If nothing else it means you can ditch the $20/mo Garmin Inreach plan, which got you PITA text messages at best. All the people going on about the virtues of disconnecting have never been so disconnected that they have to think about medical emergencies or rescue from weather / mechanical trouble / etc.
Not the person you're replying to, but I have a mini in the Jeep (shoots right through the fiberglass roof!) and it's a godsend on long drives through rural areas where cell service is spotty at best, often nonexistent for 20-30 minutes at a time.
At least for me, with my job and lifestyle, it means I can be on the road at times I would previously have been stuck at home/work waiting on that one last call.
Many many many years ago, I was a wee IT manager. Sort of a weird company, I was too young to be much more than smart kid who can install / fix anything.
Anyways, worked a few years there, made some friends, had one CAD engineer who was an utter jerk. In hindsight, probably a bully, but at the time just a really irritating person.
So that was my first foray into small electronics… worked up a small breadboard with a 555, some source of randomness I don’t remember now, a piezo speaker, and a 9v battery. It would emit a short beep at random intervals between roughly 60 and 240 minutes.
Stashed it above the ceiling tiles in his office on my last day at the company.
In college, some friends bought (they were less imaginative than you) the equivalent, powered by a 2032 cell, and hid it in my room as a prank.
Good times. I bet it’s still magnetically attached to the inside of the steel riser column of one of their desk chairs, though the battery is likely long dead.
It's a temperature thing, if they're failing then they've reached their lowest-available-power level by about 2-4am depending on house conditions. Then when they warm up again later the beeping stops, until the next night. Crude test for a suspect alarm if you can't exactly monitor the battery voltage is to put it in the fridge for a few hours.
Gnomon might be my favorite book ever. It’s one of those books where the first time through it’s disjointed and almost seems like a collection of novellas, then the second read you see the connections from the beginning and it all makes sense, and reads 3+ reward with really deep semiotics and structural parallels that I can only describe as fractal.
So Harrison aside, if you find yourself without reading material at some point, I’d really encourage giving it another try. It’s certainly abstract, but there is incredible depth and coherence throughout.
I haven't read Harrison, but that sounds a lot like Rudy Rucker, who I found infuriating for having all of the trappings of depth and sophistication but no actual substance.
That’s an odd take. The CCP was literally doing their job, just like US and other spy agencies also engage in espionage. Whether or not they “should” be doing so is a geopolitical debate that it’s easy to moralize about but difficult to change.
Huang had many responsibilities that he failed to live up to. Sure, he’s a victim of sorts, but he also failed everyone.
So they are top-flight PR and crisis management companies that are terrible at emotional intelligence, and Huang just got lucky that rather than hiring one of the apparently-universally-incompetent companies, Nvidia hired the one good one, which nobody elsewhere thought to hire before?
And that’s a simpler answer than Huang actually wanting a more direct apology?
I’m so tired of the rote cynicism. If he doesn’t apologize, it proves a sociopath billionaire who cares for nobody. If he apologizes, it proves he’s a sociopath billionaire who cares for nobody. I’m reminded of Life of Brian.
We can’t know what he really thinks, but as apologies go, this is a good one. And it’s not healthy to see every piece of evidences as further proof of one’s own unshakable beliefs.
It's not a good apology. It's boilerplate to save the stock price. It's not from the heart; it's vague by design. It's meant to get as many shareholders as possible to say: "ok." That's not genuine.
But the knee jerk maximum-cancel for any offense is a problem. CEOs are not saints. Very few people are. If our standard for corporate leadership is not just to be good at business but also to be above reproach personally… who’s left?
It’s an unfortunate fact that humans are generally fallible and imperfect. Jack Welch cheated on his wife. Many other execs have. It sucks, but the world would not be better if there were a career death penalty for doing so.
Nobody is saying he can't retain most/all of hi billions and do something else. But, leading a multi-billion dollar business should come with some minimum expectation of morality. If for nothing else because being an immoral turd opens you to extortion.
I really don't get the sentiment that flying around the world to cavort with a Chinese spy is ok-ish. That's insane.
Some call it cheating, other cultures and centuries don't. What if he and his spouse had an "open" relationship? That he got lured in by a spy, that's embarrassing. He could have and should have run a background check. Even if the lady wasn't a spy, she would have been a gold digger and he knew that, couldn't have been so naive.
Literally nobody would be left. This is big issue with our cultural moment right now. In the past, it was understood that all humans are fallible and worthy of forgiveness. The standards seem to be so unrealistic right now that it is making everyone miserable. This is not to say there should not be accountability. But there should also be proportionality and second chances.
If every C-level in the world is morally suspect, we have a bigger problem. Seriously, is your claim that being a bit iffy is a pre-requisite for the job? That's a pretty damning statement about capitalism if that's the claim.
In my experience it is much more accurate to not see the world in terms of good and bad people, but to accept that each of us have the capacity for good and bad in ourselves. To quote Solzhenitsyn: the line between good and bad goes through the heart of every person.
This world view is not only more accurate, but also more forgiving, and and overall leads to a less angry world view.
> The standards seem to be so unrealistic right now that it is making everyone miserable.
This is not at all true; our standards are extremely low for moral behaviour from public figures, and they traditionally face minor or no consequences for even severely unethical or actively criminal behaviour.
You can't say we need to preach forgiveness rather than consequences when no consequences are happening at all; it reads as insincere, and is at best inaccurate.
