> Just because your employer is willing to pay $N/hour doesn't mean you are losing $N by waiting in line for an hour.
Most people do nothing with their time. You're not being paid to watch TV or play video games. Learning is perhaps the only thing that pays, and it's not cash nor immediate.
> Some people will want cash for in person transactions but it's more rare. In the US you run into a lot of people who don't trust phones, technology, tech companies, the government
No, it's because majority of digital payment systems can be abused. Stolen accounts, payment disputes and more can cause a seller to lose the item and the money.
Cash is very, very hard to counterfeit, and there's inexpensive devices[1] to virtually guarantee a bill is genuine. There's no post-transaction fraud scheme that works once cash had exchanged hands.
> There's no post-transaction fraud scheme that works once cash had exchanged hands.
Yes but it is vulnerable to other fraud schemes, like misrepresentation or theft.
But yeah, when faced with the possibility of fraud many people instinctively retreat from the unknown (technology) to the easily understood realities of cold hard cash. Its biggest advantage is ease of understanding.
I assert it's more than that. Even Zelle can be susceptible to post-transaction fraud schemes.
Yes, someone can steal your cash - but they can also steal your item.
Setting aside theft - cash is simply the most secure way to ensure you keep your money post-transaction. There is no fraud mechanism to abuse, and no way to reclaim cash once in-hand.
For anything of value, the "old school" rules of meeting in a very public place and only accepting cash are still really sound.
Of course there is fraud risk with cash, it is just all on the buyers end of the transaction.
People are still getting scammed with cash every day with fake/locked/misrepresented/stolen items being sold on marketplace sites.
All of the legitimate reasons to reverse a reversible transaction is a fraud vector that cash is vulnerable to. That’s why reversible transactions exist.
> fake/locked/misrepresented/stolen items being sold on marketplace sites
100% of the risks you mention are still true with digital transactions. The difference is with cash, you close the door on literal fraudulent transaction claims or stolen accounts. It's vastly safer than digital transactions for in-person sales.
To be blunt - with cash, the buyer can't go home and file an unauthorized/fraud complaint with anyone - the seller has cash-in-hand, is anonymous, and the transaction is non-reversible. That's a benefit for these types of transactions, and one you seem to be overlooking.
If you're selling your couch on Facebook Marketplace - cash is king.
Listening to the live stream yesterday evening - they performed a significant amount of troubleshooting for the toilet. This required consulting with a full team of experts, including a "Toilet Lead". It seems it wasn't "flushing" waste into the collection bag or something similar - but they were eventually able to get it working.
I found the language NASA and the astronauts used to communicate absolutely hilarious - "Yes, we're excited and eager to begin immediate fluid disposal!"
Glad they got it working - best of luck to Atemis II mission!
The second law of thermodynamics dictates that everything poops.
Anything alive that is using energy and doing work and transforming matter must poop in some form or another.
We don’t know what form life out there might take, but we know it poops.
Even post biological machine life would poop in the form of industrial waste, waste heat, etc.
Even near perfect recycling can only be near perfect, not perfect, due to the second law, which means a super efficient organism or closed cycle ecosystem or industry will still poop. Just not much. It will also emit a ton of waste heat, which I guess is kind of poop since mass and energy are ultimately equivalent.
If there’s weird life out there made of plasma or something, it poops. Probably charged particles or something.
I had the same realization lately. Shouldn't it be said more specifically that anything that consumes matter to turn it into energy (as all living things on Earth) must poop? If we make the distinction between mass and energy of course.
No I think that "everything poops" is absolutely perfect. Poop is entropy, and everything turns into entropy eventually.
It might not be traditional poop as we know it, but the point is, no matter how far we go one day, no matter what/who we meet out there, no matter how much we advance, there will always be waste to manage.
Waste might be literal poop, waste heat, spent uranium, used oil, slag from a smelter or whatever. We might be perfect recyclers one day, and we might repurpose almost everything, but there will always be a little bit of "poop" left over to manage.
Years ago I read about an actual scientific proposal to look for UFOs. A few people in the UFO scene with scientific backgrounds were trying to crowdfund it.
The idea was to place very sensitive wide angle infrared telescopes at remote locations that are UFO sighting hot spots. Because as long as physics is universal anything flying around, especially like supposed alien craft, must be using a lot of power and rejecting tons of waste heat. They’d have to light up very bright in IR and physics says there’s nothing you can do about it (unless you imagine wild ideas like dumping it into another multiverse slice).
