MattCarp said:

Interesting to see all the downvotes. This is exactly why there has not been any consensus and action on immigration.

However, we’re now at a level where the costs are too high for some. How many are some? We’ll find out in November.

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It is hard to believe an Ars reader could be so uninformed. There has been plenty of consensus and action on border issues. Just this year, Senators from both sides of the aisle hammered out a very extensive proposal. It had wide support until Trump made a phone call and killed it for what he freely admits were purely political reasons. The only real difference of opinion comes from the extreme right-wing. Most people in any political party in the US are for strong control over illegal immigration. It is just that Trump and the far right hate all immigrants, legal or not. Notice he just says "immigrant" now in his tirades, he does not even bother with the word "illegal" anymore.

Genome said:

Bardella has Italian and Algerian ancestry. I guess he thinks that he’s white-passing enough. Rational thought isn’t a strong suit for these people.

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It's totally rational to think that whiteness is a skin color and not some legalese thing tied to nationality or whatever. "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time". RN politicians and electors say they don't like Arabs/muslims and (too much) colored people. It's really simple, listen to what they say. They act perfectly accordingly.

iljitsch said:

So when the IF on line 1860 evaluates to true, everything from THEN to end of line is executed. So you need that GOTO to skip over line 1870 that handles the ELSE situation.

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I grew up with BBC BASIC, which had IF, THEN and ELSE; as well as named functions and 'procedures'. It entirely avoided the use of GOSUB and GOTO <line number>. It also had REPEAT .. UNTIL. Later version had WHILE.

I really like Mexico's new President. Being a scientist, I would imagine she can understand the danger of letting another country wall off your water supply to the north. Would be nice to see Mexico sue for what is being done. Can they even do it? Outside pressure is the only thing likely to make anyone inside the US look at the problem.

"The great thing about SHARKFEST is that you're seeing new, cutting-edge science that may or may not work,"

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How is this science? What is being learned here?

Secondfloor said:

From your post history I see you’ve been drinking Rossman’s Kool-Aid for a long time. I’m not sure how I can get across to you that his interests are not your interests.

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Erm... Simple. Like with any other subject. Facts, Sound reasoning, Concise arguments regarding the case. But instead of doing that, you try to frame my post history as evidence of me being partial... You know what? That's a fun exercise! Let's do it! Over the last 10 years I averaged 16.3 comments a year- so there is not really much to go over. But among those few comment, I referenced Rossman... One Time in a single thread... That's it. Even that thread was about parts serialisation.

Oh crap I forgot. I did reference the CBC piece about Apple repairability with Jessa Jones. That basically said the same thing as Rossman. So I drank two Kool-Aid apparently.

Secondfloor said:

Think of how Epic said they were doing it for the small devs, when actually they were just doing it for themselves.

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This is again nothing substantive, just whataboutism. To answer your point Epic is not a company I like very much and they are just as self-centred as any company. But regardless of that, (at least in my opinion) their actions directly induced legalisation like the european "Digital Markets Act". Now you can argue whether it is a good thing or not. But it is a fact that Apple and others did create an imbalance in the market that legislators assessed as substantive enough to make a law for it.

Secondfloor said:

Rossman cares nothing about anything except the money in his pocket.

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Sigh... You do realise that for years and years there was no monetisation on his channel? And he himself openly advocates to his viewers to use ad-block freely on his videos. Quite the personal and corporate greed there...

graylshaped said:

If that's true for every user on any shared macs you have, then you are giving every user admin rights, which is a sub-optimal use of having user accounts at all.

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Not so.

If you are logged into an admin account and you're doing admin-type things, macOS will ask for your password to allow it to proceed. The main exception, from memory, is dragging and dropping an application into the system-wide Applications folder (but running a package installer requires the password.)

If you are logged into a non admin account and you're doing admin-type things, macOS will ask for an admin username and password to allow it to proceed. This includes dragging and dropping an application into the system-wide Applications folder. You can still do the thing - but only if you know an admin username and the password that goes with it. If you've been set up as a regular user and don't have an admin username/password combo, you can't do admin-type things.

