Public schools indoctrinate, only educate as required for job 1 - create the "right" sort of servants.
You can argue the morality and who decides among yourselves. The fact here is quite obvious and has been widely public for almost as long as there's been public education. "Give me control of the schools and I'll give you any kind of citizen you desire".
Education is a widely misused word these days. As well as a lot of others. That's no accident.
What you call communism - the government controlling everything, is actually totalitarianism, which isn't exclusively a communist thing at all. Fascists do it...crony capitalists do it (control the other way around, but it makes no practical difference as it's total and central).
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What's funny is that this "shutdown" only shutdown around 7% of the government spending and "work" - the stuff you mention among it. No paychecks don't get paid - zero. No entitlements don't get paid - there'd be revolt. Sure, the part of the IRS that gives refunds is shut down (and I'm waiting myself), but not the part that collects your money, using force as necessary. .
Yes, shutting certain parts down - you'll notice that only the parts that sometimes deliver some sort of service (you forgot to mention parks and museums) - is all for show, no part that exercises power shuts down. And shutting down some things only creates problems the government caused in the first place - you used to be able to introduce a product etc without a permit at all (not that this was utopia, but...). New types of beer - now that hurts! No really, it does. WTF were we thinking letting them control that in the first place? Is the approval of new drugs that actually cure anything so frequent? If you know squat, you know that at most the new drugs are palliative and intended as an income stream for phrama, many are just tweaks of a molecule to extend a patent, and most have some fairly nasty side effects while not curing you. Iatrogenic deaths are at an all time high. I think government is doing it wrong.
Right. It's cool that it looks nice fer sure, but...
Here, where I manage a rather large solar photovoltaic system for a decent sized campus, an IR pic is often plenty good enough if it's timely, and I really don't care what the ground looks like on their pic anyway - I can always look out the window and get a look with fantastic resolution and color rendition after all...
Agree, but that's not the only explanation/indication. Yes, concave up exponential like growth curve always means a market has become all buyers, and often these days, with leverage. Which means at some point, everyone is all in, no more money or interest to buy more of whatever. Someone sells, there's nothing but a low bid, this scares all the weak hands who then also try to sell, and down we go. I wrote about this in a blog under "stock manipulation 101" because it can also be done deliberately, you don't have to just passively watch it happen if you're big enough (grandma's retirement mutual fund).
Yup. At least it could be sold as such (and was).
Trouble with undated predictions...the stopped clock theory....but yeah, a few people made "the big short" at the right time. Sadly, I wasn't one of them.
More dangerous by far is the fact that webkit is becoming a monoculture and Google is talking about removing the api that lets ublock origin work... MS is ditching one of the few competitors to it (chrome, chromium, Vivaldi, Safari and others all use webkit).
Adblock will still work, because they're going to let it work. Why? Because they can pay to whitelist themselves on it. Along with anyone else with the bucks, and we're back to malware distribution via ads again.
While more secure DNS might make pihole not work, the pushback is to not allow anything BUT the one URL you surfed to serve anything at all to you. Drastic, like noscript, but if people do that - websites will clean up very quickly, and start vetting any internal ad content because then they will be liable - and easy to prove it - (let the lawyers do some good for a change) if they infect your stuff...
Bad to trust your money to a pro grifter in the markets (yes, I traded and lost nearly 25% before I got out - it was my own money so I cared). Thank Barney Frank and Bill Clinton for the deregulation that created that fake boom that became a real crash. What's funny, is that even though I agreed with neither, it was good intentions, mostly. Loosen regs so more people can buy a house, more people have a stake in the system, neighborhoods improve, all that - nice if it'd work.
But those same changes - unintended consequences - once you let one set of monetary entities make "questionable" loans, all must or lose market share. Add to that another ?? effect of the deregulation, which allowed CDO's and ilk to exist...and here we are.
For those who don't get it - a CDO or CLO is the equivalent of being able to buy insurance on someone without their consent or knowledge (illegal in the insurance and many other businesses) - along with a can of gas and a pack of matches. Thank people like Jamie Dimon and his then employee Blythe Masters for creating that. Banks then no longer had to vet borrowers at all, since they could sell the loans on to JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs before the ink was dry - and why care if the borrower could never pay it back, the bank had its profit in hand already...separate actions from consequences and let human nature take over - this was just one example.
