os2warpman

I was going to say "The FDA, in general, does not tell you which medications you can or cannot take." but often when people make a comment like yours and you press them on it, it turns out they're angry because they can't find a doctor who will inject something insane into an unusual part of their body so instead I am going to ask:

What medicine, SPECIFICALLY PLEASE, does the FDA not allow you to have?

edit: because I'm pretty sure you can find doctors who will prescribe 3 liters per minute of elephant farts to treat high blood pressure, or compound up some turbofentanyl mixed with vitamin q to grow hair on your gooch if you look hard enough and there's nothing the FDA can do about it so most of the time peoples' problems are with insurance companies or pesky medical ethics and various state boards of medicine.

>Why should we care how a country manages their internal affairs?

The government of Iran supplies Russia with weapons used in their invasion of Ukraine, funds Houthi rebels who fire weapons indiscriminately at international shipping off the coast of Yemen, supplies terrorist groups in southern Lebanon, and advised the Syrian government during the Syrian Civil War which kicked off the greatest wave of human migration in recent history as people fled the brutality.

By caring about their internal affairs there is a chance their external affairs may be influenced.

Also, they execute rape victims, hang homosexuals in public, and kidnap and torture women who don't want to wear cloth on their head.

Please, I'm begging you from the bottom of my heart, don't "buh whaddabow" me. It's pathetic.

Tariffs are not now, have never, and will never lead to an increase in domestic production.

They only lead to higher costs and/or a festering, shambling corpse of domestic production that is a shell of its former self.

The US has done this multiple times already and the result is always the same.

Numerous countries have done this and the result is always the same.

The results, everywhere, every time, forever, are always the same.

Higher prices, stagnant markets, eroding capabilities, higher and higher tariffs and/or subsidies to keep it all propped up.

Don't worry about US automobile manufacturers in the US.

Protectionism will continue giving us the gift of overpriced and underperforming vehicles for decades to come.

They'll say it's to protect "Murican Jerbs" but really it's to protect the thick and viscous layer of management and financial slime covering the corpse that is US manufacturing.

I'm worked on many larger teams and leadership is independent of compensation.

The fact that "high performance leaders" need to make tens of millions of dollars is one of the greatest lies being told in the modern age.

Right now my chief in the fire company where I volunteer makes the same amount of money I do: $0.00. He is the greatest leader I have ever personally met, and I've been around for a while.

When I was in the Army, my company commander (a Captain) made ~4x what the newest private did. The highest-paid officer makes ~9x.

There are government senior executives and university professors running labs with budgets and teams that make Mozilla look like a lemonade stand for practically nothing.

Mozilla should ask the Linux Foundation what their budget is, what their leadership structure is, and do that.

Mozilla, no matter what they say or think or try, is and will always be a web browser developer. A web browser. Anything else is a side project, a hobby. A distraction. Every single molecule of fuel used by their brains while at work and every single microwatt of power used by their infrastructure should be wholly and aggressively dedicated to building the tools and organization needed to create the best web browser possible.

Bloated payrolls are tolerable if the decisions made are wise, responsibility is taken, and strategies exist and make sense.

Mozilla seems to have none of these.

But man they're spending a shit-ton on "AI"!

According to Amazon my first Lutron switch was delivered on August 18th, 2018 and after testing it (and the bridge) out for a couple of months I switched every single switch in my house to Lutron.

I currently have 20 Lutron devices, including switches, dimmers, lamp dimmers, and pico remotes.

Between August 18th, 2018 and today the number of times my Lutron devices have failed to operate as intended can be counted on zero fingers.

I wish their product line was more expansive but if focus is what it takes to ensure the level of reliability they have, then ok.

>maybe in the Midwest, or West Virginia

My family is from the "decent hard-working" part of mid-America and I am the only one without a felony so whenever one of my relatives dies, I get their guns. It used to be the crime of choice was check fraud but now it's simple burglary and drugs.

I as a non-gang, non-dealing, tall middle aged white dude am safer in Baltimore than I am at the local gas station full of tweakers in "real" America.

West Virginia has the highest, by a lot, percentage of people on social security disability because their state doesn't have good welfare benefits. All of the decent folk figured out how to scam the government out of disability payments by lying about back and stomach pain.

In Wyoming County West Virginia >33% of all adults aged 18-64 are on disability. These aren't broken down coal miners they are normal, healthy, unemployed people.

My county? 6%.

The only parts of America where people aren't trying to scam each other are uninhabited.

I'm not a turbine, or power generation, expert but I am almost 100% sure that no non-solar power generation method can operate without being taken down periodically for maintenance.

How do the maintenance costs (and intervals) of these compare to gas/steam turbines?

The median age of buyers has increased from 31 in 2004 to 38 in 2024.

