crystalmeph

Chuck Schumer is trying to mollify his constituents. The one thing a politician can never tell his constituents is that they are being morons, even when it's true.

Your last link has the officer claiming it doesn't give off heat like regular drones, but just like the OP story where a police officer claimed the "mystery residue" reacted "violently" to a lead pencil, what does that even mean? Can we get an A/B test of what this officer calls a "regular" drone on heat vision versus one of these mystery drones?

And oh yeah, at about 4:30 into that link, the reporter puts up his own "authentic drone footage" that I am absolutely certain is a perfectly normal airplane.

The airport shutdown was real, sure, but that was dumb wannabe sleuths who were going to "solve the problem" using their own drones, thereby becoming the problem, or smart trolls who knew exactly how best to get a laugh out of the gullible public.

Rapid iteration at the component level would obviously require custom components, and maybe vertical integration, which clearly conflicts with point #1 about riding existing supply chains. But you can still iterate parts of the design that you more or less "have" to customize, such as the body material, axis geometries, and dozens of other factors I can't think of off the top of my head. The collected data can both be used to improve training and as input into the design iterations.

Demoralization of the enemy. Every single Hezbollah member is now paranoid that every single surface they touch is either listening to them or trying to kill them.

They lose in the short term, but if you're buying and holding to maturity, you get that money back. If you're worried about losing "market value" in a rising interest rate regime, buy shorter-term bonds. You can buy short-term bond funds, or buy bonds individually on Fidelity, Vanguard, etc.

Does it matter? It's a wasteful process, and not the only one that has been introduced into the parent commenter's workflow.

In a private company, you can just say "I don't care if we lose 1-cent screws, just order more when we open the last big box of them." You don't ever have to count them, unless you notice that you're spending an awful lot of money on replacing them.

In a public company that is legally required to keep track of its assets, you have to keep track of stuff that is really not worth keeping track of. Even if that's only on a periodic basis, there are literally dozens, probably hundreds of new "just one more things" you have to spend time on in a public company.

Yes, all those "one more things" keep you honest and accountable, but it has real, and rising, costs that can distort rational economic decision-making.

I wonder if something like Slashdot's metamoderation system could be used to tamp down such abuse.

One problem with metamoderation is that once a particular forum becomes an echo chamber, even metamoderation will unconsciously but repeatably ignore "valid" information from the other side and amplify misinformation from their own side. But if the site owners specifically searched for good-faith users from multiple viewpoints to serve as the jury pool for metamoderation, this could be workable.

> But also going to the dentist already isn't exactly pleasant, the pokes, scrapes, drill noises, etc. Maybe we improve that first before sticking it in a robot?

From the article:

> The machine's first specialty: preparing a tooth for a dental crown. Perceptive claims this is generally a two-hour procedure that dentists will normally split into two visits. The robo-dentist knocks it off in closer to 15 minutes.

So this robot is actually improving the dental experience for the patient, which will hopefully reduce anxiety as well as reducing costs.

The Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States, has been raising interest rates very aggressively for the past year and a half to fight inflation. This has ended a very long-lived policy of near-zero interest rates which has been in place since 2009, the Great Financial Crisis.

When you borrow money from the bank, i.e. to fund the operations of a money-losing site like Reddit, ultimately the interest rate you pay on that loan is affected by the interest rates set by the Federal Reserve.

While interest rates were near zero, investors in money-losing companies like Reddit could justify just borrowing more money to keep the companies going, as the money was cheap.

But now with higher interest rates, the investors in Reddit, and other money-losing ventures, can no longer afford to just borrow more money to make up for the money they lost last year, they actually have to show a return or at least cut the losses to a level that the investor will tolerate. That means monetizing everything they can.

Designing a new product can often be thought of like one of these puzzles. E.g. designing an "integrated" traffic system for a city that balances use by pedestrians, cyclists, cars, and trolleys.

I was wondering why China wouldn’t include a self-destruct feature. My daughter pointed out that crashing into a US city, even unintentionally, would probably be seen as even more hostile than sending the balloon in the first place. You obviously could choose to self destruct in a remote area or over water, but they may well have considered the escalation risk to be too high if they added potentially destructive capabilities.

I don’t know exactly how fast the air currents at 40,000-60,000 feet will drive a balloon, but I would assume that this most recent balloon was already airborne by the time the previous one was discovered. As long as they don’t launch anymore starting last week, this particular episode should wind down peacefully.

As to why use balloons instead of satellites, the most reasonable speculation I’ve seen is that they’re collecting signals intelligence (radio traffic, etc.) which is not accessible from orbital distances.