"Fireproof file rooms and cabinets in the 1920s were crucial for protecting business and government records during the rapid expansion of the industrial era. The era saw a massive shift from flammable wooden office furniture to robust, steel-based storage designed to resist both fire and water damage."
That's a Google AI summary - but I've been in a fair number of buildings with such rooms. Thick concrete walls, heavy steel fire doors, no other openings, nothing but steel file cabinets in 'em, sealed electric light fixtures that look like they belong in a powder magazine (where one spark could kill everyone) - it's really simple tech.
And "high ground" was a reliable flood protection tech several centuries before that.
Then add “earthquake” to the list, or “domestic terrorists or foreign country bombing the building”. Steelman the argument. The point isn’t “just fire and water specifically”, we’re not playing Pokémon.
We have several historic examples of records being lost in disasters, and way more recent than 100 years ago.
It makes no difference that we could’ve prevented that with better building construction. We didn’t, and hindsight does not bring the records back. We should plan for the world we want but cannot ignore the world we have.
I’m not defending digital as always better or criticising physical. Like I said, different tradeoffs, meaning there are advantages and disadvantages to both, there’s no solution which is better in all situations.
I stuck to the threats you mentioned. Paper in a file room is more slightly more quake-resistant and bomb-resistant than digital. But slower to move to safety if the threat is large volcanic eruptions.
I am not saying that paper is magically perfect. Nor better in every situation. I am saying that paper is far easier (than digital) to do well for use cases like a national records collection. "Correctly" may include off-site backups - whether or not your threat model includes massive earthquakes, volcanoes, bombs, special forces, EMP weapons, biological agents, civil war, radioactive fallout, or enemy occupation. Or "Management wouldn't pay for a done-right facility".
As I noted in another comment, the largest downside to paper (within such use cases), is that it is far more difficult to get political support for old-fashioned stuff that just works, compared to anything that can be sold as cool/new/high-tech. Especially when the taxpayer-funded revenue streams from selling/installing/supporting the tech create incentives clearly contrary to the taxpaper's long-term interests.
> Iceland’s environment minister, Jóhann Páll Jóhannsson, recently said that the latest research is shocking. Without decision-makers taking rapid action to cut fossil fuel emissions in the next decades, he warned, Iceland could become “nearly uninhabitable for our children and grandchildren”.
> [...]
> Preventing such a collapse ultimately comes down to one thing: cutting CO2 emissions, scientists emphasise. Any extra warming or prolonged overshoot of 1.5°C increases the risk of triggering an AMOC tipping point.
Unfortunately, the Nordic countries and N. Europe are not all that near & dear to the folks currently responsible for the great majority of the world's CO2 emissions. Especially not when the causal connection between "I enjoy my carbon-heavy lifestyle now" and "bad things eventually happen...mostly far away" is, in many human minds, so murky.
Sad to say, but the Nordics & N. Europe should be starting preparations for worst-case changes.
Sadly, "nail in coffin" is an exaggeration. Though the press would be throwing that phrase around. With plenty of dire-sounding quotes from cheap PC manufacturers.
Limiting cannibalization wouldn't be hard. Just load up a Neo, a 13" Air, and a 15" Air on the Apple web store's Compare page - a 15" or 16" Neo would be the "obviously lesser" laptop by 90% of the metrics.
My bet is that Apple has prototypes of the larger variant, and is waiting to see how the situation develops.
At least from CNN's story, it seems unclear whether this was an attack by a known pro-Iran group, with an "in retaliation for killing schoolgirls" tagline. Or an attack by some unknown group(s), with such a tagline.
Given how many hacking groups don't like the US, the latter would tell us almost nothing about the attackers' actual identities and objectives.
Though if I was a hacking group with little interest in Iran, hitting a US-based target...I might make some pro-Iran noises, trying to confuse the attribution. Or to curry favor with China, Russia, NK, ...
(And I'm not ruling out a nation-state actor being directly behind this.)
