Declanomous

I mean if I'm only going to read a book once I'm not going to spend $10 on it. The only books I buy are books I'd like to own so I can read them again in the future. If I'm paying $10 to read a book once that basically makes Amazon into a really shitty library that also sells knockoff goods and forces their employees to work in sweatshop like conditions.

I ripped all my CDs at one point, realized it was a pain in the ass, deleted all of them, and then redownloaded them from Oink.cd/What.cd.

I stopped buying albums for a while, because I have a Google play music subscription, but a couple albums I really liked were deleted from the service recently. I had "added them to my library", understanding that I didn't own them, but I never expected them to get pulled from the service.

I'm getting pretty sick of Google Play shenanigans altogether. I'm probably going back to ripping my own music because the streaming services suck, and oink/what are shut down.

You don't own the book itself though, you own a license to the book. The doctrine of first sale does not apply, and they can revoke your license at any time.

They have revoked licenses in the past and deleted books from people's devices. I know you have a physical file that contains the book, but that file is secured with DRM.

I think this is partly why "old money" isn't flashy like nouveau rich money. It's easier to blow a fortune than it is to make a fortune.

I don't really think it is fair to include hardware in that list. It makes sense to memorialize the death of a hardware line, but it doesn't really make sense to memorialize every single piece of hardware. That's a bit like memorializing every minor version of software that is superceded by a new version.

I think using an employer-provided card is superior for a lot of reasons, but spending 5 figures on a personal card and being reimbursed for it doesn't sound bad as someone with an extremely high credit limit and rewards cards that give 2-3% back on most purchases. I know some people who manage to fly first class to some pretty far-flung destinations using points they got from company spending on their personal credit cards.

That being said it can be pretty risky if your accounting department loses a check

I got chewed out when I expensed WiFi at a hotel once because "it seemed unlikely that I was using it for business." The funny thing is that I spent way less than everyone else on that trip, to the tune of maybe $400 over the course of 6 days (I rarely take cabs because I prefer to walk places, and I find large fancy restaurants in major cities to be bland to the point of interchangeability, so I typically eat at smaller local places), but the fact that I spent $40 on WiFi was a huge problem.

I'm sure this is the kind of fraud that this thing would detect. "Ah, you split your meal between two different food stands! That is fraud!"

"You'll never guess who I saw?"

"Who?"

"Elvis"

"Elvis? The Elvis or a Elvis?"

"The Elvis"

The doesn't imply someone is inanimate, it just means that they are a specific one.

Not to mention that if someone had several hours of CPR done to them they are almost certainly going to need to go to the hospital anyways. Not to mention the average person can only sustain effective CPR for a few minutes.

That's nonsense. It's literally illegal to change your car so that it pollutes more. You don't need a second law making it illegal to modify any and all software to make sure that doesn't happen.

How many people turn off their computer regularly? I suppose people with laptops probably do. I leave my computer on 24/7/365.

I like the automatic cars that allow you to choose your gear using the stick. I have a 2010 Impreza, which has the god-awful 4EAT, but you can avoid a lot of the issues if you just downshift manually when you'd like to.

I test drove a manual 2010 Impreza before I bought mine in automatic. The automatic has a 4EAT which sucks, but the clutch on the 5 speed would have sucked so bad in traffic.

As one of my friends with the same car said "it's a heavy clutch. It's not that bad to use if you are a tall guy, but if you are a short woman who weighs less than 120 pounds, you are going to have to stand on it or pull the steering wheel to use it"

He has the Saabaru, and his GF can't drive his car at all because of how heavy the clutch is.

Now that I only use my car for errands in the city I wish I had the manual, but I am so glad I didn't have it when I had a 1 hour commute each way in stop and go traffic.

Buying a cheese fondue is the most Swiss thing about this story. Cheese fondues were a fad in the US before I was born, and I know a lot of people's parent's who own them and use them maybe once every 5 years.

That's how it is on my car, but at the same time my car basically has no fancy electronics.

I understand software engineers pulling stunts like this, because there isn't actually a regulated engineering license, but I'd honestly have expected automotive engineers to be vehemently opposed to putting the stereo on the same system as the brakes.

Most of my experience is with non-profit orgs, but unlike a lot of people in the NPO space I have a fair amount of for-profit experience. I think people who work for NPOs tend to burn out at even higher rates than people in for-profit orgs because they get emotionally invested in the mission, fail to set reasonable boundaries, and because they typically make less than people who work for for-profit orgs and therefore have more money related stress and fewer resources to deal with stress.