The latter setup - being logged into a non admin account - is how I run my Mac Studio, and how I ran my Mac Pro before it was retired (it's still sitting there, but it's not been powered on in quite some time.) The admin account is there, and I can use the username and password when admin credentials are needed, but my main account has no rights to do admin-type stuff on its own. I have a few family members who also have logins to my Mac Studio, but they don't know the admin username or password, so they can't alter the administrative-level stuff.

Indeed. But something like "Computer, make an app that plays MIDI files, using standard audio controls" -- which is almost entirely boilerplate-- should be possible a few years from now. "Oh, and throw in a QuickLook preview, while you're at it."

(Thus addressing a 15-year-old regression in QuickTime Player....)

The crowns are getting increasingly more munted.

The DCG said:

I dunno, fam. Even if you're right, I don't think "Won't someone think of the shareholders?" is gonna fly really well in this thread.

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As I keep saying, the most generally prosperous era in the US - the golden age where a single breadwinner could support an entire family and the middle class was the major part of the population - was under FDR, in a system where unionization was ubiquitous, social services and living minimum wages were a thing, and taxes could reach 90% for the highest income brackets for both people and corporations.

The current dystopia has grown concomitant to the rate at which these fairly socialist mechanisms were dismantled.
Capital will still be invested at maximum rates if the roi is 2:1 rather than 20:1, and the nation as a whole will be much healthier when the purpose of the currency and economy is that of production rather than ending up in Scrooge McDuck's money vault.

Uncivil Servant said:

As the article notes, previous COAs showed undetectable levels of muscimol. If those COAs were from CLIA-certfied labs, they're accurate or those labs are in deeper shit than any mushroom could dream of: CLIA is overseen by CMS, and if the Jaws theme isn't playing in your head at that acronym, then you don't work in medicine.

So I'm going to take the word of CLIA-certified lab COAs and whatever government lab found 4-Aco-DMT in these candies, over the word of executives desperate for a regulatory violation because the CSA is one of the few criminal laws less friendly to defendants than regulatory law.

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the issue is the lack of regulation of supplements. there is no real information how often products were tested, how they were sampled etc. for what we know they might have been tested once, or multiple times until the results were satisfactory... so all that was done seem to be mostly voluntary tests by the brand company.
on the other hand i spotted typos (fortunately inconsequential ones) in the reports and i'm not a trained chemist so the quality of the data might not be great too.

4:00 AM. No Coffee. No Yellow.

Wordle 1,108 5/6*

fellow human said:

Thanks for this. What’s your drive config for that NAS? I’m running 2x4TB and 2x8TB HDDs with btrfs, 1 disk redundancy etc. and I think even getting 1Gb out of it is pushing it. The SoC just isn’t that strong.

I’m sure it’s great with SSDs and/or striping though.

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It's a Synology DS218+, with "8 TB" Seagate drives in both bays in a mirroring configuration. Note that the drives are pretty close to full, with around 400 GB free space.

I did some more testing. It looks like using the cp command in the terminal (handy because then I can put "time" in front of it so no manual stopwatching) is somewhat slower than using the Finder to copy files.

At 1 Gbps I could get a pretty consistent 110 MB/sec (fake 10^6 MBs, not real 2^20 ones, but at least so far nobody has redefined the second...). That's close to the theoretical max, which is something like 117. But at 2.5 Gbps the write speed to the NAS initially starts well over 200 MB/sec (data going into the cache?) but then things slow down and I get an inconsistent 100 - 200 MB/sec. Like so:



This shows the data read from the local SSD, but the network traffic looks the same.

Interestingly, files that got on the NAS through BitTorrent are slower and the drives rattle more than "normal" files written start to finish. As BitTorrent tends to download parts of files in random order, I guess those files end up on the drives fragmented.

I also did a test with a USB HDD to/from my Mac and that gave me about 120 MB/sec. So assuming those 3.5" Seagates are about the same speed as this 2.5" drive and good parallel reading of data, it should be possible to get well over 200 MB/sec, right?

Trondal said:

Side question: can you point me to data on this? Not doubting you, but would be interested to see. I'd assume that the numbers are roughly equivalent to US firms.

