1323portloo
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2 years ago
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on: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row
I didn't say that top talent doesn't live in Mississippi, I just said you will get what candidates DO decide to live in Mississippi. If you want top talent, you have to advertise nationally, and be willing to pay the national rate. I live in a city that is quite poor for an employer that is quite large. They pay slightly better than average for the area except for their engineers and upper management, that goes to market rate because they are willing to hire the best available.
1323portloo
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2 years ago
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on: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row
If you are a small shop, sure. If you are a major employer you will either meet market rate and get top candidates (willing to live in your area) or you will get whatever candidates decided to live in Mississippi.
1323portloo
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2 years ago
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on: 280M e-bikes and mopeds are cutting demand for oil far more than electric cars
The average American is not going to accept an e-bike, moped or motorcycle as a replacement for their SUV/wheeled living room.* Autocycles are starting to become more mainstream thanks to companies like Polaris that focus on performance ATVs and 3-wheeled motorcycles. They would be a good middle ground for the future, either as electric or small-displacement gas engines.
They need better penetration in more states and need to have the same insurance and operator licensing as a regular 4-wheeled automobile. My state allows autocycles where you can use a regular drivers license, but the vehicle is insured as a motorcycle (higher premiums), you must wear a helmet (but my autocycle has an enclosed body?). One of the states that borders mine does not permit autocycles as an automobile, so I wouldn't be able to drive there for any reason.
* For years I have bicycle commuted and picked up groceries year-round in a place with hills that gets real winter snow. It takes a level of commitment that most people just do not have.
1323portloo
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2 years ago
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on: What Happens When Nurses Are Hired Like Ubers
These companies (ShiftKey, Clipboard) are not acting as agents for long term 1099 contractors at a hospital or other health care facility. They are filling shifts for as little as a day at a time at a moment's notic. Quality of care is atrocious because you never know the quality of the health care worker and the health care worker may not have the necessary training to do the job required of them. Bottom line is the problem is not 1099 work or workers, it's that these garbage "gig economy" rent seeking companies are treating the health care profession as if they were picking up day laborers in a Home Depot parking lot.
1323portloo
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2 years ago
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on: I applied to 250 jobs and timed how long each one took
Something you don't want to learn post-graduation: if you don't have the connections to get a job, you simply don't have a prayer.
1323portloo
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2 years ago
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on: Antidepressants Work Better Than Sugar Pills Only 15 Percent of the Time (2022)
NDRIs were great at causing me brain zaps. So much so, that I could not meditate for more than a year after stopping the medication without reaching a brain state that caused similar brain zaps. Fortunately, that has long passed.
1323portloo
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2 years ago
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on: Ultra-wealthy people are working remotely from their superyachts
Probably. My apartment doesn't have an infinity pool with attached hot tub, a tennis/basketball/whatever court, game room, servants, "servants" or helipad with waiting helicopter.
1323portloo
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2 years ago
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on: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
That's not their focus at all. They're trying to be an all-things-entertainment company, currently, they are focusing on movie animation and digital character creation.
1323portloo
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2 years ago
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on: Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source
Yes, unless you build everything from the game engine to the distribution channel yourself, there is a cost to doing business. IIRC Epic Games Store offers a more reasonable 88%/12% revenue split, while Steam uses the same rapacious split as Apple and GOG at 70%/30%.
1323portloo
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2 years ago
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on: When did people stop being drunk all the time?
I wouldn't say sugar is innocent. It still has the same damaging metabolic effects as alcohol, but without the inebriation.
1323portloo
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2 years ago
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on: A new C# MUD based on DIKU and ROM
Ahh, I remember the good old days of MUDding (and not working on my physics homework as I should have been). My old stomping ground is still alive and kicking, surprisingly:
https://www.alteraeon.com/ with 70 users currently on! Its codebase was "built entirely from scratch" and is "DIKU-like". Written in C, the way the gods intended (joking). Wild that these text-based games are still finding new players.
1323portloo
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2 years ago
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on: Mechanical Turk workers are using AI to automate being human
I think this is wonderful. It's a human-bootstrapped AI centipede with predictable, inevitable results.
1323portloo
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2 years ago
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on: Things that surprised me while running SQLite in production
>I went on to implement storing numeric values as text strings, which worked exactly as well as you'd expect.
It can be made to work. I would've gone with Binary-Coded Decimal if IEEE 754 standard isn't precise enough.
1323portloo
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2 years ago
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on: PhD Simulator
I remember my advisor's most relevant advice, "Keep working toward your thesis, and one day, you, too, shall have a mighty hump!"
1323portloo
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2 years ago
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on: Cleaner accidentally ruins decades of research by turning off freezer
How did Covid restrictions prevent repairs to the system not prevent this cleaner from accessing the same area?
