"none having to do with the ship sinking Titanic-style."
It's rare, but not nonexistent. The Costa Concordia springs to mind. Schettino ended up with all the blame, but it did seem to be that there was some degree of institutional incompetence as well. But not with the construction AFAIK
EDIT: oh hm, maybe you're right; like the Titanic it collided with something and water began to pour in, unlike the Titanic it was close to shore so the whole ship did not sink.
It's about the tradeoffs between guarantees in distributed systems generally.
But I don't really think the allusive writing style is a good fit for tech. Actually it's pretty annoying even with non tech. YMMV. Here, it's hard to understand the post without already knowing most of what it's saying.
Of course, it's a blog post, the author doesn't owe anyone anything.
Question from a non chemist: Ok so you do some chemistry and produce a vial of supposed medicine, how do you tell that you didn't fuck up and produce something toxic? I guess a modern lab would just stick the result in a gas chromatograph or something but you're not going to have one at home.
I vaguely recall (from, er, Sherlock Holmes) that old school analytic chemistry could figure out what an unknown chemical with cheap reactions and tests, but does anyone even know how to do that any more? Is it automatable?
The old school way was basically try a reaction, see if it matches a group of chemicals. Try another, see what you get. You can only close in on a reasonably accurate guess if what you're working on is fairly simple. Otherwise you'll be stuck in a local maxima of has this group, doesn't have that group, without the ability to get any better resolution.
I advise anyone interested in pharmaceuticals to read The Old Vegetable Neurotics: Hemlock, Opium, Belladonna and Henbane, Their Physiological Action and Therapeutical Use Alone and in Combination, from the 1860s, I think. If you read between the lines, it is the story of a doctor who is immensely frustrated with the impurities of some common medicines, not knowing what you were getting, was this the actual chemical doing the job, and so forth. He proceeds to examine each part of the plant (leaves, stems, roots, flowers, and so on) to see which gives the best concentration. He then works at extracting exactly what he wants, very carefully. Then he tests tiny amounts of various rodents, then his dog, then himself, working to determine an appropriate dosage.
It's quite impressive and hardcore. You can feel this man's annoyance at the state of things and his passion to declare, "I'd rather just find this out now instead of waiting for everyone to keep fiddling about." With a small room and some glassware you could also do this. Now, it wouldn't be simple, and to be honest the various units used are a hot mess, but the basic principles are there.
Now, automatable is a matter of degree. Real chemists have whole flowcharts of "do this, do that next, now this other thing" to detect the presence of a particular sought-for thing, but that does not prove a negative, you do not know what else might be present. That's the real rub and why the focus of so much chemistry is on extraction and purification.
Historically there were actually "live" x-ray machines, where you could have seen yourself wiggling your toes. They aren't used now due to the horrific exposure to x-rays, but before that was understood to be bad they were used in shoe shops (!). I don't know that they were ever used in hospitals though
Digital x-ray sensors require a much smaller exposure than film, and I'd guess a lot smaller exposure than a shoe sizer machine, too.
For multiple exposures in motion, it will add up, but assuming there's a reasonable diagnostic benefit and the total exposure isn't too long, and the staff is well protected, it's a reasonable risk.
It took several minutes and a couple tries to get the exposure right on certain shots. They didn't seem overly concerned about the exposure. The person operating the machine didn't seem at all worried about it, so I didn't worry either. Can't rule out that I should have!
These days the machine itself should also warn if it's on too long, so perhaps the operator was relying on that. These days even UV treatment gets added to your record so that further treatments don't accumulate too much. Well, it does in the UK at least.
> UV treatment gets added to your record so that further treatments don't accumulate too much
Which also takes into account how much time you spend outside during daylight hours, right?? That seems like such a large confounding variable that it renders the hospital-side measurement kind of pointless...
And of course the most harmed by fluoroscopes weren't the customers (bad enough) but the sales staff, who had multiple daily exposures day after week after month after year.
Checking your Wikipedia link: Yikes! These were used into the 1970s.
And of course industry denialism of any possible harm the devices might cause....
"trash is an inescapable fact of the human condition"
Not really. There didn't used to be anything like as much. But what we did before wasn't necessarily better.
Most consumer products were made of organics, like wood, cloth and paper; metals, and clay. Organics were burned or recycled, metals recycled (as now). Only broken clay was really waste.
Cities didn't collect trash - they collected ash. In Britain waste collectors are called "dustmen" because that's what they used to collect. But that meant that people were burning trash in their homes, along with their coal or wood. Then, re-using your trash as winter fuel was a nice economy. Now we know that in-home combustion isn't very healthy.
Reminds me of this 2013 report on the earliest cat domestication (~3610 BCE):
> The felid bones were found in an ashy matrix in three refuse pits, H172, H35, and H130, with animal bones, pottery sherds, bone tools, and some stone tools...
It's also because an exception to inheritance tax that covers farm land and forests. Rich people have been buying up both (Dyson owns several counties now).
Literally yes - generational farms are expected to go out of business when the head of the family dies as a result, and have to sell up to massive farm businesses.
