It reads like a plea to not turn into McDonnell Douglas (this was only a few years after the MD and Boeing merger), which we all know it essentially has. The last couple of sentences fire shots at Douglas Aircraft directly:
"The fate of the former Douglas Aircraft Company, which was reduced to a systems integrator in the early 1970s by excessive outsourcing of DC-10 production, is a clear indicator of what will happen to other companies which fail to sustain the conditions under which it is possible to launch new products. It is hoped that this sacrifice can save the new and expanded Boeing from a similar fate."
The trouble is that government contracts always strongly incentivize ‘excessive outsourcing’, and Boeing’s absorption of MD increased the dependence on government contracts, though Boeing was already on that road (especially after taking on Rockwell). Government oversight (almost) always discourages large profit margins, which makes increasing low-risk costs very appealing. In addition to that, there are strong political incentives for ‘distributing’ contracts widely, with the Space Shuttle being a famous example of this, having parts made or assembled in 48 different states.
Yes making the actual product is very very secondary to successfully appeasing Congress, produce 'jobs', and follow the litany of rules in place about now the money is used and paperwork after to check boxes.
These aren't businesses operating in a competitive market with pressure to produce the best things quickly. Their goal is simply to be the best gov lapdog vs the only 1 or 2 other gov lapdogs.
Being extremely late and extremely over budget is standard practice in that world and worst case is usually the project gets cancelled for budget reasons then restarted 5yrs later doing the same thing.
This is the environment the gov fostered, they made Boeing etc critical to national security and industry while having a total aversion to risk, and zero forethought into long term investment in legitimate competition. All we get is the same growing monster that becomes the living embodiment of The Iron Law of Bureaucracy https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
Sure the government can create some inefficiencies but trying to blame them removes culpability off Boeing. If it was truly our government then many more government contractors would be delivering broken crap and that doesn’t seem to be the case. Example NOC stock seems to be doing just fine over past 5 years while Boeing..,has not.
Those government inefficiencies are a great source of profit. Cut the FTEs today because the contractor's unrealistic low bid looks better on the budget. Make sure to hire a woman or minority owned for-profit road construction company, or hell just let the roads get so bad a pizza company can make it into a very effective ad campaign. I think we are a country hobbled by capitalism, afraid to do anything because it might hurt profits, even if it will hurt people.
Early NASA was the sum of the private companies and the smartest nerds pulled from academia that they absorbed and turned into an organization. These people brought their culture of production and research from where they came from and built something great. Now NASA is merely a legacy gov agency whose culture is that of every old gov agency. Risk adverse, checkbox focused, political pawns, professional budget wranglers, etc.
Blaming capitalism alone on that is a bit silly. There's nothing capitalistic about a giant gov agency funding the same tiny group of companies for decades.
Public-private partners is a good idea because public orgs that need to produce IRL things are very flawed, but you still need national interests beyond market interests so this is the compromise that has worked many times.
But they replaced the public-private idea with a series of mega gov bureaucracies whose whole job is propping up monopolies who are prevented from failing in an open market because they are deemed essential to the national interest - entirely because gov refuses to adapt to reality and allow proper competition or long term investment.
Boeing has no risk and neither does NASA because they can just keep choosing the safe choice, Boeing. What a lovely market.
We need to kill or reboot legacy gov agencies when they get old. And we need to force any public-private arrangements to legitimately foster competition, which means lots of compromise beyond a VC type situation, like reducing the litany of special interest checkboxes (jobs, geography, diversity, etc) and paperwork for small companies.
>Blaming capitalism alone on that is a bit silly. There's nothing capitalistic about a giant gov agency funding the same tiny group of companies for decades.
I'm blaming capitalism 100% for the hollowing out of NASA. I never said early NASA was perfect.
>But they replaced the public-private idea with a series of mega gov bureaucracies whose whole job is propping up monopolies who are prevented from failing in an open market because they are deemed essential to the national interest - entirely because gov refuses to adapt to reality and allow proper competition or long term investment.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm blaming capitalism of doing.
>We need to kill or reboot legacy gov agencies when they get old.
I really think if we just didn't let this happen constantly we'd have a better system. It's going to shift the litany of special interest because the goal is profits, but barely, existing contractors will just open up a bunch of subsidiary companies.
Anecdotally, my dad lives in a rural area with no cable/DSL broadband available.
Cellular broadband only got him 10-15 Mbps. He was excited when Starlink was available. I think he was pretty early on the preorder list. Once he finally got access to Starlink (Feb 2022) the speeds were close to the advertised ~100 Mbps.
Now the price has increased and on average he's back to getting like 15-20 Mbps down.
Luckily, the EMC that services the area received some rural broadband grant money to roll out FTTH and that build out has been pretty quick. They have already run fiber down his road and said that service should be available in a couple of months. The EMC is offering 2 Gbps down / 1-2 Gbps up (!!!) for $100/mo.
So this money is actually being spent effectively when it goes to the right place. Starlink made a bunch of promises that they couldn't fulfill and the money is being redirected, as it should be.
I feel like in 90% of Starlinks use cases it is only the best option because they are the most motivated to succeed. Running traditional wired service is the more practical and permanent solution but the telecoms have made far to much money by taking money then not delivering.
>Running traditional wired service is the more practical and permanent solution
It's permanent but it depends on what the word practical means. Often the cost of setting up infrastructure for such low density population means the infrastructure will never pay for itself, or that the same money spent elsewhere would service many more customers, so its not necessarily practical.
