What's the story with the Avro C102 (per law 20)? What's the connection with "A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately"? I'm intrigued.
Two references come to mind – the first is that the Avro C102 was beat by the de Havilland Comet, which was an example of a bad design with a good presentation. It had a series of mysterious hull losses that were eventually attributed metal fatigue accumulating around a square cut-out in the hull.
The second, more depressingly, is that the Avro C102 was cancelled to redirect resources to the Avro Arrow: Canada's mythical last jet fighter, of which only a handful were produced before the program was (painfully) cancelled, and Avro wound up. IIRC, the Canadian government was the main-to-sole bankroller of the project, and ballistic missiles became increasingly more important.
I'll argue that Comet was a good design, but with too many unknowns being solved at once - while we had limited experience with pressurization the comet took more cycles, and had a much higher service ceiling.
I dont think the Comet was a materially worse design than the Avro C102 (both aircraft are similar) and the C102 may very well have had other unknown issues only to be found if it went into series production.
This is an area that could really use good research, but this study looks badly designed and completely dismissible. I hope it’s true that video game playing has some mental health benefits, and I wouldn’t be surprised. You’re not going to determine whether it does by asking a bunch of people how they feel about Mario and Yoshi.
A vibecoded (but programmer-supervised and not sloppy) retirement savings forecaster similar to what you see financial advisors using, but you're in control. Could be useful? Feedback please.
No. This perspective is wrong in both directions: (1) it is bad medicine and, (2) the medicine doesn't treat the disease. If we could successfully ban bad ideas (assuming that "we" could agree on what they are) then perhaps we should. If the damage incurred by the banning of ideas were sufficiently small, perhaps we should. But both of these are false. Banning does not work. And it brings harm. Note that the keepers of "correct speech" doing the banning today (eg in Biden's day) can quickly become the ones being banned another day (eg Trump's). It's true that drowning the truth through volume is a severe problem, especially in a populace that doesn't care to seek out truth, to find needles in haystacks. But again, banning doesn't resolve this problem. The real solution is develop a populace that cares about, seeks out, and with some skill identifies the truth. That may not be an achievable solution, and in the best case it's not going to happen quickly. But it is the only solution. All of the supply-based solutions (controlling speech itself, rather than training good listeners) run afoul of this same problem, that you cannot really limit the supply, and to the extent you can, so can your opponents.
What do you think about measures that stop short of banning? Like down ranking, demonetizing, or even hell 'banning' that just isolates cohorts that consistently violate rules?
Not OP, but my opinion is that if a platform wants to do so, then I have zero issues with that, unless they hold a vast majority of market share for a certain medium and have no major competition.
No. You are objectively wrong. It's great medicine that works -- for example, in Germany, and in the US, and elsewhere, it has stemmed the flow of violent extremism historically to stop the KKK and the Nazis. You can't even become a citizen if you have been a Nazi. Even on the small scale, like reddit, banning /r/fatpeoplehate was originally subject to much handwringing and weeping by the so-called free speech absolutists, but guess what -- it all went away, and the edgelords and bullies went back to 4chan to sulk, resulting in the bullshit not being normalized and made part of polite society.
If you want to live in a society where absolutely anything goes at all times, then could I recommend Somalia?
You may have given up too early. For me the key part of this story is that she made a personal connection willing to guide her through and to overlook technicalities (like not having enough experience). The fact that she then reached a different person who was a jerk is a matter of chance. I’d you find a way to keep making these personal connections, she’ll get a job eventually. Also: it sounds like you’re very supportive and invested: good on you. She’s not alone.
This is very well said. It's horrifying, but very well said and very true. Sometimes the situation is just plain bleak. I have been unemployed for more than a year twice; I've been unemployed or underemployed for about 5 years in total. This despite accomplishing great things while employed and being well-regarded at past jobs. For me, each time the cloud has eventually passed and new work has come along, but that doesn't help until it actually happens.
@phoenixhaber, you're in a very dark place, no doubt about it, and it sounds like you've been there a long time. I've been in that dark place and I feel for you. Let me just assure you that dark times do give way, eventually, to light. If you need a rational basis for that claim, think of it as regression toward the mean: extremes, good or bad, move toward the non-extreme. Things will get better.
In the meantime, your task is to separate from the darkness and let it be on the outside, not the inside. It's bad enough when it's on the outside: that is, in the world around you or even in your own body. When it's on the inside—not just the body but the mind—then it destroys. Push the darkness out of the mind and into the outside world. That's pretty abstract advice but it's the best I know, and if it makes sense to you, I hope it helps.
I'd love to see the evidence for or against this assertion. If BLS is grossly inaccurate, that'd be a good thing to know. If it's accurate, also good to know. Evidence?
He's not the final word on the matter, but Nate Silver writes...
