Back in the early 2000s I was programming on an IBM AIX server. Multicore, maybe multiprocessor and within the same machine, the clocks were skewed between the processors. If you’d dispatch a process, and then check its outstanding running time, it would differ depending upon which processor you’d check from, and of course it was a signed type, and then we would get negative values, which sent our code down the wrong path.
Once the US has air superiority, they don’t need their aircraft carriers anywhere close to Venezuela territory. The submarine fleet alone can enforce a blockade.
Point is, a blockade in and of itself is an act of war, and will get the corresponding response. You cannot hope to just starve them out. You can go full ham if you'd like, but that will also get a corresponding response. If you just want "a bit" of war, then you need to leave them an out.
All moot now, as anyone could have predicted, but it was fun to think about.
I’m still waiting until I see little X Æ A-Xii playing in the street while Tesla Robotaxis deliver passengers before I buy these arguments. Until then, my children are playing in the street while these autonomous vehicles threaten their safety. I’m upset that this is forced upon the public by the government.
My son was just scammed out of $1000 using some gift card scam. Typically these gift cards cannot be revoked once issued and anyone using the gift cards (like the people who scammed my son) would be able to reap the rewards without any consequences. I’m hopeful that Apple has found a way to track fraudulent Apple Gift cards and are now locking people’s Apple ID who use them. I suspect there’s more to the story than is being shared. What’s the provenance of the original gift card? Could it have been obtained through some not 100% above board means?
From other comments explaining the kind of scams running at the moment, one possible scenario is that the card may have been taken, tampered with by a scammer (and the code recorded), and then placed back in the supermarket, with the scammer waiting until the OP purchased it and it was activated at the checkout.
Perhaps between the scammer redeeming it and the poster then trying to redeem by entering the same code, the scammer’s account was flagged and then the OP’s account terminated along with the scammer for using the same code (even though the OP had done nothing wrong).
Did the original poster claim that he bought it from Woolworths, or did someone else buy it? I question if the poster obtained the gift card from some path where the original purchaser may have been scammed.
This, along with RAID-1, is probably sufficient to catch the majority of errors. But realize that these are just probabilities - if the failure can happen on the first drive, it can also happen on the second. A merkle tree is commonly used to also protect against these scenarios.
Notice that using something like RAID-5 can result in data corruption migrating throughout the stripe when using certain write algorithms
The paranoid would also follow the write with a read command, setting the SCSI FUA (forced unit access) bit, requiring the disk to read from the physical media, and confirming the data is really written to that rotating rust. Trying to do similar in SATA or with NVMe drives might be more complicated, or maybe impossible. That’s the method to ensure your data is actually written to viable media and can be subsequently read.
I’ve seen disks do off track writes, dropped writes due to write channel failures, and dropped writes due to the media having been literally scrubbed off the platter previously. You need LBA seeded CRC to catch these failures along with a number of other checks. I get excited when people write about this in the industry. They’re extremely interesting failure modes that I’ve been lucky enough to have been exposed to, at volume, for a large fraction of my career.
I remember reading an article about British workers during WW2 who were willing to work any number of hours to beat the Nazis. Initially their productivity spiked as they worked more hours. Eventually it crashed, and they did a study to identify the most productive number of hours. 35.
I remember another article from a Harvard business review where they studied the number of hours worked which was correlated with the highest promotion rate in business. 45.
So, if you’re riveting airplanes, or other manual work, 35 hours per week seem to be maximal. For office work, 45 hours per week at least gets you the best results from the business noticing your effort. I shoot for 45 hours a week on average, but sometimes go as high as 80, when sprinting, and as low as 25, when trying to recover from those sprints. Seems to have worked well for my career and work/life balance.
I’m concerned with anyone proposing “Medicare for all” in America, because they all state - for doctors who want to stay out of the system, they can be paid directly… that immediately causes a slightly different 2 tier system. Right now our 2 tier system is the 90% with health insurance and the 10% without health insurance. In the new Medicare for all, it will be the 99.9% on government insurance, and the 0.1% - the ultra wealthy - who dominate tax policy and are heavily financially incentivized to reduce their tax contributions to the public system. They will influence politicians to spend less on healthcare, with no impact to their health outcomes. The only system which will work in the US is one in which the ultra wealthy have an incentive to provide funding to the public system, and that seems like you’d need to force them to be on the public system too.