You’d get lots of planes but you could cross reference against public data to remove most of those. And obviously something doing maneuvers that are aerodynamically impossible or would turn a human into strawberry jam is not a plane.
I thought it was a good idea but I don’t think it got funded. It was years ago so the tech might have been very expensive. I bet it would be cheaper now. IMO it would be a good low cost but high payoff experiment.
YouTube was very effective for me to learn FreeCAD. I just searched for some FreeCAD tutorials and followed-along. I had zero prior CAD experience though, so I was a "blank slate" in a way.
Recently one of the magnet holders for my window shutters broke, and I thought I'd take a crack at designing a replacement to 3D Print. I'd never designed anything in CAD software before, so I had no real reference.
I found FreeCAD extremely easy to use and intuitive. I watched a couple videos and followed-along with the tutorials, then started on my own item. It's a relatively simple 3-part component. I took measurements with digital calipers, and in a few hours was printing the first prototype.
A couple prototypes later (small measurement adjustments to account for plastic shrinkage, etc), I had the final model. Replaced all of the magnet holders since they were sure to go soon, too.
I had fun, and finally used my 3D printer for something "real". Pretty cool.
A fun thing to do is take a picture and import it. Then you can trace it!
This is best done on some kind of grid background but having a ruler (or two) is usually enough.
One suggestion, print one or two layers first to check the fit. Iterate with that before you print the whole thing.
Another helpful thing is to start drawing things parametrically. This should be familiar to programmers. You're using variables and you want to design things primarily through relationships. This becomes a huge unlock because scaling your parts becomes much easier
I started with FreeCAD a couple of weeks ago. Parametric modeling is pretty hard and a couple of things are pretty hard to understand (no easy reuse of sketches between parts for one, one cannot extrude a binder is another one).
However, without it fine-tuning models for technical use would be untenable.
I definitely don't want to say that it's easy, but it's not terribly difficult. Does take a shift in thinking though, but then it clicks.
For reusing sketches, you can. There's external geometry and subshapebuilder. Doing assembly can be a bit tricky at first.
I'll admit, FreeCAD is a bit tricky if you're coming over from something more professional like SolidWorks or CATIA but it does get the job done and you can't beat the price. It's also really improved over the last two years
for incredibly simple parts that i can describe using measurements, i've had a lot of fun pointing a high-power ai at openscad and letting it iterate through making the design for me
it's still tough to turn it into something i can then keep fiddling with in freecad though
put on "tron: ares" in the background to fully appreciate the model designing something that will be 3d-printed :)
You can get even more vague and just generally describe the design of something, making sure it leaves exact measurements to parameters, and end up with something usable. ("Make me an openSCAD file for an pointed star with curved points and an inward taper. The number of points, thickness, and angle of taper should be configurable")
Previously I'd get my calipers first and try to model using the direct measurements. The key point imo of the video was to take photos and model based on the photos, and then correct the measurements with your recorded measurements second.
I had the opposite experience. Creating the parts was easy with some tutorials but when I went to the assembly step it failed horribly. There are different plugins/ways how you can do it but none of them worked and the console solely gave cryptic error messages. I gave up and used pen and paper. :(
That is the spirit! A friend recommended me to buy a Bambu P2S: there are parts I want to print and I don't want to model then send them to have them printed, nor to bother my friend all the time. Funnily enough I've got magnets falling too: for an alarm system on the doors/windows and they don't hold well anymore after the years. Then my car's radar detection device (fully legal) doesn't fit nicely in the phone holder I use to that effect: I want it a specific angle (I want it both inclined and facing towards me a bit). So I'll model those and just print them. There are a few things like that where I keep thinking: "If I had a 3D printer, I'd just print a part".
Most importantly: I've got a 11 y/o and I think it's cool for the kid to see how it works.
Already watch a few vids. Doesn't look too hard for simple things.
It was Onshape for me, but the same idea. The concepts take just a few hours to "click" (the idea that you're stacking changes chronologically, which is different from e.g. layers in photo editing), but then you can suddenly build like 80% of all tools and mechanisms that you've ever seen. Yes, slowly and usually using less efficient tools and approaches, but you can make most things look and work right SOMEHOW.
> “Employees disagreed in the chat, which resulted in Cannon-Brookes angrily interjecting to tell off the people who were complaining,” Puckett said in an opening statement at the hearing. On the company’s internal “Outrage Notification” Slack channel (a play on the “outage notifications” staff receive about technology issues), employees including Unterwurzacher mocked and condemned the comments from Cannon-Brookes, the company’s billionaire co-founder, who had joined the meeting from the headquarters of a basketball team he co-owns, the Utah Jazz.
