I think the bar for what constitutes unacceptable outside of work behavior changes significantly as you move up the responsibility ladder. Once you are in any significant leadership position where credibility and moral authority matter, doing things that land you on the front page in situations that make you look highly partisan, or immoral, or just plain stupid, in the eyes of much of your constituency - employees, customers, or community - is a real tax on your ability to lead. It justifies firing. And, to be clear, if Gow really thinks his porn appearances don't impair him in his job as university Chancellor in small Wisconsin city, he's probably also too social judgement impaired for the job anyway. Chancellor is not a back-office job.
Sex is not immoral. Fuck everyone who thinks it is and imposes that belief on others. People who impose those beliefs on others as a tool to ruin lives and careers should be in prison.
Depends on your definition of moral. In my book what is moral is what is an action or an attitude which is good for the whole society or at least living well in society.
The problem with sex is that its nature is EXCLUSIONNARY: sexual desire is made in part to discriminate who is the more fit or not to reproduce, especially among males. Historically only 60% men reproduced and 80% women... A HUGE LOT of people and especially men are not accesing sex on a regular basis.
In that sense you can't say porn / OF etcc are 'moral' in any way shape of form I think. There are actually many places in the world / religions that promote the idea that REGULATING sex (especially women's sex life) is the MORAL thing (since it allow a 'better' repartition of sex and reproduction in the society, especially for men).
I don't agree with any of it (and 100% share your point of view), but it's important to discuss the underlying reasons of what you observe in societies.. at least to better fight it.
Sounds like you want to impose your beliefs on others through threats of ruining lives and careers via the prison system... seems hypocritical to your otherwise live and let live (fuck and let fuck?) position.
I accept your clarification but your original comment was pretty specific to certain set of beliefs of a certain set of people, with a very specific punishment.
I don’t feel like you are making a genuine argument in good faith, as the alternative is literally anarchy. I would still be happier with that situation than the current oppressive regime, but come on… is that really what you are suggesting?
Yes, without naming it, because people (as you demonstrate) immediately presume anarchy === bad/chaos/disorder. All Anarchy means is No Kings, not No Order. In fact, anarchy allows for a type of emergent, bottom up order that cannot ever happen by top-down fiat mandate. It permits all (consensual, private property respecting) beliefs.
It does Not prevent someone else from disapproving of your actions (making porn), but it Does ensure that their response is limited only to their property/sphere of influence.
Anarchy has many different schools of thought. For those curious or intrigued, I'd recommend The Anarchist Handbook by Machael Malice. It contains a collection of writings from many different anarchist thinkers, from the violent dynamite throwers to the peaceful libertarians.
He's also got a podcast and has been on plenty of other podcasts, news shows, etc if you want video content.
As he says: "the black flag comes in many colors."
Porn is about the commodification of sex though, not about sex itself. You are also giving the worst interpretation possible, arguing it's "a tool to ruin lives and careers", which is very much not the point.
The article makes it clear that isn’t the case. Anyway, the issue is much broader than just porn. Every additional constraint you add on a job means the people leftover are somewhat less competent at their actual job.
Google for example is stuck with worse programmers due to their hazing stile interviews meaning many of the best either don’t apply or get falsely rejected. For companies this this isn’t such a big deal, but it helps explain why political parties rarely pick candidates that people really want to vote for.
> if Gow really thinks his porn appearances don't impair him in his job as university Chancellor in small Wisconsin city, he's probably also too social judgement impaired for the job anyway.
YES, this - but 's/probably also too/obviously far too/'.
Plus - recent legal settlements in university sex scandal cases are getting into the 1/2 billion dollar league. Nobody responsible for university finances, however libertine they might privately be, would want a flaming-red-flag idiot like this to be allowed anywhere near their students, staff, or campus.
"if Gow really thinks his porn appearances don't impair him in his job as university Chancellor in small Wisconsin city, he's probably also too social judgement impaired for the job anyway."
He clearly stated, he was aware of it:
"We think our sex is beautiful and have no qualms at all about other people watching us make love,” they wrote. “But our establishment colleagues likely would be shocked … and we’re fairly certain we’d be shunned in our community. Our careers likely would be ruined.”"
He simply thinks it should be allright and accepted behavior even for a university chancellor and I agree with that.
> The COVID devastation is also about long COVID, and even people who had COVID but either recovered “fully” or never displayed symptoms. None of this is over, and we are so, so fucked.
SARS-CoV-2 is certainly with us to stay, so in that sense it's not over. But beyond that, I don't see how "we are so, so fucked" as you say. Covid is no doubt taking a small nibble out of life expectency, and yes there is some long Covid still taking its own nibble out of productivity and life satisfaction ... but it's not that big a part of the big picture. Covid is killing less than half as many people in the US at this point as lung cancer, and those deaths are overwhelmingly amongst the elderly. I don't want to be overtly callous, but knocking a few years of life off people well into retirement is hardly going to bring the country to its knees. There are essentially no Covid deaths among people under age 18, and among the working age population, cases requiring hospitalization or leading to long term debilitization are rare.
