rocket_surgeron

According to the windows sticker, the $19,045 price is after options and a delivery charge, both of which would have been added to the MSRP of any VW Beetle "back in the day".

According to this windows sticker a 1963 beetle cost $16,500 in today's dollars.

https://www.thesamba.com/vw/gallery/pix/931335.jpg

That's 1963. A 1973 optioned, delivered, Beetle (again, the cheapest car you could buy at the time) would have been closer to $18k, much higher than its MSRP of ~$12k. Not far off from the $19k of 2023 for an inexpensive automobile. But markups vary so much from state-to-state and dealer-to-dealer you can't compare and can only use MSRP as a "good enough" basis of comparison.

$16,500 -> $19,045 is a 15.4% increase and you get airbags, a backup camera, better gas mileage, and more reliability for your 15.4%.

Also, today MOST PEOPLE are paying 3-6% on a car loan. In "the good old days" it was 10-20%, depending on the year.

In 1972: "a bank charges roughly 10 percent annual interest to lend money on a new car bought over a three‐year period. A finance company, on the other hand, charges about 11.84 per cent over a similar period." https://www.nytimes.com/1972/09/28/archives/personal-finance...

That's not, as the article puts it, "for the rich".

There are plenty of cheap cars.

You can walk onto any Nissan dealer's lot anywhere in the country and drive off in a brand new Nissan Versa for just about the same inflation-adjusted price of a Volkswagen Beetle from the 60s and 70s and the Beetle was the lowest-priced new car you could buy back then for almost its entire production run.

The Versa is better in every measurable way-- it even gets better gas mileage despite weight of all of the extra safety equipment, air conditioning, and camera.

A base optionless Beetle cost $12,000 in 2023 dollars, a Super Beetle (a slightly larger model with brakes that wouldn't kill you, a better suspension, and optional extras like a locking glovebox, map pocket, and day/night mirror) cost $16,500.

A Versa costs $15,500 but you can get $1,000-3,000 off based on how desperate the dealer is to get rid of it.

Nissan dealers won't even try to steer you towards a more expensive car. Dealers want to sell them because they're just sitting on their lots taking up space not selling.

If you don't like Nissan there are plenty of other options in the "what grandma and grandpa paid for your mom's first car when she went off to college 50 years ago" price range.

People don't want cheap cars.

Customers aren't being tricked, or hoodwinked, or gadzooked, or pressured into buying larger SUVs with heated seats, sunroofs, huge infotainment displays, wireless charging, and wifi hotspots. They want them and can afford them.

They'll walk right past all of the Versas and buy an SUV.

The entire movie is a teenaged cringeworthy fever dream.

Either immediately before or after that scene he goes on to tell his neighbor that the only reason oxygen masks are on airplanes is to keep people calm when they are about to die.

>-Tyler Durden: Oxygen gets you high. In a catastrophic emergency, you're taking giant panicked breaths. Suddenly you become euphoric, docile. You accept your fate. It's all right here. Emergency water landing, 600 miles an hour. Blank faces, calm as Hindu cows.”

Airline companies don't care if people are "calm" if they are going to die. They are not worried about the upset ghosts of dead passengers coming to haunt them. And oxygen doesn't turn you into a docile cow. I'm a volunteer EMT and if oxygen turned people docile that would make my job a hell of a lot easier.

The oxygen is there to keep you alive at altitude if there is a decompression event. At sea level it does nothing. edit: the partial pressure of oxygen at sea level is ~160mmHg and airplane passenger masks supply ~122mmHg-- they only exist to keep you alive until the pilot can descend.

One of the easiest ways to tell if I'm not going to get along with someone is if they unironically quote Fight Club.

Any entity capable of interstellar travel will possess the ability to harness energy in ways that are almost impossible for us to imagine.

If they transit space rapidly (on a human scale) they will be able to discharge energy in amounts so vast as to be incomprehensible.

If they transit space slowly (on a human scale) they will be able to store energy in amounts so vast as to be incomprehensible.

They'll be able to pluck individual hydrogen atoms out of the vast emptiness of interstellar space and reconstitute them into any element whose existence is possible. They'll be able to generate and arbitrarily manipulate gravity. They'll be able to approach, disassemble, store, and reassemble entire stars.

They won't be lazily floating in a car-sized object above the Canadian wilderness, bouncing around in the jet stream.

Not much is known of the AIM-9X but it is probably similar to the AIM-9L.