The median age of the population of the United States has increased from 35.3 in 2000 to 38.8 in 2020. (hmmmmm)

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

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

As the population pyramid of the US, which is already a "population Empire State Building", further morphs into a "Population Baseball Diamond", I expect the median age of all buyers to increase and the percentage of owners by age group in the younger cohorts to decrease.

Additionally, as the median age increases, because older people tend to have more money, I expect home prices to continue to increase.

Honestly, I expect home prices to spike by 2035-2040 as the current crop of 50–60-year-olds reach retirement realizing that their only real prospect of not starving to death in retirement is the main (and often only) asset: their home.

That will further stress younger folks, but people don't seem to care and anyone who expresses concern is denigrated as a communist so what is to be done?

Regardless, with the homeownership rate for "under 35" fluctuating between ~41% in 1982 and ~37% in 2024 "nobody owns shit no mo" is still false.

https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/charts/fig07.pdf

>People these days don’t own real estate.

The home ownership rate has been 64%, plus or minus about 1%, for the last 45 years.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S

>The first time I saw a dystopian situation of a mass of people all with their faces on smartphones was last year in Japan, every time I took the metro everyone, as if it were an unwritten rule, from when they got on until they got off did nothing but stare at their phone.

Whatever world the author looking to return to, presumed lost due to technology, where people were present and engaged in a crowded social situation, never existed.

I've spent a cumulative total of four years in Japan, most in the 90s. Here is a video that demonstrates the typical pre-smartphone Tokyo metro riding experience, which replicates my memories precisely: https://youtu.be/hyK3-w1TIyg?si=uXzm0G5pUvrvkw78&t=270

Based on the other blog posts it appears the author is too young to remember a time before smartphones.

I want to assure them that smartphones are much better than the alternative, one of which was (having forgotten my book) sitting staring at the seconds hand on my dive watch, spinning the bezel over and over again until realizing that the barely-audible clicking may be disturbing another passengers, and then stopping and just staring at my shoes for 30 or so more minutes.

I didn't mention TSA.

Most TSA, FAA, and airline operator policies and procedures are harmonized with ICAO and IATA policies and procedures. Of course, there are regional variations and differences between international and domestic flights within those regions, but for the most part things are consistent among all of the members of both signatories of Convention on International Civil Aviation (ICAO members) and IATA members.

The whole shoe thing was proposed someone who wasn't the US (I think the UK, but my memory is fuzzy-- damn cosmic rays), submitted to ICAO, voted on, and enacted by the US as a signatory.

>Edit: whoa, groupthink.

Every time an article about airport security is posted the comments are the same.

To prove that I'm sane and my memory has not been corrupted by time or cosmic rays I google "airline hijackings by year", I look at the graphs in google images, and I briefly wonder what happened in early 1970s and 2000s before remembering what happened in early 1970s and 2000s.

Then I murmur "that's some fantastically effective theater".

HN has censorship that makes those apple rules look like anarchy.

Write a spicy comment and a mod will memory-hole it and someone, usually dang, will reply "tHat'S nOt OuR vIsIon FoR hAcKeR nEwS, pLeAsE bE cIvIl" and we all swallow it like a delicious hot cocoa.

If YC can control their product (and hn IS a product) to annihilate any criticism of their activity or (even former) staff, then Apple is perfectly within their rights to make sure Siri doesn't talk about violence.

No, there's no difference.

>but from what I hear in the mainstream it tastes more like plastic burger than triple-a filet.

When has it not?

The good old days sucked. I have a large collection of CDs that I "own" and they're in a box in the basement because the medium is irrelevant.

For less than the price of 1 CD per month (and I used to buy WAY more than 1 CD per month) I have access to a near-infinite amount of music.

I've added 49 full or partial albums to my library since 1/1/2025 for $78. And some of that stuff has an EXACT AND PRECISE 0.00% of having ever been carried in a physical shop on physical media such as: a DJ set consisting mainly of remixes of The Hacker tracks from the late 90s, recorded by a Canadian DJ in a Frankfurt Studio in 2025.

We're eating perfectly-prepared filet every day and people are reminiscing about school cafeteria salisbury steak.

USAID was charity in name only. It is, or was, more of a marketing and not-quite-coercion-but-something-softer-and-gentler-than-that body.

And it was a pathetically small attempt at it, too.

Bureaucracy is irrelevant. What matters is bribes. China and Russia are bribing the shit out of everyone and everything.

USAID was practically our only way to do that quasi-morally and almost certainly on the order of their masters the administration destroyed it.

All to save a rounding error’s worth of annual spending we fucked ourselves and its absence will only benefit our adversaries.

