colinb

There's something more than a little gross in reading that Delta Force (gotta love self-aggrandizing names. I suppose Hep-Cat-with-Guns was rejected out of hand.) was inspired by the British campaign in the Malaya Emergency[0], which seems to have set the modern standard for blood-soaked, torture-ridden "counter-insurgency" warfare.

The Wikipedia page [1] references on event as the "British Mai Lai". But it happened in 1948, decades before the Mai Lai [2] massacre.

N.B. I'm expressly not saying that there's anything uniquely wicked about British or American soldiers, many of whom seem to be decent sorts, doing jobs that I could not. But the mythos of so-called elite forces is a giant stinking vat of horse pickles, and always was. (Bret Devereaux's material about the Spartans seems like proof enough [3])

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malayan_Emergency [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batang_Kali_massacre [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mỹ_Lai_massacre [3] https://acoup.blog/category/collections/this-isnt-sparta/

Hmm. Second meaning in my dictionary is

"2 Ecology of or denoting a plant which is taller than the surrounding vegetation, especially a tall tree in a forest. • of or denoting a water plant with leaves and flowers that appear above the water surface."

Is this tree taller than others nearby?

relevant song for context https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb63PdPweDc

So we're holding Ursula von Der Leyen responsible for her father's actions now? Or is it that his immorality is genetically transmissible and she too is definitely a bad person?

Hey. So at the end of the 19th century both Germany and Japan where backward agrarian societies. I have read (sorry, no reference) that bigoted westerners considered Japanese people to be lazy and feckless. I repeat, things change.

which 'always'? The rotten kleptocracy it appears to be right now (from my cosy European point of view)? The warring tribal zealot-ridden hellhole it was after the Soviet invasion? Or the (apparently) fast-advancing more-or-less liberal democracy it was before the Soviet invasion?

People and countries can change. And people and countries DO change. I think the lesson I've learned from my safe distance these last 20 years is that it is hard to influence the direction in which this change happens, even with the expenditure of blood and treasure. Oh, you can stir shit up, but there's no knowing how it will settle.

[incidentally, it really isn't clear to me why this sort of thing seems to have worked well for the de-nazification of Germany and pacification of Japan]

> That's a legitimate strategy by activist organizations.

Maybe. But you’d better be sure you would still feel that way if the ‘activist organisation’ is espousing views you find abhorrent.

Patrick O'Brian is evidence for me that fiction set in the past can illuminate my present. He wrote believable and complex (fictional male) characters, interacting in interesting ways, through lightly fictionalized real events with humor and a fair amount of ripping yarn/daring-do.

For some writers a genre is a crutch - a thousand steel-capped dreadnoughts tearing through the yielding fabric of feebly protesting spacetime blah blah. For others, and O'Brian is the best I've come across, the genre is the constraint that forces true creativity.

I think it is reasonable to observe that his female leads (modulo Clarissa Oakes maybe) are a bit cardboard cutout.

Can a place be recognized as a country by the UN if a Security Council member vetos?

Why did this get downvoted? It looks like a simple statement of fact. Is it inaccurate? Voting is not a substitute for debate.

hah. The only sharp memories of my teenage years - three decades ago - are the ones that make me stop in the street and cringe while swearing under my breath. How could I have been such an asshole? OMG, am I still that much of an asshole?

To remember the sweet and good things I did, said, and experienced as a teenager, with that same sharpness seems like the most desirable gift of all.

When WFH I would like to have a good external display for my laptop. Ditto mouse and keyboard. I would like to be comfortably warm in winter. Being cool enough in the summer is just a matter of opening windows where I live. I would like a decent desk and chair, or standing desk etc. These all cost money. At the moment some of this is born by my employer and some by me. If WFH lasts as a widely available option for several years I expect that the balance of who pays for what may change. Of the costs I listed, heating is by far the biggest deal for me - I live in an old, hard-to-keep-warm house.

But... WFH also brings savings. I used to spend significant amounts of money commuting, which is funny given how much I hated every second of it. That money stays in my pocket now. I know that the option of bringing lunch with me every day was always present, but it is the case that I eat a lot more home prepared food now my office is in the same building as my fridge, so I certainly save a bundle there.

Where I live, there is some provision in the tax code for WFH expenses, but really its so small that it might as well not exist.

What my point in all this? It is that I don't think the issue is nearly as clear cut as you make it out to be. Maybe WFH is a cost of living increase. Maybe it's a saving. Which depends on the nature of your work, the distance you used to travel, the size of cost of your living space and a host of other factors.

Maybe Trump has a really big tent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_tent) but it has lots of little compartments. Whether that's a good or bad thing is up to you.

something like this was a plot point in one of the Neal Stephenson wrist-breakers [0]. <elided plot spoilers>

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baroque_Cycle

Well, we could obviously just ask the North Korean emigres who work in our countries. Surely they will tell us the truth? Or the many North Korean tourists who visit Europe and North America? Or indeed the vast numbers of North Korean folks visiting around the world for work purposes?

Oh, wait. We can't ask any of those people, because they seem not to exist. Is that because North Korea is so wealthy that no one wants to leave to work elsewhere? Because North Korea is such a utopia that they don't even want to travel overseas? Because their industry is so advanced and self-sufficient that they need no trade deals with others?

