Kale

Regarding the 2017 comment: I was at work and read that quote “nobody knew healthcare could be so complicated” and I laughed hard for a while. Then sighed. Then I had to go for a walk. Deep down I had really doubted someone could get that far in life and be as dumb as he appeared to be. That statement shredded that thought. He wasn’t acting. He was really that dumb, and the next three years were going to be rough.

Within the Democratic party, there’s debate about how to handle climate change. There are people who advocate for slow, cautious changes and still see fossil fuels having a small role to play in the future. There are others within the Democratic party that want more drastic action, and make a huge government spending program to try to rapidly move the US energy to renewables (even naming it after one of the biggest US government programs made during the depression). That’s normal politics. And it’s all within the Democratic party.

The GOP mostly deny climate change exists. A few GOP members suggest that climate change is happening, but is a natural event not caused by man.

The recent house drama from the speakership battle was caused because 10 nutjobs didn’t want to fund any social programs and wouldn’t approve the budget. Most GOP compromised and made a TEMPORARY budget proposal that the Democratic reps would vote for. This caused the hardliners to remove the speaker. Because he had the audacity to compromise on a TEMPORARY budget.

Removing policy aside and just looking at behavior, many GOP members do not believe in compromising to get things done. There’s attempts to not hold elected officials accountable (unless they are from the other party). It’s very little cooperation and more retaliation.

A single GOP senator didn’t like that the US military would reimburse a servicemember’s travel for medical care if they lived in a state where some reproductive treatments weren’t available. This one senator has single-handedly denied 360 military promotions and nominations to military positions. The Senate has historically tried to make it where being the minority party still had some power, so the rules let this happen (the other GOP senators on this committee weren’t blocking, just the one guy).

The Democratic senators became so fed up they decided to change the rules to prevent a single committee member from blocking promotions. While most GOP senators publicly condemn this guy, many said this rule change was too much. So it looks like the rule change vote will be along party lines, although the #1 GOP senator has said it might be necessary to vote through to get the military back on track.

The last GOP senator really known for being reasonable and wanting to work collaboratively (McCain) died. He was respected by both parties until Trump came along, and now the GOP don’t really hold his legacy in high regard.

Sorry, a lot longer than I intended, but it’s a pattern showing no desire to try to govern effectively. Putting all issues of policy aside, I think it’s a bad idea to vote for the GOP.

I’m a mech E in the medical field. We’re consistently understaffed. If I validate an Excel worksheet in Excel '08 or a Python program in 3.5 with a specific version of NumPy, we’re probably sticking with those versions for a while. Every time I bring up re-validating with the latest version, keeping one old system running the old software requires fewer resources than me or a colleague re-validating.

My whole department is stuck on one version of Python because that was the most recent version when I had an emergency project and developed a data analysis algorithm. We validated it, then as new members were added to my team, they needed a copy, so we had to keep using it. I’ll probably re-validate it to the next Python release. It’s not only unit tests, or we could automate validation. Unit tests are a tiny part of validating software for making medical decisions. And software that directly runs a medical device (like firmware on an insulin pump) is an order of magnitude more rigorous than what I do.

Side note: there are people who somehow root their insulin pumps and run algorithms on them. There’s a group that can get a PID control loop on an insulin pump that has a more simple control scheme on it (because that’s how the FDA approved it). The company has been trying to get approval to use PID control in the US for years.

What about dropping the tax rate by a meaningful amount and raising the income cap to $1M?

I realize that most CEOs get modest salaries and almost all of their income from capital gains, but a move like this could bring in more revenue and be popular by reducing the tax burden on middle class and working class Americans.

The business strategy decisions behind CPU fab is really interesting over the past 15 years.

AMD made a budget clone of Intel two decades ago. Then Intel made a misstep and released Northwood Pentium 4. AMD used less power and was faster. And AMD decided to go with DDR memory, while Intel went RDRAM. Then AMD was king when they went AMDx86-64 for 64 bit and Intel went Itanium.

Then AMD made a huge miscalculation on the future of multicore computing and designed Bulldozer, while Intel got their shit together and went down the hyperthreading route and released CORE/Core2/Core2Duo chips. And Intel was king for a decade.

I don’t know the exact timing, but AMD needed cash and sold their fabs to raise money, which became TSMC GlobalFoundries, sorry. GF learned how to make stuff small since smartphones became a huge market. Then AMD let an engineer run the company and she invested in the Zen architecture, which could be made by GF with their lessons from the mobile world.

