bell-cot
Joined 5 years ago
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Comment · 14 hours ago
Comment · 16 hours ago
> The end came in an announcement as stark as it was brief: they had seven hours to get off. They were going no further than Cambodia.
> The Odyssey, owned by Florida-based Villa Vie Residences, had first set sail from Belfast, Northern Ireland, in October 2024 with an explicit offer: Donald Trump had been re-elected to the White House, and this was a way for those ill-disposed to the president to enjoy a four-year “skip forward”.
> For $319,998, a couple seeking such an escape could head off to the high seas for the length of a presidential term and come back from their journey to nowhere when the danger had passed – or not. For those who had simply had enough, there was a permanent residency option for a few hundred thousand more.
> At 642ft (196 metres) long, it was a relatively small ship, but at such prices, and with the world being held firmly at bay, what could go wrong? Neither the more than 200 passengers on the Odyssey nor its cruise operator foresaw the consequences of Trump’s war in Iran. The reality was, there was no escaping the US president.
> On Tuesday, Villa Vie Residences issued a statement. It had run out of money owing to the soaring price of oil. Monthly fuel costs per cabin in parts of Asia had risen to as much as $8,000 from $1,800, placing it “under unsustainable financial pressure”, it announced.
The price of oil hasn't been stable since about 1973. Look at the top graph here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_oil_embargo. Also, blaming Trump is a shit excuse - the whole premise of their sales pitch was that his second term would be a disaster. If you're an honest, competent seller of 4-year cruises - there are things like oil price futures contracts you could use, to make sure that you could deliver on your sales pitch. Vs. going broke before you've even made it half way.
And the mastermind behind the whole mess seems to admit that he was selling a boatload of make-believe from day 1:
> Speaking earlier in the week, Mikael Petterson, who launched Villa Vie Residences in 2023, accepted that he was the “villain in the story” but said he was doing everything he could to help the stranded passengers. “Nobody that’s tried residential cruising has succeeded and we have gone further than anyone else,” he said. “But I think we would have been absolutely fine and we would have seen this through, if there was no Iran war.”
Comment · 1 day ago
> James and Catherine Kinglake fulfilled every wine lover’s dream when they bought a 72-hectare (178-acre) winery near Limoux, France. Situated in the Languedoc region with views of the Pyrénées, Domaine Begude has over 25 hectares of vines.
So less than 40% of their winery's acreage is actually vine.
The one other winery for which the article gives numbers has a similar percentage.
Any here familiar, to comment on why so much expensive land is being left idle?
Comment · 2 days ago
Or, as Upton Sinclair noted, what a man can understand is closely aligned with his current self-interest.
Comment · 2 days ago
I'm talking about the Elbonian gov't subsidizing some local guy (named Elbon Muds?) to build a rocket company from the ground up in Elbonia - same as Elon Musk did in the U.S. America has nothing resembling a monopoly on rocket tech.
Comment · 2 days ago
General case, it's not that simple. Say there's another train a mile ahead of you...but it's on a siding. To compute the effective distance, you'll need to know the positions of the switches connecting the main line to that siding. And switch positions can change far faster than you can stop, even if the other train doesn't move.
Comment · 2 days ago
I'd interpret the "minus first N per year" to mean that you get a few "free" fires per year - but after that your habits filling your closets with oily rags, overloading electrical extension cords, and smoking in bed will start to cost you.
Comment · 2 days ago
I'd suggest reading https://github.com/php/php-src/blob/master/php.ini-productio..., then doing a web search for "editing php.ini for maximum security".
Maybe compare with https://github.com/php/php-src/blob/master/php.ini-developme..., too.
Then similar for your web server (Apache, nginx, whatever).
EDIT: About your "would've seemed adequate before this" - I dug up a copy of a PHP v5.2 php.ini file (2-ish decades ago). That file begins thus:
;;;;;;;;;;;
; WARNING ;
;;;;;;;;;;;
; This is the default settings file for new PHP installations.
; By default, PHP installs itself with a configuration suitable for
; development purposes, and *NOT* for production purposes.
; For several security-oriented considerations that should be taken
; before going online with your site, please consult php.ini-recommended
; and http://php.net/manual/en/security.php.Comment · 2 days ago
Unless it was darn small and fluffy, it seems like the object's gravitational influence would have been noticed long before now.
Might there be an astronomer in the house, to comment?
Comment · 2 days ago
True-ish? If your firewall's admin page is internet-accessible, you have no excuse for not doing "bolted to bedrock" lockdowns of your web server config and your PHP config. Either of which could have blocked exploitation of the PHP vuln.
Comment · 2 days ago
The elephant in this room is that Elon and SpaceX seem unique in their ability to actually deliver reliable launch capacity at scale. Their detractors may complain all day about gov't subsidies they've receive, and how they've cheated their way into space, and how evil they are - but back in hard reality, two dozen or more countries would happily pay 3X all the subsidies which Elon and SpaceX have received to a local space company, if the result was a launch provider with even a quarter of SpaceX's capabilities.
Has there been any serious public discussion of this issue? I'd assume it's been studied extensively in Beijing, talked a fair bit about in Washington, and reluctantly kicked around in the ESA's HQ.
Comment · 2 days ago
Yep. And, insult to injury, the /4's and /8's of little-unused IPv4 special-use addresses - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipv4#Special-use_addresses
Comment · 4 days ago
Outside of high-frequency trading and real-time control, where is speed a serious design priority for modern end-user-facing software?
Comment · 4 days ago
You are thinking long-term. In the late-stage capitalist taxonomy, long term is a subspecies of lip service.
Comment · 4 days ago
How on earth do they...
They are the 900# gorilla, and the screams of the smallfolk have no effect on their bottom line.
So - Is there a World Wine Control Commission that is forcing all growers to leave X% of their land idle, in order to avoid a supply glut? Or massive gov't subsidies that allow individual growers still make their mortgage payments and payroll expenses, when reducing their vineyard's production by (say) 50% also reduced their vineyard's gross income by 50%?