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  • The Cirrus CAPS system works as low as 400 ft if the plane is still in level flight, but if it's not got forward motion -- say, in a spin or stall scenario -- it needs more altitude to fully inflate. I'd guess that in this case, if they'd had a BRS system it probably would have had time to work, if only just, but they'd have needed to deploy it pretty early on in their emergency.

  • Cirrus aircraft are expensive even by the stratospheric standards of general aviation, which leads to a "no seatbelts, we die like real men" attitude from your average GA pilot with a 60-year-old Cessna that flies backwards in a stiff breeze.

    That said, the RV-10 is a (relatively) inexpensive kit plane, and one that has a couple parachute systems available for it. In the case of a kit plane, I think it's not unreasonable to say that adding the parachute system is a good idea... the incident rate with such aircraft is much higher than with other general aviation aircraft, and the cost of adding the chute isn't eye-popping compared to the other costs involved.

  • Tom's Hardware was on the lowest tier of tech journalism even in its heyday. You never relied on their benchmarks if there was a better source, and their news was WCCFTech-grade rumor mongering most of the time. The real travesty is that it's the last one standing out of all the early-2000s hardware review sites, when sites like TechReport (who pioneered things like frame time analysis and power supply load bank testing, and did some of the first test-to-failure analysis of SSDs back when nobody was sure how reliable they actually were) are dead or (worse) zombie husks being used for linkspam SEO.

  • Immediately, and in a vacuum? No, and you're right to fear that it will get worse before it might get better. But the wealthy and powerful have constructed a society that insulates them from consequences for committing vast amounts of (banal, legally-sanctioned) violence against the broader public. Mangione's actions, and more importantly the public response to them, are a demonstration that there can still be consequences for that kind of predatory behavior, even if it's state-sanctioned and protected, and at the end of the day consequences lead to changes in behavior.

  • I respect your point of view, but I personally have long been of the opinion that one's human rights are contingent on one's humanity, which is a quality that one can degrade and destroy through acts of inhumanity. Societies have a right and need to defend themselves from amoral predators that do not respect the social contract, and in cases where that society has become so corrupt and sclerotic as to have de-facto predator and prey classes, vigilantism may even become justified. (To be clear I don't think it's good that it came to this, or that further escalation won't start to have terrible collateral damage, but there is a certain inevitability to it.)

    I did some SWAGging as to how many deaths could be reasonably attributable to UHC's policy of excessive denials, and based on the studies I was able to find about mortality rates and delay of care, I conservatively arrived at a number of ~4,600 per year. Since Brian Thompson became CEO of UHC, that adds up to 17,000+ premature deaths. In another context he would have been standing trial in front a war crimes tribunal, but because our criminal justice system doesn't have a mechanism to handle homicides where the murder weapon is a contract dispute, he was on his way to tell shareholders about quarterly profits -- profits earned from the immiseration and death of thousands --when he was shot.

    I won't say that Brian Thompson deserved to die, but I will say this: Nobody calls it murder when an antelope gores the lion.

  • A quick scroll of your comment history suggests you are happy to make an exception for CEOs.

    Not saying I necessarily disagree, but only pointing out that the axiomatic statement you're making here isn't a universal truth, and might not even be true for you. I personally think that the death penalty should be reserved exclusively for people in positions of power who abuse that power -- call it a Sword of Damocles exception -- but an exception that still is.

  • Breaking: Gaetz no longer in consideration for Trump White House role. Trump says on Truth Social, "those are rookie numbers! You gotta more bigly those numbers!"

  • Maybe he has an Internet or social media presence with persuasive and/or humanizing postings, and they want to deny him the PR bump he'd get from them becoming public.

  • The season is longer, but conversely the cars have never been more reliable. Back in the era of engines tuned to last for one race, mechanical DNFs were much more common.

  • Keep in mind that when 10nm was in planning, EUV light sources looked very exotic relative to current tech, and even though we can see in hindsight that the tech works it is still expensive to operate -- TSMC's wafer costs increased 2x-3x for EUV nodes. If I was running Intel and my engineers told me that they thought they could extend the runway for DUV lithography for a node or two without sacrificing performance or yields, I'd take that bet in a heartbeat. Continuing to commit resources to 10nm DUV for years after it didn't pan out and competitors moved on to smaller nodes just reeks of sunk-cost fallacy, though.

