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The cost of intercepting a drone can be orders of magnitude higher than the cost of sending the drone. The cost of letting the drone get through can be even higher. If I send one drone that cost me $200, and you have to defend against it at $2,000 or $20,000 worth of munitions, and the target it would destroy is $200k or $20mm, then I win no matter what happens. This works at any scale. Iranian Shaheds are probably around $20k to $50k. They are being defended by patriots which cost ~$2mm-$5mm, and being aimed at US targets that cost $100mm. In this scenario, getting shot down is a win, and not getting shot down is a win.

With humans the math is reversed, being the defender is an advantage. Defenses can be setup pre-emptively and cheaply. Taking out a swarm of 20 Shahed drones is difficult and takes several missile batteries. Taking out a swarm of 20 infantrymen attacking a dug in position is light work for a matching force.

Remind me again why Iran and North Korea have beef with the US?

There's no historical reason for it like fomenting revolution, waging a war of choice that killed a double digit percentage of the population, extrajudicial assassinations, or any other shenanigans like that, right? The US hasn't been actively waging economic war against these countries for the better part of a century have they? These countries just have it in for the US, and no choices were made that led to that?

Ok.

What is the best alternative to that choice? You can’t answer since you aren’t the one in that position.

Frequently it is the least bad among a bunch of choices.

Choosing to go into crippling debt to pay cancer treatment bills is a choice too, but only a moron thinks the blame should be laid at the feet of the patient for making that “choice”.

Are they throw away?

These are programmable devices given to programmers. The rate of these being thrown out or underutilized is so much lower than so much of human activity.

On the scale of hosting a hackathon, a few kgs of badges likely rates below the trash generated for just the take out food in terms of impact.

Maybe we can recognize that this is so minor of an issue that we don’t need to start here, or even really look too deep at this. Let’s fight these problems on a scale where it really matters.

You’ve never been in a cockpit while a plane has been flying have you?

That makes sense for Germany, but the US does not have universally good roads or reasonably trained drivers. Many states have no regular vehicle safety inspection. On top of all that, culturally, the US is just very different when it comes to respecting regulation. I have seen germans completely befuddled when they realize that Americans will intentionally ignore laws and regulations. To many Germans it seems like it is almost inconceivable that otherwise respectable people will just not follow rules sometimes.

Some of us don't live in countries where this is acceptable.

Most cars have glued joints and body panels these days.

The issue isn't glue, its that parts are falling off.

At these pressures, it doesn't matter to the human body what is in the tank if it is at all compressible. If the tank fails, its gonna go badly.

Just for reference this is 50% more pressure than the pressure that crushed that submarine at the titanic.

A rocket engine doesn't require combustion, it just requires expelling a gas to produce thrust, and that the engine not be air breathing. Most rocket engines use combustion to produce the high speed gases, but there are plenty that don't (water rockets, steam rockets, plasma rockets, and... cold gas thrusters as demonstrated by Tesla)

It’s standard measure of acceleration. If you are going to sell a car on performance (like say… a sporty roadster), it’s a great metric.

People in the market for a car like this care far more about performance than they do safety, repairability or longevity.

That’s why performance oriented cars talk about their acceleration, and minivans talk about safety, and pickup trucks talk about longevity. Their target market determines which of the various metrics are going to be the headline.

From a 6 foot above ground level of eye, an object only needs to be 17 ft tall to disappear below the horizon at 8 miles.

Amazing the math you remember from a celestial nav course more than a decade ago.

Seconding openscad (havent tried freecad to be fair) with opus 5.5

I had it design a model sailboat hull, and it fucking nailed it. It even designed it for printability. I’m genuinely really impressed.

It sounds like you haven’t spoken to actual doctors and this is all observations from outside.

All the doctors I know of are constantly learning, even outside of their legally mandated continuing education. I don’t know any that aren’t curious about new drugs and treatments.

It sounds like maybe this is just bad communication. The writer of the article was talking about something they had seemingly read in popular media about regrowing teeth. It is not yet possible to regrow teeth in any sort of meaningful way. The doctor will almost certainly have known that. Even if they don’t know anything about it, you can’t regrow teeth so what is there to learn?

If someone came to you and said: “I heard that AI can build a $1billion business with no human intervention”, you might similarly roll your eyes and keep going about your day rather than try to explain why that brushes with reality, but isn’t.

The disappearance of fireflies is not related to lighting. That’s a global phenomena involving the mass collapse of insect populations.

I trust that you mean it doesn’t have the same effectiveness as other AC units you’ve used.

From a pedantic point of view, it is quite literally the exact same as an AC. Air conditioners are literally heat pumps.

Once I fully grokked how the Toyota hybrid transmission worked it kind of blew my mind.

It’s so simple, but so adaptable, and far simpler than any other transmission I’ve seen in a car.

Can you clarify if this was meant as a personal attack on me, or a complete inability to read?

The claim that "[real estate] is a liability, not an investment" was not made by me. I am refuting it.

I’m a programmer and tend to be relatively distant from the compliance and IT side of things.

