party may dominate so thoroughly that there's no good way for a rival bearing the banner of another party to successfully challenge the dominant party, especially if they're forced to adopt unpopular stances of the rival party.
"Couldn't" probably means "don't want to". It seems hard to fathom that Google doesn't have some kind of regional controls in their system that can pin or exclude data or processes to specific geographic regions (transnational) or national regions. It seems like a basic management function for such a large clustered compute environment.
Amazon *sells* regional availability zones as a feature, although I don't know to what extent this creates guarantees of regional isolation or anchoring of data.
My guess is the doesn't want to part comes from not wanting to be limited by national laws or get hamstrung by lots of demands for regional isolation or exclusion and having those demands warp infrastructure or analytics. Without allowing regional constraints by customers, they can focus on performance and reliability.
The municipality builds the roads, and private industry uses them to provide whatever services they can think to sell that involve transportation. The government doesn't really get into the transportation business or businesses built on transportation of goods.
There are minor exceptions, like the post office or mass transit, but there's also generally demand for this or some long-settled precedent for providing them. But there's no calling city hall to order a pizza.
When that wisdom was given to me in my 20s, it was 1991 or 1992. Dating *then* was COMPLETELY different than dating now. So different that I can't even begin to imagine how it would work.
Then, you had singles bars and other types of entertainment-oriented things that single people did and I think the lack of alternatives made people generally more open to strangers and chance encounters, as well as other people who actively worked to match single people together.
Now that system is largely shattered. You have smartphones, web sites, texting, and the whole public human intelligence networks of Facebook and other social media. It's a byzantine maze.
I mean, what *dating* web site do you use? I don't even know what the options are, but I vaguely understand there are at least 4-5 mainstream options, each of which probably has its own baggage or taxonomy of people who use it.
Back in the old days, you might have, as a first step, gone "on a date" with a woman you met by chance. Now it's this whole kabuki theater of "going out for coffee" in some public place to test the waters, see what they really look like, do you want to bother, are they a creep, etc.
But even assuming you have something like a date, how do you follow up? The phone? Text? Email? I mean, it was bad enough when the technology challenge was "do I leave a message on her answering machine?" Now, it's like which technological version of communication is the right avenue?
I mean a measurable percentage of my marriage commitment isn't the joy of marriage but the absolute horror of what "dating" is like these days.
Generally I think a lot of confusing sexual behavior starts to make sense if you try to fit it into an evolutionary reproductive biology framework.
The point isn't to reduce people to pre-programmed automatons, but to indicate a kind of general inclination and the evolutionary value it would provide.
Interesting theory. If it's correct then women were having a lot of sex just to try to get resources that society made it difficult for women to acquire, rather than because they wanted it themselves. That does fit a lot of feminist theory, in fact.
I think it helps if you think about sex also as an economic good and marriage as a transactional relationship which exchanged that good for resources that provided for successful childbearing. Men traded their surplus economic goods -- food, shelter, physical protection. The synthesis of this transaction, the added value, was children who in turn provided an economic good, such as extra labor for food production or security.
Since the success or failure of any kind of aggregate human relationship (clan, tribe, etc) depended on the male/female transaction generally working, you get social rules that promote the stability of that relationship.
This sounds like a very good things. Less unwanted sex, more financial independence. More chance of men finding women that suit them and want to be with them, rather than who are just in it for the resources.
I think the challenge here is that from an evolutionary biology perspective, women are disinclined from reproduction because of the costs and risks of pregnancy. In a state of nature, pregnancies are high risk -- disease, death in childbirth, physical limitations in late pregnancy that may risk food acquisition or survival skills (you can't run from a lion so well 8 months pregnant). So in some regards, they need the circumstantial coercion of being resource poor and at a security risk of unwanted pregnancy to enter into the transactional relationship whereby they trade their sexual goods for resources and security.
So the women who now have their own resources and the physical security Western society generally affords its citizens lack the circumstantial coercion to enter into a transactional relationship. But they still retain the evolutionary disinclination for reproduction. Basically, they don't need your money or your protection and see no reason to trade a sexual good to you merely for some higher order relationship which a man will benefit from and from which they will derive little benefit.
