I’m always thankful for these updates. Today it struck me the difference in Russian casualties here compared to the Soviet Afghan war. According to this page the total number of killed and injured Soviets was 68,753.
So that means that with today’s Russian casualties, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has cost Russia more than 16x the Soviet war in Afghanistan.
Rookie mistake. If the can owner turns the can over they’d find a P38 can opener to easily open and enjoy their beverage. /s
Vance called on Russia to “wake up and accept reality” – a reality in which they are suffering heavy losses and “don’t have a lot to show for it”.
Okay, so now Russia “doesn’t have the cards”, right?
Quote: “We remain committed to peace, but it takes two to tango. And unfortunately, what we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks is that the Russians have refused to sit down with any bilateral meetings with the Ukrainians. They’ve refused to sit down with any trilateral meetings where the president or some other member of the [US] administration could sit down with the Russians and the Ukrainians.”
What did he expect? Vance didn’t even say “thank you”. /s
The White House is being run by spoiled brats.
First, this is a great video and a thought provoking topic. While she touched on it in the last 45 seconds, I think the timeline at +10Y and +15Y would have more vacuum tube solutions for simple “computing” electronics. I also think that the ideal of social media would be too hard for modern society to abandon, and we’d revert to prior technologies for electronic social communication like “party line” telephones and HAM radio, neither of which require advanced semiconductors.
Analog broadcast television (also tube driven) would make a comeback and be well in place by +15y after so much of the spectrum was freed up from lack of digital devices consuming it. Larger use of shortwave radio would come back too.
Lastly, I’m embracing her premise as “the technology to create new semiconductors disappears”. Perhaps this is because the world’s single source of quartz crucibles in North Carolina needed for high end semiconductor manufacturing exhausts its supply. or some other reason. With that though, it doesn’t mean progress forward would stop. She touched on part of this in the last 60 seconds with video talking about groups trying to rediscover or restart semiconductor manufacturing, but she didn’t explore an alternative advanced computing medium: light. Optical Computing exists today as laboratory experiments and are far inferior to general purpose semiconductor based computing, but if semiconductors are off the table optical computing starts looking very attractive. Consider however, that this technology is the basis for most quantum computing implementations today. So we wouldn’t be starting from scratch technologically.
One note on automobiles too: I think many modern cars would be retrofit with simplier electronics to keep them on the road. Gone would be the days of advanced ECUs yeilding high performance and fuel efficient operation, but I’m betting much more simplified ECUs could be made with single mode operations that would make the car operational for general (and inefficient use). Mechanical timing would come back into play, fuel injection would be replaced with carburation again, and coilpacks with mechanical distributors.
I think I’d be okay with my Commodore 64 as my primary computing with a bit more evolved connectivity with something like Fidonet for global email communications to be maintained.
Still with my minor notes, I really enjoyed her idea and glad she did the video.
I like what you posted here and agree with about 95% of it. I’m also at the high end of tech and frequently get asked by juniors which is the most important knowledge:
I agree with you that, of those 3, experience is the most important, where we might diverge is that experience alone has limits. Someone that has experience, but no certs or degree will eventually likely hit a ceiling in their career where they can advance no further, and worse, it could eventually (after decades) be the reason they are fired.
The best answer is “Get all three!” However, I agree with you that if you have the opportunity for experience, seize it. Use it. Make mistakes. Learn from it, but don’t stop with just experience. Expand your knowledge through education (certs) and seemingly unrelated subjects (business, accounting, marketing, etc) because these are ultimately what the technologies we support are driving. . If you know what your organization is trying to accomplish (via college education) you can bring the best solutions to bear (via industry certs), and be able to communicate that to the organization effectively (via college education) to be able to implement them (via experience).
I don’t see many pure sysadmin roles listed anymore. Companies seem to want to squish two or more roles together so we have DevOps roles or SREs.
Since we’re plugging community college more, I’d also like to add that quite a few community colleges offer bachelors degrees now! Many of these are a small fraction of the cost of a traditional 4 year school (even far cheaper than 4 year state schools from what I’ve seen).
I wish these were a thing when I got my Bachelors degree.
Here’s an example of a Bachelor of Applied Science, Electrical Engineering Technology for less than $12,000 in tuition! (tack on another $2k for books I’d guess for 4 years), but $14k for a bachelors is damn cheap!
Search your state to see what schools near you offer these and in what programs:
There were entire generations told diplomas were the only path to success and only “stupid people or drop outs” would do trades or jobs without a degree.