Sorry about the lost money. But it might be nice to know how it really went down. People who handle money for commision don't care if you lost it, they get fees anyway. If you do and don't pay attention, you lose too - like I did, some. If you let a dysfunctional government run things, we all lose - those people can't add with crayons, much less understand a a complex financial system, and their entire pitch to get elected denies human nature exists and changes very little over time.
will destroy all of it. Yes, there's value in easy solutions to very atomic problems (how do I get a serial port, or a reliable stream to xyzzy?). Knowing how all this interacts and making it robust when some things can fail - for more than one reason with more than one sensible way to proceed from there, some things can block for varying times...and all that class of issues - architecture vs just moronic coding - won't be solved by this, which will probably make that whole class of problems - which is the most frequent and most important set - worse, not better.
Making it easier for monkies to code isn't going to get you anything but monkey code. Give me a break. We've already proved that one in spades. If you need to search all the time for some constructs, perhaps they should be in the language and you should, you know, actually frigging know the language you're getting paid to know. .
This has been the dream of moronic PHB's and MBA's forever - make it so we don't need skilled people who demand a real paycheck to code our custom solutions. It's all been tried in one form or another. I'm not holding my breath...remember when OLE, activeX, DCOM was going to solve it all with drag-drop components (or all the variations before and after that from MS?). Are we there yet? That was just one example of one approach. Look into the history of all this, there have been many. 100% failure rate for some reason.
There are tons of small localized weather stations. Wunderground is big where I am. Thing is... no centralized source of weather gets enough time/detail/bits to describe what's actually going on in detail. Predicting for my little town of 10k souls is easy, but no one will bother to do that who has a customer base 100's of times that size. They couldn't if they wanted to - TL;DR would happen.
You're projecting your own needs on everyone. Sure, there are a few who share that. I don't commute other than to get beer and munchies, but do need solar power to run the place, or have to fire up a backup generator. I'm interested in info you don't care about, and I'm a valid user too - and it's my real life as far as I can tell. Your dystopian need to travel every day may be common, but I wouldn't say it's the best way to live or desirable.
Useless cloud cover predictions if you manage a solar power system. Maybe slightly better than a decade ago...very slightly. We have sunny - sometimes correct, but...and we have cloudy - also sometimes correct, but never is either one fully the case or enough to predict whether I'll get enough sun to run the place.
How cloudy? When? I can tolerate a good bit and be fine, but when matters. If off-peak hours, don't care.
I may care if it's all sun in the AM and then dark - going to batteries too soon, or getting next day sun too late is something I want to know about. - This is a big system, but there are still times it's best not to plan on TIG welding or running the milling machine. Or charging the car. .
Having said that, by building my own weather stations as part of my LAN of things, and by looking at the now far better radar and satellite data available, I can do a far better job for my location. That last word is the key. I feel bad for the poor meteorologist who has to predict 35% of rain over his coverage area. In the mountains where I live, that could be perfectly accurate on average, but even the weather-person knows damn well it's going to drown 20% of the area, sprinkle on some of the rest, and the bulk of the coverage area won't see a thing. Maybe there are places where the weather is pretty uniform over some large area, but I don't live in one of those. I can drive 2 miles between torrential downpour and bright sunshine on many days - just the other side of some mountain ridge. .
The old model of some guy on TV or the radio giving the weather for the coverage area is as much at fault as bad predicting ever was. Knowing how things flow across your location by having studied the patterns in the radar and IR data...and you're going to be better at this than the pros *can* be - they have an impossible job.
Since I'm off-grid, another way of saying I'm the power company for myself. And none of it is accessible from the internet. In fact, the only parts of it available on my LAN are the results of data acquisition - all actual control is not even on the local network. It's not that hard to push a button once in awhile...
Few do - my doctors were basically in disbelief when I managed (and did various tests to prove I wasn't faking). But some manage.
I used a unique technique, see above. I have a lot of willpower when my life is on the line and death is at the door. Too bad that's what it took.