> “What’s up Outragers, just dialing in from my NBA team’s headquarters to yell at the people whose careers I’ve just pummeled,” Unterwurzacher wrote.
It takes a certain amount of entitlement and lack of awareness to do this on official internal channels - with your name attached and viewable by anyone in the company, particularly during a downsizing event.
This would have been akin to printing out the statement, signing it with your name, and then stapling it to a literal bulletin board in the office hallway. There's no reality where that is acceptable...
Except the reality in which the criticism is well-deserved, obviously. That's subjective, of course, and I'm not commenting on whether it applies here, but "zero public outcry allowed, no matter what's happening" is an absurd position. Of course that doesn't mean you shouldn't expect consequences, even up to being fired by the tyrant in question, but that's not the same thing as "unacceptable". Employees aren't slaves.
If this was said on a private, non-official channel there would be no issue. She's allowed to have that opinion, and even say it. But doing so on an official internal channel is where it crossed the line.
Again, what she did was akin to printing out the statement and stapling it to a bulletin board - or, mass emailing it to everyone in the company. It was an official internal channel everyone in the company can access...
Imagine one of your reports saying something like this about you during a team meeting, while you're standing there. Not acceptable workplace behavior... and that would be limited to just your team.
The company has an internal policy of “open company, no bullshit” and an internal channel for venting called literally “outrage”. I don’t see an “official internal” and “unofficial internal” distinction here.
I am not the CEO. I am not a leader of a company. Leaders should expect for their behavior, which has far far far more reaching effects than mine, to be criticized. CEOs shouldn't be little babies who can fire everyone but not take a little heat themselves.
If you emailed something like this about a coworker to everyone in the company, it would also be inappropriate for the workplace. Just because it was the CEO doesn't make it acceptable.
> Just because it was the CEO doesn't make it acceptable
Actually, yes, yes it does. There are some things you can't say to any employee of any rank: racist or sexist harassment for example. And commenting on the performance of an employee that doesn't report to you is also generally a no-go. But legitimate, job-related criticism of the CEO, or any other senior management, is entirely acceptable. Why wouldn't it be?
Yes it is acceptable because it is the CEO. CEOs and lowly coworkers are not the same people and do not deserve the same level of interpersonal communication. CEOs shouldn't make evil decisions and then think they can not have mild criticism laid against them.
It would be nice to know what comments the CEO decided to make in those same official channels though. The article doesn't say, except to quote someone as saying he angrily told people off. What was the communication, and should it be without consequences?
The accounting for the current conflict is far from straight forward. The money was largely already allocated to military things, and there's fixed constants of payroll, food, fuel, munitions etc that would be spent regardless on training, operations, readiness, and just existing.
The media doesn't differentiate these things to deliberately inflate the figures.
> House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., responding to a CNBC question Thursday, said he has “not heard anything official from anybody” on the $200 billion number. But he said the figure could also include things that would otherwise be sought in the fiscal 2027 spending bill.
> Hassett, speaking on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” said at that time that he did not think the U.S. needed to ask Congress for more money for the war effort “right now.”
> The massive figure would increase production of the critical munitions that the U.S. and Israel have used to strike thousands of targets since the conflict began, three other people familiar with the matter told the Post.
> U.S. military operations against Iran, which began Feb. 28, have already cost $12 billion as of Sunday, according to Kevin Hassett, director of the White House’s National Economic Council.
And a reminder, the $12B figure includes all of the normal things that would be spent regardless if we are in a conflict or not.
What leads you to believe $12B includes normal things that would be spent regardless? The source of that quote makes no such claim. They have every incentive to quote as low a price as they can reasonably defend, and it would be very easy to defend a quote that only includes new and additional expenses that are directly attributed to the war.
The $12B figure[1] is almost exclusively munitions used so far. The US didn't buy munitions and use them, they already had them.
The cost reports (updated as the conflict goes on) will also include payroll, fuel, food, supplies, etc. Everything needed to conduct the war - but much of that is already spent even if not at war.
So what do you think the cost of the war is, then? $50bn? Seems like splitting hairs or missing the point. Even $50bn is too much for a war that congress nor the American people approved.
When's the last time Congress approved of a war? How about the American people? Maybe that first six months of Afghanistan? Maybe...
