I'm at a different comapny and it's the same. They have some basic framework/matrix, but managers aren't going to help you get to the next level. In my experience the matrix isn't followed anyways - they promote whoever they want whether or not they meet the stuff in the matrix. It's all just opinion based anyways.
The people I know leaving that sector have been steadily leaving for years due to the day to day bullshit/internal politics and poor leadership that they have to put up with, not the pay nor current administration.
Right but if you're a lifelong gov worker you are probably used to the pay, and it's hard to switch from gov work to startups or big tech (at least, I would see it as a thing to question). Whereas the GGP talks about people switching from the private sector (adtech, etc.) to public.
The first thing they are going to see is the salary and run a mile. That's partly why Palantir 'works'; they pay tech salaries and have a tech culture, but do gov work. Booz Allen et al were less advanced prototypes of that as well.
Not the stuff that matters (chips, electronics, metals, etc). We don't even have a primary lead smelter, which we would likely need if we got into a peer conflict.
It's also important to note that the US lacks the ability to quickly pivot and set up plants. Much of the knowledge to do so has been disappearing as employment in that sector has been steadily declining for decades. Sure we make stuff at scale using automation, but that automation can't be changed to significantly different stuff in a reasonable timeframe.
We suck at ultra-heavy industry that outputs commodities. We're great at light industry, or specialised heavy industry, which includes a lot of electronics. You're correct on inflexibility.
Yeah, even if we can produce them now, we don't have the pipeline to keep them running - steel for guns comes from other countries, we don't have a primary lead smelter in the country, medical devices that rely on electronics rely on foreign components, etc. The only reason pharma can operate here is because of the regulations, and even then many components chemicals are sourced internationally.
Worked as a chemical systems technician for a bit. Can confirm, lots of the chemicals we used (most, some of which were pharma grade but we weren't pharma), had to come from either China or Germany. And we really did try to source as much in the US as possible. So it wasn't even a question of cost, it was simply no one here wanted to make what we needed.
Now granted, I'm not naive enough to think we should be able to be self-sufficient and manufacture everything ourselves. I think it is fine to import stuff. My bigger concern is, for some things, there just isn't a lot of options. I think its fine to buy some of the raw materials from Germany and China, but I'd also like to see a few more countries that they could be bought from.
A quarter of steel used in the U.S. is imported, and of that quarter, 40% comes from Mexico and Canada; very little comes from China[0]. So, not only does your point fall flat, the people we get steel from are our neighbors so it'd make sense to not sour with relationships with them like the current admin is doing with chaotic trade policy and invasion threats.
I really don't understand the FUD around US manufacturing capability, you'd essentially need to craft the greatest conspiracy ever to think that every politician, defense agency, intelligence agency, etc. is asleep at the wheel to not recognize this supposed threat and do nothing about it.
China ships a rather large amount of stuff to these countries to take advantage of the trade agreements. So much that you can find satellite images of large yards in Mexico that are used for this purpose with barely any effort.
Okay, let's assume most of their steel is Chinese (I have my doubts because, yet again, more conspiracies), we only import a quarter of the steel we use. That would hurt losing it overnight, sure, but we wouldn't be absolutely toast like the autarkists are saying.
These takes are much more doomer than I'm willing to bet the supporters of "bring everything back" realize. Do you have no faith in the US economy / populace adapting to a hypothetical all out war with China?
Personally I have little to no faith in the adaptability of the US workforce for such things. It would be a generational shift. Exceedingly few people even have basic mechanical skills these days.
It’s not like WWII where you have a majority population that works on the farm or in a factory with their hands, and at home fixing stuff that breaks. That sort of population can be rapidly redeployed. We would need to start from the basics like “how to turn a screwdriver” for a huge portion of the workforce.
When you really start looking into things, nearly everything points back to China at some point. Pharmaceuticals? The APIs or at least important precursors largely originate there - even if they hit a middleman country first. Then you get into basic components and it’s the same story. That part from India or Mexico might not be available without China as a backstop.
It’s not an impossible problem, but it’s a problem that took decades and a generation or two to destroy. It’s far easier and quicker to destroy things than build them.
Have you heard about the great toilet paper scarcity of 2020 during covid? and facemasks? US couldn't make either toilet paper or facemasks or ventilators or build hospital beds or anything that matters when the entire economy was at risk of shutdown.
You would be jamming the audio and video, not the wireless (that is generally illegal). They have some devices to do this already with different noise generators and overloading the camera sensors to cause unidentifiable images (especially with IR night vision).
There should be no safety reason to require audio. The only reason for audio is later use for prosecution.
It's not just that they don't want to piss off the lawyers. If they don't provide a private location, then they may be forced to take continuances and recesses so those conversations can happen elsewhere as a condition of not infringing on the constitutional right to effective counsel.
