jsperson

A few years ago I took an XC clinic from a pro woman mountain biker. A big focus was on descending. On one particular hill she got down first - MINUTES ahead of me (the first student). This was on a descent where there was basically no pedaling. She did this to us all day. During that season I won a local mens cat 2 race series. I was no slouch, but she destroyed us. All technique.

>I don't really understand the fascination with wireless for fixed services. If you can run a wire, you should, because wireless is basically just using the air as a single shared wire, and the longer the range the more people have to share that one wire.

I generally agree, but here in Kansas we have long sight lines. On our farm we use fixed wireless to the grain elevator three miles away. The alternative would be running 1.5 miles of wire for three potential customers.

For years we had Hughes satellite service. Compared to fixed wireless it had higher latency (the speed of light is too slow to geosync), usage caps (none now), and was twice the cost.

For all the folks doubting the decision making here, unless you know specifics, I suggest that the system is working well.

Years ago I worked very closely with the current Commandant of West Point BG Buzzard. I know him to be a man of honor. Based on my experience working with him and other quality officers during my enlistment, I can assure you that they are experienced, highly educated (BG Buzzard has a masters from Harvard), and have a good sense of the broader impacts of their decisions.

> The existing health insurance industry is far from free market. Try getting a price for a procedure or visit beforehand.

Oh, I know. I've tried getting prices in the past. Traditional providers can't do it. One thing that has opened my eyes is using a Direct Primary Care (DPC) provider. I pay $75 a month for direct access to my doctor (email, text message, cell phone etc.). The access is great, but an unexpected side benefit is that a large percentage of their patients are un/underinsured. They can quote the prices for most common procedures from memory.

The other day I was getting a blood test and they asked if I wanted to bill my insurance or pay cash for it. I asked about the cost and they said "two-sixty". My response: "For two hundred sixty bucks we better bill the insurance. They laughed: no, $2.60 (it was an add on to another test for my physical). When I got home I googled pricing - the exact same test normally bills for around $65.

We do not have a free market. Other countries seem to have solid solutions for "socializing" medicine. I can't think of any highly functional system that is a free market. I don't even think that one is possible without people dying in the streets. Thus the best way forward is to try what has been successful elsewhere.

That it takes such effort to pass a bill like this - 80% public approval, banning a clearly predatory practice, has turned me from a pure free market thinking into a believer in single payer healthcare. The free market just doesn't work when there is very little elasticity in consumption. I've been on the receiving end of a $15K air ambulance bill (thankfully covered by insurance) as well as the out of network specialist at an in-network hospital. The latter is particularly galling. What are you supposed to do, interrogate every person that comes in the room?

Highly recommend the YouTube channel “audit the audit”. They show recordings of police interactions with commentary by a knowledgeable lawyer. It’s both entertaining and informative.

I understand the logic of EA not developing niche games and the worry that they might kill Dirt Rally off. If that's the case though - why did they buy Codemasters in the first place? That's a lot of money for the trademarks.

The most frustrating part of Linux for me is all the damn mental CPU cycle I have to spend keeping up with the naming and positioning of the various distros. Often it borders on drama.

The other day I commented that I took my Pinebook Pro off the toy shelf and loaded up Manjaro. I commented on HN about how much I liked the user experience. The first reply I got was something about the drama with some dude named Phil. Alternatively I’ll put my head down for a while and forget about the lineage of the various options and then something will crop up about this or that distro is going away, being repositioned or whatnot.

Why does this matter? Because I want to use it for real work and I don’t want to spend time planning a long term OS strategy. There are other things to worry about. I’m far from alone in this. That’s why folks reach for Mac OS and Windows.

Downvote away, but I really do want to love Linux. I just don’t want it to be so hard to love.

I don’t disagree with your general sentiment, but I think the facts in the case are very much in doubt. It may turn out to be as you say, but we’ll have to wait for that. On the other hand the manner in which the warrant was executed is on video. Regardless of the actual crime committed, or not, the use of force was egregious. In particular drawing a weapon in the absence of a threat is most likely a violation of police policy. It certainly put all involved at greater risk.

From the article: “You don’t send 12 armed officers to raid her computer for doing that. That’s Gestapo.

Exactly. The search warrant could have been served administratively. The officers weren’t just armed. They had guns drawn. It’s a bad look if nothing else.

So here’s what will happen. Ban the “fake news” from Google, FB etc. You will have a pristine, non-offensive safe space bubble. All the banned folks will create their own safe space bubble on Parler or some other yet to be created platform. This won’t be a fringe group. It could be 30-40% of the populous. Comity and public discourse is extinct and then we really do have problems.

I think we are much better off with the misinformation and lies out in the sunlight for all to see and refute.

> we've reached "peak fake news" in the USA

Who cares?! As you said, Fox is crappy news so they don't get my business. Same thing with (generally) MSNBC and others. To answer the next question: The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Shepard Smith

> it's one of those "least worst" choices I respectfully and completely disagree. This is policing thought. Things are not worse than they have been before. The communist witch hunts of the 50s is one example. A lot of the things FDR did were marginal (turned out alright though). Once you start controlling freedom of expression, you own all expression. No one is smart enough. The free market may suck in the short run, but in the long run it will work out.

One perfect example of this: > The POTUS is lying on an hourly basis Yep, and HE LOST! His lying was a significant factor in this loss. Come January he won't be the POTUS.

