Or somewhere in between. I mean, I can buy dissolvable PVA 3D printer filament right now from Amazon or whatever. But there are limited uses for plastic that can't get wet.

His policies are completely out of touch with reality. Everything about his behavior screams "sociopath". The guy deliberately moved materials around in Mar a Lago to hide them from searches by government agencies with the authority to repossess government secrets, repeatedly spouts Russian propaganda that nearly every media organization in the world other than Fox News and a few even more far-right outlets agree is full of s**t, and basically acts like Putin's puppet when it comes to America's position in the world. On top of that, literally nothing I've ever seen him say sounds like a coherent sentence uttered by someone who is fully mentally competent. Listening to him makes me understand Van Gogh.

At this point, I've concluded that he is basically second-term Reagan; his strings are being pulled by powerful oligarchs, both at home and abroad, convincing him to vote for things that benefit them, and he is basically exactly what the Republicans accused Biden of being. Funny, that. The Republicans keep accusing the Democrats of doing things that they themselves are doing. Over and over and over again.

And yet you think that he is qualified to be POTUS. Even if he had not encouraged, or at least completely failed to talk down, an uprising against the U.S. government led by his followers in his name, even if the various commissions concluded not that he wasn't a Russian agent, but rather that he had obstructed justice to ensure that they could not prove that he was, even if none of these things were true, he still would be someone who inspires through hateful fear mongering, spewing anti-immigrant, anti-world trade propaganda that is contrary to the success of this nation financially, contrary to Christian values, and contrary to basic human decency, and he does these things precisely because he knows that fear will motivate a large number of people who don't actually understand how governments operate, how economies operate, etc. to look back longingly at "the old days" that are completely infeasible to return to because technology moved on decades ago, and vote for him based on downright absurd claims that he will somehow return us to those "glory days" (short life expectancy and all) because he somehow cares about them and their problems, despite ample evidence now from both his terms that he cares only about things that benefit him, either directly or by benefitting people with large amounts of political power in his inner circle.

No, people who believe that Harris, someone who spent most of her career prosecuting criminals, who has spent years in government learning how it really works, is more qualified to be President than Donald Trump, whose failed first administration was so toxic that he lost southern states for the first time in a long, long time, whose businesses are only successful in the "they haven't completely failed yet" sense of the word, who apparently doesn't even understand how tariffs work, much less how the rest of government works, and who has spent most of his time so far releasing criminals, violating the constitution flagrantly, and generally making a mess of everything he touches, are likely neither mentally ill, low IQ, nor necessarily folks who listen only to specific news channels.

Try again, this time with more than cheap ad hominem attacks, which in case you haven't noticed, will score you zero points on Slashdot.

Not sure who "The Cackler" is. If you mean Kamala Harris, she's a heck of a lot more qualified for the job than any twice-impeached convicted felon with a long history of sociopathic behavior and obvious word-salad dementia speech patterns could possibly be.

Ultimately, in the end, there may be no good candidate — only mediocre and bad candidates. I would never have voted for Harris in a primary, because her record is too Republican for my tastes in many areas. But she was clearly better than the alternative. And now that we're seeing President Trump doing all of the horrible things he said he was going to do, that his defenders kept saying he would never really do, those of us who voted for her are saying, "I told you so."

Remaining physically and mentally active in general slows the progression. And in spite of obesity being worse, we're doing more to combat at least some of the negative effects of that, and people are retiring later and working for more years, and people are doing more mentally because of tech. All of these things likely play a role.

Reduction in organophosphates also likely contributes (banned for in-home use since 2005). Declining use of trichloroethylene and perchloroethylene since the mid-1990s has also probably helped, as those are likely linked to PD. (They are also in the process of banning those completely in the U.S.; consumer use has been banned since 2016.)

BSE, scrapie, deer chronic wasting disease.... Officially, it is generally believed that scrapie isn't transmissible to humans, but this is likely false.

But nothing really interesting happened in that area until they banned using animals in animal feed in 1997, and a majority of the impact from that would already have been realized, because the incubation period is usually single-digit years, though it can be longer in some cases.

Alzheimer's and Parkinson's both involve misfolded proteins. Call them prions or don't, but that sure sounds like a prion disease to me. And tau proteins exist in cows as well. It wouldn't surprise me at all if differences in the way beef is slaughtered has reduced the risk of transmission of these proteins contaminating the food supply and reduced the rate of those diseases over time.

In particular, I think the age at which cattle are slaughtered has decreased over time, and the level of prions in a diseased animal increase over time, so that decrease in slaughter age means reduced risk of transmission to humans.

So... maybe that might be part of it.

If someone can log in, they have your password, which is a concern in and if itself. But I agree about 9 of 15. 90 of 150 distributed globally would be a more practical number from a data loss perspective, because it is awfully easy to take down 7 servers, but much harder to take down 61. I assume that makes the crypto harder (but I hope not less robust), but if you are just decrypting a key that you then use for the real decryption work, that might not be a big deal.

