Tim

I still find it fairly wild that on US domestic arrivals they seemingly dump your baggage straight onto the sidewalk and you have to race to get to it before the nearest tramp does… There is much about US airport design that seems absurd in an international context.

Are the airport facilities (i.e. how much space is given over to security, how many scanners there will be, the queuing arrangements, that sort of thing) part of TSA’s remit, or is that someone else’s problem and they just work with what they’re given by the airport authorities (genuine question)? Because as an outsider, it doesn’t feel like “having basic airport security” is an absurd thing - it’s “doing it badly with completely inadequate capacity” that is. It doesn’t have to be that way (nowhere else in the world seems to have this problem), but it seems like in the US instead of doing the job properly they’ve instead decided to just come up with an endless number of schemes to allow people to pay to jump the queue instead of actually fixing the queue. I guess if that’s the TSA’s responsibility, I’d probably hate them too…

I mean, sure, if the only threat you can imagine is an exact replica of 9/11, sure, I guess they’re useless. But there have been far more people killed by bombs on airliners than 9/11, and someone needs to do the screening.

It can be true that the TSA are assholes, and also that US airport security was laughable before 9/11 and someone probably ought to be checking baggage for threats. Particularly while, as a nation, you seem to be doing everything in your power to make every country in the world except Russia hate you.

The weird thing about this thread is just how many people hate the TSA.

And I’m not suggesting they shouldn’t, but - it’s weird. I don’t hate the guys and girls who work at airport security anywhere else (and I fly a lot, around Europe and Asia.) They’re just people doing a job that I regret is necessary, on the whole keeping people safe. Even the ones in China with a battery and cigarette lighter fetish.

What is it about the US that means as soon as someone gets even the remotest sniff of ‘power’ that they have to turn into a monumental asshole? There has to be something about education, society, organisation structures, whatever that makes the US almost uniquely like the Stanford Prison Experiment on a continental scale.

It’s definitely starting to feel like having your rights enshrined on unalterable tablets of stone, but which must be re-interpreted by a half dozen political appointees holding a seance with the founding fathers every few months, may not be the platonic ideal of governance that Americans are constantly telling the world it is.

China does not control the vast majority of rare earths because they’re only found in China (or even because they’re particularly rare, they’re not.)

China controls the market because they were the only people who actually bothered to build extraction and refinement capabilities.

If the US invested half the money it puts into “clean coal” or oil and gas extraction into rare earth extraction and processing, it would have its own supplies. But that would be woke, or something.

The US is battling the environmental and human rights issues that so agitate them about China by promoting ‘clean coal’ and rounding up brown people in concentration camps without due process.

It’s almost as if environmental and human rights issues weren’t their real concern 🤔.

But also markedly better in many. I’ve worked in Changsha on and off for the last decade, and I’d move there to live in a heartbeat. The modern US I wouldn’t touch with a hundred foot pole.

That’s subjective of course - but, while I don’t know what you’re taught in the US (it’s actually exciting to learn that you still have schools, I thought they’d all been converted into gun ranges) about China, that some people are clueing up to the reality being different is an objectively good thing - even if it’s not all sunshine and roses in Xi’s world either.

I seem to recall that if the disk had copy protection you could also use this to simulate an earthquake as the 1541 threw its heads against the stops with all its might…

Happy days!

Don’t forget a UK gallon is about 25% bigger than a US gallon (160fl.oz vs 128fl.oz).

(Why yes, yes Imperial measurements are fucking ridiculous, thank you for noticing…)

Yeah, that’s not very typical, I’d like to make that point.

I live in (Eastern) Europe.

That’s an incredibly longwinded way of saying “mahh Tezlur burns three times as much ‘clean coal’ per mile as a commie BMW, yee-haw”.

The article is from a UK newspaper. What is and isn’t legal for them to regulate is decided by their Parliament and nobody else. No Kings, and all that.

Meanwhile, you should know that the “free speech” lectures are getting pretty old from the country that checks social media history at the border to make sure you didn’t say anything bad about the Dear Leader, which shuts down TV shows it doesn’t like, and generally ensures the media toes the party line.

(See also - lectures on why kids shooting up schools is a necessary price to pay for that well regulated militia that will be along to save you from tyrants, well, real soon now…)

Advanced Vector Extensions instruction set; introduced with Sandy Bridge in 2011, but not included in Pentium/Celeron branded processors even after then for reasons best known only to Intel.

Mongo is the application that has most irritated me by requiring it, but I doubt it’s the only one.

Just throwing this in here as another thing to consider - instruction set. From a quick check (so I’m happy to be told I’m wrong) the Celeron & Pentium options don’t support AVX. That means some stuff - and I’m giving a hard stare at MongoDB here, but there will be others - is not going to run, or at best you’re going to be either stuck with old versions or recompiling yourself from source.

(I don’t know if any of your apps require Mongo or AVX, but I was bitten by this in the past and it was one of the main reasons I eventually upgraded one of my small clusters.)