As a thought experiment, imagine what the actual remedy is. An interesting concept would be to break up Facebook using AT&T as a metaphor. Make Facebook open up it's API to allow other applications to connect much like the baby bells could connect to the central network and eventually there were separate interconnected networks.

So the FB feed exists, but multiple apps can post. Each app consumes the feed and sells advertising to their own platform with FB charging a reasonable fixed interconnect fee.

I concur - the thing is that Mars is often spoken of as a "lifeboat" for humanity. It will take an awful lot of hard and determined work for us to ever make Earth less hospitable than Mars. Similarly it will take centuries of hard and determined work to ever make Mars as good as the worst possible Earth. Short of a full on nuclear war (small, but nevertheless non-zero probability) we're better off improving what we've got.

Note, I'm only addressing the "lifeboat" justification, I still think sending folks to Mars would be cool as hell.

Those are accurate and reasonable criticisms. I've gotten used to all that over time. I'm not a sophisticated cook by any means so my need for feedback is not boiling something over (setting of 6.5 or so does the job for mac and cheese after it's boiling). I am the family safety officer though. Love the fact that it's not a super hot surface and that I won't be running across the house after smelling gas - an actual event that could have made for a bad Thanksgiving. I'm also the cleanup guy. After three years and almost no scrubbing the surface still looks new.

If you ever get a chance, try an induction stove. We got one because the size of the gas line into our house was marginal for running heater, hot water, and a couple of fireplaces concurrently. I just didn't want to futz with potential problems. It turned out to be a great decision. They are remarkably safe. The surface only gets hot from heat from the pan so it doesn't bake stuff on like electric/gas. It boils water just as fast as gas and is quite responsive. The only downside is that the pans must be ferrous, but that has turned out to not be too big of a deal. Also the oven is electric, which in my opinion is actually better than gas - the broiler works better in particular.

Honestly I hadn’t even heard of Manjaro until I saw that it was the new PBP default image. I’m not familiar with the drama. Sorry. It seems to be a smooth product so I do hope they work it out.

OT - due to a desktop failure I recently handed my MacBook over to my wife and took my PBP off the shelf. The default OS is now Manjaro. And it’s great! The original default (Debian) was pretty janky. If you’re like me and relegated yours to occasional toy duties, spend an hour and get it upgraded. It’s a whole new experience.

Edit: on topic - the community support is generally quite good. I got great forum and Twitter response. I do think that the retail option will provide some incentive to polish up the product a bit. Can’t imagine giving one of these to my mom yet.

Agreed, and will add that the trackpad on the PBP is terrible. The keyboard is barely acceptable. For real work I’d pick something else.

>I wonder if, given the source of the article, the author might just have a vested interest in making their own systems look good compared to the Macs?

I don't think they succeeded. The Apple LAPTOPS held up really well against the optimized relatively high end desktops. Every advantage (price, size, cooling, software, architecture maturity) was on the side of the desktop and they are only twice as fast. That's a pretty slim gap.

In our case they are milking the past - and doing a good job of it. My current consulting customer has some kind of cloud mainframe agreement with IBM as the result of an acquisition. I don't know the specifics, but I'm integrating data off of it. It's not easy to work with and a lot of tools don't support it. My initial suggestion was migrating to AWS RDS, but there are too many existing integration points and business rules coded to make this cost effective. The cost of migration is something like 20x the annual platform cost.

Edit: I should also point out that they provide stellar support and a great transition from on site hardware to their cloud service. They have always been great to work with - at an appropriately high price.

The problem with dumb rules is that you have to be consistently dumb.

OT, but The Bose brand does exactly the opposite for me. I bought a pair of 700 headphones, started having problems THEN read the forums. Ooh boy do they need to work harder on the firmware. They can’t mute anything on Windows. This is after the version that temporarily bricked thousands of headphones for several months. Also support was abysmal.

I guess the brand advantage is that at least you know what you’re getting.

Recommend not going with the pinebook pro for real work. It is an excellent concept and I bought one to both support the cause and have an interesting toy. That’s about all it is though. Most significantly the trackpad is rubbish. It’s the worst I’ve ever used.

Based on the quality of support I think they will have high retention. We’re currently a relatively small customer and the support has been excellent. I submitted a bug and it was fixed on our production account in less than two months. This included a step through on our dev account. It would have taken me two months just to convince Oracle and Microsoft that they had a bug.

I had a couple of other minor issues and got very good response.

Citation please. In my fields the worst yield is near the trees. Why? Because the trees suck up all the water and nutrients. This is for corn, soybeans, wheat, and milo.

While I totally agree with your sentiments, there is a large section of the population that don’t even have the bad option of Comcast. I hope they put some curbs on adoption by those who have alternatives. Source: farm owner in the middle of nowhere KS. We have fixed wireless, but if it was hilly here we’d be stuck with Hughes and their geosynchronous satellites. The latency is huge - the speed of light isn’t fast enough.

One of the most important things a shop can do is very basic - make people feel welcome. I’ve been riding and racing for 25 years. I’ve been in hundreds of shops. I still feel intimidated when walking into some of them. At other shops you immediately feel like an old friend.

Joel on Software - practical advice for both the leader and the developer. I still reference it frequently.

Edit - more explanation

The author Ben Carlson is one half of the Animal Spirits podcast. I enjoy and learn a lot from every episode. Highly recommended.

Edit: typo