hylaride

US timezones also get messed with. This isn't a Canadian problem (in fact, many Canadian jurisdictions have laws on the books to automatically get rid of the switchover when enough US jurisdictions in the same timezone do it). The only truly unique Canadian time zone is Newfoundland, which is in it's own timezone that's off by half an hour as anybody growing up watching Canadian TV knows (X show at 8PM, or 8:30 in Newfoundland...).

I remember the shitshow in the mid 2000s when the Bush administration moved the time change cutover dates by 2 weeks as an attempt to deal with high energy prices (it didn't do much as lighting was by then a small percentage of electricity use and this was before LEDs). All sorts of machines needed updating, from ancient mainframes to clocks and watches, many of which couldn't. We Canadians also did it for longer term practical reasons.

Top private (and public) universities added relatively few undergraduate seats since 1980, while applications multiplied, helped by the Common App and students applying to many more schools. Admission rates at the most selective schools dropped from roughly 15–30% in 1980 to 3–6% today. Flagship public universities grew somewhat more but have also become far more selective (especially in California).

There has been a decline in total student population since ~2010 when the echo-boom millennials mostly finished school, but that has been impacting the "lower quality" or smaller schools more.

I think what we're seeing with most people complaining about college value is a red herring. IMO, the crux of the issue is that higher education hasn't expanded availability with population growth (made even worse by expanding foreign student enrolment) combined with a general push from everybody to get more and more people into college.

There's also the fact that if everybody has a degree, it ceases to be a differentiator. Over the years, the best and worst colleagues I've ever had have had degrees (or more) from very prestigious schools even. Some of them just couldn't move on from academic thinking, because that's what they pushed themselves for their whole lives.

The spectrum and various other rights are probably worth more than the current kit.

Maintenance and expansion are two different things. Governments of the day tend to favour big announcements for shiny new things, while simultaneously deferring maintenance whenever they can to redirect money to various other priorities.

I was in Spain a year ago and it felt like the high speed trains weren't running as smoothly as they were when I was last there a decade earlier. At the time I chalked it up to false memories and not to judge based on vibes, but I guess my spidey senses were accurate. It also felt like a contradiction as there was a decent amount of expansion construction that I saw.

Alas, maintenance isn't sexy for governments.

> I personally don't think thats necessarily a bad thing, it's just evolution of the technology business.

I think this is how best to sum it up. We (tech workers) had agency back in the day as we were on the vanguard of something new and there were no best practices in how to manage us. These companies were run by and for tech workers. Today, you'd have all sorts of "stakeholders" telling us what to do. Product managers, various management and/or work tracking styles (agile, KPIs, etc), and top-down oversight.

At my previous job, I was literally dressed down for doing work on the side to resolve some technical debt that was hindering other work because it wasn't properly pointed. Didn't matter that I did it on my own time - showing initiative beyond the current story board was a no-no. How is one supposed to be happy in such an environment?

It depends. In Ontario (or at least Toronto where I live), the fire department and ambulance services are separate. The paramedics are chronically underfunded and the result is that the fire department is constantly running up milage on multiple expensive and massive fire trucks for routine calls that should just have been a paramedic. This also compounds traffic issues when they park at their destination.

It makes sense for them to automatically show up for some situations (eg car accidents), but there should be a properly funded triage system.

Same goes for the police, which are often called for situations where there should be some other social workers available (again, there are exceptions where police should also be present in those situations).

Goldeneye for me. My friends and I spent HOURS every Friday night into dawn playing that, shit-talking each other. The licence to kill setting (where one hit no matter what killed you) with no-Oddjob slap fights. I often nostalgically wish I was young and immature again thinking about it.

Robert Moses (ab)used eminent domain. If somebody buys a piece of land and can't build on it, that's not the same problem. Most rules now in place encourage far lower and less walkable development. Even a massive chunk of Manhattan has height restrictions that are lower than what's currently built and grandfathered in.

A lot of this is because during the Cold War, the Soviets couldn't keep up. While quantity as a quality of it's own, so does overwhelming the enemy with a technological edge. The fact that the coalition so totally and overwhelmingly destroyed Iraq's air defences (that had relatively state of the art soviet kit and was very densely deployed) in Gulf War is case in point. There are reports that came out after the USSR's collapse about how horrified the Soviets were about how successful the stealth, jamming, and targeting of the air defences were (among other lop-sided technical advantages).

This is now shifting as the Chinese can technologically keep up and asymmetric warfare means smaller nation states can overwhelm with "just good enough" to make the economic calculations different.

I think the issue is that centralization is more economical due to scale, but that assumes all else (geopolitics or other black swan events) don't impact things.

We saw a similar thing with supply chains and chip suppliers.

In many ways the financial system is a distributed monolith. COBOL is still around because of bugs and issues (sometimes in code, sometimes in the OS it ran on, sometimes in the computer hardware) that have been around for decades are often dealt with downstream with their own exceptions. This is why IBM still sells mainframes. They literally emulate software and hardware bugs from equipment as far back as the 1960s.

