You said it yourself: he was primarily a professor, not an artist. His position being a "luxury" is another argument. Anyway, He taught languages to brilliant students and created a highly respected translation of Beowulf. LoTR, Silmarillion, Hobbit, and all of it, were his hobby, a secondary but burning passion.
I'm sure many on this forum have secondary passions, be it music, visual art, writing, or anything else. Yet most of us realized we need to make money, and that those pursuits can be done at a fairly high level in our leisure time.
> For serious apps it's impossible to escape reading Erlang or Erlang documentation
Erlang documentation yes, but I VERY RARELY look at Erlang code. The only times I've really done it have been fiddling with an ODBC driver issue, which isn't really supported anymore by OTP, a crash dump maybe twice, and writing a dialyzer wrapper. I've been building elixir systems for over 10 years, and use OTP heavily,
Every tech person I know who tried to work in NYC government burned out rather quickly. The government is so sclerotic and shackled to laws meant to break up the Tammany Hall machine that its impossible to do anything good or fast.
A lot of stuff gets bid out, and the procurement process is overly burdensome...
Which results in a limited number of qualified bidders collecting rents, and then subbing out the work to subs who then sub it out further.. such that its all done offshore for peanuts while we pay real money to some schmuck who ticked the right boxes in order to collect said rents.
Briefly in the mid 2010s the NYC Department of City Planning tried to build some stuff in house and hired some good people, but the old ghouls in the city ruined it by obstruction and everyone left by the end of 2017.
City government in most US cities is so fucked, it's really wild. Another guy I know who graduated from NYU Wagner as a planner got hired by the city to do some mapping work but his boss miscoded his job in a way that precluded him from ever being promoted, so he quit.
As of 2023 at least there were people working in city planning who didn't have computers and refused to use them, professional staff.
Get out of here with this Wolf Warrior jingoist bullshit. Your country was brutally suppressing a democratic movement in Hing Kong and Lai is only guilty of publishing books critical of the politburo. Which I might add is carrying out a genocide in Xianjang, illegally occupies Tibet, and mudrered perhaps thousands in and around Tiananmen Square in 1989. You'll note you can't even post on chinese social media anything containing both "Tiananmen Square" and "1989", and you call Lai a fascist... pathetic.
If you can't figure out how to use accumulated knowledge and advanced people skills by your late 30s, then maybe you weren't so rational or adaptable to new situations in the first place. Things may not click for me like they did when I was 25, but I usually see right away when I have relevant knowledge to solve a problem or when I know someone who can help.
GINA prohibits genetic discrimination in pricing common health care insurance, but not for products like life insurance, disability insurance, or even long-term care insurance. Some states have statutes that address the latter types of insurance, though.
Life insurance is mostly a useless financial product, and obviously the law wouldn't mandate selling life insurance to people who are likely to die early. That would create such a crazy perverse incentive.
They couldn’t realistically take on Walmart, Amazon, Target, Lowe’s, and major grocers all at once. They’re just not organized enough. We’ve already seen them give up or flop in court when challenged.
Tariffs are applied to the price the importer pays. Listing them separately would thus give away the reseller's markup. That's far more than the tariffs for most importers from China. Often you can look up the same item on Alibaba and find what the reseller is paying.
Graphite moderated reactors are broadly fine, the problem was with some technical specifics of that specific reactor design, and the operational culture that surrounded it. After Chernobyl, those flaws were corrected and operation of other RBMK reactors has continued to this very day, with no repeats.
Graphite reactors are not a good idea because they inherently have, well, graphite. That can burn.
The worst possible case for water-moderated reactors is uncontained meltdown. And it's not _terribly_ horrible. You will get contamination with volatiles, mainly cesium. But there's not a lot of it in the reactor, so it'll affect only a small area around the plant. Some fuel might get initially mobilized by steam explosions, but again, only a fraction.
The worst case for a graphite reactor is an uncontained core fire. That can burn for weeks and spread a significant part of the fuel as particulates over large territories (Chernobyl).
Is it likely? Nope. But there are black swan events: earthquakes, mega-hurricanes, meteorite strikes, Godzilla attacks.
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