Time to bring back gibbeting!

Be careful about that one, though. In addition to Word, for whatever reason iPhones automatically convert “–“ to “—“ so if you’re dealing with anybody like me who marks mid-sentence breaks with double dashes out of old habit, you’re going to get false positives.

Interesting that drop kits are an easily-sourced thing nowadays, I’ve looked at modern trucks and genuinely wondered how one is supposed to access the bed without a stepladder as they come from the factory. I think it’s subtly damning that GMC, among others, has been marketing their multi-position tailgate’s ability to function as a bed step. They’ve made trucks so tall as a vanity thing that it negatively impacts the their ability to actually work as a utility vehicle.

I’ve been begging (sometimes literally, I know a guy who works at Ford) for a small Maverick or Ridgeline-sized PHEV pickup for years now, and the Big Three seem to be specifically avoiding making such a thing. I don’t need to be able to tow a guided missile cruiser, I don’t need to sit ten feet in the air to feel safe, I don’t want dual 30-gallon fuel tanks in case I need to drive to Cape Horn without stopping for some reason. I just want to be able to commute in town on electric power, handle small home-improvement hauling tasks (mulch, appliances, lumber, etc), and still be able to road trip or pull a small trailer in a pinch. And there are dozens of us, at least! I see people asking “PHEV Maverick when!?” anytime I search the Net for news on the topic. But nope, no PHEV pickup for you, unless you want to buy a Ramcharger – and deal with being associated with the kind of person who drives a Ram product. No thank you!

Sorta yes and no. T-Mobile US is its own corporate entity, but their majority shareholder is Deutsche Telekom, and they take their name from that company’s mobile service brand.

I was hoping to avoid credentialiam, but… You assume much of what I do and don’t know. I grew up with a parent in higher education administration, and due to my own career I am regularly in communication with a range of R1 research universities, including two which I am currently preforming long-range lab space demand forecasts for. I have had a front-row seat to how the sausage gets made in higher education for the last three decades, and I am regularly talking to senior leadership at one of the top 5 schools in the US for medical research, specifically about these kinds of staffing issues and how the illegal impoundment of NIH and NSF grants are affecting them.

Am I intimately involved with the budgeting process at Harvard specifically? No, but then I’d wager you probably aren’t either, and it’s not that hard to look up stats about their endowment and do some basic math about them. You’re stuck on this one point that about 80% of is earmarked for specific uses, when their overall endowment is so enormous that that number is practically immaterial to the argument. (10% of it is specifically earmarked for the School of Medicine, by the way, which is where most of the lost grant money was concentrated.)

I am not proposing that there is some grand conspiracy at work to throw researchers out of Harvard. Rather, as the tone and tenor of the article linked above would suggest, Harvard’s administration is laser-focused on the money, and is starting from the notion that line must always go up no matter what. I don’t doubt that the usual academic politics is preventing the broader university from thinking that it might be worthwhile to share the load to keep scientists working while Harvard fights this, and that’s a shame.

Dude… my “janky math” is that 500,000,000 / 53,000,000,000 is ~0.01, or 1% versus the ~9.5% ROI they received on donations and investments last year. You can check that with a calculator app in about ten seconds if you doubt me, and my “conspiracy theory,” which you would have found in the post directly above if you bothered to actually read it, is that Harvard is making the shortsighted decision to hoard its cash and use the cuts as an excuse to cut perceived low-performing lab teams, rather than make a relatively minor outlay to keep everyone on, and make an implicit statement about the importance of research and the weakness of Trump’s hand here.

Did you read past my first sentence? They can replace the entirety of the research grant funding they receive from the government out of pocket and it would barely even dent the rate of growth of the endowment. You think you’re making a clever point here and you’re just not.

Run the numbers. 20% of Harvard’s ~$53 billion endowment is more than $10 billion that they can spend, no strings attached. Harvard receives just shy of $500 million per year in NIH grants. They could fund the next four years of their scientific research completely out of pocket, and it would only cost 4% of the endowment, and leave the overwhelming majority of their unencumbered funds intact. Hell, 4% isn’t even half of the endowment’s growth rate last year — they could do this indefinitely to make a point and still grow the endowment. Is reducing their annual net profit by ~10% small beans? No, but it’s entirely doable and wouldn’t create any catastrophic impacts on the rest of the of the institution.