The AIM-9L doesn't lock on to the hottest thing, it takes an IR picture of the scene and follows the targeted "blob" in the image that's generated. Additionally it has laser proximity fusing so it knows when it is close to the shape it is tracking. By not simply picking the hottest thing in a scene you can't hide in front of the sun anymore, and the effectiveness of flares is reduced.

The only thing needed to generate a "blob" good enough to target is sufficient ΔT between the scene and the targeted object.

The objects, and they have been curiously consistent with calling them "objects", definitely have sufficient ΔT compared to the background sky if they are made of any solid material that has been exposed to sunlight for any period of time.

> Are cars cheaper today?

Cars are AVAILABLE for pretty much the same price.

People WANT more expensive cars.

The Volkswagen Beetle was pretty much the least expensive car on the market for its entire sales run in the United States.

The inflation-adjusted price of a Beetle in 1973 was around $12,000.

The price of a Chevrolet Spark in 2022? $13,000.

Nobody wants a Spark, though. They want an SUV. So Chevy killed the Spark.

Before Chevy discontinued the Spark you could walk onto a lot and drive away in one of the dozen or so Sparks they had rotting away in the corner for less than the price of a VW Beetle in 1973-- and the Spark was superior in every measurable way.

2023's cheapest car is the Nissan Versa. You can 100% find dealers who will part with one for less than the cost of a Beetle. It is also better than the Beetle.

An astronomical simulator loading dark sky data, grabbing your location, charting the current positions of the stars in relation to your location, displaying detailed graphics for constellations, implementing gyroscopic controls for real-time manipulation of the viewport, and loading all overhead objects into memory: loads nearly instantaneously, responds quickly.

A food delivery app: so bloated and sluggish it is borderline unusable and 100% embarrassing.

>I have an Itanium in the garage, a monument to hubris.

I love monuments to hubris so I too have one in my garage-- a four-node SGI Altix 350.

> Is Hacker News secretly funded by J. K. Rowling?

Your comment will likely be nuked because HN posters and admins hide behind a thin veneer of faux-civility and a cognitive dissonance where both information wants to be free and also you're not allowed to point out that the vast majority of posters are bigoted morons. (because "politeness")

They tend to be like the libertarians who are only libertarian because they think it excuses their bigotry and shields it from criticism (or even examination) who then shed their ideals like a molting snake whenever it suits them.

So yeah, pretty much. JK Rowling is an individual who got very lucky by being at the right place at the right time who now thinks they are smarter than everyone else.

The F-35 has already had numerous successes operating in a high-threat anti-air environments in Lebanon and Syria (edit: and Iran) at the hands of the Israelis.

I'm not a human bodyologist.

I'm a barely functional human being who feels as though he is faking his way though being an adult.

What I can say is that two years ago in my early 40s I had a L5-S1 spinal fusion after decades of pain, tremendous weight gain, and crippling depression. My surgeon really only said two things after I woke up from the surgery. He loomed over me in what my post-anesthetic stupor remembers as a pose resembling the nun scene in Blues Brothers and said "if you want to recover, waaaaaaaalk" and then the next day when I was a little more cognizant he said "lift weights". When I asked him what else, he said "DO YOGA".

Doctor surgeon looming over my bed: https://i.imgur.com/jlMRimz.jpg

Every day I walk at least 1 mile, which takes 20 minutes. Three days per week I lift weights under the direction of a trainer specifically educated to deal with people with fused backs and I'm extremely close to "graduating" from her on to "normal people weightlifting". The other four days I do yoga, a mix of ashtanga or yin depending on how I'm feeling the day after the strength training.

It has completely, radically, transformed my physique, mental health, and life in general.

Walking and yoga cost $0.00, weightlifting costs me a lot but can be very inexpensive, and it is all more than worth it.

I'm an extremely frequent flyer and I've only ever had bags delayed due to reasons I find completely understandable.

One such case was a connection through Houston where there was a huge electrical storm that delayed flights and forced ramp crew indoors for their protection. After the storm passed the decision was made to get the passengers out even if their bags were late. My bag was delivered to my hotel the following day.

Other cases have been extremely tight connections (that I have willingly chosen to book, against my better judgement) where there is barely enough time to get ME to the connection much less a bag buried in a hold somewhere.

From your link, the success rate for bag transportation ranges from 99.85% to 99.07%.

I honestly don't know how much better it can get.

There must be something going on that people have a perception that bag loss is common, because I take 30-50 trips per year, almost all of them through Chicago (which has a reputation) and almost all of them 2 legs, which is 160 loading operations per year (~40 trips, two legs each, round trip) and no unexplained bag losses or delays.