I'd politely inform the org which ran the contest. Noting that you don't know if their "winner" violated any contest rule by doing this - but they seem to be in violation of a prior informal agreement with you, to credit your work.
Without a real-time, probably national "who has voted & where did they vote" database - how would a "just show up and vote" system block a citizen from voting once in each of multiple jurisdictions?
You can solve that simply by putting all such votes inside signed envelopes, and waiting to count the contents until all the envelopes can be checked for duplicate voter details. In Australia this can be forced on you if you are caught double voting, or you can opt into it if you don't want to appear on the (public) electoral roll (and hence can't be ticked off), or you're voting from outside your electorate (so they don't have a copy of your electorate's roll).
SSN? To me this is one of those friction things, why is it hard? Like taxes, I would take an option rather than tallying up just pay a flat $5K fee or something under your expected tax bracket.
> voting for a bad person because you like their policies.
These days, you're lucky if you get to pick from "Bad", "Very Bad", and "Worst".
(BTW, does Mr. Bad look like he'll competently implement and honestly administer his policies? 'Cause without those, "good" policies ain't worth squat):
It's quick, catchy, and convenient to call out a few corp's which pay their workers squat while the bosses rake it in.
BUT - what about the ever-inflating costs of basic daily living - housing, food, medical care, transportation, and education - for the 99% of Americans who aren't too rich to care? Does that not count as "affordability crisis", because denouncing it risks being non-performative activism? After all, if we somehow rolled back that inflation, it would hit the pocketbooks of the 1% pretty hard...
But for 99% of Americans, "affordability crisis" is the ratio between the wages they receive and the prices they have to pay.
So if you could (say) roll back rents to pre-RealPage levels - from the PoV of the ~25M rent-burdened (and worse) Americans, would that meaningfully differ from receiving a huge wage increase?
There's the concern that once we get, say, a $30 minimum wage, that will drive prices up further and then people will be saying we need a $50 minimum wage. So we could wind up back where we started except it is harder to plan for the future, interest rates are higher which drives up the cost of housing and housing construction, etc.
The counter to that is an increase in total factor productivity which really makes us richer by being able to do more with less. That is, Henry Ford changed the world by creating a production system where workers plus a reasonable investment in capital could produce cars that those workers could afford. Contrast that to child care, for instance, where it just takes a certain number of workers to take care of a certain number of children. In the case of child care you can subsidize it so along side "expensive and available" you will get a certain amount with is "affordable at point of service but rationed" that is never enough.
Sorry to cut in. This debate made me wonder whether the Feds' inflation target is orthodox economists' idea of a positive-sum game. (Let's assume for the sake of curiosity that political-economists don't yet know about the second Law of thermodynamics, AND that exogenous factors like Fords/Jobs are highly unlikely-- see Paul Romer
Consider that UBI (or wage increases) can be either inflationary or deflationary, contingent on implementation.
Although commenters tend to assume one or the other.
Consider also that Japan is moving into an inflationary regime (whether premeditated or not, we will soon have data with which to compare JP, PRC _and_ ROC, the last one to be taken as a continuation of Abenomics)
which I think has an element of truth to it but that it also comes out of a need people have to believe that all problems are caused by a conspiracy of a few sinister people. Like it or not, people don't believe in markets and they don't believe in government. Maybe they are right to not believe in these things but in a certain sense it becomes a self-reinforcing pose.
"Fireproof file rooms and cabinets in the 1920s were crucial for protecting business and government records during the rapid expansion of the industrial era. The era saw a massive shift from flammable wooden office furniture to robust, steel-based storage designed to resist both fire and water damage."
That's a Google AI summary - but I've been in a fair number of buildings with such rooms. Thick concrete walls, heavy steel fire doors, no other openings, nothing but steel file cabinets in 'em, sealed electric light fixtures that look like they belong in a powder magazine (where one spark could kill everyone) - it's really simple tech.
And "high ground" was a reliable flood protection tech several centuries before that.
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