Excluding any type of income from taxation means every other type of income needs to be taxed at a higher rate, all to protect whatever is being carved out. Thus we tax income from investments, salaries, and yes inheritance.
Inheritance tax has positive externalities as inherited wealth discourages people from being productive members of society. Meanwhile taxing salaries discourages work, and taxing investments discourages savings.
That reductionist analysis treats people as individualised economic drones. What do you mean by "productive" - earning a salary? Contributing to civic society? People don't just do nothing if they have means.
Inheritance tax damages filial peity and encourages the disintegration of society.
A hobo is less damaging than an unproductive trust fund kid. Many people contribute nothing which directly disintegrates society no encouragement required.
If a moderately larger inheritance seems to impact filial piety then it didn’t exist in the first place.
You seem to be very cynical about the input of people with money. This "unproductive trust fund kid" seems to be a sort of caricature which is easy to rely on because it evokes the "undeserving rich".
In reality, inherited wealth leads to the security which can result in great feats in music, the arts, new business, and the growth of civil society.
And encouraging generations to rely on one another directly, rather than via a welfare state, ensures that people take care of each other properly.
The alternative is the sort of degenerate individualism which has so severely weakened western society.
It might occasionally have positive outcomes but this is rare enough I’ve never seen it. I have seen the far more likely destruction personally and repeatedly. You may assume there are close family bonds with such situations, but for someone who’s never worked child rearing is an unpleasant shift, time for nanny’s etc.
People picture retirement just early, but there’s many social structures built to support people leaving the workforce in their 60’s. A 15 year old who knows they will never need to work is set adrift, why exactly go to college or even get good grades in high school? In their 20’s it’s hard to maintain relationships with people who are unavailable most of the time and can’t suddenly travel on a whim. Spending time with others set adrift can be fine, but tends to result in extremes like BASE jumping, drugs, etc. Even hobbies like general aviation can get surprisingly deadly when you have extreme amounts of free time for decades.
Honestly, the negative impact on the individual is seriously underappreciated. It’s bad enough I am not handing personal wealth to family and advise everyone else to do the same.
PS: A possible exception is matching income. 1$ of inheritance per 1$ earned seems like it would mostly solve these issues, but I don’t have enough examples to know if it actually works and I am not willing to experiment on family members.
> "Inheritance tax shouldn't be a thing in the first place."
The problem with entrenched intergenerational wealth is you eventually end up with a feudalistic society, with a small population of extremely wealthy families controlling all the capital but essentially just becoming rent-seekers, with no incentive or need to innovate in order to maintain their wealth (on the contrary, they will seek to suppress innovation and disruption in order to maintain the status quo). In the long run this leads to violent revolution or other forms of societal collapse.
Some states call it different things but most call it in "Current Use." [0]
If you want to take the land out of Current Use, you'll usually have to pay the back taxes first.
Around my parts, it's seen as a very good program as it promotes natural growth. It's also great for protecting wetlands that wouldn't be buildable anyways but can now be protected at a lower cost.
It says something about the UK that of the 10 oldest companies, 5 of them are pubs (and two more are hotels with rather pub sounding names). Three share the name "The Old(e) Bell"
A lot of the names of the pubs came from the depictions of highly recognisable objects (given that the population was illiterate) that they would use to attract customers.
Hmm that still recommends that distros allow admins to install to /usr/local, albeit in such a way that it at least can't break the OS.
IMO the idea that a 'Linux admin' is better informed than a 'Linux user' is increasingly anachronistic. In most cases the admin is just the user running sudo. I'd suggest that such functionality should be enabled by installing some kind of OS package rather than being the default
This is the right answer for internal threats, because having each employee have their own login to services means there are auditable. However it does mean you need to think carefully about the SPOF issue (single point of failure). Especially if your SSO is Google or some other company with a habit of pulling the plug without recourse.
Domain registry, password management and SSO are services which can kill your entire company if you lose access. The other option is to deploy your own SSO as a service, but that does run into the issue of potentially running a security critical service without having sufficient chops internally to keep it secure.
- Startup. Doesn't know how to make money yet, or if it does, is still learning how to execute its vision. It's essential to have a small team of maximally competent people, so recruitment is cautious. Employees are pets, not cattle. Projects are executed in time linear in the man-hours required
- Scale-up. Has found an opportunity so big that it needs to occupy it as fast as possible, before the competition does. Recruitment has to take risks. Large critical projects are executed in time proportional to the square root of the man-hours required[1].
- Established business. Has big battalions, but does not grow them very quickly. concentrates on not losing its market position. Recruitment optimizes for fungibility. Projects are executed in time linear in the man-hours required.
Each of these requires a different skill set from leadership.
[1] McConnell, "Software estimation - Demystifying the black art"
"none having to do with the ship sinking Titanic-style."
It's rare, but not nonexistent. The Costa Concordia springs to mind. Schettino ended up with all the blame, but it did seem to be that there was some degree of institutional incompetence as well. But not with the construction AFAIK
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