techsupporter

> They could afford to get degrees in subjects that may not have paid all that well (teaching, for example)

I also wonder how much of that growth is from high school students being told to go to college above all else, and how this graduation increase corresponds to enrollment and graduation from vocational schools.

I do think your point is the big one: people could go into college and come out with knowledge in the so-called soft skills, like philosophy or literature (areas that don't pay well but are vital for a society to understand itself, if nothing else). Why society doesn't value teaching and similar jobs as much as it does other industries is left as a debate for another time.

> But in any case I feel this reveals more about the reader and their proclivity to engage in 'culture-war topics' than anything substantial.

You are, of course, free to assign any motivation to me that you like.

However I am on the older side and the only times I ever heard "girl" used were as a pronoun for a younger person or as a diminutive for a person seen as lesser than the speaker.

For example, my older family members would refer to "the typing pool girls" or "the makeup counter girl" or, by comparison, "the woman at the county clerk's office."

So it is a bit astounding to me, especially now, to hear someone casually refer to someone who is providing a professional service to them as a "girl."

Because it is very odd framing, to say the least, to refer to someone in a professional context as a "girl."

> Forced arb was supposed to make things better.

The purpose of the Federal Arbitration Act was not to make things better for end customers like you and I.

The law was passed because judges at the time (in 1926, for what it's worth) were reluctant to enforce decisions reached through arbitration in courts because judges saw arbitration as either a reduction of judicial authority or less fair and open than a judicial proceeding. Both views were held at the time, take your pick for which one you prefer.

Arbitration was originally supposed to be about two parties of roughly equal negotiation and information-acquisition power being able to work out arguments between themselves. Inherently, this meant business-to-business complaints with each other.

You and I are not on equal footing and with the overwhelming majority of entities with which we contract, nor can we easily negotiate the terms of those contracts, both of which were features of the entities who originally wanted to use binding arbitration. But over the years, businesses that provide services to individual customers figured out that getting sued was expensive and decades of "ambulance-chasing class action lawyers are unfair!" turned the tide against using courts as neutral forums. Supreme Court decisions relating to the arbitration act over the past thirty years or so have effectively slammed the door on using courts and some members of Congress don't seem motivated to change this.

(Note that I am biased against binding arbitration agreements. I think them unconscionable, and I laugh endlessly when "well-intentioned" companies that do a Show HN here have them in their terms.)

> the whole thing is just a blown-up mobile UI (are that many people doing taxes on their phones!?)

Yes. According to Pew, in 2021 there were 15% of adults in the US who said they only have smartphone data for Internet access and do not have what we know as home broadband. By age, that number skews towards younger adults, with the largest share being people aged 18-29, however even older adults hover in the low teens of percent.

Even if someone does have broadband at home, the number of "traditional" desktop and laptop computers have been dropping. Mobile phone and tablet devices (but, let's be honest, mostly mobile phones) have been replacing regular computers at a pretty high clip. And where a household does have a desktop or laptop, they may only have one, where almost everyone has a mobile phone device so it's probably convenient to just pull up the tax prep web site and get to it on the handheld.

Pew data: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/

> He most likely has an active TS clearance and works with ITAR.

Not necessarily. It's as equally likely that he does not have any clearances and could not pass a background check, either with the government or the kind that Twitter's regulatory compliance people want.

In the case of companies that do work with the Department of Defense, it is not unusual for managers to have people who work for them who hold clearances but the managers themselves don't. Where I work, we operate a medical clinic in a federal facility and some of our staff have access to federal employee patient data. As a result, some of our physicians and nursing staff have a clearance as does one of our practice managers and some of our technical staff, but no one else does.

Also, remember that Musk has publicly consumed drugs that are illegal at the federal level and had some very visible run-ins with the SEC. Some federal investigators and companies would not have a problem with that, others very much would.

No, that's what the person you replied to mean when they wrote:

> hitting the limits of sprawl (congested highway commute time)

There's only so far you can bus, train, drive, bike, walk, seaplane, helicopter, hyperloop, or transporter in to go to work. Canadian cities are, just like cities in the US, hitting this limit rather aggressively.

In cities where sprawl isn't physically prohibitive, like Calgary or Toronto, the upper bound of "this shit ain't worth it" for time and money is a limiting factor. I know someone who commutes from Kitchener to Toronto on GO, so they don't even have to put up with driving, and they're debating moving back home to Winnipeg for a 40% salary cut just to not have to put up with it any more.

