pjscott

7 ms·

31.
by pjscott 2y ago
Do you have actual knowledge of their motives? Or is this speculation, confidently stated as fact? Another possible motive, mentioned in the the paragraph you quote, is that the oil companies see an energy transition coming and are trying t
32.
by pjscott 2y ago
Why would parents send their children to those schools? Never mind who owns them; I would expect the kind of hypothetical schools you’re describing to go bankrupt quickly. Private equity is not in the business of losing money in predictable
33.
by pjscott 2y ago
Do you have a source for the claim about Peter Thiel? I looked for one, and all I could find were several cases of Thiel donating to explicitly pro-gay-marriage political organizations.
34.
by pjscott 2y ago
Grading scales vary. 65% could correspond to any letter grade.
35.
by pjscott 2y ago
The obvious patch for this is to have monetary penalties for failing inspection written into the contract, so that submitting shoddy work has a price measured in dollars. Money is the unit of caring, at least at a corporate scale, so there
36.
by pjscott 2y ago
Those de-orbit in just a few years because of how exceptionally low they fly. SpaceX’s business plan is to just be so efficient at launching things to orbit that it doesn’t matter if they lose a huge number of satellites each year to plan
37.
by pjscott 2y ago
Maybe it's just a Greece thing. I notice that other EU countries are doing a lot better than them economically; not sure why Greece in particular seems to be struggling.
38.
by pjscott 2y ago
I’m less worried about that with SpaceX than I am about most companies, because Elon has shown a willingness to just fire a large percentage of a company’s employees with the massive Twitter layoffs.
39.
by pjscott 2y ago
Yes, thank you for pointing this out – but they do tend to report the facts correctly.
40.
by pjscott 3y ago
Objective C is a system for that; Objective C++ is at least three systems for dispatching calls in ways that don't involve linear search. Not sure why they'd try to make another one.
41.
by pjscott 3y ago
I'm not the OP, but I'm pretty sure there's a simple, uncontroversial answer here. They were an excellent idea at the time, allowing much more pipelining with the microarchitecture design techniques in use back then. In the t
42.
by pjscott 3y ago
The US, and the allies to which it exports F-35s, are overwhelmingly a net force for peace in the world. There’s a reason why the phrase “Pax Americana” is so well-known. You can think of these as war machines, since they’re literally machi
43.
by pjscott 3y ago
The Department of Defense (DoD) is, amusingly, Just Like That (JLT).
44.
by pjscott 3y ago
This is why they don't launch over areas where people are living, and why rocket launches are occasionally scrubbed due to the presence of a wayward boat. They're actually being careful here.
45.
by pjscott 3y ago
I remember when people were saying that about the Falcon 9, which now handles a majority of the world’s space launches. SpaceX has some good, proven engineers; belittling their work because they’re using an aggressive testing schedule (invo
46.
by pjscott 3y ago
The article claims that the US has over 100,000 shipyard workers, while Japan has about 70,000 and yet produces 20x more tonnage. This suggests that there's a lot more to it than just US deindustrialization.
47.
by pjscott 3y ago
Not an incoming monopoly, except maybe in a temporary sense for some remote areas. Ground-based internet continues to exist, and is getting better. OneWeb has over 600 satellites in orbit right now, with paying customers. Amazon's Kuip
48.
by pjscott 3y ago
Typically caning and/or time wearing a cangue, with death sentences or penal servitude for very serious cases.
49.
by pjscott 3y ago
I don’t know if there’s a formal method, but there is a method – given an English word, I can almost always figure out how to say it as an English-to-Japanese loanword. Somehow. I think it’s just something that comes naturally once you un
50.
by pjscott 3y ago
Although it's true, that's a hazardous way of thinking. If they had put more of their focus on making steel, keeping up with the technological advances rather than being dragged along grudgingly, perhaps they'd be making more
51.
by pjscott 3y ago
How in-house does it need to be? The actual physical facilities aren't being shut down; they're just under new ownership and management. And Nippon Steel is located in Japan, which is such a dependable ally of the US that I'm
52.
by pjscott 3y ago
I can confirm that one big reason why Apple went with reference counting in Swift is because they like it when garbage is freed right away. This lets them get away with smaller heaps than they'd need to get comparable performance with
53.
by pjscott 3y ago
That's what mandatory liability insurance is for: it takes the occasional risk of a huge liability payout and turns it into a regular line-item on the monthly budget. One that can be bigger or smaller depending on what the insurer&#x27
54.
by pjscott 3y ago
> This is unworkable. You can't penalize a company because their employees did not follow the safety guidelines they promised they would or are legally obliged to follow. One of life's more specific amusements is describing a s
55.
by pjscott 3y ago
One standard remedy for situations like this is to mandate that, if an employee gets silicosis for any reason , their employer must pay them some large sum of money. Regardless of whose fault it was. If cutting corners saves money, then co
56.
by pjscott 3y ago
Oh, I'm sure those sophisticated store chains, with extensive inventory tracking, have never thought about things like "inventory shrinkage" or "looting" and they're just putting a bunch of locks around for no
57.
by pjscott 3y ago
It’s not a great way of disposing of trash, if you don’t want to inhale nasty fumes, but it has a long and widespread history.
58.
by pjscott 3y ago
I’ll give the straightforward, zero-irony reply: hooray! We have a huge amount of exploitable natural resources that we didn’t know about until recently. This is good.
59.
by pjscott 3y ago
ObjC can be plenty fast, if you know what you're doing. And there really isn't that much to learn; it's just that most people don't learn and so they keep running into landmines. I'll cover the main points right
60.
by pjscott 3y ago
There are other dormitories on campus. One size doesn't fit all, but you've got to work on the margin.

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