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This made me think that I can’t be the only one who so desperately wants a sandbox game akin to Sim Earth where you manipulate plate tectonics among other Earthly things.

They do. The amount of magic involved to make it work is amazing from an engineering perspective.

Yup.

I hopped back on Facebook in 2012, and it quickly became the nexus of my online life. I started to get wrapped into how I maintained my presence, the kinds of witty things that would make it as posts, the banners and profile pics, and I was always hoping to see a double digit number in the red notification bubble. It all peaked in early 2017 where I was wrapped up in some political ideological battle and I just said "fuck it" and left. Deleted it and didn't think about it.

There were a couple hours at first where I thought I was losing a connection to the world and my friends, but that cold feeling vanished a day later. I felt like I had gotten time back, I felt free.

For all of that, I still putt around on Twitter but that scratches a different itch and I never seem to be consumed by it.

I might be alone in this sentiment, but is anyone else out there with a history working with Boeing or in the industry feel slightly irritated with the armchair hot takes seen in the comments sections?

I live in a building with a quite a few nurses that work at that hospital. It kind of scares me that one of them open mouth coughed in the elevator with me the other night. Probably nothing more than a tired nurse and a dry throat, but still kind of weird to read about a thing that is a block away from where you live.

I just left a company that used an in-house cloud object storage product for their cloud DVR service. It was an amazing piece of tech that was hamstrung by some of the most irritating "features" of Cassandra. We spent more time cleaning up than anything else. I am looking forward to seeing how people use this at scale.

This was one of those things that always ruined time travel movies for me. If I went back in time a few hours, would I be floating in the upper atmosphere? Go back few years, am I just floating in space? Does this mean that I can only really travel back to the previous galactic rotation and hope to Sagan that the galaxy both doesn't drift and the both the Sun and our arm of the galaxy are both in the same place?

I used to be in the anti sticker camp, but then someone nearly walked off with my identical MacBook Pro at Newark. After that, I've gone through three laptops and each one ends up caked in stickers from various customers and conferences. I don't have to risk someone picking up my MacBook unless they have the same arrangement IP video tech and Seattle sports stickers.

I fucking love whiteboards.

So much so that I had my office desk partially covered in a whiteboard sheet[1] and used that with fine tip dry erase pens in lieu of of and paper. The collaboration that took place was off the charts.

[1] amazon.com/dp/B00NC1D5YM

So a blimp?

The Charleston build out just felt rushed. From the IT perspective, it felt that everything was half assed, where the thought they could just stamp Everett in South Carolina. I have memories of managers flying back to Renton to just get mundane things for the South Carolina flight line when they probably should have been installed during construction.

When I left in 2010, it became somewhat of an internal joke that you were never fired from Boeing, just sent to Charleston.

From the tone of the article and what I would expect to see from some of the comments here eventually, you would think that Seattle united in fighting its corporate fascist oppressors by taxing it fairly to cover the problems the capitalist class creates and in response, Amazon is moving far and away from the scene of the crime; both straw structured arguments are patently false.

There has always been a vocal minority in Seattle that has bemoaned any kind of growth and change in the city, and the recent cause that they latched on was all of disruptions Amazon was claimed to be at fault for, or how the "tech bros" ruined the city. These were probably the same people who hated that the Microsoft of a decade or two prior washed the city over with a tech scene, they probably complained that Boeing made noisy jets for the military industrial complex and those "av bros" were destroying neighborhoods with hundred and hundreds of months of established character. This is a west coast city that I have lived most of my life in and around, it has always been changing and growing, and I along with my wife, friends, and family, love it for the opportunities and ever evolving landscape.

Then there is the argument that Amazon is taking its toys and going to play ball elsewhere, used as proof that somehow Amazon wasn't going to work with the city to begin with. Amazon is probably at the top of the current curve of growth, and some of their recent announcements in jobs and locations show somewhat of a diminished drive to expand. Additionally, to pick up and leave, or to leave the region all together is pretty expensive and disruptive to operations. Bellevue is right across the lake. It offers a city government that wants to grow as fast as possible and as dense as possible, and willing to work with anyone. The recent announcement that the local transit authority was on schedule with the light rail expansion in Bellevue lines up with Amazon and a few other companies looking to expand in the city. Bellevue is looking to be a great place to be "in Seattle" without having to be in Seattle.

This. The problem wasn’t too much austerity, it was that the pendulum seemed to always swing to extremes. Banking policy was always painted as a binary choice of excessive welfare financing or heartless spending cuts.

I always liked the idea of a two tier Euro, like 1:3, and I feel like that could have helped Southern Europe and nudged their fiscal policies closer inline with the ECB.

They also could have just pulled the bandaid off of Greece in 08, booted them from the union, took a loss on the debt, threw aid, and laid it out as an example for Spain and Italy to get their shit in order.

In an alternate world where the New Territories had their lease renewed, they probably would remained semi autonomous and any kind of full on independence would agitate China. I don't think they would have sought to isolate other nations over recognizing HK as PRC territory as the UK wields a bit of weight, but you probably would have seen some measures put forth that would have at least required private entities operating in China to treat HK as an extension of Chinese territory, much like what goes on today with Taiwan.