Mod up ^^^^^^ I already posted and have experienced this in person on my own bod. I went for the longest time like Chuck, then wham, not much warning at all...and it sucks. After a few years clean I can now do single flights of stairs....maybe someday I'll get back to two. It's no joke.
The opposite approach is what worked for me after 3 packs a day for ~ 45 years.
I got a really good mech and tank (tried several) with very good temp control, as we know what happens in destructive distillation (I do science for a living).
I got the purest available raw liquids - nicotine, menthol, glycerin, and made my own juice - stronger in nicotine than you can normally buy (> 36 mg).
Basically a couple hits would handle the jones with that stuff, no huge clouds - my lungs were already pretty shot and I had no reason to act silly and show off.
My health improved at first, maybe a few months, then started to go down again - I HAD to quit.
So I went back to high school habits - can only smoke at the top of the hour (remember between classes in the bathroom?) for 5 minutes, and if I missed one - tough crap, wait an hour.
It was hard for awhile. But I'd succeeded in dropping the physical "play with it" part of the habit, and meanwhile, you can only smoke so much in 5 min, while the juice was strong enough to wipe out the jones - I'd sometimes put the thing down and forget.
I discovered that the longer I waited each morning for that first smoke, the better the day went.
After awhile, I was making it till the afternoon, and one day ended the day with...wow, didn't smoke today.
Must be time. I put all that crap in a box which hasn't been opened since.
Does it still bother me now and then? Yeah. At first it would shake me like a leaf for half an hour, maybe once a day, but that became less and less frequent and less powerful to the point of maybe once a month after a year. 3 years clean now and it at most I get a little twinge now and then. But remembering what it was like not to be able to cruise up a flight of stairs or walk to my own mailbox and back without a rest is a powerful motivation. Wish it'd taken less and I had more lungs left, but...I'm alive at 65 and no cancer, just COPD and that not super bad.
I'd tried the weaker cigs when those were popular and it only made things worse as I smoked more of them to kill the jones, and when I went back, I smoked just as many of the stronger ones. I also found out that the lung damage was the other stuff - not the nicotine - in regular cigs - the hard way. I had similar results trying that with vapes....nope, for me the thing that worked was super strong, take 1-2 hits and put the thing down, zooming. Lose the habit...the physical addiction is the easier part.
It's January here. We have maybe 6-8 days this month where a concentrator would work AT ALL. Meanwhile, I like to make my tea every single day without fail, not to mention keep my physics vacuum system pumped down. February will be worse if it's like most years. Summertime? Hell, I can weld all day while someone runs the milling machine. That's reality.
The number of batteries I would need (I already have ~ $9k worth, a couple tons weight) - to use fewer panels but install concentrators which cost nearly the same per sq foot (panels are under $1/watt now if you install yourself) - would cost FAR more than the system I have.
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Sure, if you live in certain places they are a good deal, just like wind is a good deal in a windy place. In the mountains where it's often cloudy, they are not only useless but they are a hazard in high winds. We don't get enough wind normally to make a windmill worth it either - except in a few mountain peak places.
There's this concept - right tool for the job at hand; use the right thing for where you are, OK? It would be more expensive, dangerous, and a waste where I live to use concentrators. But then, I've only been off grid since 1980 or so, so maybe I have more to learn./s
Even if - my large array (Around 4kw peak) runs my home campus even on cloudy days, since it only draws ~ 300w when I'm not running a lathe or welder. All this crap about concentrators is dumb-ass and only for places like deserts or maybe Thailand. The rest of us have lots of cloudy days, and you know what? If there's enough light to see...there's some power coming out, even in diffuse light - from a panel array. Like street racing where there's no substitute for cubic inches - no substitute for plain old area. Concentrators only work when you don't need them, such a deal I have for you....
If I cared what you thought, I'd be in trouble. But being a free man and self-justifying, creating value and not giving you power over me by needing or wanting your approval, then I don't care if you laugh, knock yourself out. The ghosts in my town had IQ and learning. I don't waste breath laughing at those who don't. Or pity when their ignorance is their own doing.
I also despise Oracle, but there's no need to lie about how bad they are or why, there's plenty already, and internal pay inequality is not even the biggie.
