As I learn more about how this city operates, living here longer, I keep finding myself truly amazed at how corrupt this city is. Even if you try, you can't avoid it. It's truly everywhere.
You underestimate. The more places you go, the more you see, the more you do, the more you realise it is truly EVERYWHERE.
I honestly find it incredibly disheartening how rampant and underreported corruption and nepotism are in practically every sector, industry, everything, everywhere, always.
The corrupt are a minority - but they are global, and the impacts of their actions are damaging the entire human race in a very significant fashion, and always have.
I must not be human. For factual information of this sort I just prefer the information. The story is irrelevant and usually too mundane to be bothered with
I always thought this was for two reasons: one as you say is to show the plumbing works, the other is because not passing the meconium (combination of stuff ingested while in the uterus) indicates other more serious conditions might exist
I’ve been in cat 1 and cat 2 storms. They’re awesome in their power for destruction. I’ve evacuated from a category 4 storm, which did a huge amount of damage in the city when it hit.
A category 5 storm is essentially going to destroy everything in its path already. What good would adding a 6th category do?
I lived in Florida for a long time, I can tell you that people don’t evacuate when it’s a cat 4 threatening to maybe become a cat 5. Having a category meaning “this is much worse than a 4” would be meaningful here. I see no reason to have an upper limit, it just artificially makes everything at and above the cat 5 threshold mean the same thing.
Also, Florida homes are built from cement, meant to survive storms like that. The building codes come from hurricane andrew, a particularly damaging cat 5.
Florida gonna Florida. I grew up and still live in a hurricane area. Went through a cat 5 as a kid - not going to do that again. But, cat 2/3 or less I'm not going anywhere. Last time we took a direct cat 2, we didn't even lose power. Like you said, FL and really most of the southeast coast learned from Andrew. Simple changes like roof ties and more expensive ones like cement plank siding make a pretty significant difference [1].
TBH, my main concern in a storm is water. My house is ~12' off the ground and given its location, if there's water in the house we're basically in an end of days, biblical level storm.
> Having a category meaning “this is much worse than a 4” would be meaningful here.
But don't you think that cat 5 would become the new 4? That is: why do you think extending the scale will expand the range of warnings communicated, instead of smearing the existing range out over more values?
For Floridians, Cat 5 is scary but not that scary, Florida's one crazy state with sturdy buildings and only very select areas get leveled in major storms. There definitely needs to be a better way of rating hurricanes, for strength AND area of damage.
Hurricanes are extremely area focused, and they lose power FAST. It can miss you at the last second and not even knock a shingle off your roof, while leveling a trailer park 50 miles south of you.
Literally the only hurricane that made landfall in Florida as a Category 5 after Andrew was Michael in 2018, so most Floridians haven't experienced a Category 5 hurricane in decades (if ever). (Irma and Ian were downgraded before making landfall in the US.)
Michael did confirm that the new building codes were effective -- structures built prior to 2002 suffered much worse damage. From an early reconnaissance report [0]: "However, roof cover and wall cladding damage was still commonly observed even in newer structures. Failures were frequently observed in both engineered and non-engineered buildings."
Michael also highlighted that no matter how much you strengthen the building code, that means nothing for old buildings that haven't been updated, or for infrastructure (downed power lines and transmission towers, washed out roads and bridges, etc).
Would a Category 5 hurricane be more damaging if it struck Manhattan rather than Miami? Absolutely. IMO that's a consequence of climate change we should be worrying more about than peak storm strength -- more places (that don't necessarily have the same historical awareness) are going to be affected by stronger storms (and more frequently! 2020 saw two back-to-back Cat 4s make landfall in Nicaragua 15 miles and 2 weeks apart).
To say that Cat 5 isn't that scary in Florida is underestimating how incredibly rare these are, and overestimating the building code's coverage / efficacy.
EM’s vector fields formulation is fairly straightforward: it’s all curls and divergence. Any 3rd (-ish) semester undergrad multivariate calculus course is likely to cover it in sufficient depth. “Mathematical Methods for Physicists” covers it in sufficient depth, for example, provided you already have a thorough understanding of the prerequisite material. Most undergrad physics degree curriculums should have E&M courses whose texts (e.g. Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism, Griffiths) cover enough of the details. If you want to pursue it further than an undergraduate level study, you’ll also want a good text on differential equations that has or is supplemented by material covering, e.g., spherical harmonics and Bessel functions (among other things). I wish I could remember what I used, but it was…more years ago than I care to say when I was an grad student.
I'm American. I've been in two economic classes: dirt poor (as in, more or less homeless, when I was a child, for a bit) and now on the low end of rich (net worth in the mid 7 figure range). I've seen both sides of this inequality, in America, personally. And new social circles that have opened up have given me something of a first-hand view of the "truly" rich as well.
I can list numerous ways that it's a problem, if you like. Here's one to start: "as long as people can move geographically" isn't applicable to those on the lower end of the economic scale. Your comment represents something generalizable about the rich, too: they are completely oblivious to just how hard and draining (physically, mentally, and emotionally) it is to be impoverished. I shudder to think what it's like for the poor in poorer countries.
> isn't applicable to those on the lower end of the economic scale.
Why not? Immigrants come here with $0. My wife came to America with $50 and didn't speak any english. Most of America was founded on poor groups and families taking all their possessions with no jobs and creating a new life.
Is it easy, hell no. But sure beats staying in the same place and complaining about other people.
There are still cities in the US that will give you land and a house if you just stay and live there. Living in NYC and SF is not a right.
This is ridiculous. Set aside the (incredibly optimistic, to be charitable) thinking that is going into the acceleration of these probes. The astronavigation itself is hugely questionable, especially with probes that aren't big enough to hold the kinds of equipment necessary to detect bodies that would perturb the trajectory, let alone make adjustments after encountering these.
I don't think people realize how mind-bogglingly, incomprehensibly HUGE space is. It's BIG. Like think of the biggest thing you can comprehend, and it's not even the size of an atom in comparison to even "short" distances in space.
Something I would point out is that this is more of a conceptual proposal than something real NASA is planning on doing. This mission as described here will never happen. With that said it’s still a useful exercise because we will do space probes to Alpha Centauri at some point and doing a pretend proposal for one and solving all the problems that come up when you try to do so will help make it feasible to actually do that type of mission in the future eg. The Europa Clipper or a lot of the other space probes we’ve done.
At 0.25c the probes would blast through the centauri system in minutes. Hardly enough time to collect data more useful than what we already can sitting here practically stationary, even if absurdly far away.
I really appreciate the lack of magic in go's error handling. I do not appreciate the specific implementation of errors in go. It's inefficient (`reflect` is all over the place) and prone to obscuring the actual "error path". In applications of non-trivial size, it also becomes an obstacle to implementing structured logging and other components of observability. This makes debugging/triage of, say, a production incident harder than it needs to be.
Some tech is. Meanwhile large tech companies that are actually innovating (FAANG, near-FAANG, and FAANG-adjacent companies) are not. My comp has never been higher, and we're hiring. In the bay area.
These companies are always innovating. Google doesn't just say "Our ad recommendation system is good enough, lets just go into maintenence mode for a year." No. They constantly are trying to improve their models, switch to a better architecture, and innovate to try and eke out a few more percentage points of conversions.