> I've worked a lot with data produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other federal agencies. In fact, an economic index based on a half-dozen of these statistics is part of our presidential election forecast, so we’ve pulled this data all the way back to World War II.3
> And I consider it to be of very high quality. When BLS data is revised as more information becomes available, it’s meticulously documented and explained. For more on how this works, including just how difficult the BLS’s job is and how it’s being made harder by declining survey response rates and cuts to federal agencies that track economic activity, I’d strongly recommend this edition of the Odd Lots podcast with Bill Beach, the former BLS commissioner under Trump 1.0 and Biden. It might not be the most riveting interview, but one thing that comes through is just how much of a straight-shooter he is.
We can start with this reading. Average monthly job growth dropped from 147,000 initially to just over 70,000 a reduction of approximately 52% from their data. This at precisely when the Fed needed to start cuts when the administration has been aggressively hammering them. Hopefully the Fed is not too late this time, and their 6+ month delay cutting won't result in a recession or serious economic impact.
I expect they're correctly hesitant to cut rates at the same time as the president pursues inflationary policies, since that'd be courting stagflation, which was so bad last time it happened that it was one of the main factors that defined our politics for the following three decades.
You model about what the Fed does and how rates affect the economy is just wrong. The fed raising or lowering rates won't change what's happening with jobs. You have to explain why when the fed raised rates, the market shot up and unemployment dropped. But you can't with the model you have.
The fed was cutting rates and on track to continue until Trump threw a tariff grenade into the economy. They, like most businesses, decided they needed to see how the idiotic economic policy played out before doing anything else.
I know that folks are just having fun with this, but it embodies one of the things I dislike about D&D, one of the reasons I simply ignore most of the “rules.” At heart a role playing game happens in the imagination of the players. You can play RPGs entirely in those terms, with no real rules and very few numbers, just storytelling and imagination. On the other hand there are of course many tabletop games that do rely on structure, rules, and numbers, but these tend to limit the scope of what may happen in the game by virtue of having limited elements and rules. You cannot earn a trillion coins in Powergrid, there simply isn’t the time or resources. What is so strange about D&D is that it tries somehow to join these two models of gameplay: the subjective/imaginative and the objective/numeric. When it works, it’s fine (though, as I said, I personally tend to find the imaginative, storytelling part for more compelling than the objective, more tabletop-like part). This railgun embodies some sort of weird distortion in the whole affair. No: of course peasants cannot throw a pole however many thousands feet in a matter of seconds. If the rules somehow imply they can, the rules are dumb. Even if you accept the rules, use your imagination: what will happen to peasant hands and heads with an object passing that rapidly along them? What would happen to peasant skin if it tried to pull a pole with the kind of forces we’re talking about? I truly don’t understand how D&D players think. No disrespect: I’m not saying anyone is dumb. I’m saying that I can’t picture how I would be thinking about a game, or rules, or a line of peasants, such that I would consider for a moment the idea that they might propel a pole in railgun fashion. It’s… kinda funny… kinda. But the fact anyone pursues the joke more than two seconds, much less actually attempts this play with real DMs, is unfathomable to me. I don’t understand how you would be trying to merge the domain of rules with the domain of imagination in order to get yourself into this knot. Does that makes sense at all?
Like you, I'm very much in the role playing is story telling camp. I think the difference is people who, like you and I, want to play in the world, and people who want to play with the world. I.e. they are playing a meta game where they play with the rules to "win". This makes no sense to me, because there is no winning when you play in the world. It's the story you tell that is the point. But I can understand their POV because I do play to win in other domains.
Every table and group has it's own ideal version of the game and you can play either in D&D. I think a lot of people fall into the play to win because it's simpler and fits the mould of most games people are used to playing so it makes more sense to apply that pattern to role playing games.
To me, I see pushing rules boundaries as part and parcel with exploring fantastical worlds. Elves, dwarves, and dragons exist. Those aren't "real". Magic spells that allow you to fly and shoot fire from your finger-tips also exist but also aren't "real". If we're already breaking biology and meta-physics, why assume basic physics works exactly the same way either?
For some, I think it is re-capturing the child-like attitude of wonder, excitement, adventure, and asking the question "what if?". This, of course, may be tempered by campaign tone; something that might happen in a DnD campaign but likely not in Call of Cthulu, Kids on Bikes, Monster of the Week, etc
I wake up every morning and thank God I am not working on or near Microsoft code. There is nothing about this code or anything about this story that is in any way sensible or pleasing. Take a simple, well-solved problem. Forgot all prior solutions. Solve it badly, with bad systems and bad ideas. Write the code in the ugliest, most opaque, most brittle and fragile manner imaginable. Now sit back and enjoy the satisfaction of getting to debug and resolve problems that never should have happened in the first place. The miracle is that Microsoft, built as it is to such a degree on this kind of trashy thinking and trashy source, still makes its annual billions. That right there is the power of incumbents.
