> Then again, many or most people still watch live sports and old school TV channels, which are chock full of ads. I cannot even stand too obvious product placement, much less ad breaks.
Everybody is different. Back in the early 2000s when I used to watch TV, I actually enjoyed ads, because they tended to be more entertaining than the TV shows themselves (remember the Budweizer lizards and eTrade babies). Even when online ads because popular, when they were still contextual, I really did not mind. It was only when ads began to follow people around online that I put an end to it.
But I still watch live sports - only online, since I no longer have TV service. I get around ads on NFL games by having more than one game streaming on different tabs, then switch to the one that's not in an ad break.
Online, there are no ads during football (the real one), tennis and volleyball matches, so I have very little to complain about.
I think Google beat Apple to that by at least a decade. If you're not using an Apple product or service, Apple likely knows very little about you. Google, OTOH, knows a lot about you, whether you use a Google service or products.
> as the Spanish Civil War shows the USSR wasn't great at letting allies stay independent
Same is true for the US. Allied countries whose leaders take decisions that run contra to what we want tend(ed) to be regime-changed and those leaders killed.
By all accounts, Soviet chip development was ahead of that of the US (Intel). Then one day a party official killed the project. At least the lead guy found his way to the US and to Intel and the rest, as they say, is history.
Definitely not true. The Soviet electronics industry was always a generation behind the US in particular and the west in general.
When Victor Belenko defected with his MiG-25 in 1976 the CIA found that it was still using vacuum tubes when the US hard introduced the F-14 two years earlier which had the world's first microprocessor. Although the existence of it was classified for decades and until recently it was thought the Intel 4004 was the first.
Why they were behind, I'm not sure. They were definitely ahead in some other places but the technological gap continued to increase the later you got into the cold war.
Using vacuum tubes did have some advantages - notably being more EMP resistant than normal electronics. Given one of the MiG-25's roles was to intercept incoming nuclear bombers this was presumably an important requirement.
The reasons were rather simple: lack of motivation which is beyond the innovation in capitalism. The enterprises were part of ministries, and their directors were just managers working for salary. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ministries_of_the_Sovi...)
You can imagine state economy composed of 30-40 large corporations, like Walmart or LIDL running every grocery store, or Microsoft being the only software manufacturer. Remember stories of turf wars in Microsoft, between old and new technologies? Same thing was in the entire USSR.
Soviet government distributed investments, so you had to convince them. This was possible if you had a lot of political weight.
If you managed to get investment funds, your enterprise could not gain extra profit, because prices were regulated, and even if you were more efficient in production and over-produced for high demand, you did not own the extra money.
So, the prize for introducing a new product would be just a bonus and probably a state decoration. And it was often not worth the trouble fighting with the higher ranks in the ministry.
Another issue was central planning ahead of time. For instance, my father in his research institute would make demand plans for microchips and other electronic parts 2 years ahead (so that if there's more demand, the manufacturers have time to plan and budget for that).
This meant, it was really hard to introduce new hardware, and little incentive to try manufacturing new chips.
It was much easier to run the enterprise and do the plans as usually.
Pentkovski was a student when the decision to axe domestic development was made.
His achievement is overstated in Russia (mainly from the urban legend that his surname led to Pentium). He is a great engineer, but Intel never had a shortage of people of his caliber.
But he was still good enough to lead the Intel team that developed the Pentium III, or is that an overstatement?
From his Wikepedia page:
> At the beginning of 1990s, he immigrated to United States where he worked at Intel and led the team that developed the architecture for the Pentium III processor
He was good enough, what's your point though? That Pentium 3 (started well over a decade after Soviet demise) wouldn't have happened if he hadn't worked at Intel?
You gotta at least get your facts right. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The Pentium III was released within that same decade (Feb. 1999) [1], not "well over a decade after Soviet demise".
In the same manner that the US space program would have advanced without input from Wernher von Braun [2], the development of Pentium III would have happened minus Pentkovski, though their presence pushed development faster and in directions that the projects would have taken longer to reach without them.
Pentkovski is no von Braun, just one of scores of processors engineers in his cohort. That there was pentium 2 before him and 4 after him is a pretty solid hint.
