Military specifications are often designed around specific manufacturing processes. When the commercial state of the art changes, this leaves the military as the weirdo insisting they be allowed to buy a 1970s toilet seat made out of 1970s plastic. Those can be redesigned to allow purchase of commercially available goods that pass some kind of suitability testing. This is small potatoes, under a billion dollars per year.

The use and prevalence of IDIQ could be reviewed systemically. Some of those contracts are wildly disproportionate in cost to the value they deliver. This could be a few billion dollars per year kind of stuff.

Almost all T&M contracts could be replaced with FFP, or FPLOE. The T&M contract style promotes (very obviously) inefficiency at every level of the delivery process, and this actually gets even worse with growing contract scope. This is tens to maybe a hundred billion dollars per year.

Congress, holistically, should embrace the notion that unspent money should not be deallocated in a future year. The “use it or lose it” approach to budgeting causes everyone subject to Congressional review to find a way (even a silly way) to consume every dollar they are handed. If, instead, authorized money were allowed to accrue for large expenses (the replacement of a technology system, refurbishing an office, expanding a field site - whatever that agency needs) it could reduce the mindset that unspent money means losing power among the thousands of beaurocrats that make purchasing decisions on behalf of our country. I genuinely have no idea how much money is burned unnecessarily this way.

The government should hire its own experts to deliver services to itself. The entire mantra of minimizing costs known up front has produced some of the most massive wastes in history. Almost everything a contractor can do for the government that’s a total cost of more than one person’s salary would be better achieved by hiring a person to do that work directly. This is most obvious (to me) in personal computers, where the government regularly buys what should be powerful, capable machines, but then forgot to specify some requirement, and is forced to purchase a machine with a spinning disk drive, or only 2GB of RAM, or a 720p display, or… Just something obviously wrong, that no one is empowered and knowledgeable to say “This is going to critically hamper the performance of every human handed one of these computers, we need to fix it”. This is done (theoretically) to save sometimes just a few dollars, and adds to the general malaise of “The government doesn’t care about whether its workers are productive” that’s one more push for people with better options to leave government. I won’t even begin to guess at the value lost through having people think of government jobs as paid daycare for those that couldn’t cut it in the commercial world, let alone the way government contractors really are, or are perceived.

There’s probably more, but… Wait, what’s that? They’re not going to be trying to remove the stranglehold of the MIC on the government purchasing apparatus? Well, maybe they can still fix that toilet seat thing.

It was a different plant, sounds almost like “holly”.

At the Walmart near me, there’s a whole set of checkout terminals intended for only a few items, but except for the absolute busiest times, they’ll put carts to block them off, including the ones in the regular self checkout area. There’s a line, but they physically remove access to some perfectly functional terminals just because.

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“Of course you can’t walk up an elevator. Sometimes you can manually open the doors, but… Wait, what’s this in the comments?”

Fruit as the basis for a measurement system? That sounds ridiculous. Use barleycorns like the rest of us!

I don’t think anyone will actually make it, but it would be cool to have an arrangement of accelerometers and microphones that you can put on the side of a packaged gift, shake it, and get a guess about what it is.

A harvesting robot that can tell how many days from ripe an avocado is, so the grocery store can have like… “ripe today” avocados, “ripe tomorrow” avocados, “ripe in 2 days” avocados. They’d come in small cardboard boxes, and they could just shift the boxes or signs over by one each day, and have more boxes if they get avocado deliveries less often.

Machine learning clothing/hairstyle/general fashion advice would be neat, but probably too open to manipulation to sell certain brands to be practical.

Tools to help developers put houses at the best spot on a lot, for things like water mitigation, tree safety, garden space in good sunlight, wind noise, and privacy.

Search tools that aren’t terrible on shopping sites, and news sites, and research journals and things. The days of “we asked Google to do it for us” being good enough are long over.

Just in case anyone wants this converted to freedom units, 9.792 km is 744 spindles, and 2,6 km is about 95 shackles. HTH

The major strategy on CWR is pretensioning, but there are also multiple kinds of expansion joints used in different circumstances. I’m not saying it’s impossible to do the same with a vacuum chamber, but I am saying there’s no simple reliable answer, and certainly no answer so obvious and bulletproof that it doesn’t even require testing before you could start construction.

Elon Musk either didn’t know or didn’t care that his company wasn’t doing the required engineering and testing to make a real functioning hyperloop.

If any part of the hundreds of miles of tube suddenly stops being a vacuum chamber, every train all along the tube is going to be hit by air rushing in, at the speed of sound, with all the turbulence that implies, while its already moving at full speed. It might be possible to engineer a capsule that will keep the people inside alive when that happens, but it is not at all the same as e.g. rail, where “stop moving fowards” depletes essentially all the energy in the system.

Very long pipes use expansion/contraction sections that may not be possible for a vacuum sealed system that has to be incredibly straight to allow the passage of a train, and can flex pretty significantly for earthquakes, seasonal temperature changes, etc.

The article I saw on the situation didn’t mention the previous trial, or his failure to comply with discovery obligations, just that a judge ruled he was liable before this trial. Now that I realize the story is “lawyer fails to defend himself properly, so his defense goes poorly”, it makes a lot more sense.

Serious question: Why are so many of these trials starting with the judge deciding guilt before any evidence or testimony? I mean, obviously, Fuck Giuliani, but this is not the way I remember due process working, and I would hate for it to become normal to go… “Ehh, we’re sure enough that he’s guilty, so we don’t have to decide that at trial.” There are so, so many cases where that’s the wrong answer, and it’s not obvious until evidence comes out at trial, and this kind of “the judge thinks you’re guilty, so fuck you” process is only one step removed from “the cop told the judge you’re guilty, so fuck you.”

Four thousand, five hundred twenty thirth. Trust me, I’m a numbers guy.

I’ve worked at a big tech company. I can all but guarantee there are some firey memes posted amongst colleagues about this situation. Unfortunately, they’re unlikely to ever become public.

I had to read Shakespeare, then read another book about how witty and clever it was to the people of the time, then write a report about how witty and clever it was, once I understood the historical context. My conclusion that having to explain jokes is the death of humor got me a C-.

1209 is 3 times 13 times 31, and cats are better at typing than they are at math.

In base 10, the sum of the digits of any number that is divisible by 3 is also divisible by 3, so 1+2+0+9=12, implies 1209 is divisible by 3.

Likewise, 1001 is divisible by 13, so if you split a number in base 10 every 3 digits, and subtract/add alternating sets of numbers, if the result is divisible by 13, the original number is, too. 209-1 is 208, which is obviously divisible by 13, so 1209 is, too.

Divisibility by 31 in base 10 is harder to check, but 999998 is divisible by 31, as is 999999999999999, so you can just split the number every 15 digits, and add those together, and if the sum is divisible by 31… I’m talking about math to a cat.

An r320 is new enough that iDrac Express (two IPs on one interface) is available in the BIOS. The server needs a license for some features (like remotely attaching an ISO, and remote KVM), but not for the basics like controlling the power.

I just put saltines on them.

They discontinued the unlimited storage plan, so he can’t still be paying for the unlimited storage. I’m not a big fan of Google’s “I’m not seeing a return yet, better kill this product” approach, but it has been their MO for a long time. I think by now everyone doing business with them knows who they are.