Those who suffer, of course, suffer. We shouldn't be unsupportive of them in their trials. But Covid as a public health crisis is largely over.
The reason why life expectancy is going down is because middle age people are dying. People dying in their 80s has almost no impact on life expectancy calculations
Isn’t life expectancy an average? If so, then reducing any input values (people dying earlier than they otherwise would) would reduce the average. Doesn’t matter in which n-tile the reductions occur.
Wouldn't a person dying 40 years early have a tenfold impact on the average compared to someone dying 4 years early. Early being compared to the expectancy calculated without them.
Each time you catch COVID, you risk the chance of getting long COVID.
You pretend that it's not a big deal, but those numbers are going to pile up into a giant ball of health issues for a lot of people as the years progress. And for many of them, those issues are happening far outside "old age." Go get something that fucks you up for life in your 30s and then get back to us about how it's no big deal.
Not necessarily. Black locust (Robinia psuedoacacia), e.g., is one of the faster growing hardwoods in North America, but produces very hard, dense, and strong wood.
Without question, if you've got a tractor you can rely on, I would get a PTO-driven generator for backup. Even a little 30HP diesel tractor will power a 15kw generator, which is big enough for almost any household as backup. Farms typically have the grown version of these (if your small tractor is 100hp, as is the case for farms around here, no reason not to have a 50kw backup generator).
I don't see how this conversion makes much sense. He started with a generator that was junked because the ICE was shot. He could have replaced that ICE with an off the shelf 4 cycle engine for under $1000.00. Instead, he's got a car that even as junk was worth half what the new engine would cost, with the space requirements that come with a car, the investment in electronics and build, and the net result is a junked nearly 200hp car running an generator that can only use maybe 10HP tops. A great job of McGivering up something, but I can't imagine why anyone would do the second one.
electronics aside, you think fewer people can repair a toyota than a random generator? and i'm just talking about common-ase-tech-knowledge type stuff, to say nothing of the availability of parts.
Small internal combustion engines are super simple, and small engine manufacturers like those that make generators have an equally impressive dealer, spare parts and repair network to automotive manufacturers.
I'd like a report back from TigerBeetle on how many applications they actually support where the high order 64 bits are nonzero. I would note that the entire US GDP is less than 10^15 cents, and that 2^64 accommodates just shy of 10^19 in signed integers. So, even if your database had a justification for thousands of a cent transactions (not intermediate results, but recordable transactions), you'd still need to have transaction entries larger than the US annual GDP to roll over into the high order 64 bits.
TigerBeetle may have made the right choice for some market, but I predict that there are vanishingly few sales calls where this becomes an important selling point, unless it's potential customers wondering why they are wasting all those bits and checks for a whole lot of freakin' zeros.
There's one small part of the article that IMO is sort of key to understanding the why:
> [for every account] we keep two separate strictly positive integer amounts: one for debits and another for credits
It is not sufficient that their integer type is able to handle individual transactions. Their integer type must be able to handle the sum of the absolute value of all transactions that have occurred on an account. And I think it's easy to come up with realistic situations where you hit that.
So say you take the NYSE, which trades about ~$18 billion per day [0]. This is ~$1.8 trillion cents, or about 2^51 microcents. After 2^12 business days (~=16 years) you'll already be hitting the limit. (This is just a toy example ofc.)
To be fair, I used to think like this too, but chatting with multiple large exchanges/brokerages made us realize this was a thing.
> less than 10^15 cents
There are systems that don't work in terms of cents (cf. the examples of issues in many of the comments here), or even in thousandths of a cent, but with significantly more precision.
Literally, in other words:
Where you run into problems then, with 10 ^ n integer scaling, is when n is large. When n is large, you aren't left with sufficient room in the remaining bytes to represent the whole-number part. In trading systems, for instance, you can easily hit 10 ^ 10 to represent fractional traded prices.
Concretely, if you need to scale by 10 ^ 10, then your whole-number part is 2 ^ 64 / 10 ^ 10 = 1,844,674,407, which isn't terribly large.
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. Are you saying that these exchanges are trading at prices to a precision of 10 ^ -10 dollars (or other currency)? I saw private exchanges pricing to hundredths of a cent (a long time ago - it's been a decade and half since I worked on Wall Street or in the City) or yen, but never any finer than that. Even then, all transactions were recorded in whole cents.
I'm sure you've done your homework, and I'm long out of the finance business, but even so, I think the applications where this matters are, as financial applications go, very unusual.