Edit: it could just be stupidity and not conspiracy. These are the same people who think vaccines cause autism and don’t understand how space research leads to cordless power tools, a hippie studying lizard spit in the 70s leads to GLP-1 drugs, and nuclear warheads lead to microprocessors. The simple clay of the new America. You know, morons.

Everyone in here is nostalgic for Sun Rays.

I loathe them.

I worked for A Large Government Agency that was deeep into the Sun ecosystem and was using a Sparcstation 5 workstation well into early 2000s running GIS, RF analysis, and report writing tools. It was a 24x7 operation with shifts of users logging in and out every 12 hours and those systems were never not in use and never powered off. They, and the software, were practically flawless.

Then we switched to Sun Rays. For "security" and "cost". It was a disaster. The latency even just across a couple of floors, was terrible. They spent more on titanically large, best-of-the-best, fantastically equipped servers and immediately the several hundred users trying to use them overwhelmed disk I/O, network throughput, and memory capacity.

We had to log in in staggered blocks, with 5-minute gaps between groups of 20 or so people inserting their cards.

My memory is starting to fade but I recall there being absurd amounts of downtime, with weekly briefings about capacity upgrades and equipment installs and the constant presence of network and server installers dragging pallet jacks and ladders around the facility.

"Oh the servers were underspecc.." NO. They were not. They were literally and actually millions upon millions of dollars of the absolute best and most capable servers Sun sold. We had Sun employees working in our facility. They had an open spigot of cash flowing from the Large Government Agency directly into their accounts to do carte blanche whatever they needed to do to make it work.

If the servers were over-subscribed it was because the ability to deploy that much capacity did not exist for any, infinite, amount of money and Sun knowingly and willingly ripped us off.

It never worked. The experiment made my professional life a living hell for several years.

In 2005-2006 they gave up and moved to Dell workstations running Windows XP professional using thrown-together Java or X11 versions of all of the applications.

Except for capacitors exploding at random intervals, it was "fine".

Moving from ancient vector-graphics GIS tools to Google Earth blew my mind though...

edit: literally never, ever, did anyone need the ability to pull their card out, walk over to another person's desk, and say, "Well hey Jim take a look at this!" and move their session.

There are no digital nomads there are only economic migrants.

https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/networks/european-migratio...

And yes, wanting to be able to climb Machu Picchu without taking time off is both an "economic reason" AND a "material improvement in one's livelihood".

>And the author calls himself a libertarian...

If libertarianism was all of the world's beaches, a thimbleful of sand would be those who actually care about liberty.

I agree with you.

It is indeed spherical frictionless cow-ly possible if we spend a trillion dollars to increase ORNL's annual Pu production capacity so that it doesn't take 200 years to make 600kg of Pu-238.

When someone demonstrates a complex device (let's set aside power generation how about a valve? Or a capacitor?) that can last a century in space I'll agree that it is actually possible.

That's what "current level of technology" means. The lego bricks exist, now, today, preferably in stock ready for immediate shipment on Digikey, and can be snapped into place.

A maintenance-free power source capable of lasting the 200 or so years it would take to make it to 542 AU does not seem within humanity's current technological capabilities.

Parker at its highest velocity could make it there in a century, but it doesn't have to slow down and stop. Or station keep.

When we have a power source that can do 5kW (I just doubled Hubble, 542 AU would probably require much more for communications) for 100 years I'll agree that its design can be refined and its lifespan extended to 200 and 542 AU is within our reach.

Hertz used to be a business, run by businessmen who wanted to build and run a business.

Hertz is now a financial instrument run by private equity and investment bankers.

Businessmen want money the same way you or I want money. They just want to run a business in order to make that money. The same way novelists want to write novels to pay the bills. The book has to be good, people have to like the book so that they buy the book and tell other people to buy the book. So goes business.

Financial instruments are disposable, to be squeezed and wrung of every available cent until it becomes untenable and then the owners drop it and move on. If they can cut, squeeze, and extract they will. If they cannot-- they will destroy the instrument and the trick is they never lose money doing the destruction. People who run financial instruments masquerading as business don't want money like you and I. They want money the way addicts want heroin.

I used something something 10^-10 for my dust. To reach ~50MJ.

As far as the laser goes, ~2MJ is the total output. Energy that reaches the fuel pellet due to inefficiencies throughout the path of the laser, the actual "hitting power", is hundreds-ish kJ.

>The third places in the United States are almost exclusively churches and bars

I keep hearing this and completely disagree.

I assert that within an hour of any location in the entire united states not so remote that supplies have to be delivered by airplane (so excluding rural Alaska and outlying territorial possessions) there are numerous third spaces.

As a benchmark I use the small town of 400 that you've never heard of abutting Hoosier National Forest in VERY rural southern Indiana that my grandparents lived in, which I spent every summer for over a decade in.