On the medical side, there are knowledgebases that offer clinical decision support like UpToDate (https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/solutions/uptodate) that are kept up to date (pun intended) by specialists in their field. Every year or so, the articles are reviewed and updated with new information that has integrated into practice. For a relatively small fee, a practitioner has pretty much all access to the latest evidence-based standard of care across any specialty. UpToDate is also a commercial product. With a claimed 2+ million subscribers at roughly $200-500/yr, there is clearly money out there for a well made product.
In regards to the article, parsing academic publications and spitting out a word cloud or k-nn graphs of topics isn't going to be useful to a professional. They've already built up a working model in their mind that they've honed over the years. They have years of filtering information and the ones contributing to these knowledgebases have the experience to curate that information to professionals which is what's lacking from these NLP experiments.
I do think that ML and tools like SemanticScholar can be used to identify new literature that may affect knowledgebase articles and flag them for review. I'd be surprised if that doesn't already exists to some extent.
There is an ECU flash at the dealership that supposedly fixes the parasitic battery drain. I've replaced my battery a couple of times, but haven't had an issue since the ECU flash.
Most of us here probably think of LARPing as fantasy-genre LARPing, but I think this is more pointed toward Mil-Sim LARPing.
These are hardcore airsoft guys who go buy comms, night-vision, IR, with airsoft weapons that function like real weapons. There are multi-day events with NATO vs RUS forces. Look up "milsim west" on Youtube and you can get a sense of it.
There's a good amount of folks that just like to have fun, but there is a subset that use it as a type of militia-esque training.
Yeah, I participated in some events in germany and here it is probably especially in a grey zone, because normally in germany everything militia like is strictly forbidden. Paintball is not allowed with camouflage or red paint. And then you can legally go to an event on a former military hangar with bunkers and then there is an actual tank and only people in camouflage and realistic looking weapons..
So if you would want to create a stealth militia in germany, this would probably be the way to go.
And in the events I participated, I knew the orga and I knew they were clearly into LARPing - but with some of the other people who attended, I was not so sure.
So I really hope it stays legal as it is a lot of fun, but I also hope it does not go out of hand, as increasingly with covid, there has been some radicalisation in certain groups ...
edit: to share an anecdote of why it is interesting to me, aside from the shooting:
There was a big event last year, with an apocalyptic setting. Killervirus and Zombies, Military and Civilians.
I happened to be on the military side, which was (by design) better organised and equipped. And during the game, it turned out, that our side was the evil side, who originally released the zombie virus. But what to do? Everyone else was potentially an enemy, who maybe wanted to shoot you and the people around you, your trusted comrades. So you stick with them for survival. As I have never been to the military, this was an interesting inside into how conflict and war crimes works and why people stay in line, despite they distance themself from what they are representing.
The crazy/normal ratio among milsim larpers is EXTREMLY high. Just listen to the language they use in YT videos to describe other participants and general public
There is this odd thing about the human brain that as soon as it is in a group and have tools of violence at hand it will often start planing to take over the society
Luckily individual soldiers without heavy equipment (at least some artillery) are more or less useless in a proper military showdown. Has been the case at least since WW2.
ISIS was a good example, they were being quickly defeated by pretty much everyone involved in the Syrian conflict.
Yes you can wage guerilla warfare for extended periods of time if the conditions are right - i.e. if you have local support of the population, and someone outside is getting you the guns to harass the official administration / occupants.
Now think about whether either of those conditions apply in a particular scenario, then remember you need both. Afghans obviously hated being invaded and helped "their guys", they also had Peshawar.
ISIS overran large portions of multiple countries before major powers started a coordinated effort of local ground operations and precision airstrikes to defeat it, and even then it took years.
The ambushed vehicles will run for max a few weeks without maintenance. Then there is ammo of which they use kilotons (thousands of tons), and you obviously can't really capture such a quantity of ammo. Though you can capture some ammo, sometimes.
The captured vehicles could often be serviced by either side. Also, some vehicles could be traded with foreign partners'. I bet you there are multiple T-90 and even more interesting vehicles in Yuma Proving Ground and other compounds, disassembled to the last screw.
There is a nonprofit that is trying to address this called Ameelio (https://www.ameelio.org/). They were hiring in the HN Who is Hiring thread. I don't know much about them, but it seems like they have some traction in a few states. Their voice call product says that it offers free voice calling, with all the monitoring/security features built in.
I hope these types of nonprofit tech companies succeed as they are not profit seeking off of the misery of other people.
it sounds like it doesn't satisfy the most critical requirement: allowing sadistic prison employees to torture and extort prisoners in fun and new ways with no oversight
who are they expecting to buy this, Montessori prisons?
Here's an example of an arguably good builder who had one team install a in-wall tank toilet, then another team drills right through the tank causing a leak. The repair work essentially meant ripping out everything and doing it over, even though there should have been mitigations in place to prevent it and having the plans/documentation available to everyone.
While construction has more standardization, planning, and inspections, it still relies on implementation and is going to have failures.
>> I guess the solution is to buy a surround sound system and hope it's good enough.
This made a huge difference for me. I went from TV > Sonos Beam > Sonos Beam + two surrounds. I've tested going back to just the Beam (I wanted to use the surrounds as stereo music speakers) but the huge decrease in my ability to understand dialog made me keep the surrounds. It's particularly problematic on TV shows where background music is used a lot. Having that come out of the surrounds and dialogue from the Beam made things so much better.
> I guess the solution is to buy a surround sound system and hope it's good enough.
Yet many people opt for a soundbar which has similar issues with the physics of thin/small speakers. I personally have a set of restored Bozak B-302As from 1958, big box speakers that are a solid meter cube, and they sound great :)
From what I've read, Apple rounded corners are using G^2 or G^3 geometric continuity to generate smoother curves.
It's hard to tell which smoothing function this library uses since it looks like it's based on PNG masking.