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Need to triple buffer or there’s a condition where you have used a plate from the clean pile, but the dirty wash is still running. You’d just have to stand there in the kitchen like some kind of Sims character.


There is still the sink.


Great Stuff Guys! But I worry the concept of a long-running gag may be lost on today’s youth.

If you had some way to illustrate an aging joke, possibly situated near to something much younger (for comparison) I would be deeply obliged if you could print it on page 94 of your organ.


Removing context to make a selective argument is intellectually dishonest.

The article contrasts the operating environment of “Big Three” auto-manufacturers across countries. It compares manufacture costs in Germany and Japan with those in the US, and the paragraph you cite links through to a (2004) article in which it is estimated that pensions and health insurance combined add $1,784 to the cost of a car in the US.

You need to subtract some contradictory numbers in the article to come to a number you can ascribe to health insurance, but somewhere between $400 and $800 fits a quoted “$900 will flow to [pension] funds”.

Given this context it is reasonable to argue that General Motors is (or at least was in 2004) at a competitive disadvantage to manufacturers in Japan or Germany as a result of the US having no universal healthcare system.

Lamentably for your position, just because there are political decisions involved that bring about consequences, factual discussion of those consequences is not itself necessarily political.


> Given this context it is reasonable to argue that General Motors is (or at least was in 2004) at a competitive disadvantage to manufacturers in Japan or Germany as a result of the US having no universal healthcare system.

Japanese and German carmakers also make cars in the US. The primary distinction isn't that the company has to provide healthcare, which they all do, and even if they were manufacturing in different countries they still would because someone would have to pay the taxes that pay for healthcare instead of the insurance premiums. The primary distinction is that foreign automakers have non-union shops in the South whereas domestic automakers have union shops in and around Detroit, and management discovered that promising generous future benefits is a way to placate the UAW without cutting into present-day profits, with rather deleterious consequences for the company's future.

This still has nothing to do with the healthcare system except insofar as it was a category of future benefit that could be promised. The same thing would have happened (and did) by promising future pension payments or other benefits. The proportionality of healthcare vs. pension payments and other benefits wouldn't have materially affected the result, they'd have just been promised more of something else.


Challenging this axiom is why when I think of the threat model I face traveling from place to place, I come to the inevitable conclusion that I am very likely a target of assassination attempts.

Consequently, I ensure that my motorcade of armed guards are always with me, and accept cars loaded with only the toughest reinforced glass. I am, of course, paranoid about physical proximity to strangers and that mostly incentivizes me to avoid public travel, particularly flights (though even my private jets must be carefully maintained only by my most trusted insiders lest they find themselves tumbling out the sky near Tver). When flying on particularly important trips I send a decoy plane, and I make sure that air space near me is well controlled.

Or maybe, just maybe, I don’t actually face the same threat profile as presidents, spy agency bigwigs, and leaders of paramilitary organizations, and pretending I do is an act of high fantasy that far from empowering my true human soul would be so ridiculous as to make life unlivable!


One hop from the parent article is a discussion on why these researchers believe it matters.

Hacker News comments have been in a bit of an anti-academia, pro-business mood recently, so most relevant question copied below.

Imagine an (exploitative? Creative?) product launch for a probiotic yogurt made “to give you the biome of a true paleo”. We might want to ensure those whose mouths were swabbed to unlock that tag line were compensated.

> Q: What is microbiome ownership, and why is it important? Weyrich: This means that someone could own or have rights to their own bacteria. The ‘next generation’ of probiotics to support health are coming from people who donate their microbes — not yogurts or fermented foods, so establishing a framework for people to own their microbes means that they could benefit or profit from the commercialization of these microbes. This framework is important for providing equal benefits for research participants, research teams and companies that may want to commercialize someone’s microbes to make ‘next generation’ probiotics.


OK so this just confirmed my hunch: the driver for this type of research is ideological. I'm not overly disgusted by it such as someone in the "anti-academia, pro-business" camp might be, I pick the chips on my shoulder with some care. But I much prefer research that is not ideologically biased - in any direction. The more extremist, the less I prefer it.