That said, can someone who is in that side of things explain why having an archive of surveillance from employee’s home wouldn’t be a liability nightmare. The way a good company treats PII makes me think that anyone with brains would say “I don’t even want access to that data, and it probably should not be saved”. The chances of a leak or a camera capturing something that should not be on my server is high enough, and completely unnecessary to running the business, that I would not want anything to do with it. It takes one naked toddler and a CSAM filter to absolutely destroy a company. Let’s not even touch the idea of employees maliciously accessing webcams, and/or out of hours webcam access. Yikes. I’d rather have a person doing nothing sometimes than have any of that shit on my servers.

If companies got less efficient with size, sole proprietorship would be the most efficient way to become a billionaire. There's more gong on here.

Scale makes inefficiency more obvious, but that does not make it a bigger portion of the total output of a large institution.

There's an entire category of investments called REITs that invest exclusively in real estate. There's a subcategory of REITs that invest in residential real estate that verifiably hold trillions worth of residential housing. There are also PE firms that specialize in residential real estate holding an unknown amount of assets.

Besides all that, owning rental properties and investment properties for individuals is incredibly popular.

Are you really trying to claim that it is a myth that people buy houses for investment purposes? I can't continue a conversation with someone so incredibly out of touch with reality.

Don’t be a jerk. Especially if you don’t understand the comment. If all you have is a sarcastic comment it’s better to keep that for yourself. If you have something of substance to add to a conversation that you are jumping into, we would love to hear it.

The point is that things haven’t changed in a lot of ways. Traditional media chases popularity and views by tracking metrics just like digital. GP was arguing that this was a new phenomenon. Nonsense, traditional media has always had content that chases trends based on view analytics.

And yet, they are massively successful measuring by content consumption and profitability. Those outsized resources come from actual money their videos make.

Would you rather be an investor in a “professional” production like Madame Web which was very well produced by well known people and studios and lost a high 8 figure amount, or invested in a YouTube channel that appears to be 20 something friends “bumbling their way to content production” that reliably rakes in millions.

It may look bumbling and disorganized, but they are consistently producing the most viewed content on YouTube and making millions.

Traditional tv lives and dies by Nielsen ratings which are a proxy for views. Hollywood lives and dies by box office take, with token nods to awards. Music has charts. Books have bestseller lists.

Anyone in any of these media industries will happily tell you that what gets made next is heavily dependent on what is being consumed now. If you want to sell books, you’re going to do a lot better writing sports romances for 30 somethings or romance fantasy aimed at slightly above young adult. There’s a lot of that coming out and it’s based on the success of Heated Rivalry, ACOTAR and Fourth Wing.

Don’t ask them.

Look at actual metrics. People are notoriously awful at doing complex analysis of things like level of service across multiple domains across a long time frame while personal life transitions happen.

I also think that most people have no idea what they are getting for their money. Exclusive of policing (the huge majority of city budgets), cities are actually extraordinarily good at keeping things running in my experience. Most people have no appreciation for what it takes to keep the sewers flowing, roads paved and the traffic lights on. Anyone who has ever lived somewhere where road maintenance or garbage is privately handled will tell you how much cheaper and easier it is to have that handled by government.

I should be more clear that people are not at all logical about this. They want ever more services and to pay less taxes (themselves).

Crucially, many people do not see that as an incongruous thought.

I have replaced my septic. Repaired a roof. Dealt with flooding. I own a home. I have plenty of experience with homeownership. I recognize that maintenance exists and have never said otherwise. You have made assumptions about me to load up an ad hominem attack against a straw man argument. Nothing I said was angry at homeowners. Just pointing out that making 500k on a home isn’t the result of savvy financial moves exclusively, and more a foreseeable outcome of government policy at all levels.

I’m not saying that homeownership is a slam dunk. If you go back and reread, what I’m pushing back on is that the mere act of purchasing and holding a house counts as doing something worthy of a return.

My point is that homeownership, in the US especially, is so heavily favored as an investment vehicle that you perhaps should not act as if you inherently deserve the gains for having “done something”.

As you say: it’s a liability, not an investment (although, I would say it’s entirely possible to be both, and trillions of dollars of smart money agrees)). But it is a liability that has limited downside because of government policy. Because of this, it actually makes a pretty good investment as well. We would do well to recognize where those gains come from (artificially low mortgage rates, and often artificially high scarcity).

And arguably, they already extracted the value of that house by having a place to live without having paid for it up front. They didn’t even put up the capital in most cases. In the US they will have been granted a loan that is backstopped, and therefore subsidized by the government. Don’t forget the mortgage interest deduction, that’s a massive homeowner subsidy.

So someone else put up the capital, the government made that capital cheap, and societal demand with artificial scarcity (in most places) pushed up the asset value.

I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but let’s not pretend that making capital gains on a house in the US is anything like any other available investment.

The private finance industry need not be involved.

Just have government allow taxes to be deferred until time of sale with interest pinned to the cost of borrowing for government. That already exists where I live for people over the age of 65. The government can still get the revenue for free via borrowing and the payback is more or less guaranteed.

People, as a rule, do not want less service. Services generally function like a ratchet, where once one has been added it is incredibly difficult to get rid of.

So not only is the cost of service to be thought of, but the quantity of services.

The same happens within services too. The police got a helicopter 5 years ago, are they going to turn down another one, or are they going to explain why the new one needs to be more expensive with more capability? Multiply that across every agency.