partial_accumen

The payment for a “severe” injury is 3 million rubles (nearly $29,000), and for a “minor” injury, 1 million rubles (nearly $10,000). For “other minor injuries,” soldiers will receive compensation of 100,000 rubles ($960), according to Russian state news agency TASS. The decree signed by Putin does not specify how the severity of a given injury is classified.

How much do you want to be that full limb loss is now considered “other minor injuries”?

Instead of ordering a new wave of conscription, Putin ordered an increase in the sign-on bonus for new military recruits to serve in Ukraine to 400,000 rubles (over $4,600), effectively doubling the lump-sum payment of 195,000 ($2,260) rubles initially promised to recruits in September 2022.

This will be great for moral. Imagine being one of the soldiers that signed up for $2260 and the new guys are coming in getting $4600? New soldiers have to know that that bad blood will have them forced into the most dangerous or suicidal roles because the guys there before you are pissed off. Who would sign up for that?

It’s sad that the coal lobby has convinced so many people that the most reliable clean energy source we’ve ever discovered is somehow bad.

Its bad in the sense that is a crazy expensive way to generate electricity. Its not theoretical. Ask the customers of the most recent nuclear reactors to go online in the USA in Georgia. source

"The report shows average Georgia Power rates are up between $34 and $35 since before the plant’s Unit 3 went online. " (there were bonds and fees on customer electric bills to pay for the nuclear plant construction before it was even delivering power.

…and…

“The month following Unit 4 achieving commercial operation, average retail rates were adjusted by approximately 5%. With the Nuclear Construction Cost Recovery (NCCR) tariff removed from bills, a typical resident customer using 1,000 kWh per month saw an estimated monthly increase of $8.95 per month. This follows the previous rate impact in 2023 following Unit 3 COD of $5.42 (3.2%).”

So another $5.42/month for the first reactor built on top of the $35/month, then another $8.95/month on top of all that for a rough total of $49.37/month more just to buy electricity that is generated from nuclear.

Maybe the power company is greedy? Nope, they’re even eating more costs and not passing them on to customers:

“Georgia Power says they’re losing about $2.6 billion in total projected costs to shield customers from the responsibility of paying it. Unit 4 added about $8.95 to the average customer’s bill, John Kraft, a spokesman for the company said.”

So that $49.37/month premium for electricity from nuclear power would be even higher if the power company passed on all the costs. Nuclear power for electricty is just too inefficient just on the cost basis, this is completely ignoring the problems with waste management.

The next biggest problem with nuclear power is where the fuel comes from:

“Russia also dominates nuclear fuel supply chains. Its state-owned Rosatom controls 36 percent of the global uranium enrichment market and supplies nuclear fuel to 78 reactors in 15 countries. In 2020, Russia owned 40 percent of the total uranium conversion infrastructure worldwide. Russia is also the third-largest supplier of the imported uranium that fuels U.S. power plants, accounting for 16 percent of total imported uranium. The Russian state could weaponize its dominance in the nuclear energy supply chain to advance its geostrategic interests. During the 2014 Russia-Ukraine crisis, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin threatened to embargo nuclear fuel supplies to Ukraine.” source

So relying on nuclear power for electricity means handing the keys of our power supply over to outside countries that are openly hostile to us.

There was no movement for a LONG time, even after first responders arrived. Thems all dead.

You obviously didn’t read the book, because Galt actually innovated (book describes essentially a perpetual motion electrical generator). Musk is a salesperson who is particularly good at getting funding, as well as hiring people who know what they’re doing

Two things wrong with this:

1. Galt tells us he created the machine. If you were to ask Elon Musk, he would tell you he created Tesla, which isn’t true. Musk neither founded, nor did he complete Tesla from start to finished all by himself. Galt is portrayed as creating his machine all by himself, which again, calls into question its truthfulness.

2. Even if Galt created it all by himself, he did so build by a society that allowed it to happen and empowered him to do so. As soon as he perfected his machine on the back of a society that gave him the opportunity, transportation, safety, education, materials, and the populous needed to carry it out, he privatized his gains and disappears from society.

