The obvious reasons. People who do not have political agency should not have decisions made that prevent them from using their own devices in a setting that they are legally required to be in. That's not how things should work. One group of people should not be setting policy for another group of people in this matter. The victims of these policies aren't infants; they will be adults in about five minutes. Blankets bans and these idiotic 'oh just ban phones/computers entirely, pen and paper am i rite?' ideas have a ton of nasty externalities that no one seems to care about. They reduce the quality of life for people who rely on AAC (having your actual voice on the device you carry day to day is nice, having a lesser experience without your actual data is intolerable + 'everyone' having the kind of device that you use for this purpose prevents you from standing out at all times) in service of chasing and responding to a moral panic. In the real world, kids just unenroll Chromebooks via the nine million exploits that have been found over the years (many of which are unpatched and some are hardware flaws) and load software that lies to the management system about the state of the device. They do whatever they want on on those devices - which is mostly 'doing their actual work without staff being able to spy on their screen/being able to play a simple game when they have no work to do'. The people using phones in class are the exact same people who were using iPods in class, were using non-smartphones in class to text constantly, using Discmans in class and so on. To pretend that smartphones are somehow different from that past involves gesturing towards pseudoscience and non-credible actors. For more on this: https://www.techdirt.com/2026/01/21/two-major-studies-125000-kids-the-social-media-panic-doesnt-hold-up/ These policies have both possible problems - the 'gun control problem' (you can't really achieve anything that you claim to care about while also issuing kids laptops + you have to issue laptops in order to much of the kind of relevant teaching necessary in 2026) and also the problem of the policy itself not addressing an actual real problem that exists - it's mostly a moral panic about social media, not some real problem of widespread usage of phones during class. The people who are interested in learning will learn, the others will not, that's that. People should be treated as individuals rather than a faceless blob of youth who need hostile policy designed for them. I'd also remind lawmakers that these people will be adults in about five minutes and resentment can easily carry over into the voting booth. By the way, the Oregon ban is illegal and will be tossed out the moment that it gets to the appropriate level of judicial review - the Governor cannot make law.
I wish there was a way to make this decision rationally. My wife and I are coming up to the point of no return. We either do it now, or never. Now let's try to figure this out: Do we have enough money? Yes, probably. We could survive 10 years without making another dime. I don't know what kind of safety net is recommended, but people do it with a lot less. We live in a country with free health care, so illness won't end our lives like it does in the USA. With that out of the way, let's get to all the other points: How much do I want children? Personally, I don't get it. If my wife wasn't dead-certain she _must_ have at least one child, I would never, ever consider it. I hate noise and chaos. I even find co-habitation challenging. I was an only child and I think I'm mildly autistic. To me, 'alone time' and 'quiet time' are sacred and required for my sanity. Well, I know that goes out the window with children. My wife is the opposite: Many siblings, has always been around noise and chaos. Loves giving love. To me, the dog, to anyone. And that is why she seems to have this need. So, the decision is: Do I give up what I want, to make her happy? Her happiness is about as important to me as my own. So that's a stalemate. She keeps saying how worried she is that it will ruin my life. But I also don't want us to split up over this, knowing that I have 'taken' her fertile years. She won't have a kid except with me. So that's also a stalemate. I have had a pretty terrible childhood. So I know I'm biased. I don't want to let fear dictate my life. Almost any occasion where I've stepped outside my comfort zone or done things I didn't want to do out of fear turned out to be things I was grateful to have done. I can also see how raising children could be very rewarding. Even my therapist said it can be very healing to have children. It's an opportunity to do better than my parents. That's valuable, for sure. And then I think of the state of the world. Awful. I wouldn't want to bring children into this. I'd even probably say to my own mother 'don't bother' if she'd come to consult me about whether to have me first. But then I spoke to my granddad, who was a teenager during the 2nd world war. He is also probably mildly autistic. He said it was the best thing he ever did. Had multiple kids. If I look at my wife's family, they are all happy, successful, harmonious people (now). I look at my wife's parents and think "what a blessing". The richness of life they get to experience is just magical. If I could somehow guarantee that it'd go that way for me as well, then I'd have kids already. But there are no guarantees, just uncertainty. Uncertainty of the "life changes forever, irrevocably" kind. That is brutal and scary. The last time I made a similar decision was when starting a business. I knew I went down a road that would require stability and dedication. I'm a volatile person who quickly gets bored of things and wants to move on to other things. Thanks to my wife I've done a bunch of things I never thought I'd do, because they require dedication and consistency. Something I don't really have. Renovating houses, starting businesses. I surprised myself with what I was capable of. All thanks to my wife. I also think it's basically a crime to not let her raise a human being. I am certain anyone raised by her would be a net positive to society. But then there's me and my issues. I don't know how I'll deal with it. I don't know what will happen. There's a chance I can't do it. And what then? Divorce? Repeat the cycle of putting children into the world and abandoning them, like my parents did, because they also couldn't handle it? They were very young and had no money or support. Their relationship was also broken. My wife and I are 'old' and we have money and we have been an unbeatable team for well over a decade. We also have support. Grand-parents are basically next door and dying to help with raising a kid. So we are in a privileged position. But my fear of taking this step is not going away. And I won't know what it'll be like. Parents look so tired. Many of my friends are parents. They all seem to offer the same advice "it's hell on earth, I hate every moment of it, it's the best thing I've ever done". Awesome. What am I supposed to do with that? It's useless advice. It seems nobody can really tell you whether to do it or not. Any people here who were equally fearful and then did it, NOT regretting it? And I mean truly. I don't want to hear the "I love my kids"-mantra. It's an automated thing everyone has to say. I mean truly.
