Why are people upset over a $109,000 contract from the DoD. That’s literally less than a rounding error. The DoD puts interns in charge of more money than that.

$109,000 is not even enough to pay for 50% of a single contract employee’s time (the going rate is $250k-300k per head). This article is just outrage for the sake of outrage. Don’t embarrass yourself by even bringing this up in a conversation with someone.

I’m honestly more impressed the DoD found someone to write a contract for this low of a value. Hell, the total cost of the FOIA request was probably more after all the bureaucracy it went through.

Except not, because only piston aircraft use leaded fuel. Turboprops and Jet Turbines use Jet Fuel which does not use lead.

I believe it could and should be made harder, but it is already a high barrier to purchase an investment property. For a business loan on residential housing, an investor needs 25-30% down payment for the property. Also I think the longest terms are 15 years and not 30, but I could be wrong.

All the small time landlords acquired their homes through primary residence loans which allows for PMI and smaller down payments that only exist because they are subsidized by the government. A primary residence loans either requires an owner to lie to the government and bank which puts them at serious liability in the sense they could make the loan due immediately if found out, or the owners have lived in that home for at least one year.

Maybe I want to move back into it… And selling has a 10% cost after realtor fees and closing fees.

Based on the amount of vitriol I’ve personally received on this site for renting one property while I am temporarily relocated to attend school, the answer is yes.

For some reason everyone views being a landlord as easy money. But in reality returns on investment are worse than the stock market for being the landlord of a single family home.

Edit: Isn’t it funny how the critics below didn’t even ask questions about a specific situation where it does make sense to rent out an owned home? Instead of trying to understand why someone might make the choice they make, they sling insults and make wide sweeping assumptions to reinforce their skewed world view. Honestly it’s this shit that’s why Trump won. Leftists can’t see the forest for the trees and are willing to engage in ever escalating purity tests that only alienate other sympathetic voters to leftist causes.

I worked hard to be able to own my own house. Saved money and took out a loan. I never received a penny from my parents or some inheritance from a family member that died. A greater return on investment can absolutely be made by investing in the SP500, returns on investment for single family homes will be worse. The SP500 can be expected to rise an average of 10% per year. A single family home on the other hand will increase by 4.3% per year. With interest rates being higher than that level appreciation, there is effectively no profit from the leverage that can be typically seen by borrowing money. Renting is typically 37% cheaper than buying on a month-to-month basis. Owners don’t expect to Break-even on a home until after 5-10 years of ownership (depending on the city). Over 2/3 the cost of a mortgage go towards loan interest and taxes. Now what does a house get you then if there are all these downsides? Freedom. Freedom to decorate how you choose. To remodel, to build a deck, install Ethernet throughout the house, add an extension. But most of all, it gives long-term stability. After that 5 year period where a homeowner is taking a loss because of buying, they are finally ahead financially of a renter. This is why it doesn’t make sense to sell a home due to short-term circumstances, because owning a home is inherently a long-term benefit. Especially when one loses 10% of the the value of a home selling it when it would take 3 years for the home to even grow to the point where that cost is covered by increases in home value, which is not even remotely guaranteed, as evidenced by home values only increasing 0.12% after falling by 5% the previous year.

Ugh… This is all based on Dan Gryder’s YouTube channel. He’s not exactly the most trustworthy person. His channel is full of criticisms of pilots that have died flying that basically amount to “the pilot was dumb” and then when he causes a nearly mutli-fatal accident in a Lockheed 12A because he forgot to lock the tail wheel before landing, he feuds with the YouTuber that pointed this out.

He constantly derides the FAA and government in general, stating they are incompetent. He has stolen aircraft accident investigation evidence from a crash scene, a violation of federal statute. There’s the defamation lawsuit he lost against a pilot in 2023 to the tune of $1 million. And he was arrested in 2009 at an airport in Georgia.

Dan Gryder is an attention seeker who will say anything to receive publicity.

Edit: here’s the analysis on his Lockheed 12A crash: https://youtu.be/sQhA-R2kKbo?si=fWg9EwLirkXwBDOh

There are literally no other articles on the events of 25 November. The article doesn’t even mention the day it took place and uses a photo from several months prior as the headline photo.

It’s possible the poster isn’t a native speaker.

In German, the above is how a comma used, and this type of usage might might be common in other languages too.

I don’t know why you are mentioning Starship when I made no mention of that. Starship HLS is also a dumb idea, but that’s beside the point.

SLS is horribly expensive for what it provides.

The Defense Production Act could be used to meet these ends. SpaceX is a defense contractor and exists at the privilege of the US Government for the US Government.