Trust me, it's a WTF from my perspective, too, but I at least understand the psychology of folks having a need for safety, whether real or illusory.

The eight security guards, I can kind of understand. Four vice-principals makes no sense unless the school is way too big to function, in which case there's your problem. Same for twelve counselors; unless your school has 7k+ students, that makes no sense.

My guess is that your school is big enough that normal administrative processes start to break down, and that's why it is accumulating excess administrative overhead. Small schools are inefficient because you can't pay for enough teachers to cover all the classes. So you don't want schools to be too small. But economies of scale only work up to maybe a thousand students or maybe two thousand.

Above that threshold, the larger the school becomes, the harder it is to manage, and the deeper the management hierarchy tends to become. Not being able to get things done quickly enough causes people to throw more people at the problem, which makes getting things done even harder and slower because of communication overhead, and the problem snowballs.

And school systems have a similar problem, where larger, more complex districts are harder to run than smaller ones. At some point, the best thing you can do is break them all up until they stop being too big.

California average school teacher salary: $101,084
Equivalent salary in Little Rock: $56,726.84

It's still technically probably a little bit above average at the moment, but it sure isn't what most people think of when they hear the words "six-figure salary".

Nine years? The acquisition wasn't finalized until December 2019. It took them a little over five years to get from where Intel left things to silicon that worked well enough for them to ship it in a product, likely because Apple was working around Qualcomm's patent minefield.

Ah, I misunderstood. I thought you were saying that 80% had the potential to charge at home. You're leaving out a lot of factors with your estimate:

• Lots of suburban houses don't have a garage, because they converted it into an extra room, and it can be a decent bit harder to do charging if you don't.
• Condos that you own don't necessarily have their own reserved parking for each unit, and EV charging pretty much requires either that or something like ChargePoint billing, and they take 10% off the top cost-wise, so you'll pay considerably more that way.
• Houses built before about 1980 are way less likely to have adequate electric service amperage.
• Mobile homes are way less likely to have adequate electric service amperage.
• Condos are all but guaranteed to not have adequate electric service amperage.

So being possible doesn't necessarily mean that it is practical or easy. It is probably easy for 20%, and by the time you get to 80%, it is likely to be really hard.

They had LTE modems shipping. They did NOT have 5g modems shipping. The first iPhone with 5g was the iPhone 12, which was released in 2020, long after Intel sold off their modem division.

Citation: Intel's announcement about exiting the modem business. From the press release:

"The company will continue to meet current customer commitments for its existing 4G smartphone modem product line, but does not expect to launch 5G modem products in the smartphone space, including those originally planned for launches in 2020."

Second citation: Wikipedia page on Intel XMM modems. Intel had planned two different 5g modem models, both of which were cancelled before the products were released.

These *are* Intel's modems, albeit the 5g versions thereof.

And no, that's not at all accurate. According to Qualcommon, Apple was all set to dump them entirely. Qualcomm reported that in 2018. But Intel couldn't pull off 5g, and in 2019, they announced that they were exiting the modem business, so Apple went crawling back to Qualcomm because they had 5g and Intel didn't and never would.

Two months later, Apple announced that they were buying what was left of Intel's modem division so that their supply chain would be under their control. Six years later, they finally got 5g working. Now we understand why Intel gave up. It turns out that 5g was a much harder problem than they anticipated.

But the key point is that it is done and working now, and what remains is performance optimization and future revisions.

Let's be fair here. Intel never got their 5g modem working/shipping, so part of what they were doing during that time was making it actually... you know... work.

Lower power, no. The Apple chip uses 25% less power than Qualcomm's modem. And it is unclear how much of Qualcomm's superiority in those other areas was because of the modem itself versus other aspects of the phone (antenna design, for example). It's way, way too early to call the game.

In particular, having good download performance and terrible upload performance could indicate an SWR/impedance matching issue or a transmit power optimization bug or any number of other issues that have little to do with the modem hardware itself.

Apple will use it to negotiate better prices, yes, but the fact that they have one working at all means that the writing is on the wall for Qualcomm's relationship with Apple. It has long been said that the only thing worse than Qualcomm's modems are everyone else's, and having complete control over the device, the modem hardware, and the software stack likely means that Apple will be able to improve their modem's performance more rapidly.

I'd give it five years, tops, before Qualcomm is playing catch-up, mainly because Apple was angry enough at Qualcomm to buy an entire modem division from another company just to get away from them, so they're not going to stop throwing resources at the problem until they're in the lead.

Fremont closed way back in 1992, and it was because they failed to get the manufacturing volume up to expected levels, despite the plant being highly automated. I guess the tech just wasn't ready. Meanwhile, two hours' drive from there, the Elk Grove assembly plant kept building Macs for another decade.

Elk Grove shut down shortly after they moved manufacturing to China, because assembling in the U.S. didn't make much difference. The Elk Grove facility is still owned by Apple, though. I think it's an AppleCare repair depot now, plus warehousing and distribution, which I guess they also did back when they assembled things there.