Who's morals exactly? There's a big difference between following the morals of a traditional religion and following the morals of some retards you happen to align with because of your pre-existing lived experiences. Organized religion solves the individual morality problem of having an over-arching unified set of principles everyone is aligned to by making morality something that humans can't change.
I think I'm with ModernMech on this one. It's too easy, I think, to focus on the idea of CEOs being forced to resign as a "career death penalty" to the degree that we lose sight of how well-off the people we're talking about are. Jensen Huang's wealth is estimated at over $150 billion dollars. That's more than most corporations in America. If he never worked another day in his life, never earned another cent of interest on investments, lived to be 100, and spent $5M per day for the rest of his life, he would die being worth over $80B. I understand "death penalty" is metaphorical, that he probably wants to work, yadda yadda yadda, but goddamn, let's not pretend that is an actual penalty.
(For that matter, let's not pretend that if he resigned now he wouldn't be able to immediately pick up work again if he wanted to. Because, to reiterate, he is worth over $150 billion dollars. He could start a new company. He could start ten new companies. He could buy an island and build a secret underwater volcano lair to start a new career as a Bond villain. Assuming he doesn't have a secret underwater volcano lair already, of course.)
You might have picked a better example than the guy who systematically hollowed out the American institution that was GE by evangelizing cartoonishly corporatist short-term MBA culture then leaving when the bill came due and washing his hands of that destructive movement that he propelled to the forefront of American business. There are tons of great leaders who did hurtful things in their private lives. I don't think that Jack Welch is exemplary of that first criterion (unless you count a legacy of financial engineering and grinding employees into pulp as leadership).
They aren't saying "maximum cancel", they're just saying maybe this guy shouldn't be running one of the most consequential companies in the world when he's more interested in dopamine farming.
At the end of the day, asking a billionaire to resign his role, so he can sail off into the sunset on his yacht and have all the affairs he wants for the rest of his days isn't really on any scale of punishment or cancelling I'm familiar with.
Somehow we live in a world where with great power comes no responsibility or accountability, and it's quickly becoming too big of a problem to handle.
> Jack Welch cheated on his wife. Many other execs have
Along with a lot of people who are not executives, and people who were not executives at the time and went on to become executives. Like it or not cheating is relatively common, our species is not strictly monogamous and the evidence can be found in male anatomy (read about it if you are interested, particularly in comparison to Chimpanzee and Gorilla anatomy).
I am not saying this as a defense of cheating; it is just a fact that people cheat on their spouses, regardless of the moral implications or how "never cool" it is.
Dispute the research all you want; really, it does not matter why people cheat because it is a fact that people cheat. How is it a defense to point out a fact? It is also a fact that people murder each other, does pointing that out amount to defending murder?
Maybe it's demographic, then; because I don't know anyone who cheated on a spouse and am struggling to think of anyone who knows someone who did. Or maybe you spend too much time consuming pop culture.
Easy to say 80 years later, not having any of the personal experience, and handwaving away first person accounts.
You can certainly choose to believe that the decision makers were eager to use nukes and didn’t consider other paths, but you have to acknowledge that opinion is coming entirely from your own intuition and intentionally excludes all contrary evidence.
It's literally in Truman's diary. [1] I mean I suppose he doesn't "literally" say 'I'm anxious to nuke the Japs', but he comes pretty close:
"Discussed Manhattan (it is a success). Decided to tell Stalin about it. Stalin had told P.M. of telegram from Jap Emperor [actually from the Foreign Secretary] asking for peace. Stalin also read his answer to me. It was satisfactory. Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan [A-bomb] appears over their homeland. I shall inform Stalin about it at an opportune time."
And on top of this, the Japanese had been negotiating their surrender with the ostensibly neutral USSR hoping to get more favorable conditions with their assistance. And the US had been secretly intercepting these cables and knew all about it. [2] And on top of this the US had also already created another secret agreement with the USSR such that they would declare war on Japan on August 8th, which would end any hope at all for Japan. We nuked them on August 6th, and then again on the 9th.
Not quite. The main negotiator they were using in the Soviet Union was fully aware of the reality of what was happening, long before the nukes and Soviet declaration of war. He was suggesting unconditional surrender except with the promise of the continuity of the Emperor, which is exactly what they ended up going for.
The problem is that he did not, independently, have the authority to make such an offer. And in the mainland things were also confused. The Emperor was treated as a borderline divine figure, but that also meant he was mostly hands off except as a lost resort. He was pushing for surrender behind the scenes, but the war council was the one making the decisions of what would be offered, and they were completely divided. Half wanted to fight, and half wanted peace.
This division continued even after the nukes and Soviet invasion. What changed is they chose to allow the Emperor to make the final call, and he chose to surrender as he had been angling for for quite some time already. The nukes played little role in this decision. The pro-war Japanese correctly believed that we couldn't have many such weapons and were, in any case, prepared to fight to the last Japanese because they thought it'd be glorious. The thing that did change their mind was the Soviets entering the war meaning they not only no longer had any intermediary with with which to hope for more favorable terms, but also were now facing a massive invasion from the north as well.
There’s a school of thought that anything is better than blandly conformative design. In that school, the Cybertruck counts as progress.
To me, it’s more like answering a complaint about the blandness of pop music with electric bagpipes and nails on chalkboard: if you can’t be different and good, maybe don’t try so hard to be different.
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