I feel compelled to quote the late great Sean Lock:

"I'm incredibly organised. Like for example, if I make tea, I don't make one cup of tea - I'll make a big batch of tea and then I'll have a cup of tea and then I'll freeze the rest of it. And then when I want to have a cup of tea, I'll just break off a bit of frozen tea. Put it in a pan. 25 minutes later I've got a lovely cup of tea without all the all the hassle."

Not saying that the US isn't in fiscal crisis, I'm not at all qualified to say either way, but: Comparing government balance sheets to household finances is a age-old conservative folly designed to encourage the working class to support smaller government in order to reduce taxes on the rich - in other words, encourage the turkeys to vote for Christmas (or in this case maybe Thanksgiving?).

The fact is that government finances and household finances are not at all the same thing, for many reasons I'm not qualified to explain, but a couple of obvious ones:

• Households can't choose to tax the rich to increase income.
• Households can't print money.
• Households can't secure low-interest loans that extend beyond their lifetimes (i.e. issue bonds).
• Households don't typically find spending increases income (i.e. Government workers pay taxes, infrastructure investment drives growth which increases tax revenue, etc etc).

The UK Conservatives used this line of reasoning around 2010 and it's led to 15 years of growth stagnation with no real improvement in the debt situation.

The thing that really grinds my gears is the excessive use of "he/she". Workplace training is a regular offender for this. Just use the word "they" FFS, it's sat right there on the shelf for you.

Or don't, just go with "he" or "she", this fictional person in your 'case study' isn't real, they don't give a shit.

The real question is why did they install a system based on 5.25" floppy disks in 1998 in the first place!?

The 5.25" floppy was surpassed by the 3.5" floppy by 1988 - ten years prior to this systems installation - and by 1998 most new software was being distributed on CD-ROM. So by my reckoning, in 1998 they installed a 'new' system based on hardware that was 1.5 generations out-of-date and haven't updated it in the 26 years since.

Great to recognise this invention.

I was surprised by the choice of 'Mother of Wi-Fi' though - Wi-Fi hasn't used 'frequency hopping' as such since 802.11b was released back in 1999 - so very few people will have ever used frequency-hopping Wi-Fi.

GPS only uses it in some extreme cases I think, but I'm not an expert.

However, Bluetooth absolutely does depend on it to function in most situations, so 'Mother of Bluetooth' might have been more appropriate.

I agree it's good that the article is not hyping up the idea that the world will now definitely be saved by fusion and so we can all therefore go on consuming all the energy we want.

There are still some sloppy things about the article that disappoint me though...

1. They seem to be implying that 500 TW is obviously much larger than 2.1 MJ... but without knowing how long the 500 TW is required for, this comparison is meaningless.

2. They imply that using more power than available from the grid is infeasible, but it evidently isn't as they've done it multiple times - presumably by charging up local energy storage and releasing it quickly. Scaling this up is obviously a challenge though.

3. The weird mix of metric prefixes (mega) and standard numbers (trillions) in a single sentence is a bit triggering - that might just be me though.

More of a famous quote I guess, but:

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Since I first heard it, I've been far less annoyed / paranoid about other peoples actions, at work in particular.

I've been 100% linux for my daily home computing for over a year now... With one exception... To be honest I didn't even try particularly hard to make gaming work under Linux.

Instead I have a Windows VM - setup with full passthrough access to my GPU and it's own NVME - just for Windows gaming. To my mind now it's in the same category as running console emulation.

As soon as I click shutdown in windows, it pops me straight back into my Linux desktop.

I guess my point is that it isn't a particularly important part of the design of Wi-Fi - they included it in the very first iteration in 1997 and realised by 1999 they didn't need it. Therefore Wi-Fi would likely have been born regardless of the invention; Bluetooth would not.

1440p for the win!

Yelp still exists!?

Who is finding a McDonalds location on their phone's map app and then thinking "I'd better cross-check this against Yelp first"!?

If the US gets a new president in 2029, I'll be devastated if they don't take the opportunity to do a major speach or something against the backdrop of a half derelict East Wing - it would be iconic.

I've found all of the tabs on Google have a tendency to go AWOL these days - like the other day I was searching for camera lenses and Google took away the 'Products' (formerly kmown as 'Shopping') tab, even though what I was searching for couldn't have been more obviously a product. Instead, all I could get were super low quality copy-paste blogs vaguely related to the product.

Is a peacoat a coat soaked in pee?

If Newey ends up at Ferrari in time to design their 2026 car, Hamilton has either lucked into a second stunning career move or he's known all along...

This video of one of the rioters getting repeatedly struck with bricks thrown by his own mates is well worth a watch... Or two... Or three...

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/watch-rioting-southport-thug-bricks-33362943.amp&ved=2ahUKEwiglLKFltGHAxUjRkEAHThnAI4Q0PADKAB6BAgSEAE&usg=AOvVaw0uamrR8Do7LsyZ53ECNnN5

After being very confused by this picture, I just went down a rabbit hole researching the use of "corned beef" across the English speaking world..

As far as I can tell:

• US/Canada call this corned beef, and it's made from brisket.
• UK/ex-Commonwealth call this salt beef, again made from brisket, and corned beef is very different mushy canned meat product
• In Ireland it seems, from looking at the website for one of their supermarkets, they just call everything corned beef? The canned mush, raw brisket, this - all "corned beef"?

I also wasn't aware so had a search.

If you don't mind Reddit, this thread is interesting... https://www.reddit.com/r/rails/comments/133lcyl/can_someone_explain_what_happened_with_the/

Or there's this... https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/3/22418208/basecamp-all-hands-meeting-employee-resignations-buyouts-implosion

Edit: Actually this is probably the most comprehensive summary: https://schneems.com/2021/05/12/the-room-where-it-happens-how-rails-gets-made/#the-basecamp-incident

Heh, pretty much every kitchen in the UK - in homes and in offices - has a kettle that can boil a litre of water in 3-4 minutes. You can buy them in the supermarket for around £20.

And then there's this beauty my wife treated me to a while back... https://www.sageappliances.com/en-gb/product/bke825?sku=SKE825BSS3GUK1

Embrace the analogue radio.

Do take rest stops - you won't realise you're tired until it's too late.