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For the drug price discrepancy? That's easy enough to establish and you don't need me to point you towards an over-the-counter or prescription cost comparison.

As to the audit results? No, for the same reason that we can not know the exact breakdowns of R&D expenses in the US. An audit of this kind is closed and the information handed over to authorities such as national statistics centres and similar are under strict secrecy/confidentiality. What comes out of it, however, is aggregated information which once again points to a self-evident conclusion.

There have been think tanks who have gone through the data in Sweden at least. The conclusion is that much of national pharma is outsourced to universities and the "R&D investments" show up as grants to university researchers who perform the bulk of the core research.
Leading to a whole mess of concerns, most of which would be centered around to which extent partially tax funded research is handed over, in the form of patents, to pharma companies to develop further.

To address an elephant in the room of your statements above, however;

My theory is that the US is subsidizing the world by paying outrageous amounts. In other words if everyone paid that much, the companies couldn't do as much R&D. Maybe we'll see but I'm sick of the high prices here.

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That's an assertion incredibly hyped and pushed by the pharma lobby. It's a talking point which has no backing what so ever.
And this is also self-evident bullshit.
Pharma companies don't have to do business outside of the US. If the european price controls/negotiations are a net loss, why do the pharma companies keep selling to those places? No one has a gun to the head of Pfizer telling them they need to sell medicine to the EU at a net loss - and in fact, the CEO would in such a case be forced to cut that market off.

I.e. your theory is disproven by the simplest nonpartisan logic. It's a lie which assumes that pharma companies are willing to eat a massive net loss in several markets. A lie told so often it's become normalized even among those who ought to know better.

The US isn't subsidizing anything of the sort, because if any company eats a net loss in a market then they leave that market. That's how basic capitalism works. It is, however, very much in the interest of pharma companies to push a narrative so twisted it resembles what Big Tobacco used to say about the "Benefits of smoking".

Finally, about R&D...did you know that a substantial competitor to Big Pharma in the area of vaccines and cheap cures used to be third world countries such as Cuba? Biology research tends not to consume vast sums. Compared to NASA and other forms of research demanding precision tooling and high-rarity materials, bio-research is incredibly cheap. Hell, Cuba actually did build a Covid vaccine which, even if not quite as effective as that of the mainline labels, did save massive amounts of lives. And they produced that on publicly available research and a shoestring budget.

The entire premise that you need enormous sums of money to perform biological R&D is a falsehood in the first place. Again proven by the most basic logic of looking at similar results being produced by comparative ramshackle operations outside of the US.

So why is R&D considered such a vast expense post specifically in the US? My own personal theory is that pharma wants to keep that number as high as possible and has, similar to Hollywood accounting, a massive shell game going to circulate "R&D" money internally until they're either funnelled straight back into the company while still presenting a nominal "cost" to be presented to the IRS - or in the acquisition of assets which serve dual use (a research center doubling as a dormitory for staff, or including offices for legal and finance, for example).
We'll never know what exactly is done with the money unless an audit is somehow leaked, but we can still look at comparative research having been made by outfits a lot smaller which still produce sufficient results to be competitive and know that there's something fundamentally wrong with the numbers presented on the spreadsheet.

Your fundamental premises are wrong. This renders a lot of your argumentation invalid.

Finally to address this bit;

But as a principal, capital has to be attracted based on a risk/return proposition. I don't know where or how to draw the line for profits vs. incentives.

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That calculation has been performed a great many times - in fact, there was a time when the US was the frontrunner of price capping and regulation. I advise you look at what is today called a golden era of the US - postwar america, under FDR. Taxes were at 90% at the highest bracket. Social services, minimum wage, unionization...all at the peak. As was the booming economy.

As those - by any reckoning, incredibly socialist - measures were gradually dismantled the result became one of wealth concentration. Leading, in the end, to the dystopian shitpit you're in now where the average american, even the erudite one, takes for granted that you need to bribe the already wealthy with the guarantee of outrageous roi's unless they threaten to take their money and leave.
And what led y'all to this point was the tacit assumption that billionaires, banks and hedge fund managers being allowed to plunder the public purse unhindered is the only way you can gain prosperity. It's not, as your own past proves conclusively.