Within a 40-ish minute drive of that small town there are:

* two astronomy clubs: Evansville Astronomical Society and Louisville Astronomical Society

* two amateur radio clubs: Clark County Amateur Radio Club and Bullitt Amateur Radio Society

* four public libraries: Crawford, Paoli, Harrison County, Washington Carnegie. The closest library (15 minutes) has a makerspace with an Epilog laser, Brother Needle Embroidery Machine, Roland Large Format Printer, BambuLabs Carbon 3d Printer, Elegoo Saturn SLA 3d Printer, Cricut, Sewing machine, and Serger. If you're like me and didn't know what a Serger is, it is a machine that sews borders and embroidery onto things.

Plus an Anime & Manga club (in rural southern indiana!??!) scrapbooking, sewing, and multiple book clubs.

* five conservation clubs: Duff, Huntingburg, Mariah Hill, Livonia, and Schnellville (these are shooting, fishing, and hiking clubs in case you're not aware)

* too many to list civic organizations like rotary clubs, elks, masons, veterans, and other civic clubs

* a volunteer fire department in every county and most medium-sized towns (all of which need members ALL of the time)

There is even a small community-run performing arts center if you want to audition for plays, hold a performance, or be a volunteer crewmember: https://www.hayswoodtheatre.org/support-hayswood

All of this in rural, impoverished, isolated Southern Indiana where the Amish and Mennonites own all of the stores, the grain drying bins of neighboring farms keep you up at night, and cellphone coverage tapers off to a teasing and deceptive worse than nothing.

I am a middle-aged man.

I take the middle-aged man loneliness epidemic very seriously.

I am also a bit of a dick: get off your fucking phone and Xbox, quit bitching about the lack of "third places", and go out and do something.

There is a group, doing something, who wants you to join them in every county of every state of the entire United States.

You are not suffering from a lack of opportunities; you are suffering from a lack of imagination and motivation.

I wasn't even considering the sail.

Most of the designs for a system like this are "chip" designs where a single 1cm x 1cm silicon wafer is towed by the sail.

This design prevents the need for lasers so large that they create enough ozone to kill the entire human race.

The contents of the chip vary, based on who is speculating, but tend to contain exotic, uninvented, circuitry capable of both harvesting energy from the laser and doing "something" of use besides zipping by the target at 0.2c deaf, dumb, and blind. Sometimes it's even an AI-enhanced swarm! (Shoulda figured out how to work blockchain in there, post-doc guy)

Regardless, during the 40 trillion kilometer voyage to Proxima Centauri, that 1x1cm silicon wafer (and the sail) will hit space dust, and numerous other atoms and molecules (including carbon rings) because empty space... isn't.

I think I understand. Thank you and I'm sorry.

>To get around thousand-year generation ships, we are examining some beamed energy solutions that could drive a small sail to Proxima in 20 years.

The odds of a spacecraft hitting a single particle of dust while in space are 100%.

A spacecraft hitting a single particle of dust at 0.2c will impart tens of millions of joules into the body of the spacecraft, the equivalent of getting hit with hundreds of pulses from the most powerful laser ever created by humanity-- simultaneously.

Or concentrating several kilogram's worth of TNT into the size of a particle of dust and detonating it.

This is an earnest request. Please help me understand the mindset of people who fall for pig butchering scams.

The thought of giving money to a stranger who I met via a dating app or other social media platform who shifted the conversation to WeChat and asked me to wire money to a bank account is so incomprehensible to me that the mind of someone who would do that is entirely different to how mine is constructed physically, chemically, and electrically to such a degree that it is difficult for me to even believe that it exists.

I am not even particularly financially literate. In college. I barely scraped by my statistics class, took no finance or business classes, and the only formal financial literacy education I have ever received was a single one hour course given to me by the US Army in late 2001 when they announced the TSP (401k for military) was coming where the only takeaways were “compounding interest is magic” and “put your money into a retirement account and don’t look at it until you’re a decade out from retirement”.

To me, believing an unsolicited stranger who is offering you an investment opportunity like what pig butchering scams are will make you rich is the same exact thing as walking out of a rundown gas station that also sells nunchucks, bongs, and ninja throwing stars with a little baggie of pills that have a tiger on the label thinking that they’ll turn you a super sex machine.

Is it desperation?

Profound financial illiteracy that exceeds mine by several orders of magnitude?

>No, many airlines operate in imperfect markets and reap excessive profits compared to other airlines.

Which ones? Practically all airlines are public companies with easily accessible financial data.

All of the one's I've looked at are barely scraping by with single digit profit margins. Delta is around 6% and Emirates is among the if not the best at around 9%.

Which airlines are "reaping excessive profits"?

I would like to invest in them.