So, does that mean, and bear with me here, that… air is blue?
Oxygen actually - liquid O2 is blue. So to me a 100mi deep mix of 20% O2 may as well be blue :)
Readit Newscallmeal commented on Why is the sky blue? explainers.blog/posts/why... · Posted by u/udit99
callmeal commented on Spotlighting the World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell cia.gov/stories/story/spo... · Posted by u/mxfh
I don't know that the Schlesinger memo was real but I think it's conclusions were perfect. The CIA needs to be split into two divisions. The research division and the operations division.
They should all just go home. They already won. Remember this quote?
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." - William J. Casey, CIA Director (1981)
No it wasn't. A hardware defect so disastrous that it affects floating point computation on the neural engine, yet so minor that it does not affect any of the software on the device utilizing that hardware is exceedingly improbable.
The conclusion, that it was not the fault of the developer was correct, but assuming anything other than a problem at some point in the software stack is unreasonable.
> The conclusion, that it was not the fault of the developer was correct, but assuming anything other than a problem at some point in the software stack is unreasonable.
Aah, the old "you're holding it wrong" defense.
I'm glad I stumbled across this: life circumstances have allowed me go abroad for a trip the past two years. One thing I had forgotten about since the last trip were some of my group being unable to get one of the cheap prepaid data eSIMs because their phone was still locked to the carrier. I've been tempted to replace my aging iPhone SE 2022 (^1) with a trade-in deal and get a new phone, but it never occurred to me that would mean being forced to use AT&T's $10/day (capped at $100 in one billing cycle) "International Day Pass" during future trips until it had been paid off for long enough.
(^1) I wish I wasn't so tempted after ~4 years, but the battery health has dropped to 75% and the performance has suffered dramatically. A new battery is on the table I suppose, but I am split between just putting that money towards a new phone.
>I wish I wasn't so tempted after ~4 years, but the battery health has dropped to 75% and the performance has suffered dramatically.
Won't help with performance, but I've found that keeping bluetooth and location turned off lets me use the phone for the whole day without needing a recharge. Only thing that eats battery is video calls.
It's not that it's technically impossible. The very simple problem is that there is no way of providing hard spend caps without giving you the opportunity to bring down your whole production environment when the cap is met. No cloud provides wants to give their customers that much rope to hang themselves with. You just know too many customers will do it wrong or will forget to update the cap or will not coordinate internally, and things will stop working and take forever to fix.
It's easier to waive cost overages than deal with any of that.
>The very simple problem is that there is no way of providing hard spend caps without giving you the opportunity to bring down your whole production environment when the cap is met.
And why is that a problem? And how different is that from "forgetting" to pay your bill and having your production environment brought down?
Not all things labeled "processed foods" are bad, it seems. There are enough scientists that say the distinction is often hypocritical (example from an article: a factory-made carrot cake is labeled UPF, but a home-baked one isn't, even though they're practically the same thing). Sugar, fats, and lack of fiber make factory-food unhealthy, they say. Others add that we can't feed the growing metropolitan areas without it.
>a factory-made carrot cake is labeled UPF, but a home-baked one isn't, even though they're practically the same thing).
Actually they are not. "Practically" is carrying a lot of weight there. The factory baked cake will have a lot more extraneous ingredients and usually has a larger quantity of sugar and fat. Similar to how restaurant food generally has a lot more salt and fat than home cooked food.
Here we have the "stupid" bit of my reference. No, the budget should not track population growth, because improved technology means that occasionally the cost to provide the same service to an individual decreases, whereupon the budget should also decrease. Or, for instance, a military threat or other transient event (eg COVID) that necessitated temporarily elevated funding levels expires, and the budget should decrease accordingly.
The converse being, of course, that sometimes transient events or large shifts (eg increase in costs of materials used to make some important good that the government procures) make things cost more, and so the budget should increase in proportion to those beyond population growth.
Improving technology has not increased housing stock or transportation options. Everyone still needs a place to stay and ways to get to/from work. Another issue is that using technology to reduce humans in the loop is what gets us "your call is important to us..." levels of customer support.
If the number of people who need to apply for id/license/passports keeps increasing, then the number of people servicing those requests also needs to increase (or we need to stop complaining about the dmv). No amount of technology is going to replace that need.
Yes, and here's some nuance: based on my experience, the majority of the people in the bureaucracy want it to be more efficient.
To effect cuts, you can either cut the budget without improving efficiency, leading to a loss of scope (which is what the current administration is doing, and is not great), or you can keep your scope while improving your efficiency such that you don't need as much money, which is vastly preferable.
Those in the general public who thinks that government budgets should increase monotonically are a linear combination between total idiots and outright politically malicious.
>government budgets should increase monotonically
Well, they should track population growth. You cannot effectively serve a larger population with the same resources, otherwise we would continue to have two lane freeways everywhere.
Yes, and here's some nuance: based on my experience, the majority of the people in the bureaucracy want it to be more efficient.
To effect cuts, you can either cut the budget without improving efficiency, leading to a loss of scope (which is what the current administration is doing, and is not great), or you can keep your scope while improving your efficiency such that you don't need as much money, which is vastly preferable.
Those in the general public who thinks that government budgets should increase monotonically are a linear combination between total idiots and outright politically malicious.
>To effect cuts, you can either cut the budget without improving efficiency, leading to a loss of scope (which is what the current administration is doing, and is not great)
Um, $11,000,000,000 for ICE is not a cut. $850 Billion for the department of war (an increase of $25 billion over last year) is not a cut.
But yes, CFPB's funding for 2025 which gets reduced from about $823 million to about $446 million is a cut. Which will be great for consumers because we can now start paying extra fees that will boost corporate profits.
callmeal commented on Preliminary report into Air India crash released bbc.co.uk/news/live/cx20p... · Posted by u/cjr
Each of the fuel switches on the 787 is equipped with a locking mechanism that is supposed to prevent accidental movement, experts said. To turn the fuel supply on, the switch must be pulled outward and then moved to a “RUN” position, where it is released and settles back into a locked position. To turn the fuel supply off, the switch must be pulled outward again, moved to the “CUTOFF” position and then released again.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/11/world/asia/air-india-cras...
Or they could be inadvertently flipped if the "locking" version was not installed:
(see the avherald link):
>>India's media report that the investigation is NOT focussing on a human action causing the fuel switches to appear in the CUTOFF position, but on a system failure. Service Bulletins by Boeing issued in year 2018 recommending to upgrade the fuel switches to locked versions to prevent inadvertent flip of the switches, as well as the FAA/GE issued Service Bulletin FAA-2021-0273-0013 Attachment 2 relating to loss of control issue (also see above) were NOT implemented by Air India.