Funny, I'm white, male, all that. And being mostly the best engineer I'd ever met, the rate of my pay and promotions always seemed unfair to me - had I been one of those other - person of color, wrong sex, whatever - I'd have been sure there was discrimination. And no reasoning would have convinced me otherwise. This observation is to me, quite eye-opening. I'm now out of the game and old enough to look back with a little less ego in it and see why things were the way they were in my own career (which was quite successful in the end).
I was brash, a bit of a prick, bad people skills, immature...but technically a fantastic engineer otherwise. I had zip for social and negotiating skills, only bothered to be nice to others I felt might be worth it and who might help me up the ladder, in other words, I was a real asshole. And people put up with it because I delivered the goods, technically, but I'm pretty sure they didn't like it. It's embarrassing now to look back on in some ways. .
My point is, if there is one, that if you're too close to a situation, it's hard to be an honest judge of it. If you go in with an agenda, no hope of finding truth. And in my own case, yeah, I was "discriminated against" and for damn good reasons, they just didn't have anything to do with my "identity" or "class" as people now would divide things up to make conquering easier. I'm so grateful I wasn't anything but white, but not for the reason that white males did better - there was still only one person at the top, after all - and that was the big issue, there's not much top, and to be there you have to have more than one thing working right. Had I been one of those "repressed" identities, I'd be dead sure to this day that my failure to get to the top super fast was discrimination, patriarchy, totalitarianism, favoritism, cronyism, whatever. Nope...it was that the world isn't, and probably shouldn't be, a pure meritocracy in some narrow definition of that concept. Sure, I was one of the best EE's ever - but that's not all there is to merit in an engineering job, not by a very long shot. Doh!
Well, about using identity politics as a divide and conquer technique, I agree (and I rarely do with you). Oldest game in the book, used forever, but more recently put into hyperdrive by the very people you are rooting for here. Damn, the cognitive dissonance is deafening.
This has been like someone used the shoe-shop ray (Hitchhiker's) to create discord, and it's more on the Alinsky side, not that anyone is particularly innocent.
This partisanship is all a distraction while the very top run off with the rest of our money and freedom (the controlled opposition even got the numbers way wrong - accident? - , you're in the 1% if you own your own home debt free and have a little in the bank - the problem is more like the.0001% - or less). They're not partisan, they're statist, classist, and elitist. They are all the war party. If you try to end a pointless war now, it's called treason. WTF? No one represents the people, which has been borne out by many studies that now show the US as a complete crony oligarchy.
That's the problem, the rest is just symptoms.
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Public schools indoctrinate, only educate as required for job 1 - create the "right" sort of servants.
You can argue the morality and who decides among yourselves. The fact here is quite obvious and has been widely public for almost as long as there's been public education. "Give me control of the schools and I'll give you any kind of citizen you desire".
Education is a widely misused word these days. As well as a lot of others. That's no accident.
.
What's funny is that this "shutdown" only shutdown around 7% of the government spending and "work" - the stuff you mention among it. No paychecks don't get paid - zero. No entitlements don't get paid - there'd be revolt. Sure, the part of the IRS that gives refunds is shut down (and I'm waiting myself), but not the part that collects your money, using force as necessary.
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Yes, shutting certain parts down - you'll notice that only the parts that sometimes deliver some sort of service (you forgot to mention parks and museums) - is all for show, no part that exercises power shuts down. And shutting down some things only creates problems the government caused in the first place - you used to be able to introduce a product etc without a permit at all (not that this was utopia, but...). New types of beer - now that hurts! No really, it does. WTF were we thinking letting them control that in the first place? Is the approval of new drugs that actually cure anything so frequent? If you know squat, you know that at most the new drugs are palliative and intended as an income stream for phrama, many are just tweaks of a molecule to extend a patent, and most have some fairly nasty side effects while not curing you. Iatrogenic deaths are at an all time high. I think government is doing it wrong.
Right. It's cool that it looks nice fer sure, but...
Here, where I manage a rather large solar photovoltaic system for a decent sized campus, an IR pic is often plenty good enough if it's timely, and I really don't care what the ground looks like on their pic anyway - I can always look out the window and get a look with fantastic resolution and color rendition after all...