Fred Rogers advised François Clemmons, an openly gay cast member, to remain closeted and even suggested he marry a woman to protect the show's viability.[1] Terry Crews? Porn addict. [2] Lin Manuel Miranda "blindly asks BIPOC performers to act in a piece detailing historical events benefiting their oppressors." [3] Henry Cavill undermined the #MeToo movement saying he feared being called a "rapist" if he pursued women. [4] John Cena buries talent... used his backstage influence to undermine the momentum of new stars (remember The Nexus in 2010, CM Punk etc) [5] Steve Irwin fed a crocodille while holding his month-old son, putting him in danger. [6] Dave Grohl? Chronic infidelity. [7] All these men are way better than me, for sure. But you can see how these arguments against Chuck Norris are a slippery slope: > The homophobia? The racism? The infidelity? The conspiracy theories? You're cherry-picking virtues from people aligned with your politics and ignoring the good things your perceived "adversaries" have. [1] https://www.npr.org/2020/04/30/847315345/officer-clemmons-mister-rogers-neighborhood-policeman-pal-tells-his-story [2] https://www.addictioncenter.com/community/terry-crews-pornography-addiction/ [3] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/12/9/unpop-opinion-color-blind-casting/ [4] https://culturess.com/2018/07/13/henry-cavill-missed-point-metoo-isnt-alone [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQr5ZD6fr0g&t=3s [6] https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-47343688 [7] https://www.gutinstinctmedia.com/latest-articles/a-rockstar-exit-dave-grohls-history-of-affairs
> Would you be comfortable using this same logic to invest most of your net worth in lottery tickets/betting on black in a casino? I wouldn't "invest" in lottery tickets because for these p is far too small (exception: if I found a loophole in the system of the lottery, which has been found for some lotteries). For casinos, there is additionally the very important aspect that the casino will scam you (if you start winning money (for example by having found some clever strategy that gives you an advantage), the security will escort you out of the building and ban you from entering the casino again). So, to give an explanation of the differences: - Because "the typical run" for such an investment will be loosing, you should never invest your whole net worth (or a significant fraction thereof) into such an investment. The advice that I personally often give is to use index funds or stock investments for generating the money for investments that are much more risky, but have huge possible payouts. - You should only do such an "early investment" if you have a significant information advantage over the average person. Such an advantage is plausible, for example, if you are deeply interested in technology topics - Lottery tickets have an insanely small p (as defined in my comment). You only do "early investments" into topics where the p is still small, but not absurdly bad. The difference is that for lottery tickets the p is basically well-known. On the other hand, for "early investments", people can only estimate the p. Because of your information advantage from the previous point, you can estimate the p much better than other people, which gains you a strong advantage in picking the right "early investments" to choose. But be aware that this is a strategy for risk-affine people. If you aren't, you better stay, for example, with index funds.