The President doesn't need approval for military action, and hasn't for decades. In a not so subtle way, we elect Presidents to make decisive decisions, such as when to engage in a conflict.
And to address your question, the cost is probably neutral so far. We'll need to replace many of the munitions, but we do that anyway. The loss of life is probably the most costly aspect of this conflict thus far.
The cost of the war is zero? You're off your rocker.
The constitution grants Congress the sole power to declare war and authorize military force. The fact that our country's politicians have manipulated our system to the point that this has been disregarded basically since WWII should never be normalized.
This country has been run by the rich for a very long time and democracy is on its way out.
Agreed, unfortunately. The amount of people that actually care about the national debt is near zero in reality, despite many stating otherwise.
When their party of choice comes into power, it's always "spend, spend, spend" - how else do you do all the things you want to do while in power? Then the table turns and they pretend to care while the other party takes a turn.
Round and round we go, deeper and deeper in debt, spending like a there's no tomorrow.
This is only possible because the taxation is obfuscated through debt or inflation, both of which effectively are a tax but a less obvious one allowing duping of the populace.
We don't need a new party necessarily, just a constitutional amendment that the government can only spend money from direct tax proceeds, with no pre-emptive withholding.
Like most of us, they're certainly using ai-assisted auto-complete and chat for thinking deep. I highly doubt they're vibe coding, which is how I interpret the parent's question and probably why they are being down voted.
This is insulting to our craft, like going to a woodworkers convention and assuming "most of [them]" are using 3D-printers and laser cutters.
Half the developers I know still don't use LSP (and they're not necessarily older devs), and even the full-time developers in my circle resist their bosses forcing Copilot or Claude down their throats and use in fact 0 AI. Living in France, i don't know a single developer using AI tools, except for drive-by pull-request submitters i have never met.
I understand the world is nuanced and there are different dynamics at play, and my circles are not statistically representative of the world at large. Likewise, please don't assume this literally world-eating fad (AI) is what "most of us" are doing just because that's all the cool kids talk about.
Your IDE either uses an LSP or has its own baked-in proprietary version of a LSP. Nobody, and I mean nobody, working on real projects is "raw dawgin" a text file.
Most modern IDE's support smart auto-complete, a form of AI assistance, and most people use that at a minimum. Further, most IDE's do support advanced AI assisted auto-complete via copilot, codex, Claude or a plethora of other options - and many (or most) use them to save time writing and refactoring predictable, repetitive portions of their code.
Not doing so is like forgoing wheels on your car because technically you can just slide it upon the ground.
The only people I've seen in the situation you've described are students at university learning their first language...
I write code exclusively in vim. Unless you want to pretend that ctags is a proprietary version of an LSP, I'm not using an LSP either. I work at a global tech company, and the codebase I work on powers the datacenter networks of most hyperscalers. So, very much a real project. And I'm not an outlier, probably half the engineers at my company are just raw dawgin it with either vim or emacs.
Ctags are very limited and unpopular. Most people do not use them, by any measurement standard.
Using a text editor without LSP or some form of intellisense in 2026 is in the extreme minority. Pretending otherwise is either an attempted (and misguided) "flex" or just plain foolishness.
> probably half the engineers at my company are just raw dawgin it with either vim or emacs
Both vim and emacs support LSP and intellisense. You can even use copilot in both. Maybe you're just not aware...
When your language has neither name-mangling nor namespaces, a simple grep gets you a long way, without language specific support. Ma editor (not sure if it counts as IDE?) uses only words in open documents for completions and that is generally enough. If I feel like I want to use a lot of methods from a particular module I can just open that module.
I don't use an IDE under the common definition. All my developer friends use neovim, emacs, helix or Notepad++. I'm not a student. The people i have in mind are not students.
Your ai-powered friends and colleagues are not statistically representative. The world is nuanced, everyone is unique, and we're not sociologists running a long study about what "most of us" are doing.
> forgoing wheels on your car
Now you're being silly. Not using AI to program is more akin to not having a rocket engine on your car. Would it go faster? Sure. Would it be safer? Definitely not. Do some people enjoy it? Sure. Does anyone not using it miss it? No.
I didn't say using different technology was cheating, and metal tools are certainly part of woodworking for thousands of years so that's not really comparable.
It's also very different because there's a qualitative change between metal woodworking tools and a laser cutter. The latter requires electricity and massive investments.
Most people do nothing with their time. You're not being paid to watch TV or play video games. Learning is perhaps the only thing that pays, and it's not cash nor immediate.
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