Posts by Michael Wojcik

Re: $54K median ... LOL

Yes, in many parts of the US purchasing even a small house on a $54K annual income would be financial suicide. And in many places AirBnB has encouraged landlords to convert long-term rentals into short-term ones, driving long-term rental prices up.

Medical costs in the US are also high and fall mostly on individuals. My wife and I have what's considered "good" dental insurance, for example, which covered $600 of a $1400 procedure for my wife recently. And you don't want to be in a traumatic accident in these parts; if the local hospital doesn't have room or feels you need some type of care they can't provide, they'll ship you off to the nearest alternative – and since there's no longer a ground ambulance service which will take you, that means a helicopter ride that will cost you, personally, tens of thousands of dollars.

Fuel prices here are relatively low, but lack of public transit means many people do a lot of driving.

Education in the US is, of course, wildly expensive in the general case.

Median salary really isn't a useful point of comparison, or benchmark for what's required to achieve a "middle-class lifestyle", however that might be defined.

Re: No Oldies Here

Anecdote, but I know a number of over-50 senior-level software developers working in the UK.

Re: It's all a matter of perspective...

I've often thought it might be entertaining to work part-time at a hardware store or the like and explain things to novice DIYers. I'm sure it would be a rather mixed bag, but showing someone an inexpensive specialty tool that makes a job much easier¹ or explaining a problem-solving technique could be good fun.

That said, I'm in no hurry to retire from my current job.

¹The traditional example for this is the basin wrench, but for a decade or two now most faucet fittings in the US have used hand-tightened nuts with compression washers, making the basin wrench unnecessary. But there are others – screw extractors, say. Or even the humble coping saw.

Re: Not great news for youngsters

I hope we aren't letting the Angles totally off the hook.

Can you even have a hook without an angle?

In the context of a crypto article I think saying "fiat" is entirely justified. Anyone who's into crypto has thought a bit about what "money" really is, and that tenner in your pocket ... is ultimately just an idea that a lot of people believe in.

And anyone who cares is aware of all that, so there's no need for the Reg to stick "fiat" in all over the place.

Techbros at the top of the pyramid could fail to jump before it collapses?

Really, who in the temperate regions wasn't? It's kind of an obvious thing to do.

Re: Linode no longer allows access listing

Nothing is "secure" in an absolute sense. All that security measures can do is increase the work factor for attackers. Allow lists do that. Removing them on the grounds that they're not a panacea is foolish.

I hate to sound cheesy, but that's a bit of a saucy take!

Re: You can’t always get what you want

You generally won't get good pizza from a chain. Their economic incentives lie elsewhere. Small shops depend on local repeat business, so they have to please customers and maintain a reputation. Chains can rely on familiarity and marketing to ensure a steady supply of occasional customers (most of whom aren't going to be very discriminating), and want to reserve capital for expansion, marketing, and other costs that don't contribute to food quality.

We're lucky to have three independent pizza places, with significant differences in their interpretations of the subject, in the relatively low-population area where I live. And Domino's, in case anyone ever needs to be reminded why the independents are a good thing.

(Though in fairness I think Domino's may be less terrible now than it was, say, 20 years ago? Perhaps that's just my aging senses losing their precision.)

Re: Mb99 -> Tc99m

Half-life makes it somewhat inelastic as a commodity.

Re: Mb99 -> Tc99m

Computery, but not very UK. Maybe something like the time it takes a standard kettle [cite relevant ISO spec] to heat a cup of water for tea?

Re: A perfect storm of his own making

Cannon didn't have much choice about the "hamstringing" after the Eleventh Circuit tore her a new reasoning-hole. They vacated not only every part of her order that the DoJ appealed,¹ but essentially all of her opinion as well.

It's not how you want to start out your career as a District Court judge.

(And two of the judges on the Circuit panel were also Trump appointees, FWIW.)

¹It was a narrow appeal against only the part of the order that applied to the Top Secret documents, presumably to improve the DoJ's argument and chances of success, and because they didn't really care about the rest. As it happened, the part that remains in effect seems to be backfiring against the Trump camp anyway, so in a sense the DoJ won across the board.

Re: A perfect storm of his own making

Musk under oath would be interesting.

That's one word for it.

Personally, I can't imagine how irritating it would be to depose¹ Musk. The man is almost superhumanly obnoxious. I'd say the lawyers are earning their fees on that one.

Though it would likely have made a terrific episode of Verbatim, perhaps even rivaling "Follow the Chicken". Unfortunately I believe Verbatim is no longer being produced.

¹In the testimonial sense, though deposing him as King of the Tech Bros would no doubt also be an agonizing process.

Re: Reheat the popcorn

The smug dem voters who talk a lot about wanting to solve societies problems but in reality they are only interested in ensuring their money supply, one-upping against their 'friends' and paying as little as possible to their (likely undocumented) maid and gardener.

And they're in league with the bugbears under AC's bed and the vampire unicorns in the closet, too!

Re: Reheat the popcorn

If you have exposure through one of those banks, don't wait to move funds around.

I don't, but frankly this advice is silly for typical US individuals, whose "exposure" to banks is either in small-time personal retail banking, or extremely indirectly through things like 401(k) mutual funds. In the former case, their deposits are insured by FDIC and they'll never see enough interest to matter, so it really doesn't matter what the bank does. In the latter, their exposure is highly diluted and not under their direct control.

