shifter's comments

shifter | 7 years ago | on: When California Was the Bear Republic

Very much so, beginning with this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_pioneers

shifter | 7 years ago | on: The last known unidentified marking on the Saturn V S-IC

Paging Steele...

shifter | 8 years ago | on: I am leaving llvm

To the downvoters: I'm a liberal speaking from years of working with him in meat space. You may not like what I said but it's accurate.

shifter | 8 years ago | on: I am leaving llvm

Gotta love how clattner shuts down the thread. He's a nice guy but he does have a strong authoritarian side that gets triggered by the typical SJW causes (even in small talk about silly things).

shifter | 8 years ago | on: To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years

Or, as the calculus on living in the Bay Area shifts [0], top tier talent starts to direct itself elsewhere. This stems growth in the Bay Area since founding successful companies in lower cost areas will be possible, housing investment slows as a result of that, and the market naturally cools down a bit [1].

[0] Don't fool yourself into thinking that only people without the income or capital to live well in the Bay Area would leave it. There are intangibles (culture, traffic, distance to skiing, etc.) that, for some people, are non-optimal. For others, it's perfect. That's okay, humans are a varied lot (and it's a good thing).

[1] Nothing major, it will remain expensive due to geography and talent/creativity/capital density.

shifter | 8 years ago | on: YouTube Stars Being Paid to Sell Academic Cheating

That shifts the "cost" to employers... and you profited from it. Does that make it theft? :-)

shifter | 8 years ago | on: Foxconn Will Take 7M Gallons of Water per Day from Lake Michigan to Make LCDs

Clarification: the outrage machine does exist as a phenomenon in American politics. It's real.

I agree that stewardship of the environment is very important.

shifter | 8 years ago | on: Foxconn Will Take 7M Gallons of Water per Day from Lake Michigan to Make LCDs

There are multiple "American publics". The outrage machine will not like it, you are correct, but take a drive through Nevada or West Virginia and you'll see folks used to such side effects.

shifter | 8 years ago | on: The Surprisingly Solid Mathematical Case of the Tin Foil Hat Gun Prepper

There's enough oxygen floating around in various forms that the _lack_ of an oil layer can allow rust to form. There are other ways to treat it, as your uncle alluded to, but they are probably very sensitive to following the appropriate maintenance schedule.

shifter | 8 years ago | on: Fake books sold on Amazon could be used for money laundering

The laws aren't there to protect us, they exist to secure entrenched interests.

shifter | 8 years ago | on: The Surprisingly Solid Mathematical Case of the Tin Foil Hat Gun Prepper

Yep. They also need regular "exercise" and lubrication if you want them to be worth anything in a WROL situation.

shifter | 8 years ago | on: Tesla Was Kicked Off Fatal Crash Probe by NTSB

Yep, this used to happen frequently on road trips. It relies on squeezing the wheel fairly firmly.

I got into the habit of periodically giving it a good squeeze while resting my hand on it.

shifter | 8 years ago | on: In the 1950s, a California teacher's annual mortgage payments were 14% of salary

Nashville's getting pretty expensive, too, thought it's nothing compared to the Bay Area.

shifter | 8 years ago | on: Trump, Congress approve largest U.S. research spending increase in a decade

There's a surprising amount of super-detailed material on the state of the US Armed Forces:

https://www.armed-services.senate.gov

You can do a "wikipedia dive" on that site and take away a depth of understanding that, honestly, probably exceeds 99% of political commentators'.

shifter | 8 years ago | on: Wi-Fi startup Eero lays off 30 employees

Eero works okay but the consistency is not great (wild variations in ping time, for instance). I switched to a Ubiquiti (Unifi) setup and it is a world of difference. My ping times are super stable (like < 1ms of standard deviation awesome) and that makes a big difference for any realtime demands.

shifter | 8 years ago | on: Extreme event attribution is an expanding subfield of climate science

War is peace

shifter | 8 years ago | on: VA’s foray into Internet of Things faced ‘catastrophic failure’

To be fair, you're discounting the possibility that nostalgia-tinged anti-political-correctness views are correct ;-)

shifter | 8 years ago | on: Where to hide your nuclear missile submarine?

Due to projection distortions, the size of the area was visually misleading. An area-maintaining projection would be a more accurate way to communicate this data.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projection#Projections_b...

shifter | 8 years ago | on: E Pur Si Muove

In general, that makes sense. However, achieving big things requires working with people, ergo their opinions do matter in that regard...

shifter | 8 years ago | on: E Pur Si Muove

Well said! Sam posted a great defense of what I view as the second leg of "freedom of speech". There's the legal sense of the term – which is limited to government suppression of speech – and then there's the idea of what private society allows of its own volition.