If they're all poor who is stealing all their dates? I doubt the young women are sleeping with 40yos just because they have money.
That's how it was when I was in my 20s, 30 years ago. And it's not like younger women with older men is some kind of new social concept nobody has ever heard of.
Girls in their mid-20s often dated "established" guys with full time jobs, cars, and lots of disposable income. My peers and I just getting started financially all lamented it. You just couldn't get a young woman's interest if you didn't have money.
At that time, too, I think a lot of women were very future-life oriented, too, looking at people they dated in terms of "could he be my husband?" which meant that the selection criteria was very resource focused.
A friend's dad, who was in his late 40s and divorced, told us it was much easier once you hit your 40s if you were single. The pool of women were either divorced (and thus had criteria not based around the little house with a picket fence fantasy), never married and not interested in marriage, or were younger women with a preference for older more financially established man.
I ended up married in my 40s, so I never got much of a chance to test this prediction.
I have always been a regular brusher but couldn't stand flossing so I didn't, and nearly every dentist I ever used nagged about it constantly.
Due to job changes and ambivalence and dislike of dental practice, I didn't go to the dentist for about 2 years. I had an old filling break, which basically forced me to go the dentist. I figured I probably had several cavities since I typically had at least one every dental visit, so I looked for a dentist who did sedation so I could get them all fixed at once in the easiest manner possible.
I gave the dentist my backstory and told him that not going to the dentist regularly was a dumb idea but that I was not going to floss, so don't tell me about flossing. If you bug me about flossing, I will just get up and leave I'm here for dental care, not lectures. He was pretty good about it.
Anyway, after an overhaul that included 2 crowns, a root canal and a few fillings I was back to decent shape. I started using (at their suggestion) a mouthwash with CPC (Crest ProHealth is the best known commercial brand, but generics are everywhere).
Since I started using CPC mouthwash my gums are in great shape and I've had zero cavities. The CPC seems to be an organic solvent for plaque and whatever sticky shit holds food particles in your mouth. I've brushed with an ultrasonic brush, rinsed my mouth with water thoroughly after and then used the CPC mouthwash and been AMAZED at the crap that comes out with the mouthwash.
I think in the absence of any dentistry, flossing is probably a good idea since it mechanically removes buildup in places brushes do nothing for. But I think that CPC mouthwash is a really decent substitute, since it not only treats your entire mouth and can get in places you can't floss or brush, it does an awful lot to nuke bacteria and growth that leads to cavities. I also think that the regular cleanings help, too. You just can't clean your own teeth the way a hygienist can with the tools and physical access they have.
I think, though, that it takes a generation or two for the social attitudes about gender relationships to become really ingrained. The women who first came of age in an era of real financial independence were raised by women who didn't know any better in an era where the expectations were different, so they mostly internalized the older value system.
Their daughters were raised with slightly different expectations and those women's daughters (more or less the millennials) were one of the first generations raised in an era of expanded options and different attitudes.
Now, you couple that in with some evolutionary reproductive biology instincts that are oriented towards not selecting a mate who isn't seen to be a resource-rich provider for offspring and you have a situation where they don't need a male partner in any social or economic sense, either, so they've kind of selected themselves out of situations where sex is likely to happen.
The grandparents are either still alive, active and living independently spending that money, or they're paying for expensive health care to keep their ailing bodies going, or they're living in an assisted care facility that costs $100k/year and requires you sign over all your assets.
We're also kind of past the era where the "grandparent" generation easily acquired a lot of wealth in the form of meaningful hard assets like real estate. I think that was more common 1-2 generations ago, but in many ways the current grandparent generation probably came of age in the 1960s, got hammered in the stagflation of the 1970s during the peak of their earning power and then suffered the long-term stagnation of wages like everyone else.
We're literally onto the 3rd or even 4th generation of "middle class" people who have lived in an era of stagnant wages which generally means stagnant or zero wealth accumulation, and much of the accumulated wealth they have ends up burned up by college tuition and health care.
I've run into this with old, very low-view count videos, including the only one I've ever uploaded to YouTube.
My assumption was always some kind of cache miss thing, as even Google wouldn't possibly cache a video from 2007 with 12 views close enough for seamless streaming.