Is there a specific mode of air travel, like the crazy weird itineraries that people come up with to save $60 on airfare? Or weird, oddly-shaped, hard-to-handle bags? (I've seen taped-up coolers and trash bags used as checked luggage)

Broken luggage? That's a different story. Airlines have broken so many of my suitcases that I now transport my dirty laundry home in a Pelican Air 1615.

(edit: and they're doing their best to break that-- good luck!)

> Good luck producing LCD array with same level of tech in some remote colony light years from advanced foundries.

Any colony that can manufacture integrated circuits can easily manufacture LCD panels.

The ability to manufacture integrated circuits will likely be seen as important as the ability to manufacture oxygen in any colony, so there will probably be an LCD "printer" as part of their standard list of abilities.

This person made a simple passive LCD at home: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zoeeR3geTA

The ability of simple automated machines stashed in a maintenance closet to churn out screens of arbitrary size as-needed is not far-fetched in a world of interstellar travel.

> Plus, the tubes allowed for quick and easy maintenance at Russia’s primitive airfields,

I don't buy the maintenance angle.

Modern solid-state avionics are swappable LRUs. Like lego, you plug and unplug them. Just as easy as tubes, in fact the exact and precise same. Plus you can drop them and they don't shatter.

Techs aren't out in the field desoldering surface-mount components and swapping capacitors, the are unplugging and plugging modules the same as unplugging and plugging in a vacuum tube.

I also don't buy the EMP angle. The metal that aircraft avionic components are encased in also serves as EMP shielding. Not that that matters, the effects of thermonuclear EMP effects are so poorly understood that anyone claiming to be able to predict them is a liar. An EMP in the upper atmosphere may fry well-shielded components 1 meter away from unshielded components if the unshielded components are disconnected and at a different angle to the blast than the shielded ones, and vice-versa. Every real-world analysis of EMP effects is punctuated by how seemingly random the effects are.

An analysis of the effects of STARFISH PRIME on the streetlights of Honolulu notes how random and unpredictable the outages were, and this is on unshielded long-wire circuits (ideal for soaking up EMP radiation).

Did High Altitude EMP Cause the Hawaiian Streetlight Incident? http://ece-research.unm.edu/summa/notes/SDAN/0031.pdf

It will not.

They will see the microscopically minuscule number of people who still smoke due to the black market and claim the entire effort to be an abject failure.

They will ignore the millennia of higher quality lifespan added to the population, the massive savings in public healthcare expenses, and the almost-non-existent second hand damage smoking does and just focus on the thousand or so people smoking smuggled cigarettes.

When you suggest that their position is somewhat analogous to not passing laws against murder because "well that dude over there got murdered so OBVIOUSLY the laws aren't not working" they will just look at you funny.

I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe.

I'm a 40-something SEI&T engineer, Senior Principal, at Large Aerospace Firm A. 20 years of experience. My beard is completely and thoroughly gray, my bald spot is spectacular, and my demands on my employer are high.

I could shit on my boss's desk and management would politely ask me to not do so again and move my office further away.

If I quit, Large Aerospace Firm B would hire me and if I didn't like their offer Large Aerospace Firm C would hire me.

If I no longer wanted to work at a Large Aerospace Firm, NüSpace Firm X would hire me. Maybe with a slight pay cut but they also tend to be in lower cost of living areas.

And I'm merely average. Shitty school paid for with GI bill with mediocre grades due to having to work full time while taking 15 credits a semester, a couple of professional memberships I don't invest enough time into, and a history of working on projects that have imploded due to scope creep or poor management.

In what fields do engineers work where unemployment is even possible? What locations?

In my field (rockets and satellites and the like), at my location (middle Atlantic), we are starved for employees.

Except for the junior engineers, hired in a mad dash directly out of school to snap up bodies as space has exploded, everyone I work with is ten thousand years old. There's a massive chasm between 20 year olds and 10,000 year olds because everyone in their 30s and 40s has gone to work for some dot-com company whose only purpose in life is to steal their user's personal data and invent new ways of spamming ads everywhere.

Being old is a net positive because you know where the bodies are hidden, how to hide them, and can teach the kids how and where to hide them.

>You definitely have to be a special type of person and even a borderline social outcast to make it a regular job.

Many, many years ago I was in the Army and served with a man, Corporal White, who was the oddest person I had ever met. He was probably the best soldier I have ever seen, but refused to take anything seriously and treated the Army as a game to be played (as one should).