Working for an NPO can be existentially rewarding, but I hear a lot of myths about how NPOs provide better work life balance, etc, and I don't think that's true at all.

I have a theory that a lot of people do things in certain ways in order to keep up appearances. For instance, a lot of startups waste a lot of money on things that are 'business-y' to legitimize themselves as a 'real business'.

To that extent, I find that a lot of NPOs waste a lot of resources appearing 'thrifty' (read: cheap). I've worked with a lot of NPOs that waste tons of employee time and money because they don't want to spend money because of the 'optics'. What this means is that getting anything done takes more time and energy at an NPO.

My specialty is database marketing, and I've literally done thousands of experiments across millions of mailed letters. I've found that for most donors, anything that can make a letter appear 'cheaper' improves response rate and the average donation. Most people interpret similar data as people preferring more 'personalized' letters, but I think that's because there is a lot of overlap between 'low-budget' and 'human touch'.

The irony is that at once place we spent more than three times as much per letter to make them appear cheaper.

This mindset also applies to people who work at non-profit orgs. People would spend 3 days doing stuff by hand rather than paying $100 to have it automated. On a similar note, I was stuck with an ancient Pentium 4 for a long time because the IT department bought them used. They were eventually replaced with Core 2 Duos. They were slow as hell, which was bad enough, but if you did the math the lifetime cost was much higher than buying a new computer due in large part to how much power Pentium 4's used. Not to mention it took them forever to upgrade from CRTs, which use so much more electricity than LCDs.

Well you can block them, it just means you lose advantages of a JWT, like not requiring a database hit.

The US won WWII through superior logistics as much as anything else. The Japanese strike at Pearl Harbor was in recognition of the fact that they would lose any prolonged war with the US because of the manufacturing capacity that we possessed.

It kind of looks like they are in a plains state somewhere. Having lived in the midwest nearly all my life, I can say with confidence that you are going to spend a lot of time waiting if you are waiting for a calm day.

They probably just make sure the wind isn't gusting too much.

Commission typically isn't paid out until the company is paid in my experience. Bonuses are different, but some companies I work for actually tracked how many orders were actually fully paid for vs. how many were entered into the system. A concerning number of salespeople would basically sign people up if anything the customer said could be construed as being interested, and their numbers would look great until you looked at the number of sales that fell through.

I never has the most sales in a single month when I worked sales, but I regularly had the highest realized revenue because every single person I signed up actually wanted what they were purchasing.

Eh, I really depends. I think softphones are great if you use the phone infrequently, or if you use the phone so often that you always have a headset on. If you use the phone a several times a day for really short periods using a softphone is a pain.

That's not even taking the average age of the employee into account. I worked at a place where the average employee was probably 45 or so.

At my last job they replaced the POTS telephone system that had been around for 30 years with a new POE touchscreen phone. The backlight never dimmed and it occasionally showed an animation.

I wrote an angry ticket about it after about 2 days of having it, and 3 people from the IT department and 2 people from the company that sold us the phones showed up at my desk the next day, trying to figure out if there was something wrong with my phone, because "it shouldn't be that distracting."

The only person who understood why I was pissed was the mid-level tech support guy from the phone company.

I hated that phone so much I covered it in a sheet and only uncovered it if it was ringing.

Similarly, the ringtones were all super obnoxious. When everyone had the same ring you could just tune out the ones that weren't coming from right beside you. The new phones had a huge speaker on the back and the ringtones demanded attention like a klaxon. It was maddening because the phone of someone 3 cubes behind you could get a call and it would be louder for you than it would be for them.

Also, the touchscreen took 3 times longer to use than the old design did just because buttons are faster, you can use them without looking, and the UI was slow to begin with.

I love using new technology, and I wanted a new phone because the old one was huge and took up a ton of my desk, but that phone had the worst UX. I just wanted a phone that did the same thing my old phone could do, maybe with better audio quality. I didn't want a phone that demanded my attention to do things.

I visited a friend who had moved to Europe when I was in high school. I was astounded when I learned that German apartments came with no appliances, and if I recall correctly, things like counters were also brought with.

It makes sense if you are planning on living somewhere for a long time, but it blew my mind. In my experience people didn't even move their appliances when they sold their house and moved to a new one.

A quick follow-up to this point. The exome, or coding region of the DNA is approximately 1% of the genome, so arguably the chances of a mutation randomly occurring in a coding region are 1/100 as probable as I suggested here.

