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Comment: Re: I doubt it. (Score 1) 78

hey, I had a GE made in Mexico about a decade ago - complete junk. I just gave away a Bosch too - also junk. Before the GE was Whirlpool junk. Replaced the Bosch with a Maytag, a model with a grinder, and it's the first dishwasher I've bought that I haven't hated in two decades. Not sure where it's made.

Comment: Re: It's totally superfluous (Score 3, Interesting) 163

by bill_mcgonigle (#48658149) Attached to: NetworkManager 1.0 Released After Ten Years Development

oh, does bridging work finally? I spent well over an hour with nmcli docs and on Google trying to setup bridges for each vlan I was using on an el7 machine and got nowhere close to working. Spent 5 min setting up redhat ifcfg- files and was done after yum uninstalling nm. It says that nmcli got some love in 1.0, and boy that's a good thing.

Comment: Re: not original (Score 3, Insightful) 187

by bill_mcgonigle (#48658061) Attached to: Uber Pushing For Patent On Surge Pricing

Price "gouging" is a good thing. It sends information signals to the market to divert goods to where they are needed. Hurricane approaching Florida? That load of plywood headed to Michigan should be diverted to boarding up windows in Dade County instead of to building a dog house in Lansing. But if the price of plywood is kept artificially low (only possible by the guns of government), there's no incentive to send the truck towards a hurricane, so the Michigan contract is fulfilled.
During Hurricane Sandy some friends and I looked at renting a truck and getting some generators from our local stores to NJ - about 300 miles. It would obviously have to be worth our effort but both we and the people without power who could not find generators would benefit. But then Chris Christie got on TV threatening anybody who would charge above big-box store non-emergency prices with National Guard action. "Screw that", we said, "they can sit in the dark and enjoy their fairness".
The important information theory piece to learn is that prices are the information signals that are sent through markets. The important economic piece to learn is that scarcity is real. The important political piece to learn is that politicians ignore both, to the detriment of their people but to their own personal gain.

Comment: Re:Dementia will get'm long before 120 (Score 2) 439

by bill_mcgonigle (#48654483) Attached to: How Venture Capitalist Peter Thiel Plans To Live 120 Years

Or many of the other old age related diseases of which there is no treatment. Wishful thinking.

He's 47. He's got more than two decades before those are likely to affect him. I'll bet that in 2034 we have effective treatments for most all of them, with genomic analysis and gene therapy being available at the shopping mall, next to the place that does nails. OK, probably not FDA-approved (possibly even banned in the US due to costs of welfare if people don't die off) but that's what medical tourism is for. You might need to fly to Theil's boat to get it.

Comment: Re:Nothing can go Wrong Here (Score 2) 439

by bill_mcgonigle (#48654443) Attached to: How Venture Capitalist Peter Thiel Plans To Live 120 Years


How could this possibly go wrong?

It's just nonsense - to build on a sea platform would require tremendously strong buildings and no owner of such a platform would permit shacks to be built there as crumbling buildings would threaten the platform and its other occupants. The notable difference between a seastead and local building codes is that such agreements on a seastead would be entered into voluntarily, not by fiat backed by violence.

The people who would live and work there would need to be attracted to live on a sea platform, so low-paid workers and destitute beggars aren't even an issue. This isn't a model for society, it's more of a Galt's Gulch.

I still think it's silly to get all the anarchists on a platform that can be sunk by a torpedo (see the Free State Project for a more sensible option) but TFS is written as if by a seventh grader who's heard something about libertarians.

Comment: Re:Stone Age diet ? he wants to live all 20 years? (Score 3, Insightful) 439

by bill_mcgonigle (#48654381) Attached to: How Venture Capitalist Peter Thiel Plans To Live 120 Years

Read up on the anthropology, especially about the value of grandparents. Also be careful to avoid means as averages in such cases.

Hint: healthy humans don't undergo menarche until they're about twelve, and human children do not survive well if their parents die off before they're eight.

There's evidence that life expectancy went down with agriculture, though housing heralds an improvement for infant mortality so the means go up, though tempered by increased disease.

Comment: Re:Precious Snowflake (Score 0) 323

by bill_mcgonigle (#48652669) Attached to: Putting Time Out In Time Out: The Science of Discipline

A child without physical punishment learns early that all consequence is harmless. Risk becomes a non-existent factor in decision-making. The child becomes a self-entitled asshole or goes to an early grave.

Right, you know more about this than all the neuroscientists who have evidence that your claim is idiotic.

Lemme guess - your parents abused you and you feel a cultural need to love Mommy and Daddy, so you'll claim it was good for you to make the dissonance stop.

Comment: Re:Precious Snowflake (Score 3, Insightful) 323

by bill_mcgonigle (#48652525) Attached to: Putting Time Out In Time Out: The Science of Discipline

And thus the decline of western civilization...

If it's to fall, it'll be due to people who were raised on the idea that physical violence against innocents is a virtue and who thus support societal institutions that use it as their primary means of motivation against adult subjects, contrary to the human drives towards freedom and creativity.

Way to ascribe the cause to the cure.

Comment: Re:LOL ... w00t? (Score 1) 291

by bill_mcgonigle (#48652481) Attached to: Amazon "Suppresses" Book With Too Many Hyphens

Addendum: It turns out the author used the minus sign instead of the hyphen. That (a) looks wrong on the page, (b) breaks screen readers, (c) confuses readability scores and (d) makes this not news.

Ah. What's news then, is that Amazon can't deploy a simple perl script to fix common typography errors such as these. YouTube wants more content creators so it deploys helpers like 'auto-stabilize' and such. Amazon, in contrast, prefers to castigate its contributors for typography errors. Who benefits? Copyeditors.