I wouldn’t go as extreme as saying “diplomas are the only path to success” but even today, over time, a college degree is a better predictor of being employed than non-degree. The graph in the article shows this:
That dark orange line at the lowest measurement of unemployment is folks that have had a college degree and older than 27 years old. Keep in mind, the graph is covering about 35 years, so those earlier on the chart, in say the beginning in 1990 as the blue line with higher unemployment than older college grads join the older college grad statistic in 1997.
Further, the article is focusing on recent college grads being unemployed, but the graph shows that even this group has a significantly lower unemployment than “all young workers” which presupposes that group doesn’t have a degree.
So even today “get a college degree instead of not” is good advice if you’re looking for future employment. The extra advice I’d give on top of that is “don’t go crazy into debt to get that degree”. Folks graduating with a six figure student loan debt with only their bachelors are likely decades behind their peers that didn’t take on such a large debt load. Community College people! Use it!
Trades can also be good, and I don’t want to discourage that, but recognize the physical toll on the body it takes over a career and make sure to plan accordingly to transitioning to leadership or a lighter desk role as you advance in your trade career.
There was some reddit drama blow up a year or two ago where admins were banning if you upvoted people that used a banned word or phrase. I don’t reddit anymore but I saw some posts here about it.
A ban for voting in a certain way? WTF is this reddit?
While thats true, a digital meter is at about 5x the cost of a one-time disposable test. I didn’t want to scare him off (or delay the test) because of cost. If the disposable test shows a positive reading for radon, I’d recommend skipping the digital meter anyway and hiring a company that does professional readings as well as installation of mitigation systems.
One thing to check for your health and family: Radon
Since you’ve now got a pit, you also have the prime location for a mitigation system. At a minimum, you can get a Radon test kit at the hardware store (I know Menards carries these) for about $20 that has a sticky card that you mail away for analysis after a set time.
If Williams really took a step forward as a whole that would be quite something
It would, but its unlikely. Even Sainz in the post-race interview did not seem hopeful about a repeat performance with the races remaining.
(especially as no one is bringing upgrades for this year anymore at this stage).
And we know with Williams they never really did upgrades for FW47 (as its essentially their 2024 car) deciding instead to save their development budget for the post-rule-change 2026 Williams car.
The unicorn owner:
Also, she asked if he’d wear it for the rest of the year, so its not the last time we’ll see it!
They could even do that, but told Lawson and Tsunoda to light a fire under them to see who could out-compete the other. Neither team is close to winning the Constructors championship, so the risk of losing points from being over competitive (crashing) isn’t that big of a deal. Sounds like a great opportunity to really test the mettle of both drivers in real world conditions with low risk to the teams.
You can say Sainz, Lawson did well to hold up there in what are typically worse cars, but Russell actually is one of the few who moved forward
Warning, incoming Williams fanboying:
I would not have guessed but Baku seemed to be the ideal conditions for the Williams FW47 car. Sainz provisional pole in qualifying, but still ending up at P2 at the end of qualifying is one example. The other during the race Albon starting at 19th on the grid and moving up eight places to end the race at P11 (but with a penalty).
The other possibility (which I don’t even dare to hope), is that the Williams team have cracked the code on the FW47 to get Merc like performance out of it that we might see in future races. I don’t think this likely, but a man can dream.
This photo was clearly taken around the time Arnold was shooting the movie Commando. Though there’s not world tie in between the movie and game of the same name, its a nice historical piece to see they recognized the similarity and memorialized it in this picture.
Suddenly American companies are going to start re-embracing “work from home” as long as “home” is your home country. Multinational companies will increase offices in foreign countries and just have their non-US workers work there. I see Canada, Mexico, and a number of countries in Central and South America that operating in the same time zones as the USA benefiting.
Great pictures! I had to crosspost this to the folks over at [email protected] .
Before we went EVs we did this kind of thing a lot with our local grocery store chain. Buying groceries and gift cards from these stores on American Express Blue Cash Preferred credit card (6% back in grocery purchases) would effectively net you 18% off (in gasoline and cash). During certain promotions it would jump to 22% off. This means that anything you bought from Amazon, Ebay, Apple, Southwest Airlines, Disney, Best Buy, Universal Studios, Dicks Sporting Goods, Khols, Chipotle (and the list goes on…) would be at least 18% off. We would never purposefully buy something we didn’t need from these stores, but rather if we ever had a need, we’d make sure we used this avenue to buy it.
The gasoline program at the grocery store changed a about 5 years dropping the discount yield to 13% which still wasn’t bad. However once we went EVs we had no use for gasoline and stopped bothering with it.