They still do, and a quite a bit of English

I guess I'll be honest here as I spent way too long trying to come up with a response as your comment rattled a part of me, the part that gets a touch emotional when walking across the square where the shadow of the Goddess of Democracy once graced. Where those same stones were later soaked in the blood of men and women who only sought to voice their displeasure in the actions of their leaders.

I saw the umbrella movement as an early action to show that there will be resistance from those who do not feel that ruling party has their interest at heart. When those who lead and championed this movement were removed from the territories and sent to the mainland to be punished, it signaled that PRC was not going to change its tactics and resistance to gilded tyranny would have to charge on.

Now I have heard the arguments that you have parroted here, but this is the first time where I have someone effectively call my desire for my close friends to maintain their Democracy as a form of white supremacy. I'm sure you'll tell me that June 4th was just an uneventful day in that square and it was the West that unjustly agitated the student population.

Went from two 27” thunderbolt displays that were side by side, to two Dell 38” stacked on top of each other. With the bottom monitor closer to the desk and the chair a bit higher, my eyes are at the top center of the bottom monitor and I’ve noticed my head doesn’t go back and fourth and my eyes can cover the vertical space pretty easily.

Looking forward to some high dpi 38” monitors over the next few years.

It might be a bit dark and somewhat controversial to think about in light of mental health and what not, but maybe there is a point where civilized entities advance past a need of a survival instinct and just decide to turn off the lights?

When you have satiated your thirst for existence, whats next?

I had been hoping to some degree that this and Oumuamua were stronger pieces of hard to answer bits that said maybe, just maybe, these could not be easily explained away as "not from other intelligence". I guess I am just left with long, weirdly spinning, rock thing.

I let them know about this way back when, email went into a void.

Pretty sure this puts a strain on the relationship between Costco and Apple on some level. It’s also just a dick thing to do.

Yeah, more like “great”, but with a sarcastic tone to it.

I had an email about an iPod Nano. More than happy to talk to Apple about it, but when I emailed them in 2010 about the scheme my friend was running, I never heard anything back.

You have to be a business in the state of Washington and sign an agreement with Costco. It isn't a thing they open with anyone and when I inquired about doing this on my own, even with a license, I was turned away at the door by security.

Pretty sure it is a shady arm of Costco.

Costco would sell a couple dozen to several hundred iPod Classics, Nanos, and Touches, all in varied condition, as a "lot". At best you could buy these based off of a grade, which just judged their physical condition, but most of the time you were always buying these a couple dozen at a time, sight unseen.

Apple warranty fraud is a great way to make money. I know of a guy who between 2008 and 2010 would purchase used iPod lots from Costco Electronic Hardware Services, refurbish the water damage indicator in the headphone jack and dock, and then try to return the iPod to one of the few Apple stores in the Seattle area. The refurbishing method would consist of cutting tiny strips of white wax paper, applying a little adhesive, and then sliding the paper flush down the hole. When Apple caught onto this guys method, he would later take the whole headphone assembly apart by using a pen knife to lift the plastic around the headphones, pulling the jack out, and using whiteout to cover the other end.

I went to the Apple store with this guy and felt ashamed just being around him as he dropped off a dozen water damaged iPod Nanos, each with an appointment, telling the guy that they were from guys in Iraq, as if that were to add some emotional weight to getting new ones.

Nearly a decade later I found out the guy was running the same scam with the iPhone SE by using reassembled water damaged phones or dummy phones from China. I am guessing he didn't get caught because the scale of his operation were a few at a time, maybe a couple hundred in a year, but not thousands over a year.

Now that I think about it, I had let him use my Apple account for appointments and claims, and ever since then, I have always had a bad time working with the genius bar over things that I bring in.

I was diagnosed as a teenager and prescribed Zoloft. I hated the medication because intrusive thoughts would spiral from “what if I jumped infront of this car” to “what if I locked the doors of this grocery store and set it ablaze”. So I stopped taking it and got fat.

As for high intensity, I’m sure that my use of the term isn’t correct, but I do something that raises my heart to 165+ for 30 seconds, keep my heart at 130, do something to spike it after 5 minutes and repeat until tired. I’ve been able to recently accomplish this reliably on an elliptical at the highest resistance level and maintain activity for 60 to 90 minutes.

After longer sessions I feel pretty good and sometimes a bit euphoric.

Personal experience is that high intensity exercise mixed with a comforting ritual was what broke me out of a couple bouts of severe depression. When the streak was broken by an event or travel, and several days missing out on exercise followed, I would fall back into the depressive mood.

The most recent depressive bout was probably the most extreme I've gone through, and required a couple close friends to jump in, but again, routine exercise with comfortable bits of a routine mixed in - like making a cup of tea, making sure I have a podcast queued up, a book to read, and a handful of songs I like - has seemed to help pull me from the brink.

Now that I have eclipsed thirty years and I still am over 300 lbs, and some of the recent depression-like feelings, I am making a more of a cognisant action to keep working at this and to journal how I feel before, during, and after the routine.

I look forward to seeing this kind of work being taken a little more seriously as a means to treat depression as opposed to only medication and therapy.

It was all for free.