ryanmercer

Except that isn't what it is for. It's so when someone is being lawfully detained, you don't get 30 people circling the officer(s) shouting things and exciting one another, while recording and blocking view and the movement of officers.

It's purely a safety thing. You don't want random people close to you while you are dealing with something

These videos can be graphic:

- Here protestors drag an officer into the crowd and savagely beat him https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le07VPqBZ58

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw3F91w6D78 here is a video of onlookers recording agitating one another, several of which are standing in the street and blocking police vehicles.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71wdrhKzuys here a man that had been harassing local businesses and patrons all day charges a guardsman (who's an off-duty police officer) and the crowd starts surrounding him, recording, shouting things, agitating, when another bystander jumps to the guardsman's defense and now you've got multiple hostile people getting more and more agitated while the guardsman waits for uniformed police to come take the guy that tried to assault him, tried to damage his car, was harassing others, etc.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H40vEOOs5z0 here are protestors, standing around filming each other, assaulting a motorcycle officer on his motorcycle as he tries to drive away from them

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvDwWSl-sVE here officers try to restrain a felon, in felony possession of a firearm, that had tried to assault officers while a felon unlawfully possessing a firearm, as people surrounded them to hold their phones as close to them as possible to take footage, then as 3 of them try to subdue the suspect that continued, while armed, to try and resist then has to escalate to non-lethal violence of gasp punching the guy to try to get him to submit. At 3:42 an onlooker throws a full trash can at the officers that are actively trying to handcuff an ARMED FELON that is fighting tooth and nail to escape.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdFsumyHLXo guy on a roof of a business hops down, then retrieves a handgun and aims it at officers, the officers start issuing commands while a bystander walks into the officer's line of fire filming and occasionally shouting things (go to 4:20 and you can see them just right of 12 o'clock.)

Etc.

It's hard enough to deal with a life or death situation without an angry mob of people standing around shouting shoving their phone in your face.

>Are they really going to save 400 m$

I'm sure they'll save many millions.

Earlier this year I left FedEx after 15 1/2 years of service. Every single day I used an IBM AS/400 terminal to interact with several systems to do my job, the bulk of my job was done via that terminal. Yeah, that's how old most of FedEx's tech is. A few months before I left they had just migrated one of our in-house systems over to Oracle likely as part of this. That said, the mission-critical system was having almost daily errors/downtime once migrated to Oracle soooo...

I imagine some of this is the simple fact that they need to replace these severely aging, no longer supported, IBM AS/400 servers throughout the company. They lost hardware support around 2020 and, if I'm not mistaken, haven't been made since like 2008 or something. That alone is going to save a pretty penny in new hardware and energy costs as well as free up physical space at often already crowded areas.

It'll also save time-lost costs. Any time power would go out at our building, the servers would usually be done for tens of minutes even with the generator kicking on. We'd lose a couple of hours a year usually to the servers that were in our building coming back online. A couple of hours, times 100~ employees at one site, equals a LOT of backlog being created which ripples through the company. While that few thousand dollars they're paying employees during that downtime isn't much, it would cascade and disrupt the freight handling. If a single package didn't clear customs in time, then it might end up as an overage and have to go to a bonded cage, that's now 2 extra movements added, that's freight planning for possibly multiple trucks that will be part of the delivery once the package landed in the United States, you might see a thousand or more shipments (that may or may not be single package shipments) now needing to be handled extra at a half dozen ports, even more sort facilities, and even more local facilities. That's just from 1 office losing power for say a half hour.

Moving those servers to a cloud provider should provide a much better uptime which should translate to a notable savings in the above situations.

I left FedEx (Trade Networks) after 15 and a half years earlier this year. The entirety of that 15 1/2 years was spent using IBM AS/400 terminal to interact with various systems and was also used to submit paperwork to Customs and any other applicable government agencies to clear international freight.

It... was an experience.

I imagine that is going to take quite a bit of work to migrate over to someone else's servers, as I doubt they're going to be like "sure, we can accommodate your decade and a half old, mission-critical, systems"

>Once again, why are companies like Stripe [0], Moneygram [1], still using cryptocurrencies then?

Because they want to be part of the current buzzword, just like every company throwing around "AI" and "machine learning". For the most part those companies are also fairly quickly converting any crypto into hard fiat, their risk is entirely minimal, yet the fees they are charging are quite profitable.

They're mostly acting as moneychangers, not crypto fanatics. And their adoption doesn't change the fact that you can go on dozens (hundreds?) of DNMs and buy child pornography and drugs from the privacy of your living room.

The vast majority of crypto is currently speculation/pump and dump and illegal commerce. Period. It is cancer, electricity-hungry cancer.

The font is definitely less than desirable for a smooth read.

