DanTheManPR

One difference is that the VA is a complete system, with it's own hospitals and staff. Medicare is that half-way solution, a public insurance system which buys medical services for the members from the private sector.

As for the VA system's woes, I would say: yeah, it's definitely possible to build a system that doesn't work well. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying.

This practice (adding a ? to a declarative sentence) is very informal, and so you wouldn't see it used in published English language media, so I'm not surprised that you may never have encountered it. It's used as a shorthand method of inviting clarification when the author is unsure of the veracity of the claim.

This sub-thread reminds me that there are many informal rules in languages that are rarely taught, and which can trip up non-native speakers. Informal shorthands, idioms, slang, etc.

You can find the FLAG cable referenced in the article on this map. The easiest landmark for finding it is the narrow section of the Malay peninsula. Stephenson spends some time in the article covering the overland construction there.

I'm also a new homeowner, and my mortgage + property taxes + insurance + utilities are about 2/3rds of what I was paying for rent last year. Will ongoing maintenance on my home eat up the $400 a month I'm saving? I guess that's possible... but even if it did, I'm still breaking even, and I own my own home.

That's particular to the area I live in, though, where the rental market is extremely tight in comparison to the buying market. In my particular case, the article's advice about "what else you could do with the money" is moot. The rental market here exists for people who need transient housing, or who's financial situations makes a loan difficult to get.

Apple continues to support OS updates on the iPhone 6s, a device released almost 6 years ago. Nor is it reserved for their flagship models - the 2016 iPhone SE also gets the latest and greatest.

Meanwhile, my flagship android phone from 2018, the Samsung Galaxy S9, is stuck on the last version of Android. At least it still gets security updates, some manufacturers don't even go that far.

That gives an interesting sense of scale to the problem. Dealing with C02 emissions is similar to water waste treatment, both in concept and in scale of infrastructure required.

The government of Taiwan has been willing to maintain the status kayfabe, including maintain the "Republic of China" name and holding China's seat at the UN for a couple of decades. It all seems quite ridiculous from the outside, but a lot of people in the region still get quite pissy about the particulars.

A fresh install of Catalina was unusably slow on my 2010 Macbook pro (to say nothing of even trying Big Sur!). I had gone back and forth between MacOS and Linux on this machine over the years, and the Linux experience has been improving in comparison. Especially now that some apps are falling out of compatibility with High Sierra (the last version that ran acceptably on this hardware). And it's not as though you need to use a lightweight distro; regular Ubuntu works fine on old hardware. The focus on keeping everything lean and performant, while maintaining compatibility with older hardware, is a great advantage of modern linux distos.

Linux hasn't replaced my desktop workstation OS quite yet, but the last few years have definitely been "Year of the Linux Laptop" for me.

To expand on that: the home building rate kept pace with population growth up until the housing crash, and then collapsed. I'm not sure how much of a lag time there is between population growth and the demand for more housing, but eventually all the kids born in the last 20 years will need to live somewhere. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041889/construction-yea...

Bagram is about 25miles outside of Kabul, though.

How else are you going to get people to download the app?

In The Economist case, the app update is making me seriously consider cancelling. UI can be subjective... but what's not is the unresponsiveness and lack of reliability in the audio playback. It's not acceptible for these to degrade with new releases.

I wondered about the claim in the first sentence, but it is true. Toyota and it's subsidiaries produced ~9.5million vehicles in 2020, or ~2.4million per quarter. Tesla's total vehicle sales since it's foundation are ~1.4million. To be fair to Tesla, they have expanded quite a bit in the last few years, producing 0.5million vehicles in 2020. Even with that expansion, their rate of output is only 5% of Toyota's.

Yes, if you have root on your phone.

Syncthing has re-framed how I think about the file systems of my computers. I used to occasionally plug in my phone to sync pictures and documents to my desktop. Now I don't even think about the distinction between them - the files simply exist on all of my computing devices, and any changes I make automatically propagate to the other devices.

I normally do all my work on my laptop, but I went ahead and set up sync between my work folders and my personal desktop. Syncing ~1tb of work data has been no problem.