I stayed in a hotel for a week which, in addition to the parking lot lights had an architectural illumination light *right* outside my window. So not only did I have orange sodium vapor parking lot light, I had a white spotlight beaming into my room.
What's stupid is that the curtains do a great job of blocking the light, but they don't close/overlap completely. Never thought of the pants hanger option -- that's a great idea, but in this hotel I got 4 large binder clips from the front desk to pin the curtains closed.
In one hotel I even re-arranged all the furniture except for the bed and the TV stand so I could work at the desk and see the TV.
Wait, you're saying Musk might be dabbling in an accounting/balance sheet/share price gambit and not unifying Tesla and Solar City for the benefit of humankind?
I wear progressive bifocals which gave me fits on computer monitors due to the narrow focal length on the lens they provide at computing distances.
I asked the ophthalmologist for a prescription specifically for computer distances and it's been a miracle, so much so that I sprung for a second pair to keep in my work laptop bag. It's a single distance prescription, but less strong than my nearsighted distance prescription. It's flexible enough that it works for laptops and large displays set back on desks or tables, it's close enough to my distance prescription that it's easy to get up and forget I have them on -- more than once I've left the house and driven a half block only to say "hey, why is the stop sign kind of blurry.." and realize I've got the wrong glasses on.
I also find that it helps to pick frames with large lenses. Rectangular lens shapes kind of suck because they lack a lot of vertical peripheral coverage often necessary with large displays.
I gave up on alarm clocks over a decade ago -- I wake up within about 10 minutes of 5 AM every day without any alarm clock. I found that all alarm clocks did for me was give me anxiety when I woke up in the middle of the night, reminding me how punishing it would be to not go back to sleep or some other time-related anxiety. If I absolutely have to be up at a certain time Or The Gates of Hell Will Open, I set an alarm on my smartphone, but when you can wake automatically at 5 that's almost never.
Any fucking LED in my bedroom makes me crazy, no matter what color it is, and every damn thing in the world seems to have an LED bright enough to use as a lighthouse signal.
I carry a roll of black electrical tape when I stay in hotels to cover the status LEDs of the TV and various other items in there. Unplugging the alarm clock is step 1.
I ran this on my Win 10 laptop and came up with only signed drivers.
I think 2012r2 has required signed drivers, and there's some Texas-two-step you can do to put it into developer mode and ignore driver signing, which is only useful trying to get drivers loaded for a marginal use cases. In my case it was to get an Intel non-server OS NIC driver for the motherboard to load in Win2012r2 with a hacked INF file since Intel won't allow the drivers to load in server OSes.
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You're assuming that somebody made the decision that a choice was made to spend the money on the Iraq war instead of science, and had the Iraq war not been fought the money would have went towards something else and that on that list of something elses, science was next on the list.
I'd argue that the total public science spending is more zero sum in the short and near term, that over any given period of time there was only a relatively fixed amount of money to spend on science. My guess is, though, that the zero sum nature of budgeting probably extends down through the sciences, too, so that money may have just been spent on other physics projects and not on some other science.
I think it's generally more secure to have a personal email server at home than to rely on a third party system. It does raise the question as to how physically secure your home is, though.
And of course it raises the question as to who you exchange email with and how secure they treat your emails.
The NS Savannah in the late 1950s/early 1960s was built as a combined cargo/passenger vessel as something of a demonstration of nuclear power in civilian maritime service. It had a pretty short career and was decommissioned in 1971, never quite successful as either a passenger ship (probably too late in that mode of travel's era) or as a cargo ship (the passenger component of the design compromising the cargo carrying nature).
The remainder of passenger ships use diesel or bunker fuel. I think most contemporary designs are diesel-electric with diesel electric generators powering electric motor propulsion (pods or direct-shaft driven). Older designs used diesel or bunker fired boilers feeding multiple-reduction steam turbines driving the prop shafts.
I haven't run across the use of gas turbines electric generator as power sources. Probably not fuel efficient enough for most use cases, although I'd wonder if there would be a use case in a modern mega cruiseliner which used both electric prop drive and had a giant baseload electric demand for passenger facilities.