If you tell every investor they get to look at a 2:1 or 3:1 roi instead of a 10:1 or 20:1, do you think they'll stop investing? Stop making money even if the money earned is less?
Other investors will. The market should apply in the investment sector as well - yet it doesn't, right now.

arcite said:

Classic divide and conquer strategy. Allow the far-right to get their foot in the door, which terrifies the far-left toward the centre. The centre must hold. Scary purple surge on the right….

View attachment 84328

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Piketty predicted these shifts (that voters would be increasingly attracted to political extremes with support collapsing for the centrist middle).

Looking like Hari Seldon right now.

The Jovians neglected to take out the extended warranty on their spot (despite many calls urging them to do so at a very reasonable rate) so had to save up for a century to buy a new one.

Shavano said:

Metric was made necessary when the Americans and the British couldn't agree on the size of a pint.

Change My Mind

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If we're going there, let's really acknowledge the insanity. And this is not intended to poke fun at Americans for still using it, just the sheer level of "dear god why?!", cried out in pain at our mutual ancestors who originated the fucking thing (1).

Firstly, there are some genuinely sensible units in there. Even as a metric-sexual, I have to admit, inches and feet are actually genuinely useful "ish" values, and I do occasionally use multiples of them myself. On the other hand, mathematics is a beutiful and elegant thing, and we just start there by making it awkward.

Because of course, inches are 1/12th of a foot. Not 1/16th. Sure, 12 is a really sexy number, gotta love all of those divisors, but that means we need a secondary multiplication table, we can't just stick with powers of 2. And why stop there? Let's have 14 pounds in a stone, but only 8 stone in a hundredweight. On the one hand, yay, power of 2, but on the other hand, that means a hundredweight is 112lb. Would it not have made more sense to have a stone as 12lb and a hundredweight as 96lb, one might ask? One might not, fuck off with your logic right there.

Going in the other direction, one starts by dividing inches up into fractional powers of 2. Which, great, that looks like a system, and a natural one two, because it's much easier to divide something accurately into 2 than it is into 10. So we have 1/2, 1/4, 1/64 and so on. But, of course, then the industrial revolution came around, and we both needed much finer measures, and the ability to calculate those finer measures with, at best, a slide-rule. So at some point, you have to start mixing, say, a rod sized in thousands of an inch with a thread sized in 1/64ths of an inch, and good luck with that (insert pained rage face here)

Meanwhile, inches and feet are great for small scale stuff, but they get to a bit of a pain when you need to know the size of a field, or the distance to market. So we have a progressively larger set of units, all of which are, with the benefit of hindsight, thoroughly silly.

A yard is 3 feet. Not 2, not 8, not 12, not 16. 3. Great, not even a multiple of 2, never mind a power. Ternary it is! (And while we're on the subject, a barleycorn was 1/3rd of an inch)

A fathom is 6 feet, and a cable-length is 100 fathoms, ish.

A chain is 22 yards long.

A furlong is 10 chains long (... so we're throwing some decimal in for good measure? Cool.)

And then we come to miles. Which have no fewer than 22 different definitions on WIkipedia, and while many of those are minor variations defined by different countries, England used no fewer than 4 definitions simultaneously (The old mile of about 2100m; the statue mile of 8 furlongs, except not those furlongs the nautical mile of 60 arcseconds at the equator, defined as such long before there was any kind of general agreement on the size of the Earth(2), and the roman mile, because of course)

I could go on, and one day I will be annoyed enough to do so, because metrology and its history is fascinating even if it is infuriating, but just going through some of the basic distances and weights, never mind volumes, we're up to multiples of, count them:

• 2
• 3
• 6
• 8
• 10
• 12
• 14
• 15.5 (did I mention perches?)
• 22

Some of those are degenerate - if you can work with powers of 2, then 8 and 16 kinda come along for free, but still. In a world where we can bang out replicas of known dimensions to high precision and in industrial quantities (so, basically, post 1750 ish), the relationship to natural units such as the width of a finger, or the length of a foot, or the height of a man, became much less important. And the need for precision made the complexity of the system a bit of a liability compared to the elegance of the metric system (3)

---

(1) Yes, I know why it developed this way: much of this originated long before standardisation was needed for anything other than tax purposes, all you had as a reference were natural units such as relations to body parts, and the communications and travel technology of the day amounted to "shouting" and "walking" respectively, so as long as a local area of villages could roughly agree, it was Good Enough.