  • Intel's problems, IMO, have not been an issue of strategy but of engineering. Trying to do 10nm without EUV was a forgivable error, but refusing to change course when the node failed over and over and over to generate acceptable yield was not, and that willful ceding of process leadership has put them in a hole relative to their competition, and arguably lost them a lucrative sole-source relationship with Apple.

    If Intel wants to chart a course that lets them meaningfully outcompete AMD (and everyone else fighting for capacity at TSMC) they need to get their process technology back on track. 18A looks good according to rumors, but it only takes one short-sighted bean counter of a CEO to spin off fabs in favor of outsourcing to TSMC, and once that's out of house it's gone forever. Intel had an engineer-CEO in Gelsinger; they desperately need another, but my fear is that the board will choose to "go another direction" and pick some Welchian MBA ghoul who'll progressively gut the enterprise to show quarterly gains.

  • Nah, fuck no. Sure, he'd been self-radicalizing for a while but Musk declared his change of allegiance literally hours after the story broke about him propositioning a SpaceX employee to join the Mile High club with him in exchange for a horse. He saw the #metoo train coming for him and decided to throw in with the guys who see that shit as a badge of honor, simple as.

  • This feels like complaints over asset flips bleeding over into first-party asset reuse, because the people complaining don't understand why the former is objectionable. It's not that seeing existing art get repurposed is inherently bad (especially environmental art... nobody needs to be remaking every rock and bush for every game) but asset flips tend to be low effort, lightly-reskinned game templates with no original content. Gamers just started taking the term at face value and assumed the use of asset packs was the problem, rather than just a symptom of a complete lack of effort or care on the developers' part

  • My employer is in the process of decommissioning all their on-premises storage and shifting all data into the many-headed hydra that is OneDrive/SharePoint/Teams/Azure. It's going... not great. Automatic file locking for non-Office applications doesn't exist in the context of SharePoint and people are losing hours of work when two people had the same file open all day without knowing. Projects that had large, complicated folder structures have whole swathes of files that cannot be edited because of path length restrictions rearing their ugly head ("C:\Users\Username\OneDrive\VerboseHumanReadableProjectNameAndNumber ends up being quite a bit longer than P:\ProjectNumber, whodathunkit?!). Nobody's sure of they should be syncing or linking their project directories locally. Some options for file management appear in SharePoint views of shared folders, but not Teams.

    As a tool for portable user profiles or casual filesharing or syncing, it's fine, though I'd prefer if MS didn't force it into Windows and Office apps by default. As the core of a complex international business operation? Fuck this I hate it desperately, and I cannot imagine any way in which it's going to save the business money over keeping storage in house.

  • Science: knowledge workers stop being consistently productive past 40 hours per week, and probably less than that

    Rentier-capitalists hot boxing their own farts recreationally: ackshually the problem is we let you dirty fucking peasants go home to sleep at all

  • I've got two big sycamores in my front yard, and they both are currently dropping leaves the size of dinner plates in enough quantity to completely cover large portions of the yard. If I don't rake or mulch them, they will smother whatever ground cover that's underneath them. I know this because I tried leaving them one year and it took the next three years to get all the mud pits left behind in the spring to fill back in.

  • GenZ is the generation raised by helicopter parents, whose late-Boomer-to-early-GenX parents went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that they never faced any challenges. Of course they'd have some odd ideas about how the world ought to work, after spending their entire childhood and early adulthood with Mom and Dad working strenuously to shield them from personal struggles, emotional distress, and the consequences of their actions. What remains to be seen is how those attitudes shift as the rubber hits the road and their parents lose the ability to protect them from the increasingly dire state of the world. I suspect it'll be an even three-way split between blithe entitlement, despair and withdrawal, and an impulse to step up and do something about it.

  • Sorry. Not casting aspersions on you, just despairing at the situation.

  • Working on it, but for the overwhelming majority of people emigrating is a hell of a lot harder than just showing up in another country and saying "my place sucks, can I come in?"