How the hell do you get LTSB edition for Enterprise? Is it a unique SKU or some configuration preference applied to vanilla Enterprise?
LTSB Enterprise actually seems to be the desirable edition for any business, not just POS terminals. I know of no business customer I work with that has any interest in Cortana and the Windows store or its "apps". I guess I wouldn't put Edge quite in those same categories, since it seems to be just a replacement for IE, which, if MS has managed to kill some of the glaring deficiencies of IE, isn't a bad thing.
I'll admit that my Win 10 experience has been limited, but I don't find there to be much difference between Enterprise and Pro in terms of general experience. Both are plagued by annoying injections of Cortana and the Store and its Apps.
I'm continually amazed that the broader economics supports so much forced branching of Windows 10. I guess I can buy into a single Home/non-home branching, with Home oriented towards cheap, pre-installed retail devices and a unified non-home branch oriented towards any business/professional focused device.
But otherwise I think MS would save big money on support and engineering costs by having a single unified non-home version and that the market wouldn't support so many branches, leaving the investment of their creation not producing the return to justify the cost of creating and supporting it. It seems like the market will solidify on 1-2 releases anyway based on IT familiarity and developer support, much in the way that smartphones seem to only really support two operating systems.
It was a pretty amazing design overall for any ship -- wood wasn't allowed in the framing or decoration and there was extensive use of aluminium. The top speed was kept something of a secret and the power to weight ratio is still the best for any commercial ocean liner.
The cruising speed of 32 knots (37 mph) is still amazing for a vessel of this size and impressive even in comparison to nuclear powered military vessels. I've got a small speedboat that will do slightly over 40 mph on a calm inland lake, the notion that this can cruise at a similar speed is astonishing giving its size and open ocean conditions. The wind conditions on open decks would have been pretty harsh westbound -- I'd guess combined air speeds of 60 mph wouldn't be unlikely considering combined surface speed with wind speeds.
It's an amazing design although I'm not at all surprised that return to service has been abandoned. IIRC, a lot has been stripped from the interior and the level of refit and refurbishment required is probably vast. They also used a lot of asbestos building it and dealing with that is probably a huge headache even if much of it could just be sealed and kept in place.
Any private company would probably would be facing costs that wouldn't provide a ship that could produce the same return on investment as new construction. A new cruise ship would probably cost the same and provide a layout and accommodations far more in tune with modern expectations as well as much more passenger capacity.
What market there is for long-haul passenger service is probably better served by smaller ships at higher levels of luxury that match the costs and number of people interested in and capable of the fares required, and they are probably not time sensitive enough to need speeds in excess of 25 knots.
You're right, the carriers have a huge moral hazard in that they collect interconnect fees from VoIP providers. They can identify any call origin, but the question is do they want to give up that provider's payments.
It always galls me that law enforcement wants unmitigated hacking power for communications systems and devices, but never use it to go after fraudulent businesses.
Call routing on the PSTN is a pretty well-tracked thing by telcos as they charge for access, so they could pretty easily trace these back to specific VoIP providers bridging robocalls onto the PSTN.
It's a double-edged sword, though, as some may charge per call bridged. This creates a moral hazard for telcos, as they end up making money on robocalls by bridging them onto PSTN.
What would make it harder, though, are the number of hackable or open VoIP/PSTN bridges out there they may be terminating robocalls without knowing it. At that point it becomes kind of like spam and open relays.
Isn't that the kind of thing the Chinese would turn out? AFAIK that's where people get cell jammers.
Proportional representation usually works differently and only really works for legislative bodies where you vote for a party instead of a candidate, and the legislature is filled proportional to the party votes. The party lists candidates in the order they would be seated. And there are various hacks that balance proportionality against geographic representation, so that proportionality reflects geography.
So while third parties do better, the party hacks are higher on the list and destined to gain seats no matter what.
You really can't do proportional representation for offices with a single officeholder, though. Those offices are winner-take-all no matter what you do. And the parties end up warping the system so that general elections are always contests between two top parties. Even in proportionally elected parliamentary systems you end up with majority party domination of offices held by parliament members.