This is my take. By AMD turning GF loose, GF could date other people work on mobile projects, which helped them learn.

It’s a side note now, but Intel hung on to their fabs and lagged behind GF. AMD let their fab go and benefitted from it. EDIT: I had some facts wrong. It’s possible Intel fabs are ahead of GF.

As a side note, Intel did try fairly hard to get into mobile like GF. They had the Atom chips and went for tablet, Ultrabook, netbook, and mobile. I had an ASUS Android phone with an Intel SOC. So it’s not like they ignored mobile, but it didn’t benefit them as much as TSMC.

I don’t think NY splits electoral votes. To get any NY electoral votes, he’d have to carry the whole state.

Will this leave him off the ballot for the primary? He is expected to win the primary and this will pump the numbers for another GOP candidate. If enough states do this, it could give the convention the cover to select someone else.

There are methodical ways of valuating a private (and public) company. Some are pessimistic and some are wildly optimistic. Your can legally use whichever one you want, only you must only use that valuation method for everything. It’s illegal to value the company low for taxes and high for loan collateral. And if you sell it, you can owe back taxes if your valuation was off (sale price is the new valuation).

This is overly-simplified US accounting rules (from finance class 10 years ago)

He took it private so, although there can be shares, they aren’t traded on the open market. So no positions to short.

Minors can’t sign a contract. Their parents have to sign for them. Maybe that’s related?

Seriously? I was looking at a Surface product recently, and it appeared to have an access panel for the NVME drive. I read a ton of complaints about the dimensions of the drive being unusual, but access to it was easy. I don’t think I was looking at a Surface pro though.

If a surface pro wants to be a full OS and not a tablet OS, it should be easy to replace the storage device.

A politician and a political party has two domains they operate in: policy and governance. Policy is where a politician stands on issues, and typically where almost all of the campaigning happens. Where does this politician stand on healthcare, gun control, environment, etc.

But governance is as important, both for the individual and for the political party. For the politician: can they build consensus? Can they prevent alienating their constituents. Can they set goals that are big, but achievable. And for the political party, governance is how well they develop their members. Identifying who fits best in each elected position. How to help members gain experience for other offices. How to identify up-and-coming politicians.

The GOP is currently experiencing a failure of governance. The HOR is unable to operate because the GOP can’t effectively govern. And time is ticking on one of the core HOR duties: approving the budget. The GOP is not getting high quality people into the correct positions, and has too many obstinate people in place to govern.

I get the idea, but it’s akin to saying “let’s not enforce the law because these people might break more laws”. It says to the public: to escape justice, you have to be violent enough that people fear you.

It’s sad that “moderate” in this context means that someone can compromise, work cooperatively, and not resort to lying about other political views.

This is where parliamentary systems can sometimes force cooperation. The US setup kind of pushes towards two parties.

Yeah, only the people who don’t flip their car should get one.

I have zero problems with owning one, and have owned them in the past. We knew this person was a crazy driver and that it was a bad idea.

And even more violence could have been prevented if Hamas had cooperated and openly communicated with Israel before they attacked and took hostages. /s

Yeah. I know people who say stuff like that. I know someone who wanted a convertible car (they were 18). Someone mentioned the greater danger of they flip, and this person said “well I’m not going to flip a car”. We all gave them a hard time about whether they thought everyone who flipped a car did it on purpose. The next year, this same person flipped their car several times (and walked away OK somehow).

Some people can’t comprehend that bad stuff would happen to them.

Plastic is usually scratchy. Glass is much better about resisting scratches. I believe you’re, right, modem phone glass is pretty flexible. It’s also (usually) coated with something that prevents finger oils from building up easily.

I haven’t dealt with HPC in a while, but Intel C compiler against MKL libraries were fastest CPU, and Nvidia CUDA was slightly easier to develop than OpenCL for other cards. I’m not sure if the situation’s changed.

For my current applications, I use NumPy compiled against Intel MKV installed as a binary. It works great.

If you want to blame the Americas for anything, blame syphilis. That wasn’t in Europe until the late 1400/early 1500.

You mention bedbug PTSD. That’s not hyperbole. I think it’s about 10% of bedbug infestations cause diagnosable conditions that meet clinical definitions of trauma or anxiety.