To drive home how luxurious this was, 1981 was the start of a recession that lead to 10% unemployment, the highest since the end of World War II, and here are people buying a TV that would be $35,000 in today's money.
Readit Newsbpoyner commented on 1981 Sony Trinitron KV-3000R: The Most Luxurious Trinitron [video] youtube.com/watch?v=jHG_I... · Posted by u/ksec
I hope everyone is reading through and noticing this is for F, M and J visas, which are all education related visas. Not that I love that either, but it doesn't apply to every visitor.
Haven't these guys heard of the "reciprocity principle"?
When I went to Brazil a few years ago, the basic price for a tourist visa was like $25 and could be done online. But, if you were a US citizen, it cost $150 and you had to schedule an attend an interview in person -- because, those were the costs and burdens placed on Brazilian citizens to apply for a US visa.
Does the US want other countries inspecting our citizens' social media posts for the last five years?
ED: Fix spelling mistake
Bolivia also has a reciprocity visa charge of $160 for US citizens. Many years ago we were very close to the Bolivian border but the visa cost for a day trip just didn't make it worth it.
bpoyner commented on In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio newslttrs.com/yes-in-the-... · Posted by u/spzb
This is great and I believe it. But saying your game would be loaded "after a few minutes" might be true for a small game. I had the Commodore 1541 floppy drive while my friend had the Commodore Datasette. The speed difference between these were huge. The floppy drive was around 300 bytes per second while the tape drive was around 50 bytes per second (3KB/minute). We would literally go outside to play while waiting on the tape drive.
"IBM PS/1 486-DX2 66Mhz, "Mini-Tower", model 2168. It was the computer I always wanted as a teenager but could never afford"
Wow - by 1992 I was on my fourth homebuilt PC. The KCS computer shows in Marlborough MA were an amazing resource for tinkerers. Buy parts, build PC and use for a while, sell PC, buy more parts - repeat.
By the end of 1992 I was running a 486-DX3 100 with a ULSI 487 math coprocessor.
For a short period of time I arguably had the fastest PC - and maybe computer on campus. It outran several models of Pentium and didn't make math mistakes.
I justified the last build because I was simulating a gas/diesel thermal-electric co-generation plant in a 21 page Excel spreadsheet for my honors thesis. The recalculation times were killing me.
Degree was in environmental science. Career is all computers.
That definitely brought back memories. Around '92, being a poor college student I took out a loan from my credit union for about $2,000 to buy a 486 DX2-50. For you younger people, that's about $4,000+ in today's money for a pretty basic computer. I dual booted DOS and Linux on that bad boy.
A beautiful plane, shame those 6 engines in line is unreal to see.
Similar vibe would be the B1-lancer for engine although in 2s
The have a XB-70 at the Wright-Patterson USAF Museum in Dayton. I was blown away looking at the engines. Highly recommended museum if you're into aviation, it's huge so give yourself plenty of time.
bpoyner commented on Gold Is Worth More in New York bloomberg.com/opinion/art... · Posted by u/ioblomov
My favorite fact I learned just the other day is that gold held by the federal reserve is "on the books" at a value of $42.22 per troy ounce and would represent a sizable sum if valued at market rates. But since we'll never sell it I guess it doesn't matter much what we value it at.
Huh, interesting. They claim to have $11B of gold but at market rates it's closer to $450B.
bpoyner commented on Surnames from nicknames nobody has any more blog.plover.com/lang/etym... · Posted by u/JNRowe
Along these lines, 'Mc' and 'Mac' mean 'son of' in Scottish and Irish surnames.
bpoyner commented on Bluesky now has 30 million users bsky.app/profile/bsky.app... · Posted by u/belter
You mean the social network that keeps showing my wife dick pics even though she turned off adult content? That social network? Pass.
It will probably continue to send location information, vehicle speeds, and telemetry data back to Mazda even after you let the subscription lapse. We know GM and other car makers do this, so it's safest to assume they all do.
Unfortunately I'm pretty sure you're correct. This is just how things are now. You could probably break the antenna (whoopsie daisies).