> The only system which will work in the US is one in which the ultra wealthy have an incentive to provide funding to the public system, and that seems like you’d need to force them to be on the public system too.
In my state, I pay $15k/year in school taxes, yet I have no children. I pay $1000/year in property taxes to support my city's library, yet I don't have a library card. People are taxed for lots of things they don't actually benefit from. I don't think we would need to force rich people to use the plans. If they want to buy medical services from private doctors, sure we can let them.
The issue then becomes more about allocation of resources (how many doctors are available to be seen on the public system vs. only available to self-pay customers) rather than the issue being about how to collect taxes.
This may be small potatoes, but I've heard it said that people like you benefit "by not living in a state full of dumbasses." There's definitely an indirect benefit from these payments.
> (I personally don't mind subsidizing my library + local school district... good schools and libraries are good for the community)
Just sharing random coffee break thoughts... it always blows my mind is how many people _don't_ think like this. When base conditions improve for society, the conditions improve for _everyone_ regardless if they directly benefit you.
I'm also in the boat where I don't have kids, but I'd also like to live in a place that has educated people - so schools make perfect sense to me. Heck, even if I didn't benefit from it, providing children education is just the gosh-darn right thing to do.
It's just lack of trust. It's not that people want a worse community, it's that they have a hard time believing that taking extra money from their paycheck will create a better community.
Part of it is real; seeing massive amounts of state/local government waste and corruption makes it feel safer to keep your extra dollars instead of giving them away.
Part of it is difficulty evaluating timelines; more tax dollars for a better elementary school to be built in 3 years and to yield higher educated people 18 years from now it a lot to bet on.
IMO it's because there's both benefit and waste/corruption in these kinds of social benefit structures. some people choose to only see one or the other:
"these benefit everyone including those who don't use them directly! how could you be against it?"
"this money that I'm having to pay is either overpaid to corrupt vendors, or just straight wasted, why would we ever want to increase how much we're paying into this system?"
in reality you can't have one without the other. it's up to each person to decide whether they can take the bad with the good
Yes, universal health will start saving money even during the first transition year. We spend almost 1/3 or more of those total health dollars on billing administration. That amount surpasses the uninsured number. And the reality is if we can get medical care during the daytime, eventually emergency rooms might get less hectic. My hope is that more days than not ER personell have to pass the time like at a Firehouse.
Be careful what you wish for. Having health insurance doesn't equate to having access to care. Especially in the mental health space, fewer and fewer providers will even accept new patients on government-sponsored health plans due to low rates.
That would require that the more tax money the school system gets the smarter the students will be. Every time I see a bill for increasing school taxes their justification is not for improving education quality, but for some other pet project they want to do.
Every western country that has a single payer system as far as I know allows for private clinics, doctors and labs.
I spent 18 years in Canada. The healthcare I got was as good as anything I received in America (in both cases it depends on where you live, unfortunately) and looking ahead to 2026 was cheaper (comparing my tax burden in Ontario to the terrible insurance I can afford for 2026 in America).
Healthcare quality and access varies widely between Canadian provinces. It's common for affluent Canadians to come to the USA as medical tourists and pay out of pocket for elective procedures like MRI scans or joint replacement surgeries due to excessive waiting times at home. There are advantages to the Canadian system but some clear downsides as well.
You're never going to make a system that prevents the ultra-wealthy from augmenting it with private services. You might, however, reduce the power of the ultra-wealthy.
This is precisely what allows for the NHS to be cannibalized. They underfunded one of the best systems of healthcare and replaced it with private care for ultra wealthy while reducing quality of care for vast majority of people.
Private care has been available in Britain throughout the history of the NHS and is available to people far below the 'ultra wealthy' strata. Don't ruin a valid point with hyperbole.
> is the 90% with health insurance and the 10% without health insurance
it's even more complicated, because you can have insurance fully accepted at one clinic and "not contracted" with a different clinic. it's a total mess.
The wealthy benefit from military spending as it keeps their resources secure. The ultra wealthy are also business owners who benefit from increased commerce made possible from the highways. They don’t benefit from paying for my father’s cancer treatment.
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