They’re labeled as destroying public goods because the government sees all private creations as some form of “public good,” but they merely practiced the ultimate form of “take their ball and go home,”

This is a great example of Rand’s bad teen fanfiction. The classic hero protagonist with plot armor is invincible. Galt’s Gulch never experiences a hurricane, drought, invasion of foreign military, pandemic disease, or any of the other grand scale crises that humanity encounters. It’s residents are unrealistic epitome of self-sufficiency. Yet Rand presents this as the ultimate utopia.

it’s pretty easy to assume than John Galt is some kind of important figurehead, when he’s actually just the first in a larger group to exit a corrupted society.

A group that left a corrupt society, and is successful without itself being corrupted? Can you point to one place in human history that this has ever worked long term? The pragmatic realty of this would more likely play out like the small real world examples we’ve seen where a New Hampshire town tried to turn itself into a Libertarian paradise a la Galt’s Gulch.

I get why Rand’s message is attractive. It paints a world that individual merit is the soul metric of achievement and demonizes everything and everyone that doesn’t follow this model. Its just not even close to being realistic across any culture or long lived society throughout our entire history.

At the trial one witness was brought forward claiming to have been turned into a newt by her. When the defense pressed the claim clearly pointing out the witness was indeed human, the witness reported “I got better”. And now for something completely different. /s

I admit I haven’t read Fountain Head or Anthem. That still sounds like reading 400+ pages of Rand to get the same point she’s trying to get across. If others want some better storytelling surrounding her message, it sounds like yours is the better path. For those that just want to rip the bandaid off, the Galt speech by itself is the shortest path.

For those reading the Galt speech, Elon Musk might be a close contemporary example of Galt. He’s a rich industrialist that benefited from other’s labor and the society structures that gave him protective laws, safe food/water, an educated workforce, a welcoming to immigrants, and all of the things that let him succeed. As soon as he succeeds he puts all his energy into destroying those structures because he sees himself as the main character and everyone else unworthy of his ‘genius’.

Eh, I thought the opposite. I thought John Galt’s speech was absolutely skippable since the point had already been thoroughly made by that point.

I’m not sure what you’re proposing. I’m saying skip the rest of the 1000+ pages and JUST read the 48 page speech if you want to know the point of the book. You seem to be saying, “read the first 500 pages, and then stop reading the book once you get to the speech”. I agree with you that the speech is mostly redundant at that point however my method skips right to the point while yours would require the reader to suffer through 500+ pages of cardboard characters with vapid storytelling.

What am I missing from what you are suggesting?

“I hope you enjoyed your Uber ride today. Give me 5 stars or I’ll tell the secret police on you even though you never said anything.”

The 1000+ pages of Atlas Shrugged are all an excuse for a 48 page Manifesto portrayed as John Galt’s speech that occurs in the middle of the book.

If you want to understand what Rand was saying, just skip the book part and go directly to that manifesto. Its still a long slog to get through just that part. The rest of the book is slightly worse than bad teen fanfiction.

There’s a cost to keeping an agnostic solution that maintains that portability. It means forgoing many of the features that make cloud attractive. If your enterprise is small enough it is certainly doable, but if you ever need to scale the cracks start to show.

For some reason they think cloud is more stable than our own servers. But we had to move VMs off Azure because of instability!

If you’re treating Azure VMs as simply a replacement for on-prem VMs (running in VMware or KVM), then I can see where that might cause reliability issues. Best results means a different approach to running in the cloud. Cattle, not pets, etc. If you were using Azure VMs and have two VMs in different Availability Zones with your application architecture supporting the redundancy and failover cleanly, you can have a much more reliable experience. If you can evolve your application to run in k8s (AKS in the Azure world) then even more reliability can be had in cloud. However, if instead you’re putting a single VM in a single AZ for a business critical application, then yes, that is not a recipe for a good time Nonprod? Sure do it all the time, who cares. You can get away with that for awhile with prod workloads, but some events will mean downtime that is avoidable with other more cloud native approaches.

I did the on-prem philosophy for about 18 years before bolting on the cloud philosophy to my knowledge. There are pros and cons to both. Anyone that tells you that one is always the best irrespective of the circumstances and business requirements should be treated as unreliable.