Anyway, he put in a DA4187 form, a personnel action request form, with roughly four words on it: "request duty in Antarctica", it worked its way up the chain of command, and after several months a telegram (the army sent telegrams called PERSGRAMS up until the late 90s!) arrived assigning him to duty in Antarctica.

He spent about six months down there, in his words "moving around barrels and crates and playing Nintendo", and came back engaged to a scientist.

Now he and his wife are itinerant adventurers and I don't think they've lived anywhere for more than six months in the last 25 years.

>I'm using an iPhone 6s because I can't be bothered to spend $1000 for the new models.

The iPhone SE starts at $429. The performance, battery life, screen quality, camera quality, and network speed improvements are extremely noticeable between the two models.

It is indeed most environmentally friendly to use hardware as long as absolutely possible, but you ain't on 6s because of $1,000 phones....

Much less digital money is lost than real money.

And when digital money is lost due to fraud or error it can be restored.

For example, in 30 years of banking I have lost $0.00 in digital money. Sure, there have been gas station skimmers, system outages, misplaced debit cards, but I haven't "lost" a single cent.

I have lost at least $20.00 in real physical money.

$0.00 < $20.00

Digitalization helps other things too, I've lost hundreds of dollars in misplaced transit cards. Back in the 90s when I was a broke punk some loser stole a transit card with ~$47 on it. That was (and is) a big deal. Others have been misplaced or damaged beyond hope.

Since digital transit cards became a thing I have lost $0.00 in transit funds.

Running a TOR node to fight for "freedom" is like handing out plutonium to laypersons so they can fight nuclear proliferation.

Everyone daydreams of activists and journalists but really they're only enabling child pornographers and methamphetamine dealers.

>I believe that, had FTX International been given a few weeks, it could likely have utilized its illiquid assets and equity to raise enough financing to make customers substantially whole.”

I haven't really been following this because I think crypto is one of the dumbest fucking ideas a human being has ever come up with, but isn't the above quote just describing a ponzi scheme without using the word ponzi?

Like, what do the people who cover the losses of the ponzi-schemed customers get, promises of more rounds of fundraising to cover THEIR inevitable future losses?

A huge (A0, 33-1/8 x 46-13/16 in-sized) 12-month calendar with the months laid out in long strips.

I wasn't doing enough. Too much YouTube and reddit, so I stopped and decided to do things.

I used different colored markers for different aspects of my life-- health, work, fitness, recreational travel, home maintenance, etc) and decided I had to do something every week.

The different colors even accounted for down time. Too much color? Draw a nice relaxing blue line for a couple of days and do nothing.

I went from being a hermit to a EMT-qualified volunteer at my local volunteer fire department on his way to Firefighter I training, a spotlight operator at a local community theater, an enthusiastic yogi, and by having the year laid out I can look at weekends with holidays and plan my year's travel months in advance. I make notes on when to plant what and have a pretty front yard.

Digital calendars are nice, but they can't beat having a huge-assed poster right next to the front door with everything laid out in black and white and red and blue and green and yellow and........

If you feel like you're not getting the most out of life, get a huge-assed calendar, start googling local volunteer opportunities, write it down, and then do it.

$30, including markers.

I was a network engineer for many years and had a setup consisting of cast-off enterprise gear until I got tired of managing enterprise gear.

Now my setup is:

Gigabit Fiber ONT -> Dell Optiplex 980 running OPNsense -> cheap gigabit switch feeding patch panel to in-wall CAT6 -> 2x hardwired Eero Pro6e APs. A 10-gig switch sits in my office and all of my 10-gig devices are connected to it to access an all-SSD NAS over NFS and Samba.

Every device that has an ethernet jack is hardwired.

The 12 year old i5-540 in the Optiplex is capable of 300mbps wireguard VPN connections, which is more than enough for the hotel wifi I use to connect back to home. Optiplexes are so cheap that I have two, with a pre-configured spare sitting right next to the running system ready to go.

I run a lot of services but am smart enough to know that I am too dumb to port-forward responsibly so while everything has an entry in my local DNS server if I need to access anything remotely, I do so via the VPN.

Mobile web designers are doing a much better job than Apple or Google could ever dream of when it comes to creating horrifically unusable mobile web sites and applications.

It’s almost like they’re in cahoots.

When they are so bad, either maliciously or not, that one would rather download an app or wait until a desktop browser is available, one has to wonder.

>If so, try writing a check a Russian oligarch, to pay for cuban cigars, or to sell something to Iran.

