Better unmanned than manned. They were advised of the risks with Challenger and killed the crew trying to prove they knew better than the engineers and technicians.
I think the author misses the point that often those poorer people who are victimized by criminals are then ignored or even endangered by the police response. Police budgets keep increasing and outcomes including percentage of solved crimes keep declining. A good portion of that money could be much better spent on eradicating poverty, treating drug addictions instead of incarcerating users, keeping people in schools, keeping parents in homes, and having mental health resources for people before they are beyond help.
Plus, good apples in the police force end up drummed out or worse. If you try and blow the whistle you might end up involuntarily committed and your buddies on the force will make challenge coins commemorating it.
The author is trying to declare this perspective as elitist rather than address it head on.
It's a pretty common political trick to reframe populist views as elitist and vice versa. It allows you to either promote or attack a "dangerous" idea/candidate without having to actually engage with it.
As for why people espouse them, I grew up in the stereotypical working class family of four. Two parents who weren't always happily married, one sister, and me in an 890 square foot 3 bed, two bath on a tiny lot. It was the largely Black and Hispanic part of a mostly white town with factories and tourist attractions. My dad never graduated college, and my sister did before my mom enrolled.
Let me tell you, the police never did a thing for me but harass me. I was sexually assaulted as a young boy, but of course nobody at the police department would take a child's word over a teenager's. I was stopped in front of my home one night by six cruisers, one officer with a shotgun out, because an off-duty officer saw me swerve within a lane to miss a couple of potholes half an hour earlier. My sister's book of checks were stolen out of our mailbox, and the police found out who did it. My sister was away at university and had her account frozen. She had to beg and borrow money until it all got fixed. But the police refused to release the identity of the thief for a civil suit because "the bank is the only victim". My car was damaged on the high school lot, but the police wouldn't even take a report because the school district should handle it. The school district refused to release the information for the other damaged car because "that would be a violation of a student's privacy". In another town in another state I had a motorcycle stolen. I raised hell with the police and DA's office. It was finally recovered, but they decided not to arrest or prosecute the thief because he returned it. He returned it with about $1200 worth of damage to a $900 street legal, licensed bike. When I went to the DA's office in person to complain, two ADAs had a conversation in front of the waiting room about "that guy with the motorcycle" who "probably let his dealer borrow it and was slow to get it back".
I had plenty of friends coerced into residential rehab for minor drug usage because it was a criminal offense. So rather than going on with their lives or getting some outpatient counseling, they lost their jobs and often their homes. I have a friend who lost a lucrative job with a huge multinational company because he had a breakdown related to his bipolar disorder while at work. He ended up couch surfing a while between jobs until he found another one.
So, yeah, call me elitist. I think money could be better spent actually helping people who need it than sneering at them and threatening them when they're already the victims.
> You could say that's the job of the software company - to slog through the mountain of feature requests disguised as specifications to arrive at a system that will actually solve the customer's real problem.
That's the role of a business analyst, product owner, customer liaison, sales engineer, or some similar role for sure. If you're running a large project without one of those as a dedicated full-time resource then it falls on the project manager. If the PM can't do that, they should delegate to some role like those, possibly a few of them for various vertical slices of the project.
Interesting concept, but a more modern, more secure set of tools at this level these days should be done in a language that makes secure coding easier than C. I get they want to easily offer a C-level API, but at least use something that machine-generates correct C.
I don't have the code handy, but I once was hanging out with a buddy in an OS/2 lab at uni and used copy con to write a reboot COM program. I meant it to be a soft reboot, but it ended up being a simulated hard boot.
There are DNS blocklists for mail servers. It's a slightly different thing, but basically there's if there's an entry it means there's a reputation for the mail sender. Some of them are present/not present and some have a score. Some are against the IP of the sender only, while others are against the domain name or full hostname of the sender. You just set your mail server to do the right lookup against the right DNS server, and incoming mail can be filtered based on the results of the DB someone else is maintaining.
The CPU/GPU/Memory SoC in a Mac is a line item, albeit a hefty line. The one in an iPhone is more so. They sell systems as their product, not retail box processors. It's thought an M1 cost them around $50 in a $2000 laptop.
Well, I think we're of two valid points of view on this one. You're saying Apple adds value to the CPU itself, which taken abstractly is true since they do have some advancements in the CPU and how they package it in the SoC. I'm saying that concretely they and their customers tend to consider it value added to the finished system, especially since you can't just go out and buy an M1Max or an M2 for your own system with a board from elsewhere. Lots of their design and engineering is in the SoC rather than the CPU proper, too, with how it's integrated with the GPU, the memory, and the storage controller.
So in the really broad statement that only companies that make just the CPU or CPU IP add value to it, I'd consider Apple more of an edge case than an outright exception. Of course Intel, Qualcomm, Samsung, NVidia, and AMD don't build and sell only CPUs either. They make, among them, storage, RAM, display panels, GPUs, chipsets, radio baseboards, TVs, whole computers, etc. I think the point is best worded that they sell the CPUs as a retail or OEM part rather than as part of a larger system of their own. That's debatable, too, but I'm not sure Apple is a perfect counterexample to the point as I described above.
> I wonder if it's because Apple captures so much margin from the final product which means they can afford to spend top dollar on CPU design teams?
That's an excellent question. If I could answer it completely and definitively I'd probably be making my living as an industry analyst for some magazine or investment fund. I have a suspicion that might be right, though.
Apple and Google today, and sometimes other companies, are starting to remind me of AT&T before the divestiture. They're such big, profitable players that they can have huge skunkworks attacking adjacent problems to their core business and keep doing so in new directions.
It's difficult to be productive when you're waiting on a shipment of parts, for one thing. We've been working for decades to make industries work with more advanced logistics and less stock on hand. Now there are supply chain issues, and you can't assemble and sell something if you don't have the parts whether it's a car, a computer, or a rose hip half skim gigante honey latte.
Real wages are up a bit, but revenues are way up despite the supply chain issues. People are being forced back into offices who don't need to be there. Maybe morale is low. I know of concrete instances of low morale, and I'm sure there are others.
People's life changing because of RTO requires attention.
People are often looking to move or to change jobs recently, which requires attention.
Millions of people have been ill with a respiratory/vascular virus which sometimes causes long term damage. More than a million in the US have died from it. Survivors often have pulmonary issues and long-term mental fog which may be permanent or take years to recover. They have less energy and stamina. It's harder for many of them to concentrate. Some of those who died were in the workforce, and whatever knowledge they had about their job died with them. Other deaths were people's family and friends. Funerals, cleaning out houses, donating their belongings, and the grief itself aren't exactly good for worker productivity but they are things humans need to do.
Lots of micromanagers exist. For people who haven't returned to office with no open floor plan to walk around, many of them use a messaging app like Slack to micromanage. Water cooler conversation is in Slack channels. Meetings are in Slack, Teams, or Zoom or something else, and everyone's supposed to be engaged rather than working on their laptop until it's their turn to speak. There are often more officially designated meetings because people can't drop by one another's offices. Lots of work is concentration-based work, or "flow" work. Constant interruptions are bad for anyway, but when it takes 20 or 30 minutes to get all the context in your head to solve a problem and a three-minute interruption to lose all of that, more interruptions can be catastrophic for productivity.
Some types of business have minimum staffing requirements. You can cut staff and try to "right size", but you need enough staff to keep the place open if that's your goal. If orders are down enough, your staff will sometimes have less to do. If because of the shortages mentioned before your ability to fill orders is down, the same thing applies. You have a choice of eating some less profitable quarters until the supply chain levels out or just closing shop. You can't lay off 100% of your trained staff and count on rehiring them later.