For what it’s worth I am in regular contact with another R1 institution that previously received significantly more federal research grant funding than Harvard, with an endowment a fraction of the size. To my knowledge they’ve frozen new hiring and are planning to tighten their belts in terms of capital expenditure, but they have not moved to cut researchers yet. This feels like a short-sighted move on Harvard’s part, and I rather suspect that they’re taking the opportunity to cut perceived chaff more than anything else.

Posted to the wrong comment, whoops

Architect, so in the neighborhood… I mostly interact with UL in the context of fire-rated assemblies, though.

You’re acting as if Harvard has no control over the way they utilize the endowment, and that’s just not true. Of course they want to manage it so that they are only drawing from a portion of the gains rather than actually spending it down. Of course some percentage of funds are earmarked for specific purposes like new buildings, endowed professorships, and the like.

None of this means that Harvard cannot make the strategic decision to dip heavily into the endowment to maintain researchers’ livelihoods while their fight moves through the courts. Arguably it’s the fiscally-responsible thing to do, because many of the affected researchers are going to be losing work in progress that may have to be replicated if they are ever rehired, and some portion of those laid off are going to move on to other things, impacting Harvard’s research capacity and their reremovedtion as a desirable, high-status employer in the sciences. One would have hoped that they picked this fight with the intention of winning it, and failing to tap the endowment as bridge funding while the legal challenges play out risks making it something of a Pyrrhic victory.

I recently switched phones and forgot I didn’t have an adblocker installed yet. Clicked on an article and holy shit the modern mobile web is a toxic hellscape without it…

In fairness(?) Ford bet big on small cars in the wake of the Great Recession, and that worked well for a while, but by the time they decided that the only non-truck (from a CAFE standpoint) that they were going to keep selling was the Mustang, they were losing money on every Focus and Fiesta they sold.

A lot of that was their godawful automatic transmission that was forcing them to spend zillions in warranty repairs, but at the end of the day the margin on economy cars is so slim that you can’t afford to make mistakes. Rather than bet on perfect execution in a market that was already shrinking in the US, they decided to focus on higher-margin products… and that’s fine in the short term, but as you mention it’s going to leave them exposed once nobody can afford to spend $50k+ on a horrifically overpriced big pickup anymore.

In AEC work we’ve moved almost exclusively to a competing PDF tool called Blubeam, which is proprietary but very worth the price, with tools for scaling, dimensioning, and producing material takeoffs from PDF drawings. Much of what you’d use Acrobat for in a more typical office environment are absent or limited, though.

All the people mentioned in the article are alt-right lunatics and/or Trumpworld grifters. The only other place they might conceivably take their schtick is Truth Social – this is really only interesting as confirmation that the thin-skinned and insecure FrEe SpEeCh AbSoLuTiSt running that shithole is absolutely willing to silence anybody who annoys him, over the pettiest of disputes, regardless of political affiliation.

Fair point. My thrust was more that the reason why things like system boot times and software launch speeds don’t seem to benefit as much as they seem like they should when moving from, say, a good SATA SSD (peak R/W speed: 600 MB/sec) to a fast m.2 that might have listed speeds 20+ times faster, is that QD1 performance of that m.2 drive might only be 3 or 4 times better than the SATA drive. Both are a big step up from spinning media, but the gap between the two in random read speed isn’t big enough to make a huge subjective difference in many desktop use cases.

The trouble with ridiculous R/W numbers like these is not that there’s no theoretical benefit to faster storage, it’s that the quoted numbers are always for sequential access, whereas most desktop workloads are more frequently closer to random, which flash memory kinda sucks at. Even really good SSDs only deliver ~100MB/sec in pure random access scenarios. This is why you don’t really feel any difference between a decent PCIe 3.0 M.2 drive and one of these insane-o PCI-E 5.0 drives, unless you’re doing a lot of bulk copying of large files on a regular basis.

It’s also why Intel Optane drives became the steal of the century when they went on clearance after Intel abandoned the tech. Optane is basically as fast in random access as in sequential access, which means that in some scenarios even a PCIe 3.0 Optane drive can feel much, much snappier than a PCIe 4 .0 or 5.0 SSD that looks faster on paper.