Remote work might help with this but even there, you have people who are moving "a little further out" but not leaving the region because they want to stay nearby for other reasons (or because they're not entirely convinced that full remote is actually on the table long term).

We are aware of these. The reason is: Because unless you get the "enhanced" version, due to the ridiculous REAL ID situation you have to have another card anyway. For me in particular, where I work operates a medical clinic in a facility owned by the federal government so a non-enhanced card doesn't get me in the door, but a passport card does.

For my wife, it's because she has even less tolerance for paperwork than I do and it's easier to just go to the pharmacies we know have their heads bolted on straight than it is to gather up all of the stuff and go to the overworked and harried DOL.

> With explanation in abstract that its easier to buy meth than pseudoephedrine.

People may laugh at this, as they should since it is an absurd situation, but this isn't entirely wrong.

Neither my wife or I drive and during the pandemic she gave up her license after getting an appointment at the DOL was difficult. Both of us carry US passport cards as our ID.

This has resulted in several situations where we've been turned down for purchasing restricted items like alcohol or drugs containing pseudoephedrine, particularly the latter, because a passport card can't be scanned by the usual point of sale systems. There are a couple of places in Seattle that are happy to accept a passport card but even at them it's sometimes been dependent on who is working the counter that day.

> The best I've heard is that paying taxes being hard is good because it reminds you how much money you give the government, so you are more attentive how it's spent

The argument I've heard is that so righteous indignation over the "staggeringly high" taxes "stolen from the hardworking American people" or whatever. This is one of the same arguments as to why sales taxes shouldn't be included in the shelf price of an item or service.

Except it doesn't work. People can be mad about taxes regardless of whether they're easy or hard to file. (Paying taxes is straightforward; the vast majority of us have it done for us from our paychecks every interval.) And where I live, public votes to raise the sales tax for various projects, often public transit, rarely if ever fail.

It seems to me just to be an excuse to not actually deal with our busted as hell tax collection system because that system benefits people who themselves have an excuse to rile people up about taxes.

> This also makes many states cease to matter.

States are abstract political entities; it's people who matter.

People are represented in the House by population (less so than they should be since we refuse to let the lower chamber grow in size) and in the Senate by state.

The President of the United States represents every United States citizen everywhere on the planet. The holder of that office should be elected by a majority, preferably with some form of expression of ranking preference, of those voters regardless of what political entity they are currently in or connected to.

> Have look at Mikrotik CCR2004-1G-12S+2XS (1G-12S+2XS means 1x1Gbps RJ45, 12xSFP+, 2xSFP28) or CCR2116-12G-4S+

Both of these look fantastic. The second one, with the four SFP+ ports, looks like an almost drop-in replacement for the Infinity, particularly with its 16GB of RAM. (We use soft-reconfiguration inbound which bloats the amount of RAM needed for the tables.)

> However, neither of them will route 80 Gbps full duplex.

That's actually fine, at least for our needs. We only have 50Gbps of connectivity between peer, IXP, and transit links and today's 30Gbps is high because of end-of-month activities. We got the Infinity largely because it was the only EdgeRouter that could do what we needed. Like the gap between EdgeRouter Infinity and "every other router that can do what it does," there's a rather large gap in Ubiquiti's EdgeRouter line. The next one down in the list is the EdgeRouter-12 that is a small fraction of the capability of the Infinity.

> another thing on Mikrotik naming conventions: CRS = switches; CCR = routers

That's good to know. I hadn't started down the Mikrotik path yet but I'll give it a look. We have a leaf router at a small office where we experiment and maybe I can put one in there to start.

Thanks for all of the information!

I appreciate the recommendation but that's kind of a gap from the EdgeRouter Infinity (ER-8-XG). The Infinity has 8x10Gbps SFP+ ports, a single copper 1Gbps port, 16GB of RAM, and a multi-core processor because it's designed as an inexpensive core router for a mid-sized network.

Where I work, we use one of them as our main router with multiple peering sessions and two transit uplinks. According to Cacti, right now we're pushing about 30Gbps through the router.

That's what I'm looking to eventually replace, if Ubiquiti doesn't start up with software updates to the EdgeRouter line again. But I think that's the problem: the EdgeRouter line is so amazingly inexpensive for all of the power you get, there's no financial incentive for Ubiquiti to invest in it and all of the players with the "proper" routers--the Junipers and Ciscos and the like--start at three times the price of an ER-8-XG.