Agree, but that's not the only explanation/indication. Yes, concave up exponential like growth curve always means a market has become all buyers, and often these days, with leverage. Which means at some point, everyone is all in, no more money or interest to buy more of whatever. Someone sells, there's nothing but a low bid, this scares all the weak hands who then also try to sell, and down we go. I wrote about this in a blog under "stock manipulation 101" because it can also be done deliberately, you don't have to just passively watch it happen if you're big enough (grandma's retirement mutual fund).
Yup. At least it could be sold as such (and was).
Trouble with undated predictions...the stopped clock theory....but yeah, a few people made "the big short" at the right time. Sadly, I wasn't one of them.
More dangerous by far is the fact that webkit is becoming a monoculture and Google is talking about removing the api that lets ublock origin work ... MS is ditching one of the few competitors to it (chrome, chromium, Vivaldi, Safari and others all use webkit).
Adblock will still work, because they're going to let it work. Why? Because they can pay to whitelist themselves on it. Along with anyone else with the bucks, and we're back to malware distribution via ads again.
While more secure DNS might make pihole not work, the pushback is to not allow anything BUT the one URL you surfed to serve anything at all to you. Drastic, like noscript, but if people do that - websites will clean up very quickly, and start vetting any internal ad content because then they will be liable - and easy to prove it - (let the lawyers do some good for a change) if they infect your stuff...
Bad to trust your money to a pro grifter in the markets (yes, I traded and lost nearly 25% before I got out - it was my own money so I cared). Thank Barney Frank and Bill Clinton for the deregulation that created that fake boom that became a real crash. What's funny, is that even though I agreed with neither, it was good intentions, mostly. Loosen regs so more people can buy a house, more people have a stake in the system, neighborhoods improve, all that - nice if it'd work.
But those same changes - unintended consequences - once you let one set of monetary entities make "questionable" loans, all must or lose market share. Add to that another ?? effect of the deregulation, which allowed CDO's and ilk to exist...and here we are.
For those who don't get it - a CDO or CLO is the equivalent of being able to buy insurance on someone without their consent or knowledge (illegal in the insurance and many other businesses) - along with a can of gas and a pack of matches. Thank people like Jamie Dimon and his then employee Blythe Masters for creating that. Banks then no longer had to vet borrowers at all, since they could sell the loans on to JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs before the ink was dry - and why care if the borrower could never pay it back, the bank had its profit in hand already...separate actions from consequences and let human nature take over - this was just one example.
Sorry about the lost money. But it might be nice to know how it really went down. People who handle money for commision don't care if you lost it, they get fees anyway. If you do and don't pay attention, you lose too - like I did, some. If you let a dysfunctional government run things, we all lose - those people can't add with crayons, much less understand a a complex financial system, and their entire pitch to get elected denies human nature exists and changes very little over time.
Making it easier for monkies to code isn't going to get you anything but monkey code. Give me a break. We've already proved that one in spades. If you need to search all the time for some constructs, perhaps they should be in the language and you should, you know, actually frigging know the language you're getting paid to know.
.
This has been the dream of moronic PHB's and MBA's forever - make it so we don't need skilled people who demand a real paycheck to code our custom solutions. It's all been tried in one form or another. I'm not holding my breath...remember when OLE, activeX, DCOM was going to solve it all with drag-drop components (or all the variations before and after that from MS?). Are we there yet? That was just one example of one approach. Look into the history of all this, there have been many. 100% failure rate for some reason.
There are tons of small localized weather stations. Wunderground is big where I am. Thing is... no centralized source of weather gets enough time/detail/bits to describe what's actually going on in detail. Predicting for my little town of 10k souls is easy, but no one will bother to do that who has a customer base 100's of times that size. They couldn't if they wanted to - TL;DR would happen.
You're projecting your own needs on everyone. Sure, there are a few who share that. I don't commute other than to get beer and munchies, but do need solar power to run the place, or have to fire up a backup generator. I'm interested in info you don't care about, and I'm a valid user too - and it's my real life as far as I can tell. Your dystopian need to travel every day may be common, but I wouldn't say it's the best way to live or desirable.