You don't have to believe everything you read about North Korea, but to dismiss it all as US propaganda without offering a significant countervailing body of evidence is, well, silly.

Hah. I have memories of being a grad hire working on this project - mostly to fetch tea and follow the directions of my betters - but still, it was an impressive thing to see.

I sat next to a guy who worked on something called Jacket & Tie. I don't remember which was which, but the essence of this was to compile VAX32->Alpha assembly, then run that on a big ass VAX (an 8000? It's been a while) that had loadable microcode(!) enabling it to emulate a very very slow Alpha. I think I recall hearing that the first successful boot to login prompt took ~24h on this hardware.

I ported the RAD50 6-bit character set library (so you could handle 6 characters in a 36 bit word file produced by ancient TOPS20 boxes from the Marlboro Computing Company), written in the even deeper past by my then boss when he had been a whippersnapper. It was in PL1 I think.

I ported (i.e. changed the build files to target Alpha rather than VAX32) the badblock utility, and tested it with an Alpha work station, a SCSI floppy drive, a box full of unused 3 1/2 disks, and a paperclip to scratch the surface of each one before initializing it.

I had some madly brilliant colleagues who ported millions of lines of hand-tuned VAX32 assembly, a boatload of BLISS32, and oddments of other languages.

I used to have a numbered super-secret copy of the project plan but I think it went in the dumpster decades ago.

I had a terrible time, and left with my self-confidence shattered having spent several years achieving not much, but watched some astoundingly competent colleagues do amazing things at a time when Intel's chips were topping out at 33MHz and Alphas were planned for 1GHz. I wish I had made more use of my time there, but boy, I'm glad I got to see some really top notch engineers at play.

I don't know where you're sitting right now. I'm sitting in Europe, and credit card transactions are quite common where I live. Europe is a big place. Even within the EU there is plenty of room for difference.

A generalisation like this is no better than the frequent occurrence of HNers posting articles headlined with "the nation" which mean "the USA".

Perhaps, but isn't it received truth that "Yes Minister" means no, except if the minister is feeling "brave", or perhaps "courageous"?

and here was I thinking it was the Poughkeepsie branch. Thanks for the tip.

My spidey-senses are tingling. You're clearly a plant (!) sent by big tofu to double bluff us.

so I know hi-fi preferences are the Vietnam of tech discussions (in the quagmire of war sense, rather than the vibrant modern economy sense) but what speakers did you pick, and why?

“He finally staggers up to the last resting place of the late Slats Slavin and falls there with the blood pumping from the hole that Johnny Brannigan drills in his chest and as I notice his lips moving I hasten to his side figuring that he may be about to utter the name of the horse Slats gives him for me.”

There is only one Damon Runyon, and always will be.

That is just modern art. But... if in the previous week you paid someone those same 7 figures, or you paid N people 7 figures/N for their creative dance with walnuts, then the tax people might be justified in their curiosity.

Now I want to know if there's an ETF that tracks transactions by senators.

You ask questions rather than state a position, so I'm not actually sure what your position is.

Do you reject all violence? Under all circumstances? Some think that to be admirable. I think it's nonsense.

Interesting idea. Will everyone spend the next twenty years complaining about how much they hated Mrs Jones the programming teacher and how Stroustrup ruined programming for them?

Put it another way. The reason we interview people the way that we do, is because it isn't realistic (unfortunately) to expect that a CS grad can fizz-buzz, or delete from a linked list, or whatever. Anyone who has spent a little time interviewing can confirm this. Why should we expect that secondary education would do a better job?

Is this US-only thing? I have an LG and a Samsung TV, both less than 4 years old. Neither do this. I'm inside the EU, so I wonder if GDPR is protecting me from the misbehavior.

Failing that, I guess, there's always the PiHole DNS shenanigans. But you shouldn't have to be the IT guy/gal just to help your next-door neighbor watch their damn TV.

Oh for goodness sakes. I don't know where you're writing this from, but Europe a is a big place. And lots of it is doing reasonably well - modulo lock-downs.

I'm not convinced at all that Europe is declining, though I am convinced that China and India are rising (as they bloody well should after the horrible history Europe has given them in recent centuries) though I'm worried that this isn't accompanied by a freer, fairer society in those places, just a richer one. Being richer is a good thing of course; freedom being of limited value to a starving child.

Which leads me to ask what your basis for comparison is? Because I've lived in wealthy parts of the US - much wealthier than anywhere I've lived in Europe - and seen streets paved with metaphorical gold, but I've visited plenty of places in the US that seemed pretty backward, poor, soaked in ignorance and hopelessly broken. When 2 million people in the richest country in the world don't have indoor plumbing then something is wrong with that country's measure of wealth.

Two things struck me about this. First, the numbers being thrown around remind me strongly of the red-baiting father/politician in the original Manchurian Candidate. Second, the way the various execs are reportedly wrestling to throw each other under the bus is deeply self serving and I hope it ends badly for them.

TFA mentions that such newly formed county-like local governments would have courthouses. It doesn't talk about police, sheriffs, boys-in-blue. Does the first imply the second?

Is this William Gibson's future of HR with guns?