When you lack a majority party in a proportional system, you get coalition governments with power sharing, but these end up being fragile, tepid and fraught with conflict.
IMHO, part of the blame in the US falls on third parties who are very focused on pushing party ideology versus specific solutions for specific problems and the leadership qualities of their candidates. I'd guess that candidate selection for these parties ends up being very ideologically driven given their small size and the ideological affiliation of their members, so the leadership ends up being ideologically-driven, too.
It's reasonable research. The equipment may cost $90k now, but that doesn't mean that the techniques developed couldn't be refined, specialized and miniaturized for cheap in the future.
Guns and bricks and home made spike strips work, but they have difficult limitations that make them limited use techniques. Jamming autopilot in some way may be something extremely hard to detect, possible to do at distance, more selectively or more en mass without much risk of detection.
I think it's reasonable to think about what it takes to jam autopilot and at least as important whether the car could detect a jamming attempt and how it should respond.
Party affiliation only matters for states with closed primaries where only those with a stated party affiliation can vote in that party's primary election. Which is sort of reasonable if you accept that political parties are private organizations that can regulate who votes in their primary.
Of course, there are larger problems with this process -- like why does the state sponsor an election for a private organization's leadership? Why do the winners on the Democratic and Republican side automatically advance to the general election?
I'd like to see a primary election that was party neutral and where the top 3-4 polling candidates advanced to the general election, regardless of party. In many cases, the runner-up in one party is actually a more desirable candidate than the winning candidate in the other. In districts (municipal all the way to state level), a single party may dominate so thoroughly that there's no good way for a rival bearing the banner of another party to successfully challenge the dominant party, especially if they're forced to adopt unpopular stances of the rival party.
"Couldn't" probably means "don't want to". It seems hard to fathom that Google doesn't have some kind of regional controls in their system that can pin or exclude data or processes to specific geographic regions (transnational) or national regions. It seems like a basic management function for such a large clustered compute environment.
Amazon *sells* regional availability zones as a feature, although I don't know to what extent this creates guarantees of regional isolation or anchoring of data.
My guess is the doesn't want to part comes from not wanting to be limited by national laws or get hamstrung by lots of demands for regional isolation or exclusion and having those demands warp infrastructure or analytics. Without allowing regional constraints by customers, they can focus on performance and reliability.
This is basically the model of municipal roads.
The municipality builds the roads, and private industry uses them to provide whatever services they can think to sell that involve transportation. The government doesn't really get into the transportation business or businesses built on transportation of goods.
There are minor exceptions, like the post office or mass transit, but there's also generally demand for this or some long-settled precedent for providing them. But there's no calling city hall to order a pizza.
When that wisdom was given to me in my 20s, it was 1991 or 1992. Dating *then* was COMPLETELY different than dating now. So different that I can't even begin to imagine how it would work.
Then, you had singles bars and other types of entertainment-oriented things that single people did and I think the lack of alternatives made people generally more open to strangers and chance encounters, as well as other people who actively worked to match single people together.
Now that system is largely shattered. You have smartphones, web sites, texting, and the whole public human intelligence networks of Facebook and other social media. It's a byzantine maze.
I mean, what *dating* web site do you use? I don't even know what the options are, but I vaguely understand there are at least 4-5 mainstream options, each of which probably has its own baggage or taxonomy of people who use it.
Back in the old days, you might have, as a first step, gone "on a date" with a woman you met by chance. Now it's this whole kabuki theater of "going out for coffee" in some public place to test the waters, see what they really look like, do you want to bother, are they a creep, etc.
But even assuming you have something like a date, how do you follow up? The phone? Text? Email? I mean, it was bad enough when the technology challenge was "do I leave a message on her answering machine?" Now, it's like which technological version of communication is the right avenue?
I mean a measurable percentage of my marriage commitment isn't the joy of marriage but the absolute horror of what "dating" is like these days.
Generally I think a lot of confusing sexual behavior starts to make sense if you try to fit it into an evolutionary reproductive biology framework.
The point isn't to reduce people to pre-programmed automatons, but to indicate a kind of general inclination and the evolutionary value it would provide.