But nothing can do that exactly, for example 1/3 has an infinitely long decimal or binary representation. So why round to 10^-10 as opposed to something like 10^-3?
For sure. We didn't pick 10^10 scaling. It's just what some massive brokerages/exchanges actually use. The fact that these were not necessarily crypto made us take note.
At the same time, you can understand that 10^10 scaling is at least significantly more precise. And I can imagine these things are viral too, who you trade with, also determines your minimum resolution. You can always downsample in presentation, but once downsampled in storage, it's impossible to upsample.
It also wasn't the only use case. But it tipped the scales.
Yeah, was just curious if the brokerages explained their reasoning in detail. Even if it's just viral, someone big had to have a reason to start the trend.
Hey! Thanks for your curiosity. This was news to us too. And I think we spent about a year thinking about this before we swapped for a bigger piggy! :)
Some languages do have proper support for ratios, so if you define x = 22/14, the value stored is 11/7. Multiply later by 7 and you get 11.
You can maintain exact calculations through an entire data pipeline this way, as long as your base numbers are all integers and ratios, and optionally have one rounding step at the end if you want a decimal value. Most math languages and lisps do this.
There must be libraries for other languages that can do it too, but it’s much nicer to work with when it’s built-in.
I'm not a collector, but I'm tempted to bid on this book. It's remarkable to imagine the effort the original owner had to put in, over a couple of decades, to collect all those signatures, and it really is a who's who of the Manhattan project, and of course, of the bombing itself.
Well, the details are at least somewhat impeached by the fact that she got the date wrong (or you did, in your comment). There was no Trinitite to be had at Los Alamos until 1945.
I think there has been some misunderstanding here, most people read "she apparently was involved in the manhattan project somehow" as "based on the fact that she had this, I think she must have been involved in the Manhattan project as there is no other way that she would have it" whereas what you meant was "I know from other sources that she was involved in the Manhattan project"
Well, that, and all those wonderful apps were inherently client-server architectures, with the business logic on the client. Nobody ever built a properly factored, with stateless layering, and high-end scalability on such an architecture. Just trying to keep 1000 clients in sync, so your business logic remained consistent could drive you to distraction; in a truly distributed product with tens or hundreds of thousands of clients, it was impossible.
Nothing about two-tier architecture prevents you from keeping clients in sync, scaling up or implementing business logic.
Consider that scaling your database has to be done anyway. Your web app will bottleneck on the DB too. The only difference is number of connections assuming you keep them open (but there are multiplexers for that, and many business apps don't need them anyway, RAM is cheap enough).
With stored procedures you can implement whatever logic is needed for maintaining your data.
Of course, if you want to twist VB, or Delphi, or any of the client-server construction sets into pretzels, you could build a well-factored system. And yes, your data has to scale to your system size, regardless of the architecture. But if you use any of those tools (the article was about VB, after all) as designed, you cannot escape the problems I outlined. Your business logic will be either entirely on-client, or split between the client and the database, and it won't be stateless. You will have database connections and transactions spanning thousands of client processes directly to the database, with all the scaling and contention problems that introduces. And you will have an update problem, because updating business logic requires you to push changes to thousands of client machines, which may or may not be available and updatable when you go to deploy your new version.
Can you still build a system, and operate it? Sure. A lot of us did. For small to medium scale systems, it was manageable. But there is a reason we abandond 2-tier client server 20 years ago. While it made building CRUDy business applications vastly easier for the developer, it was a systems nightmare.
(It also led to crappy user experience for any application that wasn't itself inherently a CRUD record keeping job, because it inhibited application designers from thinking of the application as anything other than CRUD. But that's a different argument for a different day).
If you have an ability to force web-style updates on the client apps (which a tool like Conveyor supports, see my other posts or profile), then all you need is a database that supports many connections. You can then atomically upgrade all the clients by e.g. writing a version number to a db table that's checked as part of each transaction, if the version doesn't match the app proceeds to upgrade itself before continuing (unless it's marked as a soft update, i.e. not worth interrupting the user for). The versioning issues aren't much different to the ones you face once you decide to have multiple web servers and rolling upgrades.
I'm happy for you if that's working out in your enterprise. It was not our experience in the time frame we're talking about (VB was sunset over 20 years ago), and frankly it was not our experience 5 years ago - when we were running skads of applications on Citrix servers so we could have absolute control over the "client" runtime environment, and have the actual on-the-glass experience be thin client.
IIRC back in the day, Windows could not replace a file if the file was open by any process. So an application could not update itself, without doing something like launching a separate "updater" and then exiting.
Another thing people tried was putting the VB app on a network share so it wasn't installed on each machine, but I think all the ODBC and other config still had to be local on each client.