I spoke with a semi-retired COBOL programer about a decade ago. They literally often can't fix specific bugs because multiple other consumers (from banks, hedge funds, insurance companies, the central bank) outside of their organization (and subsequent downstream consumers as well) would all need to adjust their code. Rewriting it is grand, but won't fix the spaghetti code mess. This is made even worse in the US, which has a much more fragmented banking system. "Modern" COBOL isn't even that bad, but they can't even use it most of the time. There is SO MUCH that isn't even documented - and if it is, is in a binder that's been shelved decades ago and half of this developers time was going into the corporate archives to dig it up.

This isn't to say that a lot of legacy code can't be modernized, but it's not always that easy.

> The trade-off between quality and speed of development has always been a tenet of software engineering. Agentic coding changes the equation a lot, but the equation is still there.

The quality and speed tradeoff doesn't matter if other incentives aren't aligned. In today's product-driven world, where usage stats are compiled in real-time, features are added and then pop-ups, nudges, etc are added to software to get product usage up. These features may or may not add quality, relevance, etc. But the "success" is measured in usage, forced or not. This is essentially Microsoft today (especially with copilot), but even after every major apple OS update, I get "what's new" pop ups for every Apple app (notes, reminders, mail, etc) on every platform (iPad/iPhone/Mac) that I own. I opened the email app to check my email, don't get in my way!

> Unfortunately activists have done a fantastic job turning gay into a broad political issue encompassing a lot of ideologies that many people find off-putting

This is true of almost everything nowadays. I recoil at almost anything religious for similar reasons, even though I know not everybody that goes to church is a militant anti-abortionist christian nationalist. Nonetheless I will watch `The 10 Commandments` as it's still a very good example of the golden age of Hollywood epics.

>A bigger argument though is that if they've had all these amazing successes why have they never told anyone? Why are all, or at least a lot, of their failures over the decades public but none of their successes?

Because it could expose people, secrets, or methods that are still relevant. The vast majority of former spies are still bound by various legislation about not exposing what they did - most of them have to have their books signed off by their former employers. It's why you should take everything a former spook says (especially people like John Kiriakou) with large grain of salt.

In extreme cases, it can also involve quasi-legal methods or cause diplomatic scandals. "All or a lot" of their failures aren't necessarily public, but only the ones that unravel in a way that gets leaked or exposed to the general public. I can guarantee you that the fuckups of every intelligence agency we've been exposed to is only the tip of the iceberg; even where there is exposure, we very rarely have the full story. Even for WW2 intelligence stuff, we're still getting drips of what "really" happened in many cases.

I'm not saying the French are perfect, but French intelligence can be solid - their dossiers on Iraq WMDs were accurate and they (rightly) concluded that Saddam's opaqueness was to give Iran pause on any thoughts of attack. The myopia is more an issue with politicization, which I would argue is a real and persistent problem with French intelligence - and yes, they had a huge gap with Russia.

Politicization of intelligence is toxic anywhere it's applied. The US/UK fell victim to it in the 2003 Iraq invasion run up, and core to that politicization was politicians selectively bypassing intelligence analysts and grabbing raw collected data - which contains all manner of bad stuff from people just trying to get money, etc.

A counter example is back in the Iraq run-up, an American diplomat wanted to themselves present the Iraq WMD "evidence" to a senior Canadian official, and the Canadian official curtly responded "no, send it via our intelligence channels and our analysts will compile a report" - which the diplomat knew that via the five eyes alliance, they'd very quickly and correctly realize that the evidence was weak. I'm not saying that Canadians brilliant and invincible to politicization, but the incentives at the time for the Canadians were to "do it properly".

Israel is a special case, and it is not a fair comparison (even against the CIA) as a country constantly threatened and attacked . Even they fell victim to warning failures (if recent allegations are even half true) of the Oct 7th attacks when politicians wanted to focus more on Hezbollah over Gaza and ignored other warnings (including literal videos of Hamas training attacks on tanks and wall breaches that Israeli border guards recorded).

Also, and I cannot stress this enough, a good chunk of intelligence credited to the US/CIA is correlated and collected via the five eyes alliance. There is no intelligence alliance like it in the world and it gives a far greater picture than the US alone could.

> Name one EU country's intelligence service that has a reputation, any reputation - good or bad. European intelligence services (ex-Russia/Ukraine) are a bunch of jokers. They are lagging behind so much vs their adversarial peers.

MI5/MI6 (unless you literally mean the European Union). They benefit from Five Eyes, though.

The French system is considered quite good, but focused on the Middle East and Africa. It's actually quite capable, considering how independent minded they are, often refusing cooperation with others. Though their intelligence quality can vary outside those core areas.

The Dutch are quite highly regarded and punch above their weight. The AIVD got inside the Russian Gozy Bear hacking group and the MIVD also caught the GRU trying to hack the OPCW in The Hague - even exposing their taxi receipts.

The Nordic states are known to have capable services that operate quietly, especially focused on Russia. The Finns especially.

The Baltic states also take it seriously, obviously focused on Russia.