The southern us doesn’t even walk, much less bike. The car infrastructure down here seems insane, but you literally do get covered in sweat walking from your car to a building. The southern us is not good for the outdoors due to weather, and because no one bikes/walks the infrastructure is horrible.
(I’m in Tennessee on vacation, walking everywhere. Many sidewalks just end, no crosswalks, etc. biking here would be dangerous)
Knoxville and Nashville have walkable potential in the core, and of course Asheville, NC, but outside of that, the south is as you said very pedestrian unfriendly.
In the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas, the city of Richardson is very bike- and pedestrian-friendly. The area around the Univ of Texas at Dallas is especially so.
That depends on your age and cardiovascular health. Overexertion in heat can be deadly.
I am 43, I have no chronic disease, but I would be afraid of more than just sweating if I went on a biking trip in that temperature. Sometimes I feel unwell even when walking in such heat.
It is much easier to ride a bike than to walk in the heat. Because you create your own wind.
If I stay at home and walk around I have troubles breathing when it's over 35°C, I have been several times on the verge of fainting when it lasts a bit too long over that temperature.
But I don't have a problem biking at that temperature or above. I've ridden for hours in temperatures near 40°C with no shade. As long as I get plenty of air, it's OK: it lowers the temperatures and I can breath. I mean, I prefer if it is 15°C lower :-), but it feels much better than walking.
Now in such circumstances you'd better not get caught in a climb, when your speed drop under say, 8 mph, because then you don't get any wind, while being on max effort. That's horrible. It happened to me once in a small mountain pass, on a road which looked like it had been painted black to make things worse. I had to climb down the sharp slope on the road side as I could, to find the shade of the few bushes which were around and stay there a few minutes, because I felt my temperature was rising way too much. Never again.
Then the problem is not the heat, but your fitness level, which regular biking, jogging will improve. It did for me. After about 20 years of no exercise, just sitting in front of a computer, I decided last November to start exercising (jogging. Bad knees make biking a bad idea)
My 1st day out jogging, I could only go 0.5 miles non-stop before I almost passed out. Today I can do 5.5 miles non-stop. My cardiovascular system is in the best shape it has been in a long time. And I'm almost 60.
I have quite a lot of exercise, but I have hard time tolerating high temperatures in general, and it has been getting worse with age. I should have been born somewhere in Siberia.
I simply just want to do other sports and want to have the choice of what I do for exercise, and have maximum freedom to how I spend my (free) time and energy, and not use most of it on commuting.
> the ride from start to finish lasts about 25 minutes.
That's about 50 minutes to and fro. That's all the exercise a child needs in a day. Wish they'll succeed in making it every day, instead of just on Fridays.
That, actually, is way more than the minimum recommended. See [1]. It took me about 10 minutes of jogging at least 3-4 times a week over several months before I got to the point where I can now jog 60+ minutes non-stop.
I used to overstate my commuting, as well, but when I compare it to running, you need to at least double the duration for equivalency. Both in numbers and feelz. And you really need to push it (lol) to get your heart working. Not a complete replacement for exercise, otherwise. Luckily, I start hunting on a bike naturally, but lots of people seem to not even break a sweat, or really enjoy sitting on their saddle. Exhaust pollution wise, bike commuting seems to be still beneficial, but it’s definitely putting a counterweight in the bowl, too. Tho, that’s supposed to get better, with fewer (my city started converting whole car lanes into bike lanes <3 ) and electric cars.
Anyway, those children grow up riding bikes will likely continue as adults where getting any exercise is better than nothing. And if you’re used to taking your bike everywhere, you may easily make 20-50km/d, which is something. Biking can be more than a mode of transportation. I often get overwhelmingly happy flowing through the city with a breeze on my skin and people in the same room. I wish that bliss onto everyone.
But those would then be immigrants, right? And likely will need to come in under H1B or something. How will owners of that platform react to hiring to immigrants?
No?! Why on earth would that be the logical conclusion? This is almost funny in how Americentric these threads become. You can outsource your project elsewhere. It's very common. America isn't the only country in the world that has software engineers who are competent.
MAGA hats were pretty famously made in China. That doesn't mean they were made by immigrants (though, I don't know anything about immigration in China)