Might be quicker to detect disturbances using audio too rather than video only, think of ShotSpotter. Sounds made up though and probably either a way to spy or chill speech.
I would make a cli game. Something like generating a random number between 1-100 and having the user guess. The game tells you higher, lower, or correct. Then let her try a few times. Then you tell her you can do it in 7 guess every time. Explain the math about alwasy closing the midpoint of the remaining range to cut the field in half. It's like a magic trick based on math that teaches basic syntax.
I was going to suggest the same game, guess the number. But instead of doing it in CLI, do it on her class calculator. If she's 11, she may already have something like a TI 82. These come with some form of BASIC (at least it had 30 years ago).
I remember that I did that about 30 years ago, and then because I had done it, I spent hours playing it.
Then if she likes that, you can make a 2 player tic-tac-toe, or a play-against-the-computer paper-rock-scissors. The fun is to start simple and then modify the game slowly. For example, in the guess a number, you could have funny answers for special numbers.
or a tame-the-unicorn game that's a bit like a tamagotchi, you can feed her, play with her, let her sleep, that kind of stuff, with very simple counters. In the end you can to ride on her back and be her best friend forever.
Anything that's turn-based, where you have very simple inputs that go in variables, check the variable against the game state, and then change the state in a basic fashion, and output something as text, and repeat.
Anything with a graphical game loop is going to be too much imo.
Interestingly, contamination of the forensic equipment was considered early on already. However, due to the geographic area of the findings and initial negative control tests using fresh swabs, they ruled it out.
The Phantom of Heilbronn, often alternatively referred to as the Woman Without a Face, was a hypothesized unknown female serial killer whose existence was inferred from DNA evidence found at numerous crime scenes in Austria, France and Germany from 1993 to 2009.
The only connection between the crimes was the presence of DNA from a single female, which had been recovered from 40 crime scenes, ranging from murders to burglaries. In late March 2009, investigators concluded that there was no "phantom criminal", and the DNA had already been present on the cotton swabs used for collecting DNA samples; it belonged to a woman who worked at the factory where they were made.
That's incredible. Though the effect of this will be claims that microplastics don't exist while no one in that case claimed that murders didn't happen. Happy to have learned about an interesting historical oddity either way.
I don't think anyone will claim microplastics don't exist, but people will definitely be skeptical of articles about how many there, and where they're found.
At worst, I'd expect to see people disregarding the threat, not disregarding the presence of the microplastics themselves.
I'm not sure if they have established a threat. I thought it was mostly hypothesised or very locally specific harms.
On the other hand I suspect much of the real science on environmental plastic might avoid the term microplastic since it seems to have a meaning that flows to whatever can make the scariest headline today. I have seen the size range to qualify run from microscopic up to a couple of millimetres. Volumes, quantities, or location stated without regard to individual particle size. I'm relatively certain that they have not discovered 1mm particles inside red blood cells.
Even what counts as a plastic seems to be an easy way of adding vagueness, I saw one table that seemed to count cellulose as a plastic, which makes sense if you are thinking about properties of the material, but unsurprisingly easy to come across that it's not really worth going looking for it.
It's a different kind of dependence. Sure you need China for this particular panel you're buying now but from then on you are no longer dependent on them.
Compare that to oil and gas which has to continually be shipped. And no one says that we won't figure out how to produce these things ourselves one day.
We can produce them already, but they're too expensive. You are still reliant on China etc continuously shipping panels because panels will need to be replaced and expanded over time. Sure, it's a smaller volume, but still the same sort of problem.
Solar panels last for decades, you have to import oil every single day. How is it the same problem? And that's not even assuming we won't figure out how to build them cheaply ourselves.
Exactly. This is such a goofy idea, that you can buy something from China and use it in the EU and suddenly you’re “energy independent”. No, you’re China dependent. I guess the argument would be that solar panels last a long time and thus you’ve bought yourselves 20 years or whatever the life span is, of energy independence from China? But you’ll need new batteries sooner than that.
With rooftop solar and an EV I’m a lot less dependent on China for the next 30 years than everyone around me is on the Middle East daily for gas to drive and natural gas for heat.
It seems like most people in the first world either couldn't do physical tasks or would tell themselves they can't. Things like bow making and hunting (including processing) require specialized knowledge and a lot of physical work. Same goes for farming.
But the real thing that makes the comparison fall apart is that with machines people have less utility and people today "require" more resources- can an individual today do anything meaningful to help the tribe survive? And by meaningful, we necessarily tie it to positive economic impact, which is very hard to achieve at lower paying jobs or jobless when we look at things that get paid for by the tribe such as like healthcare cost.
reply