gravescale

Note that "a bit" refers to the second half of the sentence, not your comment exactly.

A bit like imagining how many of the royal family have to die before Princess Eugenie becomes Queen or a Borgen-type affair where a junior minister becomes prime minister, can you imagine the crazy sequence of events that has astronauts rescued by a Shenzhou capsule?

And would it produce some detente or raise tensions?

Specifically, any new creative input to the book is copyrighted. Usually, this is things like new prefaces or forewords and new illustrations or cover art.

It comes from the Latin "laevus".

Funnily enough, although "sinister" came to mean "the bad side", it may have come from Proto-Indo-European for the "favourable side".

> He told us our product was too expensive for what it was and that we would never succeed in business like he would.

To be fair, when you're a 15 year old selling homemade drink, everything seems expensive, because you have basically zero costs other than your own time and a sack of sugar and it's difficult to conceive how much money roars around in business with any non-family employee.

I've been working 20-ish years and I still get sticker shock over even quite minor things even though some sap pays me three figures, more than my childhood annual income maybe, a day.

Perhaps it's too much free (as in beer) software and over exposure to ridiculously cheap-through-insane-scale consumer goods - a whole mid-grade phone for the same cost as a meal for two, say. But I think there's also a huge disconnect with how we tell children the world of "good, capitalist work", in which they'll probably spend the rest of their lives, works, and how it really works. About all you really get is Peppa Pig setting up a lemonade stand and learning a lesson on the value of hard work, say, and a jagged line graph briefly mentioned on the news.

The school system, at least for me, was extremely light on that kind of thing, even when you include economics (which I didn't take). In fact even in the media, other then specifically financial things like the FT, how the whole world actual or books in the subject specifically, how everything actually functions at any practical level is just...never really mentioned. Kids might know every kind of dinosaur, the function of the bits on the steam engine, the names of the sails on a ship-of-the-line, but it's almost like everyone has agreed we just don't need to talk about daily reality. It's like a huge "draw the rest of the owl" meme.

Just like Amazon being unable to deal with fake reviews and listing manipulation, despite having so much data that they have to invent new words for it like lakes. They don't want to do it: presumably they make better and-or easier money by letting scammers operate with impunity.

> But what is a Nixie Watch? How does it function? These are some questions worth exploring with this distinct and idiosyncratic wristwatch. So—let’s continue!

> ....

> Without getting into the weeds too much, the watch harvests electricity from said battery; deploys that electricity through currents; then the currents are switched off-and-on at exact times via a circuit board—which governs the electrical currents.

While this certainly isn't "in the weeds", it does rather feel that this is not even within visual range of any plant at all.

At the risk of eating the Onion, though it's not inaccurate, it doesn't seem like a very useful description, to anyone, even if the reader has never encountered electricity. The juxtaposition of that sentence with the earlier airily unelaborated-upon "a Nixie tube is a cold cathode tube" is pure art.

"Some people (X'Grn'k et al) say it was a device used for humorous purposes. However, we consider that the presence of sacred etched silicon devices rules this hypothethis out. While crudely worked in that time, and despite the abundance of raw material on the planet, such silicon was in short supply and was central to the nascent Guptian Church movement. In addition, records suggest that the "geo"politics of the time, somewhere between 1980 and 2050, had silicon artisanry in constant high military demand (see the F'llr'wq Metaversity analysis on use of Phonic Screen Devices in Central-West Asian planet-surface warfare between 1945 and 2045), and if not inducted into the Guptian priesthood, a silicon carver could expect a so-called 99-6 life, a 105-Earth-hour cycle with 99 hours in a warfab and 6 hours to rest (J'Hrar et al). Furthermore, per a recent discovery of a transaction record thought likely to be payment for living volume at the Western-American coastal enclave, the artisan class appears to have little in the way of disposable resourcing. Thus, we consider it unlikely that an artisan of that period could have spared or even been allowed the resources or time for such levity."

I don't know, I think there was definitely a turn around the mid 2010s when actions and consequences really started to diverge.

And to be clear, I don't mean that the exposure of CA was the cause, I mean that what CA and their ilk was delivering to their customers - detailed, real time, granular analysis of the reactions to actions.

Some time a bit before the public CA exposure would have been when analysts looking at the data delivered by CA would have first realised just how little what would until then have been "scandal" actually moved the needle of their supporters, without having to infer from slow and inaccurate techniques like polling and focus groups.

The problem is that this (if my theory is not just bunk) isn't something you can really go back and do differently. An emergent property of the reactions of polarised groups to the behaviours of their leaders was discovered to be quite different to what had been assumed. You may as well say "we have to go back to the old ways" when lamenting the relativity makes physics too complicated.

Though, as to the point I think you're actually making, it's also been made very difficult to object to these things in any terms that could possibly have an effect without being thoroughly denounced as a nutter, an extremist, or worse. After all, the "right" thing to do is always to simply "vote!".

My pet made-up theory is that careers aren't really killable like that any more, since Cambridge Analytica.

Before CA, the received wisdom was that if you do something bad, you will need to resign before you are pushed for causing damage to the organisation reputation and therefore electability. This was perhaps borne out with enormous error bars by focus groups and polls asking "would you still vote for X in case of Y".

After CA, and in particular the live social media sentiment data that was gathered around the debacle of the UK Brexit referendum, the data showed that actually egregious misbehaviour did not materially affect sentiments, and perhaps even appealed to a larger proportion of people than believed. For example, the famous "shy Tory" might not show up well in a focus group, but it all hangs out after analysing Facebook's data.

With that data in hand, people started doing things that they would never have dared to do before, knowing that it won't actually harm them, at least in the short run (since this data only shows short term effects).

And that's how we go from resigning over fairly small gaffes to the "screw it, what you gonna do, we know you won't vote for the others, we've seen your data" of today.

Not long ago, calling a woman a bigot on a hot mic was a dreadful PR disaster. Now, you can physically snatch a journalist's phone and it barely registers.

It does, however stack up over time with catastrophic final effects, much like chasing only quarterly figures or always postponing dealing with technical or real debt.

My school had streams for several subjects which is perhaps unfashionably pragmatic, but at least it allows the top, bottom and inner quartiles to go at their own paces with more tailored tuition.

The lower streams also took the lower exam tiers. Which limited their maximum grades, but a C (or whatever the number grade is these days) from a decent showing in Foundation Maths is better than an fail from a disastrous attempt at the Higher tier.

It won't help when children are multiple entire years behind their peers, though. Short of actually repeating years with extra tuition and major parental involvement until they can catch up, I don't know what you're supposed to do at that point. Obviously just chucking them into the next year and marking it down as a "pass" might make look good for the paperwork, but it's just compounding the misery for the poor kid who might as well be being taught quantum chemistry in Ancient Sumerian for all the good it will do them.

White reflects sunlight better and leads to less heating of the airframe's skin, shows up damage and leaks well, and the expensive paint job doesn't fade in the high-UV troposphere, so it's the supreme paint colour for most civil aircraft both in practical and economic terms.

That's a document that really has had money spent on the formatting, it's really very nicely designed.

The editable fields are a great touch as you can just paste in your answers directly from ChatGPT.