Interesting theory. If it's correct then women were having a lot of sex just to try to get resources that society made it difficult for women to acquire, rather than because they wanted it themselves. That does fit a lot of feminist theory, in fact.
I think it helps if you think about sex also as an economic good and marriage as a transactional relationship which exchanged that good for resources that provided for successful childbearing. Men traded their surplus economic goods -- food, shelter, physical protection. The synthesis of this transaction, the added value, was children who in turn provided an economic good, such as extra labor for food production or security.
Since the success or failure of any kind of aggregate human relationship (clan, tribe, etc) depended on the male/female transaction generally working, you get social rules that promote the stability of that relationship.
This sounds like a very good things. Less unwanted sex, more financial independence. More chance of men finding women that suit them and want to be with them, rather than who are just in it for the resources.
I think the challenge here is that from an evolutionary biology perspective, women are disinclined from reproduction because of the costs and risks of pregnancy. In a state of nature, pregnancies are high risk -- disease, death in childbirth, physical limitations in late pregnancy that may risk food acquisition or survival skills (you can't run from a lion so well 8 months pregnant). So in some regards, they need the circumstantial coercion of being resource poor and at a security risk of unwanted pregnancy to enter into the transactional relationship whereby they trade their sexual goods for resources and security.
So the women who now have their own resources and the physical security Western society generally affords its citizens lack the circumstantial coercion to enter into a transactional relationship. But they still retain the evolutionary disinclination for reproduction. Basically, they don't need your money or your protection and see no reason to trade a sexual good to you merely for some higher order relationship which a man will benefit from and from which they will derive little benefit.
If they're all poor who is stealing all their dates? I doubt the young women are sleeping with 40yos just because they have money.
That's how it was when I was in my 20s, 30 years ago. And it's not like younger women with older men is some kind of new social concept nobody has ever heard of.
Girls in their mid-20s often dated "established" guys with full time jobs, cars, and lots of disposable income. My peers and I just getting started financially all lamented it. You just couldn't get a young woman's interest if you didn't have money.
At that time, too, I think a lot of women were very future-life oriented, too, looking at people they dated in terms of "could he be my husband?" which meant that the selection criteria was very resource focused.
A friend's dad, who was in his late 40s and divorced, told us it was much easier once you hit your 40s if you were single. The pool of women were either divorced (and thus had criteria not based around the little house with a picket fence fantasy), never married and not interested in marriage, or were younger women with a preference for older more financially established man.
I ended up married in my 40s, so I never got much of a chance to test this prediction.
I have always been a regular brusher but couldn't stand flossing so I didn't, and nearly every dentist I ever used nagged about it constantly.
Due to job changes and ambivalence and dislike of dental practice, I didn't go to the dentist for about 2 years. I had an old filling break, which basically forced me to go the dentist. I figured I probably had several cavities since I typically had at least one every dental visit, so I looked for a dentist who did sedation so I could get them all fixed at once in the easiest manner possible.
I gave the dentist my backstory and told him that not going to the dentist regularly was a dumb idea but that I was not going to floss, so don't tell me about flossing. If you bug me about flossing, I will just get up and leave I'm here for dental care, not lectures. He was pretty good about it.
Anyway, after an overhaul that included 2 crowns, a root canal and a few fillings I was back to decent shape. I started using (at their suggestion) a mouthwash with CPC (Crest ProHealth is the best known commercial brand, but generics are everywhere).
Since I started using CPC mouthwash my gums are in great shape and I've had zero cavities. The CPC seems to be an organic solvent for plaque and whatever sticky shit holds food particles in your mouth. I've brushed with an ultrasonic brush, rinsed my mouth with water thoroughly after and then used the CPC mouthwash and been AMAZED at the crap that comes out with the mouthwash.
I think in the absence of any dentistry, flossing is probably a good idea since it mechanically removes buildup in places brushes do nothing for. But I think that CPC mouthwash is a really decent substitute, since it not only treats your entire mouth and can get in places you can't floss or brush, it does an awful lot to nuke bacteria and growth that leads to cavities. I also think that the regular cleanings help, too. You just can't clean your own teeth the way a hygienist can with the tools and physical access they have.