We have decided to bring as much as we can in house and only put the workloads that have strict contractual uptime agreements on our VMware or HCI stack. The rest of the stuff goes on KVM or bare metal to save costs.

This is similar to the recommendations I give my customers, but its never this easy.

Entire teams are trained on managing VMware. Years of VMware compatible tools are in place and configured to support those workloads. Making a decision to change the underlying hypervisor is easy. Implementing that change is very difficult. An example of this is a customer that was all-in on VMware and using VMware’s Saltstack to orchestrate OS patching. Now workloads they move off of VMware have to have an entirely new patching orchestration tool chosen, licensed, deployed, staff trained, and operationalized. You’ve also now doubled your patching burden because you have to patch first the VMs remaining in VMware using the legacy patching method, then patch the non-VMware workloads with the second solution. Multiply this by all toolsets for monitoring, alerting, backup, etc and the switching costs skyrocket.

Broadcom knows all of this. They are counting on customers willing to choose to bleed from the wrist under Broadcom rather than bleed from the throat by switching.

The VMware is superior by far IMO because I like to have full control of my systems and roll my own stuff.

This was a strong argument before the Broadcom acquisition of VMware. Have you looked at your renewal costs yet? VMware is a great product but is far less attractive at the new pricing. Every customer I have is asking how they can get out of VMware as quickly as possible because of the new pricing.

Space Center Houston is a really enjoyable attraction for history and spaceflight. Stand next to a full sized Saturn V rocket (on its side so you can walk it end to end). Go inside the Shuttle Carrier 747 plane! Much more to see too. Spaceflight is inspiring!

No, I just don’t want them in my life.

This part we agree on.

but if you backflip on the top of a tall building, I don’t know you anymore.

The list of things that people can do that I wouldn’t want them in my life is nearly infinitely long, but I guess I don’t call that a list of “things I vehemently hate”.

Just randomly thought: I also hate people who seek thrills and extremely “unique” experiences. Like those who own pet chimpanzees, try various drugs to get high, or risk their lives for TikTok.

The pet chimpanzees thing I get. Its a wild animal and shouldn’t be a pet.

However all the other stuff is only affecting that person doing it. Why do you care what they do to themselves (as long as no one else is involved without their own consent)? How is your life negatively affected if those other people do those things to themselves? Do you want those other people having a say in what you do that doesn’t affect anyone else?

Son, that’s the cost of a new roof.

Depending on their circumstances, they might already have the new roof too. Or more likely they bought the vehicle with a minimal down payment and stretched the loan across 80 months.

What specific traits or habits do people close to you recognize that would reveal an impostor trying to mimic you?

They ask me what specific things would reveal themselves when they mimic me. Thats probably a red flag.

Nobody’s demanding they wear a mask

Which country are we talking about. In the USA there were absolutely mask mandates.

“They’re wearing a mask to stop the spread of disease, because they are sheep and I feel a need to react to this person’s wearing of a mask to prove to everyone else within eyesight I am not sheep lest they question my superiority."

FTFY, they don’t see the mask as preventing disease that needs to be prevented. They see COVID as a mild inconvenience. An inconvenience that isn’t worth doing anything to prevent it, and they get upset when anyone tells them they should care about it (even if its just for other people’s sake).

Masks are a highly-visible sign of compassion. It’s a sign that you don’t want others to suffer due to your own actions, especially if you’re suffering already.

I agree with this.

So when a person who has no compassion (but doesn’t want to admit they have no compassion) sees a mask, they feel the need to defend themselves and attack the mask.

I don’t agree with this. There is no self awareness of lack of empathy in this group. Its not like they’re recognizing masking as an empathetic action, and choose to act counter to telegraphy the don’t care about empathy.

Instead, they (wrongly) see mask mandates as some kind of subjugation (even though it isn’t). They build the narrative that “COVID is just like the flu” so no freedoms should be impinged. Personal exceptionalism demands they rail against anyone or anything demanding their obedience or compliance. They see the demand of not hurting others with the spread of disease as an infringement on their freedom.

The result of their actions is a lack of empathy, but I don’t think that is their goal and they even have any awareness about anyone else’s needs except their own.

That drone sitting on the ground taking off to chase the motorcycle. That’s a new definition of “loitering munition”.