Coming from several people who work with SpaceX, there is a dedicated group of people that exist to distract Elon from all vital SpaceX functions.

SLS is on track to be more expensive when adjusted for inflation per moon mission than the Apollo program. It is wildly too expensive, and should be cancelled.

This coupled with the fact that the rocket is incapable of sending a manned capsule to low earth orbit which is the the lunar gateway is planned to a Rectilinear Halo Orbit instead.

Those working in the space industry know that SpaceX’s success is not because of Elon but instead Gwynne Shotwell. She is the President and CEO of SpaceX and responsible for all things SpaceX. The best outcome after the election is to remove Elon from the board and revoke his ownership of what is effectively a defense company for political interference in this election. Employees at SpaceX would be happy, the government would be happy, and the American people would be happy.

The technical definition of AI in academic settings is any system that can perform a task with relatively decent performance and do so on its own.

The field of AI is absolutely massive and includes super basic algorithms like Dijsktra’s Algorithm for finding the shortest path in a graph or network, even though a 100% optimal solution is NP-Complete, and does not yet have a solution that is solveable in polynomial time. Instead, AI algorithms use programmed heuristics to approximate optimal solutions, but it’s entirely possible that the path generated is in fact not optimal, which is why your GPS doesn’t always give you the guaranteed shortest path.

To help distinguish fields of research, we use extra qualifiers to narrow focus such as “classical AI” and “symbolic AI”. Even “Machine Learning” is too ambiguous, as it was originally a statistical process to finds trends in data or “statistical AI”. Ever used excel to find a line of best fit for a graph? That’s “machine learning”.

Albeit, “statistical AI” does accurately encompass all the AI systems people commonly think about like “neural AI” and “generative AI”. But without getting into more specific qualifiers, “Deep Learning” and “Transformers” are probably the best way to narrow down what most people think of when they here AI today.

It’s quite common actually: https://www.thewatchpages.com/why-do-clocks-and-watches-use-the-roman-numeral-iiii-instead-of-iv/

This is truly a terrible accident. Given the flight tracking data and the cold, winter weather at the time, structural icing is likely to have caused the crash.

Ice will increase an aircraft’s stall speed, and especially when an aircraft is flown with autopilot on in icing conditions, the autopilot pitch trim can end up being set to the limits of the aircraft without the pilots ever knowing.

Eventually the icing situation becomes so severe that the stall speed of the ice-laden wing and elevator exceeds the current cruising speed and results in a aerodynamic stall, which if not immediately corrected with the right control inputs will develop into a spin.

The spin shown in several videos is a terrifying flat spin. Flat spins develop from normal spins after just a few rotations. It’s very sad and unfortunate that we can hear that both engines are giving power while the plane is in a flat spin towards the ground. The first thing to do when a spin is encountered is to eliminate all sources of power as this will aggravate a spin into a flat spin.

Once a flat spin is encountered, recovery from that condition is not guaranteed, especially in multi-engine aircraft where the outboard engines create a lot of rotational inertia.

Valve is a unique company with no traditional hierarchy. In business school, I read a very interesting Harvard Business Review article on the subject. Unfortunately it’s locked behind a paywall, but this is Google AI’s summary of the article which I confirm to be true from what I remember:

According to a Harvard Business Review article from 2013, Valve, the gaming company that created Half Life and Portal, has a unique organizational structure that includes a flat management system called “Flatland”. This structure eliminates traditional hierarchies and bosses, allowing employees to choose their own projects and have autonomy. Other features of Valve’s structure include:

• Self-allocated time: Employees have complete control over how they allocate their time
• No managers: There is no managerial oversight
• Fluid structure: Desks have wheels so employees can easily move between teams, or “cabals”
• Peer-based performance reviews: Employees evaluate each other’s performance and stack rank them
• Hiring: Valve has a unique hiring process that supports recruiting people with a variety of skills

Someone did the math and realized we would need a 130% tariff on all goods to replace current income tax revenue.

People’s number one concern is inflation. If that tariff is created we will see 100% inflation over night!

You do realize that every posted on the Fediverse is open and publicly available? It’s not locked behind some API or controlled by any one company or entity.

Fediverse is the Wikipedia of encyclopedias and any researcher or engineer, including myself, can and will use Lemmy data to create AI datasets with absolutely no restrictions.

It took Hawking minutes to create some responses. Without the use of his hand due to his disease, he relied on the twitch of a few facial muscles to select from a list of available words.

As funny as it is, that interview, or any interview with Hawkins contains pre-drafted responses from Hawking and follows a script.

But the small facial movements showing his emotion still showed Hawking had fun doing it.