Which of those transactions is "normal"? It should be noted that even with cryptocurrencies laws still apply. You're still seeking "permission" for your "normal" transactions.

Here's the deal. The commentator said, effectively, it is NORMAL for "duh gubmint" to control your spending.

It is not.

Normal has a well-defined and commonly-accepted meaning. You cannot call bribing a Russian oligarch "normal" unless you are a different kind of person than most. Unless you are an abnormal person doing abnormal things.

There are edge cases where the government does regulate cash transactions and whether or not those edge cases are right or required is a separate discussion I am not having right now.

Also, checks aren't cash?????

>...and Bitcoin is mot digital cash.

The title of the bitcoin white paper is "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System". Is it lying?

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

To ape on Diderot, "Man will never be free until the last libertarian is strangled with the entails of the last cryptobro".

Hyperscalers either stick that same ASPEED BMC in their systems or roll their own solution based off USB-over-ethernet and/or some kind of janky I2C hack that is quite frankly an incomprehensibly terrifying safety nightmare of its own.

And by "hyperscalar" I mean "the ODM who actually designed the system".

Both Microsoft and Meta née Facebook hyperscaled their data centers using the AST1050.

All of the various Open Cloudserver specs call for BMCs: https://www.opencompute.org/wiki/Server/SpecsAndDesigns-old

Things haven't changed that much from these specifications.

>Normally I can buy or sell something if:

>1. My government will allow me to transact 2. My bank will allow me to transact

Cryptobros keep saying this.

What kind of fantasy world do they live in where the government and banks "normally" approve or disapprove of cash transactions?

The bank from which you have withdrawn the cash does not know or care what you use it for, and the government may care but good luck it finding out.

Remember, bitcoin is DIGITAL CASH as per the first sentence of the bitcoin white paper so like for like should be compared: analog cash to digital cash.

You used the word "normally". I don't think "normally" means what you think it means.

Crypto is insane. Incomprehensible. The perfect merging of paranoiac libertarians and immoral grifters forming a feedback loop of destruction that grinds up and spits out the masses in order to enrich the few at a scale that traditional banking could only dream of. Executives at Goldman Sachs are looking at the people running off with cash at all of the cryptoscams, the margins of miners, with jealousy because "duh jackbooted gubmint" says they have to like, obey the law and stuff.

Crypto is a symptom of something being wrong with society but I don't know what.

I do know that everyone I know personally who has been into crypto has either been an immoral scammer... or an imbecile.

I live in a world where the actions of 14 year olds are irrelevant to their adulthood.

A world I wish more people would join me in.

In this world I also refuse to hold children accountable or responsible for the actions of their parents, and vice-versa because I am not a North Korean dictator.

Join me.

>How do you explain this picture then?

The optempo of US Navy vessels is inconceivable to foreign navies.

Practically every second of every day while underway the ship is expected to be operational and a ship's itinerary is pre-determined down to the minute. Delays are not tolerated.

The fleet keeps getting smaller but the workload remains the same. The Navy is burning out its personnel and equipment trying to keep up.

The records for both longest deployment (215 days) and longest time at sea with no port calls (208 days) were both broken in 2020.

From 2017:

> The Navy has doubled its number of forward deployed naval forces ships operating out of Japan since 2006 – a bump from 20 to 40 ships – but those ships do not follow the Optimized Fleet Response Plan readiness generation model that includes dedicated time for ship maintenance and crew training ahead of rotational deployments.

https://news.usni.org/2017/09/20/cno-richardson-high-optempo...

The problem has only gotten worse since then.

The Navy used to heave to and have a day or two to clean up before entering port but they don't do that anymore. Those days cannot be wasted on cleaning.

As for the picture, if you told me that there were individual members of the US Navy crew that had more time at sea than the entire combined crew of the Polish ship, I would not dismiss that comment immediately as being implausible.

Online busybodies, like those commenting on the tweet you linked to, will bitch and moan about the navy going soft but they would crumble into dust under the pressures the Navy is operating under today.

The worst are the old-ass "CoLd WaRrIoRs" who spent 20 years in the navy doing a 3-month med cruise every year who got less time at sea than the 19-year old deck seaman on the rusty ship in that photo got before they pinned on E-3.

They would have gone AWOL if forced to go 200 days without touching dry land.

Lucas is my favorite tech author and I plagiarize him every time a text editor discussion breaks out:

"Let me be perfectly clear: ed is the standard Unix text editor. If you don't know ed, you're not a real sysadmin."

https://shop.aer.io/mwl/p/Ed_Mastery_The_Standard_Unix_Text_...