How cloudy? When? I can tolerate a good bit and be fine, but when matters. If off-peak hours, don't care.
I may care if it's all sun in the AM and then dark - going to batteries too soon, or getting next day sun too late is something I want to know about. - This is a big system, but there are still times it's best not to plan on TIG welding or running the milling machine. Or charging the car.
.
Having said that, by building my own weather stations as part of my LAN of things, and by looking at the now far better radar and satellite data available, I can do a far better job for my location. That last word is the key. I feel bad for the poor meteorologist who has to predict 35% of rain over his coverage area. In the mountains where I live, that could be perfectly accurate on average, but even the weather-person knows damn well it's going to drown 20% of the area, sprinkle on some of the rest, and the bulk of the coverage area won't see a thing. Maybe there are places where the weather is pretty uniform over some large area, but I don't live in one of those. I can drive 2 miles between torrential downpour and bright sunshine on many days - just the other side of some mountain ridge.
.
The old model of some guy on TV or the radio giving the weather for the coverage area is as much at fault as bad predicting ever was. Knowing how things flow across your location by having studied the patterns in the radar and IR data...and you're going to be better at this than the pros *can* be - they have an impossible job.
Is that you, Mr Alinsky?
Since I'm off-grid, another way of saying I'm the power company for myself. And none of it is accessible from the internet. In fact, the only parts of it available on my LAN are the results of data acquisition - all actual control is not even on the local network. It's not that hard to push a button once in awhile...
Few do - my doctors were basically in disbelief when I managed (and did various tests to prove I wasn't faking). But some manage. I used a unique technique, see above. I have a lot of willpower when my life is on the line and death is at the door. Too bad that's what it took.
Mod up ^^^^^^ I already posted and have experienced this in person on my own bod. I went for the longest time like Chuck, then wham, not much warning at all...and it sucks. After a few years clean I can now do single flights of stairs....maybe someday I'll get back to two. It's no joke.
The opposite approach is what worked for me after 3 packs a day for ~ 45 years. I got a really good mech and tank (tried several) with very good temp control, as we know what happens in destructive distillation (I do science for a living).
I got the purest available raw liquids - nicotine, menthol, glycerin, and made my own juice - stronger in nicotine than you can normally buy (> 36 mg).
Basically a couple hits would handle the jones with that stuff, no huge clouds - my lungs were already pretty shot and I had no reason to act silly and show off.
My health improved at first, maybe a few months, then started to go down again - I HAD to quit.
So I went back to high school habits - can only smoke at the top of the hour (remember between classes in the bathroom?) for 5 minutes, and if I missed one - tough crap, wait an hour.
It was hard for awhile. But I'd succeeded in dropping the physical "play with it" part of the habit, and meanwhile, you can only smoke so much in 5 min, while the juice was strong enough to wipe out the jones - I'd sometimes put the thing down and forget.
I discovered that the longer I waited each morning for that first smoke, the better the day went.
After awhile, I was making it till the afternoon, and one day ended the day with...wow, didn't smoke today.
Must be time. I put all that crap in a box which hasn't been opened since.
Does it still bother me now and then? Yeah. At first it would shake me like a leaf for half an hour, maybe once a day, but that became less and less frequent and less powerful to the point of maybe once a month after a year. 3 years clean now and it at most I get a little twinge now and then. But remembering what it was like not to be able to cruise up a flight of stairs or walk to my own mailbox and back without a rest is a powerful motivation. Wish it'd taken less and I had more lungs left, but...I'm alive at 65 and no cancer, just COPD and that not super bad. I'd tried the weaker cigs when those were popular and it only made things worse as I smoked more of them to kill the jones, and when I went back, I smoked just as many of the stronger ones. I also found out that the lung damage was the other stuff - not the nicotine - in regular cigs - the hard way. I had similar results trying that with vapes....nope, for me the thing that worked was super strong, take 1-2 hits and put the thing down, zooming. Lose the habit...the physical addiction is the easier part.
Big Bag of Crap is better.
