As someone who half-learned to drive in Manila, the idea that they would use Filipino drivers as backups is ironic.

For context, my "driver's test" was going to the back of the office, and driving some old car backwards and forwards a few meters.

Sort of, but the difference here is that it's really "blame the person who created the process, not the person following it". The people with the authority to alter faulty processes don't want to change it, even if it's clearly bad, because then they become "the person who created the process".

This is just the modern version of the parable of the talents.

Electric motorized bicycles exist, they're just called motorcycles or mopeds. The whole point of an e-bike is the limiter, and size restrictions.

> the first Germany defeat

Assuming you're talking about stategic defeats, I'm pretty sure the Battle of Britain was earlier. Possibbly North Africa too, but that's more debatable.

Standards are great, in theory, but a standards group can easily be co-opted by throwing enough people and money at it. That's basically what happened with DRM.

> a standards group can easily be co-opted by throwing enough people and money at it.

The word 'easily' does a lot of work there. How easy? Many standards work well. The Internet, an incredibly successful engineering project, is built on standards.

But the popular tooling for it (e.g. Visual Studio), isn't.

Visual Studio Code is available for Linux and MacOS. As is Rider.

Isn't this what the NSA is for? Also, I think we have plenty of reason to believe they regularly try to penetrate powerful companies, they just don't necessarily tell us when they do.

I've never heard anything about the NSA telling a company they have a security vulnerability. Have you?

Not the NSA, but I know of at least one time the FBI did: https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/01/chinese-malware-rem...

That was probably because the NSA and other critical government agencies use Microsoft Exchange and it was a bug found in the wild.

But if it wasn't a bug found in the wild, can you imagine the fights between the NSA red and blue teams on whether to alert Microsoft about it?

Probably not a lot at all tbf

I don't have citations on hand, but it's commonly held that NSA fixed the S-boxes in IBM's "Lucifer" cipher design for DES to improve its resistance to (then publicly-unknown) differential cryptanalysis.

Of course they also crippled the key length to 56 bits...

They absolutely have bugs up their sleeve, but if they tell the companies to allow them to fix them then they can't use the bugs for spying (or at least, not as effectively)

Yeah, but I'm pretty sure that's not what's happening here. What jccalhoun is describing is actually a reduction in the cost of living. The younger people from the city are moving from the city because the town is cheaper. They didn't move before the aparments were built because the detached homes in the suburb were too expensive.

What's happening is two things 1) that people in detached homes in the middle of town the who aren't willing to live in apartments are seeing costs go up (because their land is more valuable) and 2) more people from the town are working it the city.

Of these two thing, I'd say that #2 is generally bad, but also orthogonal to building apartments. It just happens to be that they often happen together.