I think, though, that it takes a generation or two for the social attitudes about gender relationships to become really ingrained. The women who first came of age in an era of real financial independence were raised by women who didn't know any better in an era where the expectations were different, so they mostly internalized the older value system.
Their daughters were raised with slightly different expectations and those women's daughters (more or less the millennials) were one of the first generations raised in an era of expanded options and different attitudes.
Now, you couple that in with some evolutionary reproductive biology instincts that are oriented towards not selecting a mate who isn't seen to be a resource-rich provider for offspring and you have a situation where they don't need a male partner in any social or economic sense, either, so they've kind of selected themselves out of situations where sex is likely to happen.
The grandparents are either still alive, active and living independently spending that money, or they're paying for expensive health care to keep their ailing bodies going, or they're living in an assisted care facility that costs $100k/year and requires you sign over all your assets.
We're also kind of past the era where the "grandparent" generation easily acquired a lot of wealth in the form of meaningful hard assets like real estate. I think that was more common 1-2 generations ago, but in many ways the current grandparent generation probably came of age in the 1960s, got hammered in the stagflation of the 1970s during the peak of their earning power and then suffered the long-term stagnation of wages like everyone else.
We're literally onto the 3rd or even 4th generation of "middle class" people who have lived in an era of stagnant wages which generally means stagnant or zero wealth accumulation, and much of the accumulated wealth they have ends up burned up by college tuition and health care.
I've run into this with old, very low-view count videos, including the only one I've ever uploaded to YouTube.
My assumption was always some kind of cache miss thing, as even Google wouldn't possibly cache a video from 2007 with 12 views close enough for seamless streaming.
I stayed in a hotel for a week which, in addition to the parking lot lights had an architectural illumination light *right* outside my window. So not only did I have orange sodium vapor parking lot light, I had a white spotlight beaming into my room.
What's stupid is that the curtains do a great job of blocking the light, but they don't close/overlap completely. Never thought of the pants hanger option -- that's a great idea, but in this hotel I got 4 large binder clips from the front desk to pin the curtains closed.
In one hotel I even re-arranged all the furniture except for the bed and the TV stand so I could work at the desk and see the TV.
Wait, you're saying Musk might be dabbling in an accounting/balance sheet/share price gambit and not unifying Tesla and Solar City for the benefit of humankind?
I wear progressive bifocals which gave me fits on computer monitors due to the narrow focal length on the lens they provide at computing distances.
I asked the ophthalmologist for a prescription specifically for computer distances and it's been a miracle, so much so that I sprung for a second pair to keep in my work laptop bag. It's a single distance prescription, but less strong than my nearsighted distance prescription. It's flexible enough that it works for laptops and large displays set back on desks or tables, it's close enough to my distance prescription that it's easy to get up and forget I have them on -- more than once I've left the house and driven a half block only to say "hey, why is the stop sign kind of blurry.." and realize I've got the wrong glasses on.
I also find that it helps to pick frames with large lenses. Rectangular lens shapes kind of suck because they lack a lot of vertical peripheral coverage often necessary with large displays.
I gave up on alarm clocks over a decade ago -- I wake up within about 10 minutes of 5 AM every day without any alarm clock. I found that all alarm clocks did for me was give me anxiety when I woke up in the middle of the night, reminding me how punishing it would be to not go back to sleep or some other time-related anxiety. If I absolutely have to be up at a certain time Or The Gates of Hell Will Open, I set an alarm on my smartphone, but when you can wake automatically at 5 that's almost never.
Any fucking LED in my bedroom makes me crazy, no matter what color it is, and every damn thing in the world seems to have an LED bright enough to use as a lighthouse signal.
I carry a roll of black electrical tape when I stay in hotels to cover the status LEDs of the TV and various other items in there. Unplugging the alarm clock is step 1.
I ran this on my Win 10 laptop and came up with only signed drivers.
I think 2012r2 has required signed drivers, and there's some Texas-two-step you can do to put it into developer mode and ignore driver signing, which is only useful trying to get drivers loaded for a marginal use cases. In my case it was to get an Intel non-server OS NIC driver for the motherboard to load in Win2012r2 with a hacked INF file since Intel won't allow the drivers to load in server OSes.