The discussion is centered around the idea that "adopting early" provides some future proofing in a rapidly evolving (and largely non-standard) terrain. I share the FAs' position that it does not. > The web is special in this sense, it's intentionally long-lived warts and all. So the fundamentals pay outsized dividends. Fundamentals pay dividends, but what makes you think that what you learn as an early adopter are fundamentals? Fundamentals is knowledge that is deemed intemporal, not "just discovered". The historical web and its simplicity are as available to anyone today as it was back then. People can still learn HTML today and make table-based layouts. HTML is still HTML, whether you learned it then or today. But if back then you intended to become a professional front-end developer, you would still have to contend with the tremendous difficulties that some seem to have forgotten out of nostalgia. You'd soon have to also learn CSS in its early and buggy drafts, then (mostly non-standard) JavaScript (Netscape and IE6) and the multiple browser bugs that required all kinds of hacks and shims. Then you'd have to keep up with the cycles of changing front-end tools and practices, as efforts to put some sense into the madness were moved there. Much in all that knowledge went nowhere since it was not always part of a progression , but rather a set of competing cycles. Fundamentals are indisputably relevant, but they're knowledge that emerge as victorious after all the fluff of uncertainty has been left behind. Front-end development is only now settling into that phase. With LLMs we're still figuring out where we're going.
My experience with customer support with every major company has always been a miserable one. The fundamental problem from my perspective is that if I've decided to call support that means I've already exhausted any other alternatives, and most likely my issue is one that explicitly requires human intervention because I've found myself wedged into a crack in the self-serve systems. I'm not particularly bothered by waiting 15 minutes, but what pisses me off the most is that when I finally do get a person they're also not empowered to do anything except read to me from a script that is word-for-word identical to the documentation on the website which was written by Legal instead of someone technically competent. What I really want is something like https://xkcd.com/806/ to be a real thing. In a fit of irony, the one time I got somewhere useful was when I called Comcast/Xfinity. I was able to isolate a problem with my connection to an aggregation router in their network that was not very far away from me, and I happened to know was in the middle of a major public construction zone. I actually managed to get someone on the line finally who could direct information to their network engineering team and it was discovered that there was a partial fiber cut caused by the construction and it was repaired a few hours later. It's hard for me say anything positive about Comcast, but I was pleasantly surprised that day that I was able to get information to someone who could do something with it, even though it was not exactly the smoothest process. Most companies you just run into a competence wall. Generally speaking, I am not calling because I don't know what to do or don't understand something (unless its a lack of understanding in the sense that the company's process is utterly stupid and therefore incomprehensible). I'm calling because I fully understand what needs to happen, I've thoroughly investigated my issue and identified an appropriate outcome, and I have a good understanding of the systems involved. I simply lack the necessary access to make it happen and resolve my issue, so the customer support line is simply a gatekeeper. In the infinite cost-cutting wisdom of miserable bean counters everywhere, customer support has been so disempowered in most cases that they are then gatekept from actually doing anything also, and are often bottom-dollar workers in cheaper third-world countries, so also lack the competence, context, and care to actually effect any positive outcome even if they have the access. Realistically, customer support systems are not customer support systems, they are legal compliance systems that are designed to find the cheapest and most defensible way to tell your customers to fuck off after you already have their money.
SAR operates in side-looking slant geometry. Consider shooting a ray at the ocean at an oblique angle from a satellite: it bounces off and scatters away from you. Hardly any of the energy scatters back towards you. Now, put a ship there. The ray bounces off the surface of the ocean and scatters up into the side of the ship, and from geometry, it's going to bounce off the ship and come straight back towards its original source. You get tons of energy coming back at you. A ship on the ocean is basically a dihedral corner reflector, which is a very good target for a radar. > I'm having a hard time imagining a sufficiently high radar resolution for such a wide sensor swath width at such an extreme range. Is the idea that you locate it with the wide sensor swath and then get a detailed radar signature from a more precise sensor? That's one approach, there are so-called "tip and cue" concepts that do exactly this: a lead satellite will operate in a wide swath mode to detect targets, and then feed them back to a chase satellite which is operating in a high resolution spotlight mode to collect detailed radar images of the target for classification and identification. However, aircraft carriers are big , so I don't think you'd even need to do the followup spotlight mode for identification. As an example, RADARSAT-2 does 35 meter resolution at a 450 km swath for its ship detection mode. That's plenty to be able to detect and identify an aircraft carrier, and that's a 20 year old civilian mission with public documentation, not a cutting edge military surveillance system. There are concepts for multi-aperture systems that can hit resolutions of less than ten meters at 500 km swath width using digital beamforming, like Germany's HRWS concept. tl;dr: Radar works very well for this.
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