TL;DR there are many capable intelligence agencies working in the EU, but they're usually much smaller and focused. Also - they usually prefer to NOT be in the limelight.

As a geopolitical nerd, I've consumed a lot of non-fiction espionage content. In general, there's a general theme that German intelligence is a joke at best. He must have gotten too greedy or very lazy/sloppy.

My mom worked at Nortel in the 1990s at their Ottawa R&D campus. As a teenager visiting, I asked about corporate espionage, hoping for a story about Cisco or something. Every one of her co-workers just belted out "China" at the same time. It was apparently an open secret that the Chinese were hoovering up IP and management didn't care. It's a bit of a shame as Nortel's telecom kit was considered top-notch (especially the cellular stuff), but it gave the Chinese an enormous amount of help catching up.

That being said, the Chinese then went off and innovated off of it and Nortel imploded, mostly due to other poor management reasons. My mom was at least smart enough to cash out most of her equity as she got them, though. Lotta people lost everything.

I can give Monet a pass as he probably didn't fully understand WHY it happened and it was just art, but the way tech companies exploit our brains (algorithmic dopamine hits, LLMs, etc) is pure insidiousness. The fact they act like victims when the backlashes come is what really grinds me.

Exactly! The recommended way to use GitHub actions is to use their deploy hash as the version to prevent hijackings. It was never the intention (nor would this have been envisioned when git was created), but security needs to be applied to the way tech is used.

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me".

American re-elected him, despite the cronyism, jan 6, mental decline, etc. Combined with the democrats are so self defeating and they also repeatedly poked at trade issues (the loooooong running softwood lumber disputes, Keystone XL, "buy American" provisions that ignored NAFTA/USMCA for projects that were going ahead w/o the provisions, etc).

We know what populism is (we've experienced and are experiencing it ourselves) and know that it is usually fleeting, but we don't trust another "smarter" nativist president to come along and screw us again.

Also, there's an internal game going on here. Canada has (institutionally) took the "easy" way out of controversial projects, often due to our proximity to the US. This has meant that when some projects run into a greater than normal amount of political resistance (eg environmental fights against pipelines or LNG terminals), the default has usually been to back off. But Trump has in a way given cover to actually move forward.

I don't expect the next president to "cave" so easily. Even before he was sworn in, republicans had their messaging in full swing against Obama about the deficit. I fully expect the same thing to hammer the next president on trade if they're a democrat.

Like most things militarily Russian, the S-400 over-promises and under-delivers, but that doesn't mean it's not potent. It's probably incapable of hitting most ballistic missiles in real world conditions, but a plan flying in a straight line would be a lot easier, ignoring any stealth capabilities.

Same story at my bank. Tellers used to speed run through a TUI, hitting tab and other key combos to accomplish things. Now it's a long wait with them mousing around.

I live in Canada (Toronto) and choose to live and raise my family downtown. We bought a multi-bedroom condo in a slightly older building (better layout and larger size than more modern buildings). My child walks to school and we socialize with the parents during dropoff, is constantly meeting the neighbourhood kids in the public parks, and my commute is a 15 minute walk. We are also within walking distance to all the amenities the city has to offer (aquarium/museums, shops, etc). I sometimes think we live in Sesame Street w/o the muppets; my 8 year old runs the cash register for me at several stores we shop at because the owners know us so well.

Any "savings" I would have moving to the suburbs would be cancelled out by the thousands in commuting costs (I'd have to buy, maintain and insure a car, which I only now use car sharing and the occasional old school rental). All being equal, a larger home would be nice, but then I'd be in a position where I go out less.

I'm not saying urban life is for everybody, but you make it sound like a choice between dystopia and utopia (it was awful during the height of COVID, though). The fact that the American cities that are closest to the urban ideal are so expensive does signal that people would like to live like that, but for very various reasons (ranging from zoning to historical gov't mortgage insurance only applying to houses) has not been expanded much elsewhere.

There is no way it's 3% if they're getting electricity from the grid, even if they get their cooling from somewhere else (eg lake/river water or outside air in winter). Median DCs are anywhere from 25-40% (depending on the jurisdiction's electricity costs and how much cooling they need). Hypercaler datacenters tend to be even more dense than the median traditional ones.

Precisely. France built out its current nuclear fleet over decades. The first reactors were expensive, but then costs came down. Of course, then they stopped and are now trying to restart again with new reactor models. It's been expensive and it's not clear they'll start building en-mass again.

Most satellite signals are high frequency, but low power (it's amazing how little power you need for a LoS radio signal). So generally they're easy to overwhelm, especially as GPS receiving antennas tend to be multi-directional. GPS transmits on several fixed frequencies and is relatively bitrate, too. The military signals are apparently more robust, but full details are more scarce.

Yeah, royalty payments average ~60-70% for services where we can cleanly see the breakdown, and much higher for certain artists that can command it. Assuming the overhead for Apple and Spotify is 10% (big assumption), the margins are 20%, which is small for most SaaS. However, I assume both mostly use it as a loss (well, less-profit) leader as part of wider bundles.