> make a real router of an x86-64 system rather than putting a mikrotik pci-e card into it (wtf, why?) I'd recommend they go with vyatta or VyOS instead

One thing I've been looking for is a hardware box that can replicate what Ubiquiti's EdgeRouter Infinity does: a handful of 10Gbps SFP+ ports (sorry, I know that the term is "cages" but I just can't) and a couple of copper 1Gbps ports.

So far I haven't found anything but I feel like my search will get motivated in the next couple of years since it feels like Ubiquiti has forgotten that EdgeRouter exists.

Do you have any rack form factor x86-type systems you like for VyOS?

I am a baseball fan, so maybe other sports are different, but from my perspective: When I go to the stadium, I have a single vantage point. Oftentimes I'll have a low resolution stream going of the game where a few-second delay is optimal because I'll get to see a replay of something that happened out of my view or that I just missed. Plus, for all but the biggest plays, a replay of a close call isn't usually shown on the scoreboard.

> When you sign up for a new account, they aggressively prompt you to sync your contacts list with the app, and will continually prompt you in the future if you choose not to.

Even everyone's much-loved Signal does this. Contacts sync is presented as "not now" or "yes forever." The "not now" message even explicitly says they'll bug you again.

We didn't defund the police; Seattle PD took an 18% budget cut that was largely the result of declining to enlarge the department and moving some tasks, like parking enforcement, out to other departments. Also, SPD has something like 230 open positions for officers. That said, we would prefer that they not take the tack of "shoot first and dodge OPA later," if they wouldn't mind.

"Our prosecutors" is not the City of Seattle. The Seattle city attorney does not have the authority to prosecute anything above simple misdemeanors. It's up to the county who gets prosecuted and who doesn't, and King County has said that county policy is that you can't arrest people into better conditions.

> safe place again after the bad ol' days. And then we undid it in 24 months

Pardon? Are you really saying that downtown is less safe and less inviting than downtown in the 80s and 90s? You are aware that the waterfront largely did not exist back then, that violent crime in 98101 was almost six times its current amount back then? That the number of people living in downtown has rebounded from its COVID-induced trough and is now 4% higher than before?

I have lived through those "bad ol' days" and also the "good times" you mentioned and to say that downtown is undone and worse now than it was before, to quote an esteemed colleague, "is madness."

> After they are arrested for violent crimes, Seattle releases them back to being free within ~3 hours.

Considering the City of Seattle lacks the legal authority to prosecute "violent crimes" (anything beyond a simple misdemeanor is handled by the King County Prosecutor) and the jail is operated by the county, please explain how it is that "Seattle" releases them within three hours?

This is a staggering misrepresentation of what Councilmember Juarez wrote. (I will point out by way of potential bias that CM Juarez is the councilmember for my district and I voted for her in the last election.)

Seattle PD is the problem in a lot of ways. We've made one simple ask of them: stop arbitrarily shooting people. They have failed in that task, and every time we, the voters, try to hold them accountable, we are told that "the Mayor doesn't supervise the police department" or "Office of Police Accountability has no authority" or "the consent decree prohibits us from passing that ordinance."

CM Juarez, who is a person of color I might add, is correct that the actual statistics say that being a person of darker colored skin around a Seattle PD officer is a risky endeavor. So adding more badges and guns to the street won't do much.

Since threads about topics like this often have a very similar vibe regardless of forum, I would like to make one ask:

Please, remember that actual people live here and not just bits displayed on a screen. Also remember that these are incredibly complex problems and that any solution you type into this text box is not going to be easy to implement, easy to track, or easy to push to resolution. Life is not a set of Jira tickets.

I have lived inside the city limits of Seattle virtually my entire life. Except for a brief stint in Texas for work, Seattle has been home. Seattle, like all cities, has its warts and problems. The absolutely staggering level of income and wealth inequality we have experienced in the last decade has taken all of those problems and multiplied them tenfold.

Seattle is a beautiful city with a lot to offer...which is why tens of thousands of people move here every year.

Should there be crime on 3rd Ave? No. Should there be crime anywhere? No. But, finally, please remember that agendas exist and are being pushed and, bluntly, Amazon has a lot of arrows in its quiver if it wants to make a proper good influence on our shared hometown. Odd that it so rarely uses those arrows, except for press releases.

This is incredible, thank you for the link.

All these people want to know, "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?"

That game show on PBS was my favorite and I was genuinely sad when Lynne Thigpen died. That show got me into Jeopardy!, and then into the trivia group I found on a local discussion forum, and then through a friendship made there into the job I've had for many years.