The number of batteries I would need (I already have ~ $9k worth, a couple tons weight) - to use fewer panels but install concentrators which cost nearly the same per sq foot (panels are under $1/watt now if you install yourself) - would cost FAR more than the system I have.
.
Sure, if you live in certain places they are a good deal, just like wind is a good deal in a windy place. In the mountains where it's often cloudy, they are not only useless but they are a hazard in high winds. We don't get enough wind normally to make a windmill worth it either - except in a few mountain peak places. There's this concept - right tool for the job at hand; use the right thing for where you are, OK? It would be more expensive, dangerous, and a waste where I live to use concentrators. But then, I've only been off grid since 1980 or so, so maybe I have more to learn. /s
Even if - my large array (Around 4kw peak) runs my home campus even on cloudy days, since it only draws ~ 300w when I'm not running a lathe or welder. All this crap about concentrators is dumb-ass and only for places like deserts or maybe Thailand. The rest of us have lots of cloudy days, and you know what? If there's enough light to see...there's some power coming out, even in diffuse light - from a panel array. Like street racing where there's no substitute for cubic inches - no substitute for plain old area.
Concentrators only work when you don't need them, such a deal I have for you....
Dunno what ass is modding you back down after I mod you up.
If I cared what you thought, I'd be in trouble. But being a free man and self-justifying, creating value and not giving you power over me by needing or wanting your approval, then I don't care if you laugh, knock yourself out. The ghosts in my town had IQ and learning. I don't waste breath laughing at those who don't. Or pity when their ignorance is their own doing.
Livius - I realized on reading my own post I wasn't clear - you weren't lying at all, the story on the other hand...
Funny, I'm white, male, all that. And being mostly the best engineer I'd ever met, the rate of my pay and promotions always seemed unfair to me - had I been one of those other - person of color, wrong sex, whatever - I'd have been sure there was discrimination. And no reasoning would have convinced me otherwise. This observation is to me, quite eye-opening. I'm now out of the game and old enough to look back with a little less ego in it and see why things were the way they were in my own career (which was quite successful in the end).
I was brash, a bit of a prick, bad people skills, immature...but technically a fantastic engineer otherwise. I had zip for social and negotiating skills, only bothered to be nice to others I felt might be worth it and who might help me up the ladder, in other words, I was a real asshole.
And people put up with it because I delivered the goods, technically, but I'm pretty sure they didn't like it. It's embarrassing now to look back on in some ways.
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My point is, if there is one, that if you're too close to a situation, it's hard to be an honest judge of it. If you go in with an agenda, no hope of finding truth. And in my own case, yeah, I was "discriminated against" and for damn good reasons, they just didn't have anything to do with my "identity" or "class" as people now would divide things up to make conquering easier. I'm so grateful I wasn't anything but white, but not for the reason that white males did better - there was still only one person at the top, after all - and that was the big issue, there's not much top, and to be there you have to have more than one thing working right. Had I been one of those "repressed" identities, I'd be dead sure to this day that my failure to get to the top super fast was discrimination, patriarchy, totalitarianism, favoritism, cronyism, whatever. Nope...it was that the world isn't, and probably shouldn't be, a pure meritocracy in some narrow definition of that concept. Sure, I was one of the best EE's ever - but that's not all there is to merit in an engineering job, not by a very long shot. Doh!
Well, about using identity politics as a divide and conquer technique, I agree (and I rarely do with you). Oldest game in the book, used forever, but more recently put into hyperdrive by the very people you are rooting for here. Damn, the cognitive dissonance is deafening. This has been like someone used the shoe-shop ray (Hitchhiker's) to create discord, and it's more on the Alinsky side, not that anyone is particularly innocent. .0001% - or less). They're not partisan, they're statist, classist, and elitist. They are all the war party. If you try to end a pointless war now, it's called treason. WTF? No one represents the people, which has been borne out by many studies that now show the US as a complete crony oligarchy.
This partisanship is all a distraction while the very top run off with the rest of our money and freedom (the controlled opposition even got the numbers way wrong - accident? - , you're in the 1% if you own your own home debt free and have a little in the bank - the problem is more like the
That's the problem, the rest is just symptoms.
Yep, this ^^^^^^.