In the worlds I've worked in it would help a lot for every engineer to do a stint at a customer site. The bigger places I've worked for could have easily placed people with a customer for a while.

It's remarkable how much stuff is designed by people who don't use it for a living, will never use it for a living.

While I'd prefer to work, not needing the money implies the ability to avoid the interview process. It's a funny thing being in an industry where people retire not because they can't do the work at a professional level, but because getting a job is such a PITA.

So how on earth do you take an idea like this and scale it for both broad web coverage and high traffic? For that matter, just how much 'useful' text is there on the net?

My main (practically only) use for it is to watch amateur-produced special interest shows that are done on a regular basis. Usually it seems to involve automotive bodywork or subsurface mining with the occasional computer show.

The channels that move to having sponsors or getting a lot of free stuff are for the high jump (although it's absolutely a riot to watch Heather Heying shill for some sofa company, hating life all the while). I think the best ones are done by pure hobbyists.

Otherwise my current plan is to build a library of worthwhile videos via youtube-dl and DVD transfers. My guess is that the ad environment and much heavier copyright policing on youtube will make much of it unwatchable over time.

To be fair, the current results should have been predictable. A small, finely focused and self-interested group can usually defeat an unruly mass.

>I would note that my ventures are in the area of atoms and not bits :)

Good for you. My own bias and personal experience highly tends towards that, including US manufacture. Thinking about the article at the top, I wonder sometimes what the 'economy' even is anymore. I tend to distrust articles on it as all the news tends to involve internet-based FIRE 'industries' and surveillance marketing startups. I'm not feeling the love for those segments.

Lord knows what sort of magic they stick into 'Energy Star' appliances.

I'd say not. I'd genuinely like to know if a cloth bandana has any value, if grocery stores are dangerous, is the mass of people actually better off for an early and hard vaccine regime. It's partly intellectual interest and partly an attempt to guide my own behavior.

Having said that, everyone is too invested in their theories to be skeptical.

Modern newspapers and news magazines (they still exist?) don't read at all like the ones from 50 years ago.

It looks to me like you've got bigger fish to fry than Facebook. It's probably time to give your parents a break.

It worked out fine I think and, mind you, it used to be a lot harder to push out a fix. A lot harder.

At this point, I'd say that that's the entire newspaper. They operate in the same ad space as Facebook.

I can see that working both ways. The anti-vax folks are never going to believe the 'get vaccinated or you'll die' sort of rhetoric. Better to use real numbers. There's been enough time and cases to make good estimates.

Do masks work very well? What kinds of masks? Where do people actually get COVID (home? bars? schools? hiking in the forest?). What are the actual results from non-vax drugs or treatments? How long are the vaccinations likely to be useful? Did early large-scale vaccination simply cause forced evolution of variants?

There's a shroud of mystery throughout this situation with a need by some people to simply shout down to the masses. None of this is that complicated and medical leadership is some mixture of secretive and incompetent, and I'm not sure what the strongest tendency is.

How honed is the writing and how is that done? How do advertisers (the point of the exercise after all) respond? How has it all changed over time? How do people become writers, how much of it is done programatically?

It's a small thing, but something I'm struck by is how little international news is out there anymore.

So much for the Polish Cipher Bureau. Not so many tragic hero opportunities there.

After reading that I sat here for a minute and racked my brain as to who my childhood 'hero' might be. I can't remember a single person.

It's amusing to me how much of intellectual work deals in a currency of status. Getting/giving credit for things appears to be the Prime Directive, at least among the observers. We've now graduated to not only stressing who is responsible but what demographic groups they are a part of.

Now, it could be that the real deal groundbreaking folks don't give a damn. Tip o' the hat to those people.

It's funny to me how the whole ICE vs. EV argument just isn't that much of a slam-dunk. Looking at page 5 here:

https://theicct.org/sites/default/files/publications/EV-life...

Completely altering the vehicle mix doesn't look like a game changer to me. I guess there's probably no low-hanging fruit.

In the future, no doubt not only will houses be unaffordable for the middle class and below, but also cars.

Actively managing things is ever so much fun.

A sample set of new schools.

. Work oriented, basically four year versions of junior college. Teaches EE, nursing, CSc, accounting, etc. Higher quality (and cheaper) than current for-profit versions.

. Research institutions. STEM masters and up.

. 'Soft' disciplines. Not just history, cultural anthropology, and the like but also the newfangled xxx studies, diversity equity stuff, etc.

. Traditional old school 'classical' college. Essentially the classwork from Harvard in 1900. You don't need too many of these.

. Highly specialized schools like Berklee although there was a time when music was learned the old-fashioned way, at bordellos.

What we probably don't need is a world where most of the state-funded institutions are huge lumbering megaschools.

...and then you've got something.

I'm actually surprised that I've never seen a tire with some kind of closed-cell super lightweight foam, some kind of aerogel maybe. I suppose the problem in that case is that you can't spread heat throughout the whole interior.

Which makes me wonder, how do they radiate heat on this Michelin? Does it stick around the outer surface and that's it? Do the 'spokes' bear it away somehow?