> but the characterization of appealing to burned-out engineers, especially older folks,

It's not just "older folks" that are burnt out from being effectively abused by employers for years or decades. I left my last employer after just shy of 16 years as I didn't have a cost of living increase in over a decade, worked over 400 hours of overtime in a calendar year and was constantly being asked for more, with every single thing I did being micromanaged with a time stamp down to the second with it going as far as some managers asking employees to notify them when they'd be AFK to use the toilet to justify a few minute gap in activity, while my CEO gave himself a 40-something million dollar annual raise (while being a multi-billionaire).

In the past year and a half roughly half of that office has quit, heck when I put in my notice one of my team leads had put his in day before and the one I directly reported to put in his the day after I did.

People are tired of being treated like crap, with or without "enough" pay.

Sometimes being trusted, being treated like an adult, and being given some amount of freedom is far more attractive than more money.

I spent just about 2 years WFH at my job with FedEx, shortly after I left to join TrueNorth they went permanent WFH for my former office, I highly doubt they outsource that.

I'm also WFH with TrueNorth, again I see zero reason why they would replace me. I'm already arguably quite cheaper than people in HCOL cities, I'm competent, I'm proving I can work largely autonomously and deliver quality work and I don't have a job role that simply doesn't require me to be in person for anything, what meetings I do have work fine with Zoom as they often involve screen sharing and might use all of the allotted time or a fraction of the allotted time.

WFH is going to be the new norm going forward for a lot of roles, roles like mine that don't involve a lot of heavy in-person discussion.

Will you get replaced by someone better qualified in another geographic area that may or may not be cheaper? Maybe, but the same can be said for in-person roles you're just competing against a much smaller pool of people for a given role.

Will you get replaced by someone in another country, that can work for a fractional amount of what you can? Probably not, there's a myriad of tax implications as well as time zones and general reliability to deal with. It's much harder to vet people in a country that's going to make economic sense to outsource to, there's usually a language (or at least considerable accent) barrier, cultural differences (Based on Reddit and HN, Europe for example generally finds the bulk of what Americans experience at work to be absolutely unacceptable, things like a 40+ hour work week with a half hour unpaid lunch, being expected to be actively working all 40+ hours) the tax implications in both countries, data laws might be different in the second country which could become a royal pain, etc.

And if you do lose your job to outsourcing to increase company profits, did you really want to be working there anyway?

I think you just created a YouTube channel for an enterprising artist Part 1: paints cell then Part 2: cell gets destroyed in window during time lapse, then it could evolve even more testing different paints/paint brands/colours.

I'd watch a handful of them.

>Right, choose your own and MUDs and such are environments created for you with pre-determined options

That's valid, I guess I never really thought of them that way.

This year I left my previous employer with 15 and a half years of service shudder I can't imagine having worked another single day for them, let alone 84 years.

Aren't the point of tabletop RPGs primarily the fact that they are a social experience though?

Wouldn't it be easier to just read a Choose Your Own Adventure, or play a solo text based adventure game? Or just log on to a roleplaying leaning MUD and still get the benefit of others?

> but better than catfish.

I challenge you to a duel, thems fightin' words. Fried catfish is one of the greatest things on the planet (mind you not terribly healthy).

>Have you ever been to a farm and ranch?

Have you ever been to a feed lot? It is not a pretty little hilly patch of land with cows wandering aimlessly around nibbling on grass. The vast majority of cattle are, at a minimum, finished on a feedlot. A patch of dirt, packed in as much as movement allows, and fed grain via a trough for half (or more) of their weight gain.

>Another 14% come from grains and other food that could have been eaten by people. But altogether this less than a quarter of the calories livestock consume.

Are you wholly unfamiliar with feedlots? 50% + of the bodyweight of the bulk of cattle in the world comes when they live on a feedlot, where they get 5.5 to 6.5 pounds of feed, via trough, to raise them from 600-900 pounds up to the slaughter weight of 1250-1350 pounds.

Corn (dent, which is still usable for human foodstuffs but is mostly just grown for animal feed) is widely used on the feed lot because you don't need 5.5-6.5 pounds per pound of beef, you only need 2.07-2.24 pounds per pound of slaughter weight. Each pound of dent corn yields about 1,566 kcals so you're trading 3241+ kcal of (fertilized) corn crop for 800-1250 kcals of beef.

So for 1 acre of corn you need 40 to 50 pounds of nitrogen, 1 acre of corn. For the 2020 crop year, USDA estimates U.S. corn yield to be 181.8 bushels per acre. 1 bushel is 56 pounds. So to finish 1 cow to slaughter weight, assuming it's pasture fed to 600 pounds, you're looking at roughly 2.9 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer.

So roughly 2.9 pounds of nitrogen, 1345 pounds of corn, and then factor in the water which is 1-2 gallons per 100 pounds of of bodyweight per day times 12-36 months depending on what fat content is desired in the meat.

Again, we can use less fertilizer, reduce water usage, and better use some current cropland (75+ million acres in the United States alone) for crops intended for human consumption, drastically reduce the risk of new diseases by eliminating hundreds of millions of chronically stressed animal hosts, and to simply restore of them to native species in an area and reduce all of the negative environmental impacts of farming in those areas (runoff, soil depletion, loss of native habitats).