Hit it, Rockapella.

> Missing: Q: "So can I just walk into one of those zillion bank branches you've set up in the last 10 years, squatting on all that storefront real estate that could be used for real businesses that sell me something, attract tourists, or whatever?"

> A: "No, they're just for show. We don't actually do any business there...

This is what I don't get about BECU being the most popular credit union in Puget Sound. Every time there's a thread on Reddit asking about the credit unions people use or if there's a newcomer who's at a social gathering or just on Twitter, BECU is always the recommended place. I don't understand, since their branches are solely there to sell you a mortgage.

Yet everyone is mad that Chase is opening branches all over town where you can do actual banking with an actual human.

(I'm neither a Chase nor BECU customer, for what it's worth.)

> in Seattle there are similar mixed toll and high occupancy vehicle lanes that were built to help fund expansion of light rail systems

Tolls from the express toll lanes or on state routes like 520 and 167 don't pay for the transit system in Puget Sound. The long and short of why is that because funding indirectly comes from the motor vehicle fuel tax account, at least as backing for the bonds, the state constitution prohibits spending the money on anything but roads.

The closest you can get is that part of the ETL projects on I-405/SR 522 will build a full ETL pathway that bus rapid transit can use as part of Sound Transit's STRIDE network from Renton to Bothell, but that's only for transit insofar as public transit vehicle operators don't have to pay tolls.

(Washington State contributed, until the pandemic and assuming Move Washington passes, $0.00 to Puget Sound transit agencies. The state legislature insists that transit is a local issue. The state kicked in some money to local agencies to help during the pandemic but the bulk of that money was supplied by the federal government as part of stimulus bills. If Move Washington passes, it will be the first time the state funds any transit operations west of the Cascades in over a decade.)

Great, now I've blown $50 on more pens. Thanks.

(tongue firmly in cheek :), though I did just finish the order.)

> When engineers are not allowed to use "alarmist language"

This has been a recurring theme throughout my career, the struggle between being seen as "alarmist" and accurately conveying urgency.

We get this in the medical field all of the time. "Outcomes delivered via mechanism seen as potentially contraindicated" or some other spaghetti. I've been in these meetings many times, where we (the individual contributors) have to tell the bosses or peers or partner group about something that might be bad. As in Y2K-style of bad, where it will be bad if we don't address it but if we do address it with the urgency needed, no one will be able to recognize the success for what it is.

As you said, no one's manager wants to be seen as crying wolf all of the time, but post-hoc there's the expectation that a couple of engineers way out at the end of the limb of the tree didn't just wait for the limb to be sawed off behind them, they took out the saw and did it themselves. That they stood up in the presentation and yelled "you're all idiots! This is going to kill the entire crew! Everyone will die, don't you see?! And I'm not standing for it!" just before they rip the badge off of their lanyard or belt hook and then righteously storm out.

That is very cool, I didn't know about that feature. I agree, that would be super neat. The closest Apple Music gets is you can set it up to automatically download to mobile any tracks added to library with the "+" button.

> Google Play Music was the only app to really nail it

For what it's worth, I have had good results with Apple Music. It works great as a "custom jukebox in the sky" for me.

I use iTunes installed from the Windows Store and just drag my own music files onto iTunes. It syncs them to Apple Music where the files stand right alongside the streamed tracks from the paid service. I can put them in playlists together, edit metadata for my own tracks or Apple Music ones, see (and add!) lyrics, and so on. They even have an Android mobile app.

According to this subthread, it's that the code is positively ancient: https://web.archive.org/web/20220225082909/http://ars.userfr...

"Like for the past 17+ years...

... I own the ISP hosting UF.

The biggest problem is supporting the legacy mod_perl stuff that the site is built on... you'd basically have to re-write the entire front end, or find a very bored perl monk to update the code base.

Basically to keep the ARS active, you'd need someone to take over the operations of the server & code. Maintaining it is a big deal.

Cost-wise, I could bring it down quite a bit if it was moved into a VPS (which we also offer), but again - it's a maintenance/care & feeding issue. This site is still running on Apache 1.3 here.

Someone would need to volunteer some senior technical skill for several weeks, and start... pretty much now."

Agreed. Dilbert was for if you worked in an office building doing pretty much anything. User Friendly was for a very specific niche of people who either worked at mid-sized ISPs (like MandieD wrote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30593421) or who supporter or empathized with people who worked at mid-sized ISPs.

"Thank you for calling Columbia Internet, this is Miranda."