There are a few caveats:

1) The non-coding region appears to be less useless than previously assumed. There are still 'highly preserved' areas in non-coding regions. If a section of the genome is highly preserved, it means that a mutation in that region probably results in death/non-viability of the organism.

2) We know the rate of mutation of the genome. If random mutations were really adding enough base pairs in the telomere region to lengthen it, the genome would be growing at an incredible rate.

There are a lot of reasons why it's also implausible, but they have to do with the amount of energy in a bond, etc. and other biochemistry stuff that I'm not qualified to comment on.

Not to say Chevy's are reliable, but they are definitely better than Chrysler.

I don't understand brand loyalty with cars though. I can understand wanting to buy an American car, but even then it might make more sense to buy a foreign car depending on how you define what an 'American car' is.

I majored in Biology, with a focus in genetics and computer science because I wanted to go into bioinformatics. I could literally write 30 pages about why what you wrote is incorrect, and it would take several orders of magnitude more time than it took you to write out your hypothesis.

I provided resources for you to educate yourself. If you believe that it isn't a good use of your time, that's exactly how I feel about addressing the points you made beyond broadly saying 'this won't work, here are resources that address this on a level which you can understand.'

In this case 'almost no chance' is somewhat analogous to shuffling a deck of cards and finding them in order by suit and value, and then shuffling them again and finding them in reverse order by suit and value, and repeating that feat 10 times over.

The length of a human's telomeres when they are born is about 11k base pairs. Chromosome 21 is the shortest chromosome, and has 46.7 million base pairs. That means with random chance a mutation is 4200 times more likely to occur in the coding region of the chromosome than in the telomere.

Due to the way DNA Polymerase works, you will lose 20 base pairs of DNA on every replication. Ignoring everything about rate of mutations and the likelihood of insertion mutation, this means your chance of lengthening your chromosome through mutations is (1/4200)^20, or 1 in 2.6x10^72.

The odds of shuffling a deck of cards and having it come out in suit and value order is somewhere around 1x10^68.

That's using a best-case scenario as an example. Chromosome 1 has more than 5 times as many base pairs as chromosome 21, and you'd literally need to have this happen on every single chromosome every single time you had cell division.

> Buying a Chrysler was a huge mistake

One of my good friends is an automotive engineer. He's told me never to buy a Chrysler product, no matter what. That includes Jeep, Fiat, Dodge, Ram, etc. It's pretty bad when the people who design your cars literally think you are the worst car on the market.

I tell people this when they are looking for cars, and they always tell me "Well I asked the salesman about [whatever issue they heard Chryslers have], and he said they got rid of those issues." Without fail, a few years later there are a whole bunch of problems with whatever Chrysler.

I really don't understand how your cost accounting can be so terrible that literally everything you design has a horrible flaw. I guess they stay in business because people always want Jeeps and cheap cars that have 'luxury' interiors.

Floating point inaccuracy in software someone built to trade?

>Even if it were the case that each replication made the chromosomes smaller (personally I would guess that there is a non-zero probability of them not getting smaller and even a non-zero probability of them getting larger thanks to a mutation) that would still only imply a hard limit on the number of replications.

The fact that chromosomes get shorter during DNA replication is a scientific fact. Chromosomes have padding at the end called telomeres that provide a buffer from the 'useful' DNA. There is an enzyme that can lengthen telomeres, and its of great interest to scientists interested in extending human life.

There is almost no chance that mutations:

a) regularly occur in such a way that makes the chromosomal DNA longer, especially in a way that offsets the base pairs lost during every transcription.

and b) occur in the telomere area of the genetic code, after all the useful bits of DNA.

If mutations did occur at a rate that would counteract the shortening of the telomeres, the rest of your genome would be mutating so quickly you would almost certainly die rather quickly.

There are a whole host of other reasons why what you wrote is nonsense, and I don't have the time or the space to address them all. There is literally no fact to what you have written. It is clear you don't have even a rudimentary understand the biology of genetics. An understanding of math doesn't preclude the need for understanding the actual mechanism of how things work.

The following articles are a useful primer to understanding the flaws in your reasoning:

Okazaki Fragments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okazaki_fragments

Telomeres: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere

Telomerase: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomerase

DNA Polymerase: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_polymerase

DNA Replication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_replication

I don't think you are accounting for the inevitable trip to the emergency room.

Or galvanic corrosion.