There are roughly 1 billion head of cattle in the world, depending on the soil and climate you need anywhere from 2-25 acres per head of cattle to 100% grass feed them (in areas where this is done, obviously 25 acres of desert isn't going to feed a cow).

Even if we assume an average of 3 acres per head, you're looking at 3 billion acres of land just to keep beef going (never mind the 785 million pigs and 33 billion chickens).

If you entirely pasture feed, you're going to get lower slaughter weights too as their weight at slaughter averages about 1,200 pounds compared with about 1,350 pounds for feedlot animals, you'd end up needing something like 30% more cattle to get the same amount of meat https://awellfedworld.org/grazing/

Pasture, that is harvested for straw/hay to feed to cattle, still gets fertilized usually at a minimum with added nitrogen. That nitrogen could be better used in other fields growing crops specifically for humans, never mind the negative implications of the runoff that causes damage elsewhere.

Most commercial cattle aren't pasture fed, they aren't free ranging it in a field eating whatever they forage. Hobby and small farms, sure, but the operations that raise the most heads the cattle generally spend the bulk of their life standing in a dirt pen (a feedlot) eating from a trough. They're then fed a mix of corn, soy, ruffage (grasses).

Here is an example of a feedlot https://www.bilaterals.org/IMG/jpg/33a3ab67aa6bbe3184c0441d2...

The cattle come to a side and eat from troughs like this https://cdn.farmjournal.com/s3fs-public/styles/840x600/publi...

It takes 2.5~ pounds of grain and 1,850~ gallons of water to produce 1 pound of beef.

Well, we can feed ourselves a lot better rapidly by:

- Drastically reducing food waste. In the United States, food waste is estimated at 30-40% https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs

- Shift away from animal based protein rapidly. Livestock takes up nearly 80% of global agricultural land, yet produces less than 20% of the world's supply of calories https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets.... (don't get me wrong, I love meat, but I also love a habitable planet that can sustain the current population...)

Can I finally get verified now?

Etch the code onto metal sheets?

The CrafsMan has a DIY video on how to do it, he's also just a wonderful treat in general. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tYMUqsVhfc

The "fishy" taste is likely indicative of a higher omega 3 content, you get the same taste from 100% grass fed and finished beef and buffalo due to the higher omega 3 content.

Turmeric has had similar issues, with some individuals adding industrial lead chromate to improve the colors (and add to the weight, as it is sold by weight) https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/09/28/turmeric-...

>What about all the embedded systems out there,

We didn't observe daylight savings here in Indiana until about a decade and a half ago, and we have our own time zone in everything still (go look, you'll find "Indiana (East)" or some such). I can't imagine it'd be too difficult to implement.

We didn't even observe it here in Indiana until something like 16 years ago and it is the dumbest thing that I've ever been a part of.

Like I said years ago in this post https://www.ryanmercer.com/ryansthoughts/2017/2/13/i-miss-th...

"Yes, I am a 20th century person. My curse is that of being born on the cusp of the digital revolution. My curse is that of wanting a simple life in a friendly world. My curse is that of being smart enough to know that this 21st century life isn't something good, it will never be for me. "

>but I read this and it sounded like someone who thought very highly of themselves, has limited work experience, has limited experience in technology but expects the company to work around their needs.

This was also my takeaway. I think, in general, younger people feel more entitled and have no idea how things really work. They want you to cater to them, rarely want to put in the effort, and want big money for it and think they are an expert that knows more than anyone that's been doing a given job for any worthwhile amount of time. Just a quick glance at /r/antiwork and /r/overemployed are a good cursory look at this sort of mentality.

Similarly go look at YouTube videos of 'day in the life' type content for data analysts/data scientists, you get a lot of "I wake up, check emails, go ride my bike for an hour, look at emails, cook a fancy breakfast, look at emails, go CrossFit/shower/cook lunch/take my kid to the wherever for 2 hours, I then hop on a meeting for an hour, then I run a python script, then I cook dinner for my partner and eat it, play some video games, and go to bed. I enjoy my 6-figure income".

>It doesn’t feel dishonest to me

In some cases they are outsourcing the work on their own dime, I saw at least one thread where someone said they were outsourcing it to another country, one where someone was asking about doing it, and a third where someone was actually caught doing it (I believe it was an article share).

A lot of the attitude seems to be "offload it to other people on your team/subordinates".

Lots of "refuse to attend meetings if they overlap, remember they need YOU you don't need them" type attitude too.

I think dishonest might be an understatement for a lot of what I've seen in that sub.

Paid for OT. I was working 6 days a week, up to 11 hours a day, for several months. It sucked not having a lot of free time, especially once you added in class and religious pursuits, but man that extra money sure did let my wife and I get a lot of stuff done around the house and garden.

Wow, I saw a few threads involving people claiming 4 full-time jobs too. Interesting to see it here on HN.