enjoy-your-stay

In the UK dentists are mostly private, it hasn't increased the quality or availability in the least.

Public transport is actually a fairly small part of the nation's transport, the UK is very car-centric so the strikes largely inconvenience commuters and drive even more people onto the roads, unless they can WFH.

Strikes are also a very recent phenomenon, just in the last 6 months or so, so this is quite a new thing driven by inflation.

Problems with the NHS are very much poor management by the last run of governments where there is a quite a growing suspicion they are deliberately trying to run down the NHS in order to make a case for to privatise it, following e.g. America's disastrous model.

I can't say for sure, but I think cryptos are actually behaving a bit more like precious metals, in that people use them as speculative store of value - so a bit like you say, commodities.

The other thing that surprises me is the sheer number of currencies that currently exist - I had thought there would be a massive shake-out in the market but so far they seem to be multiplying like fungus.

.. serveral 'ours layter ...

Thanks for that rabbit hole of nostalgia, just remembered how wild Mac OSX 10.1 in its first release was. It was a real game changer, and looked great (albeit a bit slow on my poor G4 Cube).

>...and still, no one seems willing to answer if they or their kids should be among the dead/maimed

Why don't you instead ask that of the Chinese? How many of them are willing to go to the bottom of the ocean in order to complete a pointless and petty war? There's a lot of hostile water between the mainland and the sovereign nation of Taiwan that they'll have to cross, many would die. And for what?

The USA has one of the largest and most ready navies in the world, if it came to a fight, China - which has very little naval experience in war as far as I can remember - might find itself massively outclassed between the US and possibly Japan.

What then happens in a war of attrition where China can't win, but won't back down?

The allies will basically blockade China until it chokes to death on it's own hubris, and industrial production will return to the US and Europe.

Money flows out of equities and into bonds which yield a higher more dependable return when interest rates are high enough.

The equities market was already running at artificially inflated values for some sectors (like technology), which means there isn't much growth potential (if everything is deemed to be already overpriced), and so the outflows were quite significant from those sectors, accentuating the inverse relationship between equities and interest rates.

Really good article, and this made me laugh

"Essentially, to juice its P&L in the short term, SVB ambled into 2023 almost completely unhedged".

Was it denazification, demilitarization, or de-satanization? I've lost track of the many stated goals. Or was it to help those poor souls in the DPR shoot down more civilian jets? Can't quite remember. Or was it to protect German speakers in the Sudetenland?

And anyway, it's not a war. It's a Special Military Operation. How more plain can you get?

"ChatGPT lied to me and then tried to deny it"

It's getting more human every day!

I would the say the opposite is true, the western media is more than happy to discuss and (over) analyse every little detail of information that quite freely flows into our media machines from many different sources.

We agonize over failures and freely discuss tactics and events, report explicitly and react to horrors occurring, sometimes so much that we get a bit desensitized over time.

It could be argued that we sometimes omit too little. Unlike in Russia now where telling the truth can get you a criminal record and land you in jail.

People are tribal and emotional about the invasion of Ukraine principally because they see that Russia is a bully, and people naturally revile bullying - even to the point that their creature comforts might be a bit disturbed when confronting the bully.

I see that as a good thing.

Russia as it currently is, is a massive and diverse country with many talented and artistic people. It could take any number of courses, and act in many different ways to be a better world citizen, but it hasn't. Russia had, and still has many many options, but somehow seems stuck in a downward spiral of trying to throw its weight around the world whilst simultaneously casting itself as a perpetual victim.

For the longest time I've written my own smart pointers to manage the lifetime of pretty much anything that needs a cleanup - database connections, query objects, file handles, threads, mutexes and yes raw pointers.

All of this code built just fine on pre c++11 compilers, ran reliably, was performant and easy to maintain.

Rolling your own smart pointers is not something I'd discourage.

And step 1 in marketing a new language is a cute mascot, obviously.

I think the fact that it eventually ended up as a server app language took everybody by surprise - Sun never saw it as anything like that at inception I'm sure.

Adding JDBC and later nio is probably what got it there the most.

WaitForMultipleObjects (been in Win32 forever) is not really related to IO completion Ports, whose API came a lot later.

My understanding is that condition variables were designed to be a superior alternative to Windows Event objects.

I'm glad to read here that others find them fiddly and overly awkward to use since that was also my impression vs the consistent and usually easy to use Windows thread synchronization HANDLE based objects. Dave Cutler definitely did a good job there IMHO.