Switching to a different bank would just be a pointless opportunity cost and headache.

It's possible that taking a hit from Musk's Misadventures might mean a given bank has a bit less to loan to other businesses, which could in theory hurt some small businesses here and there; but there are plenty of other lenders.

And if you need to drive long distances often, you're probably not burning petrol

Not in the US, I'm afraid, where diesel vehicles are relatively rare and options are limited, and diesel fueling is difficult in some areas.

Most of the personal (i.e. non-commercial) diesel vehicles left on the roads in the US these days, since Dieselgate, are large pickup trucks. Not ideal for long-distance travel.

Indeed. It's terrific how the EV fans assume everyone shares their use cases.

Here's what my recent journey would have looked like with air travel instead of driving:

1. Drive 2.5 hours (at least) to the airport. 145 miles.

2. Fly to the airport nearest my first destination. Minimum of a 2-hour wait. $400 or so.

3. Rent a car, because there's no other way to get from the airport to where I'm going. Time from flight arrival to when I'm in the car is at least an hour (from prior experience), maybe more. Expedia gives me rental prices around $400.

4. Drive 2 hours / 100 miles to my destination. That's an entire day gone, longer than the 10 hours I would have spent driving it.

5. Three days later, do the same to return to the airport.

6. Fly to the cheapest major airport near my next destination. Another wait of 2+ hours at the airport, then a few more hours in the air. This is a one-way flight and I might get lucky on pricing; let's say $100.

7. Rent another car, so another $400. Drive 90 miles to my destination. I might arrive in time to have dinner with someone, if flight schedules work out.

8. A few days later, it's that 90 miles back to the airport.

9. Flight #3, the price of which I can't check because I've just lost Internet. This time I'm headed to a small city that isn't near any particularly large airports, so I'm not sure what my best option would be anyway. But it's the usual story: Wait at the airport, fly, rent a car (now we're up to $1200 in car rental fees – except this one is being rented for a week, so probably more like $1500 or $1800).

10. Now I have the choice of flying back to the airport from step 1, which is the faster and cheaper option; or visiting people on the way back, which is what I actually did. So either it's a less-rewarding trip, or multiple flights and more car rentals.

In short, the "just fly" argument is as feeble as the "you can stop every three hours" argument. That's an option for some people, for some trips. It doesn't work for everyone.

Or have to do long drives through rural areas.

For most of the driving I do, there aren't any EV chargers for several hundred miles.

I recently drove over 5000 miles over a two-week period, with just shy of 86 hours behind the wheel. Some days I had 15 hours of driving. Stopping every three hours to spend half an hour charging my vehicle would have increased my travel time by 14 hours, even if it had been possible. No thanks.

True, but public opinion is always in flux. Sometimes it's hard to see the true direction of movement in this field. The direct approach might not work, but alternatively with the correct inducement, all sorts of problems can be bridged or rectified.

Re: The Holy Grail

Plus you tear open the pack and a few hundred spill out, and then they're rolling all over the road...

Re: Measuring a property does not set it...

See, this is why Ilya is a Grade A kook, and not a second-tier one like the OP (though OP is off to a decent start). Concise, not anonymous, almost coherent, yet still nonsensical – that's what we like to see.

Re: Measuring a property does not set it...

Ah, that's some good kookery. Keep it up, you nut!

Precise figures and units aside, you can simply apply Monroe's Heuristic: If the external power supply (if the device has one) and the device itself aren't emitting much heat on standby, then they're not dissipating much power.

In the US, residential power use is dominated by space heating and cooling and by water heating – that's almost half of a typical residence's power use. Turning TVs and phone chargers "off at the wall" (which in the US would mean unplugging or using a power strip, since most of our receptacles aren't switched) has a negligible effect.

Over-sized, over-powered personal vehicles are another major source of individually-controllable energy waste here, as is waste in general – wasting food (when considering total energy cost across the entire production chain), replacing products that could be kept in use, wasting treated water, etc. But people love to focus on little things that have no real benefit but also no real personal cost.

Re: Notes? How old school!

Shrug. I was in my forties when I received my most recent degree, and there may be more yet. It's really only a question of whether I want to spend the money.

Re: "Using NLP to crackdown on paper mills"

Since NLP is poised to replace paper mills with machine-written papers, this is a nicely symmetric development in this particular arms race.

I'll also note it's one I predicted in a post to one of the rhetoric mailing lists about a dozen years ago, but since it's an obvious development anyone paying attention ought to have seen it coming. It hasn't been a technical problem for a long time – just a question of economics. Existing paper mills enjoy cheap labor¹ and an established network of customers², which makes them harder to displace by automation. But not immune to it.

¹Mostly unemployed and underemployed people with advanced degrees, according to research I've seen. There was a long piece by a former paper-writer in ... Harper's, maybe? ... some years back that supports this.

²In the US, this includes fraternities and sororities, and organizations that "support" student athletes.

Re: Plagiarism & Shadow-Authoring

Presumably it will work just like other ML-based judging systems (e.g. systems for assigning sentencing factors in criminal cases): as a black box with no real provision for appeal, because fuck you.