The thing is, standardisation was important long before improvements in communications technology moved even as far as the metalled road, and figures in authority - from the king, emperor or pope, all the way down to local landowner - had strong incentives to agree upon known values, either locally or throughout a whole polity, because tax, and rent. Within Britain, commonly defined weights and measures were in place before the writing of the Doomsday book, and while those common measures would not have been as ubiqitously equal as they are today, there was still interest in ensuring that the pound of grain paid in tax in the east was about the same weight as the pound of grain paid in tax in the west.

(2) As annoying as they are today - they get used for measuring altitude, which is just bonkers - nm are a case of technology preceding knowledge. While the sextant as we would recognise it today only showed up in the early 1700s, meaningful measurements of latitude via the stars was used for navigation in the 1500s.

(3) Pocket calculators post about 1965 have helped reduce the complexity of conversion, and I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge that wonders of the world were built with, not in spite of such measurement systems - from the pyramids of antiquity to the wonders of the industrial age. Vast creations like the SS Great Eastern, to the tiniest, finest clockwork.

Oohh nice. I have worked on the instrument for the sounder as an AIT engineer and was just about to check out if there any updates on the launch date as I work somewhere else now.
So I guess I got my update now

eldonyo said:

If you're experienced with these types of products you know not to eat the whole package at one time. There may be potency issues, but there are also failure to heed the label issues, too. This also happens with products bought at legitimate dispensaries.

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those products were not supposed to contain muscimol or any other psychoactive alcaloid found in mushrooms for that matter. those products were even tested for that. there is no "potency issues". so you know where you can stick your argument in.
i would question intelligence of anyone buying this kind of products, no problem, but this is not the issue here.

Don't think you can buy them new anymore these days, though?

Disclaimer: Happy PS2 owner.

That JD Power survey quoted above is notorious among PS2 owner circles. Mainly because there is no methodology, no sample size, no idea where the hell they got the numbers from.

The initial article stated that PS2 owners had complained about the battery, transmission and engine. Which led me to six hours of thoroughly checking my car to find the transmission and engine...

(It was fixed in a later published version.)

Bardella has Italian and Algerian ancestry. I guess he thinks that he’s white-passing enough. Rational thought isn’t a strong suit for these people.

A_Very_Tired_Geek said:

Holy crap! That's the infamous fly agaric mushroom. Not necessarily deadly, but definitely not a pleasant experience when eaten. Bet these guys were going around without an experienced mushroom hunter and picking mushrooms that look vaguely like Psilocybin mushrooms. Looks close enough, riiiight?!

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i mean... you need to be very much legally blind to mistake one for another. below are comparison pictures (and it took me quite a while to find ones that do resemble each other a bit). let me repeat this again - they were adding other "medicinal" (as in not psychoactive but with dubious health benefit claims) mushrooms. most likely poor quality control of their sourcing for material that gets easily contaminated during production and storage ("boss this red mushroom fell into the container what should i do? eh, we are not wasting whole container of lion's mane, it's fine, ship it.") resulted in some amounts of unwanted chemicals in their confectionery. they tried to cover their asses by doing some amount of testing but the quality of them is questionable. i pointed this in previous article and Beth mentioned it now too. sadly the most likely shruumz will go under without any serious consequences and prophet belnds will just rebrand it to another product. supplements regulation is a joke, not only in usa but in other countries as well.

For no discernible reason, I woke up at 1:30.

Now it's 3:47, and I'm approaching the point where I give up on the idea of getting back to sleep, and start drinking coffee instead.

Wordle 1,108 4/6*






I found a broken crown!