I agree it's interesting. But back then (I'm 34) we only had desktop computers so the distraction time was limited.
I remember being forced to take a typing class my senior year in HS, at which point I was already a very proficient typer. So I figured out how to hexedit the program save files and mark my exercises complete.
I feel that the new era of phones and apps have two major drawbacks:
1. The always on distraction in your pocket and on your wrist.
2. The walled garden hardware and software that makes it nearly impossible to tinker and gain a deeper understanding of the magic behind the screen.
I had a T9 dumb phone because that's all that was available. Smartphones didn't exist yet. There was no reason to be on your phone the whole time, at most I might be distracted because I'd be texting a crush during class. I wouldn't be scrolling through social media - it didn't exist yet or what did exist wasn't accessible by phone.
> America’s cows are now extraordinarily productive. In 2024, just 9.3 million cows will produce 226 billion pounds of milk (about 100 million tons) – enough milk to provide ten percent of 333 million insatiable Americans’ diets, and export for good measure.
Is that all the cows in the US? Why tell us how many cows produce 10 percent of demand?
The only hypothesis that makes sense to me is that there is something very dangerous on the loose that is being searched for, such as nuclear material. The highest authorities don't want to cause panic so they are executing a search this way.
EDIT: Actually there were statements that didn't leave room for semantic games:
“The Bureau is actively investigating the situation you mentioned, the unexplained sighting of drone activity over that part of New Jersey, including in proximity to sensitive sites and areas of concern. We do not attribute that to an individual or a group yet."
If they are Department of Energy, that's consistent with them not being US Military. For example, DoE is publicly known to have radiation detection helicopters - See Aerial Measuring System (AMS) and Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST)
The reason AMS like functions are carried out by fixed wing aircraft and helicopter slung pods is the weight of the doped crystal packs required to sense gamma radiation from even relatively low ground clearance.
Radiation surveys are steady paced gridding runs, evenly spaced lines flown at a uniform height and speed.
Little drones bobbing about aren't doing a good job running a detection grid.
Highly doubt someone in military PR is doing the 4d chess involved with making this quote while also being in the search grid and not informed:
"While no direct threats to the installation have been identified, we can confirm multiple instances of unidentified drones entering the airspace above Naval Weapons Station Earle," Bill Addison, public affairs officer for the naval station, said in a statement to ABC News.
They’d just say nothing was seen, or it was normal flight ops, or make up a training mission.
The military doesn’t re-enforce the reason for public panic or admit they aren’t omnipotent unless they really don’t know.
I'm not. I was part of the government and a defense contractor.
As to what these are: they are clearly something complying with the FAR on dusk to dawn lighting, it's going to be some disappointing, boring outcome like dominos pizza delivery drones.
Half the videos I saw were people noticing a commercial aircraft with landing lights on. I saw a bell 412 with some terrain mapping sensors mounted on it hovering in a pattern around my neighborhood earlier in the year and it turned out to be scanning for the power company, a new way of checking the lines. I'll be far more interested in a UAP that doesn't follow our dusk to dawn lighting rules.
Gas mileage, safety, noise, cost, on top of the fact they already have tons of long range single prop drones kitted out with surveillance gear. Almost all of the videos look like predator style drones flying search grids. Maybe they have some large quadcopter drones in the air but I haven’t seen a single photo or video of anything that looks like one.
The military has all sorts of cool techniques to find things without using drones, which makes me wonder if it's a private party conducting a search. Or is this in order to make it deniable for the military - not _looking_ like a military op
Yeah wouldn't they pull out all the stops if this were the case? Including running these drones during the day and all night (and making up a cover story)?
You're right that car centric transportation is entrenched, but this is the wrong statistic to prove that point. The US is a huge country and the overall density of roads (km/100km2) is lower than Europe.
Europe isn't a country though - difficult to do a comparison as a about 40% of Europe is the European part of Russia which has a much lower road density than the US, mind you European Russia is going to be the part that has the highest road density of that country.
Only if you're trying to intentionally cherry pick the data. Population density inherently affects road networks, and that will be reflected in the data.
Amazing that Minneapolis tops the city road quality chart, despite having the harshest winters. Do southern cities not build their roads so robustly? Or are they not maintained?
I'm guessing not maintained. Minneapolis is forced to spend a lot more on roads just to keep things acceptable. They also have a lot of voters with a memory of how bad things get after a bad winter and so politicians don't dare short road funding let they be voted out over a few potholes. (I've seen roads in Minneapolis that were more pothole than surface)
There’s a joke in Minnesota about having only two seasons, winter and road construction. As soon as the ground thaws, road construction starts up all over Minnesota.
St Paul is right next door to Mpls and has absolutely terrible roads, but they’re improving. St Paul has full road replacement on a 120 year schedule because they got drunk on TIF over the past few decades and don’t have the money for to schedule full road replacements every 60 years.
My grandpa used to work for the MN highway department. That isn't a joke, it was reality for them. Either the plows are on the truck and they are plowing snow, or the plows are not on and they are fixing roads.
Roads are a tiny % of any government budget. St Paul could have the money to do more if they wanted, and it wouldn't be much of a total budget increase. However it would still increase taxes and so people should debate if it is worth the cost.
Maintenence. I grew up in the north (Michigan) and spent time in Massachusetts, living in Texas now it's very different how infrastructure is funded. I'd call it a result of the general politics, no one wants to spend money on infrastructure.
I believe the latest stat I heard was that over 70% of the roads & alleys in the city where I live are >40 years old. That also means all of the infrastructure under the roads (water, conduits, etc.) are also >40 years old.
Florida is an outlier in road quality both anecdotally and from this page - almost equal in quality to blue states of New Hampshire and Maine. Non-interstate Florida roads drop to 74%, lower than Alabama (which has less interstate roadways than Florida) but higher than all other Southern states and most Northern states.
When I was driving in Minneapolis a few years ago, you couldn’t drive more than 20 miles an hour because the roads were so bad around the neighborhood. I wonder if they fixed that.
Winnipeg has notoriously bad roads throughout the city, and the harsh winters are always the excuse. But Minneapolis and Fargo don't seem to have these problems!
I mean, yea? CA has the highest real poverty rate (SPM) in the whole country.
Some of that won't translate as well to road quality due to the fixed cost portion of road repair (because the OPM rate isn't the highest (though still quite high)), but some of it will due to the not fixed cost portion (labor, etc).
But it definitely affects prioritization. People won't care as much about road quality relative to other things.
I tried o1-preview on chatgpt and asked it to count the "r" in "strawberry" and "o" in "troubleshooting" and it got both immediately. It was also able to count the vowels in each.
To me the main benefit of Python is the standard library. You can do a lot with it without any additional packages. Things get tricky when you have a lot of external packages in rust or Python.
"Volunteers" eh? That's one way to put it.