I turn off my computers when I'm not home, and my phone runs syncthing-fork on a limited schedule, so I did at one point have some issues with stuff not syncing because devices weren't turned on. So I set up syncthing on a raspberry pi with a big external hard drive plugged in, and it sits next to the router just quietly synchronizing everything in the background.

It's all very set-it-and-forget-it. Just a great piece of software.

You may have to manually step through the conflicts menu to resolve them, choosing which device's version to keep. But typically that won't happen unless both device's versions of a file change at the same time.

Is that a function of the wavelength it's using? A quick search suggests that starlink uses 10-12ghz, are trees opaque at those frequencies?

I wonder if they'll finally make it possible for more than one instance of Settings to be open.

Definitely quite usable for modeling parts and basic assemblies. I use it almost exclusively now when working on community hobby projects, so as to make sure everyone has access to the development tools to make their own modifications.

But it's definitely behind the curve in terms of how friendly and discoverable the user interface is. It's a powerful modeler, but I'm not sure that it's in a good state to be used by a large engineering team on multiple large projects. In particular, a lot of the PDM options for FreeCAD seem sort of questionable; for better or worse, a lot of organizations are going to need it to interface with their current data management software. I haven't seen the effort to do that yet.

The advancement of CAD software over the last 20 years has been one step forward, one step back. There are lots of small, genuinely helpful everyday improvements (try doing modeled threads in Solidworks 2001 vs 2021), but they've also packaged in a lot of obnoxious "functionality" that is constantly nosing it's way into your workflow. The 3D modeling suites are IMO overall more usable, but the 2D stuff was arguably more usable before the ribbon craze.

Autodesk's present scheme seems to be to make as much of their software cloud-connected, with the purpose of entrapping all your company's vital IP within.

Per the article, he was unpaid. Literally just a prisoner.

Tomato is such a slick piece of software, combined with one of the most practical pieces of consumer electronics I've ever owned. Only reason I stopped using it was because of eventual advances in networking tech. My old WRT54G with Tomato got donated to my friend's game store, and still serves to this day as the public wifi access point there.

The CDC has an excellent visualization for this. 2020 is a major outlier in the last few years in terms of excess deaths. If you drill down into the local data, you can see some really stark visualizations: for example, the tremendous increase in deaths in New York City in spring of 2020.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

I am experimenting with it as a replacement for hobby projects that I want to share and collaborate on. I was always leery of Fusion 360 precisely because it was not truly free, and instead encumbered by the whims of Autodesk. If I want to create things that are meant to become part of the creative commons, then my whole creative toolchain should be part of that same commons.

There is a learning curve to it, as the interface and a lot of the paradigms are different than what is typical of other design tools. I've had to humble myself and follow through a lot of video tutorials (Joko Engineering is pretty good https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8h1ofkRFdeI). I'm then re-modeling some simple projects just to assure myself that I can replicate what I've done before (for example, https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4616582/files). Some aspects of it seem fairly unfriendly initially, but the experience smooths out once you grok the approach. I'm so used to using Solidworks that I kind of forget what it was like to first learn how to use parametric modelers.

What's interesting is how strong the selection pressure seems to be to have melanin content adjusted to match the local conditions for sunlight. In the western hemisphere, where humans have only lived for ~20,000 years, there was already notable variations in pigmentation developing prior to 1500AD. That would make sense if vitamin D production is very important to health.

The ratio of the thickness of the glass compared to the unsupported span of material makes them relatively much more rigid than a big, floppy pane of glass. A glass window is not only much less rigid, but also maximizes the surface area that pressure from the blast wave can push against.

Fortunately, a lot of Android phones these days offer both systems, so you can use whichever is most convenient for you at the moment.

Excellent, this is now a top option for me!

FYI, it has been called YouTube Premium since 2018. I pay for it, as I can't stand advertisements. For the amount of Youtube content I watch, it's one of the more cost effective services I pay for.

I remember being very bored a lot in the 90s. Waiting around in the laundromat, sitting in waiting rooms, riding the bus, doing house and yard work. Books and walkmans and gameboys existed, of course, but they were slightly too big to always carry them around in your pocket.

I was a very early listener of audiobooks on digital media players, which was a godsend for alleviating that kind of boredom.