I'm familiar with the notion that "everything is politics" and the like, but it is a completely useless rule of thumb for everyone but undergraduate zealots and ideologues, who ultimately prefer to spend their energy defending their bias instead of looking at the data.


> an anti-academia, pro-business mood recently

recently? bro this is an incubator for SV startups -- its always been that way.


Best drop that M from STEM; from the article, and similar recent reporting, the graduate Maths program is one of the indulgences Virginians can do without.


Knowing that group N passengers may be forced to check their bags, the pricing to put yourself in group N - 1 is your “calculated misery”. Repeat across other airline convenience fees like seating.


CPU Hotplug is a long established name for this process, whether for correctness or power, particularly in Linux Kernel contexts.


Absolutely nobody hotplugs a CPU for power management.



Sigh… I guess we’re doing this!

The term cpu-hotplug in the arm world almost never means hot-adding a new package/die to the platform, we usually mean taking CPUs online/offline for power management. e.g. cpuhp_offline_cpu_device()

https://www.spinics.net/lists/arm-kernel/msg739722.html


That's marketing overloading a term, not technology.


I like a good analogy challenge, let me try to shape something around your framework!

We sell particularly high-value, unique jewels, that are seated in jewellery. In fact, our jewels are so valuable to us, that our stores are able to modify the case around the jewel even before they sell to a customer. Each customer will be offered the last casing the jewel was in, and be given the opportunity to change it - though they might still choose not to buy.

We have a set of stores that we can sell from, and of course only one store can have the jewel in it at a time. We’re losing customers by only having the local stock available to sell, so we instigate a new policy; every store takes a picture of the casing for the jewel when they have it in store, they can show this last copy of the jewel in their catalogue. If a customer wants the jewel from the catalogue, we call around the other stores asking for the physical jewel to be brought to us.

This works well a lot of the time, but we find a new problem. Sometimes the customer really liked the casing the jewel was in for the photograph in the catalogue, but when the physical jewel arrives the casing has changed. The customer mutters something about false advertising and storms out disgusted by the stale photo shown. So we add a new policy. If a store changes the casing for a jewel it has to send a picture to every other store of the new casing so they can all update their catalogues.

Well! Now we have chaos! Every store owner is so busy updating catalogues and sending pictures around the other stores that they’re getting less real work done. We look at our catalogue, sometimes we’re updating the same page many times without a customer even seeing it!

So we come up with a new policy - instead of immediately changing the catalogue when we get told that another store has changed the physical jewel, we’re just going to mark the catalogue page as out of date. If eventually a customer asks to see that jewel, we’ll apologise to them for the wait, we’ll ask the other stores who has the jewel right now, then we’ll go get the physical jewel from them, take a picture for our catalogue, and show it to the customer. (As a minor optimisation, if we think the customer will want to change the casing we’ll politely inform the store we picked it up from that they can now mark their catalogue out of date).

It is all going well, but there’s a lot of overhead in our catalogue with only one jewel per page, so we start putting multiple jewels on each page. That makes our catalogue page update a bit difficult so we declare that a store must always collect all physical jewels for any given catalogue page.

One day we find that two stores are sending the same two jewels backwards and forwards all day. We investigate and find that the two jewels are on the same catalogue page, one jewel is being changed by a particularly indecisive customer in one store, and the other is being change by an equally determined customer in the other store. Neither cares about the jewel the other is trying to change, but both customers are getting frustrated by the wait as our policy requires both jewels in the same location before an update can be made. The store managers bemoan ever putting the two jewels on the same page to create this false sharing nightmare. They agree that even if wasteful, for these particular jewels they’ll leave blank space in the catalogue, the two jewels land on different pages, and the shuffling of jewels between stores stops.


Thanks for taking the time and explaining. In your opinion is this a problem unique to CS then?


There is a large user manual available in “Books” ; https://books.apple.com/gb/book/iphone-user-guide/id15159955...

I imagine most iPhone users don’t know it is there!


See, I didn't know that, and I've had iPhones since the 4 (a grand total of four devices), and am the sort of person who reads the manual in general, and likes to know all the features of a device I spend time with.

On the one hand, thanks for the tip! On the other hand, Apple has an enormous discoverability problem, it's getting worse, and they're responding by making the UX dumber instead of addressing it head on.


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