prime_number_314159

You missed that on the right side of the image, the stool has a leg that runs straight up and down, but on the left side of the image, the legs slant outwards. The tops of the stools are also different widths.

Most restaurants match their furniture better than this.

It's yuge. The biggest mandate in the last 3 years, by far. It's not even close, it's an amazing mandate. Yesterday, I was on the phone with a man, and he said, "Mr. President, the experts didn't think you would have a mandate." and I was, I was. He said it was such an amazing mandate. People love my mandate.

Military specifications are often designed around specific manufacturing processes. When the commercial state of the art changes, this leaves the military as the weirdo insisting they be allowed to buy a 1970s toilet seat made out of 1970s plastic. Those can be redesigned to allow purchase of commercially available goods that pass some kind of suitability testing. This is small potatoes, under a billion dollars per year.

The use and prevalence of IDIQ could be reviewed systemically. Some of those contracts are wildly disproportionate in cost to the value they deliver. This could be a few billion dollars per year kind of stuff.

Almost all T&M contracts could be replaced with FFP, or FPLOE. The T&M contract style promotes (very obviously) inefficiency at every level of the delivery process, and this actually gets even worse with growing contract scope. This is tens to maybe a hundred billion dollars per year.

Congress, holistically, should embrace the notion that unspent money should not be deallocated in a future year. The "use it or lose it" approach to budgeting causes everyone subject to Congressional review to find a way (even a silly way) to consume every dollar they are handed. If, instead, authorized money were allowed to accrue for large expenses (the replacement of a technology system, refurbishing an office, expanding a field site - whatever that agency needs) it could reduce the mindset that unspent money means losing power among the thousands of beaurocrats that make purchasing decisions on behalf of our country. I genuinely have no idea how much money is burned unnecessarily this way.

The government should hire its own experts to deliver services to itself. The entire mantra of minimizing costs known up front has produced some of the most massive wastes in history. Almost everything a contractor can do for the government that's a total cost of more than one person's salary would be better achieved by hiring a person to do that work directly. This is most obvious (to me) in personal computers, where the government regularly buys what should be powerful, capable machines, but then forgot to specify some requirement, and is forced to purchase a machine with a spinning disk drive, or only 2GB of RAM, or a 720p display, or... Just something obviously wrong, that no one is empowered and knowledgeable to say "This is going to critically hamper the performance of every human handed one of these computers, we need to fix it". This is done (theoretically) to save sometimes just a few dollars, and adds to the general malaise of "The government doesn't care about whether its workers are productive" that's one more push for people with better options to leave government. I won't even begin to guess at the value lost through having people think of government jobs as paid daycare for those that couldn't cut it in the commercial world, let alone the way government contractors really are, or are perceived.

There's probably more, but... Wait, what's that? They're not going to be trying to remove the stranglehold of the MIC on the government purchasing apparatus? Well, maybe they can still fix that toilet seat thing.

My Geiger counter is beeping occasionally, even though I'm hiding in my basement. Is... Is this the end?

Face to face, this is definitely possible. I've convinced more than a dozen people that climate change is real, and humans are the primary cause of it in face to face conversation. Online, where tone is easily misinterpreted, everyone is a stranger, and people are more able to rapidly retreat into a bubble of others that agree with them, I think it does a lot less good - but every once in a while, something works a little bit for someone.

More importantly, if we decide that we should all exist in our isolated bubbles of (non)social acceptance, it leads to the rise of extremism in some of those groups, and even the most terrible ideas can be allowed to fester and grow. Pretty much regardless of who you are, or what you believe, you probably have an example or two of such beliefs.

Actually, debate between hostile strangers online serves an important role in churning up internet drama. This is vital to the continued survival of the popcorn industry.

The Affordable Care Act passed, and addressed some of the most glaring, campaigning worthy issues. It's only been 14 years, and already support for the ACA is rising, and opposition is falling off.

Support for more fracking has risen slightly in the last 4 years, but it lags behind the growth in support for solar, wind, and even nuclear. I suspect (caveat emptor) that as renewables bring energy costs back into check, support for fracking will follow the drop in support of coal production. It should not be a surprise that any shelter is popular in a storm.

Both parties used to be strongly against illegal immigration, now one campaigns against it, but did most of the things they were allowed to do to encourage and allow it, including publicly declaring their support for illegal immigrants, and passing sanctuary city laws.

I don't have a strong grounding in how much open support there is for genocide, but I think the American population is more aware of it happening than they were in the past. Hopefully that means we care more now.

It, uhh... It looks like your double peen is made of plastic. Are you sure this is something to brag about?

Get a very long Ethernet cable, and occasionally walk around the building with the WiFi router. If there's a particular spot where the access has been bad, point the router at it and hold it there for a few seconds, up to a minute. The more devices you have using up your WiFi, the more often you'll have to do this to keep it spread out.

At my grandmother's house, we only have to distribute the WiFi once per year, because she only uses a little WiFi. At work, with dozens of heavy users, we have the IT intern do it once per day, Monday to Thursday. That way we run out of WiFi on Friday, and the developers won't do any deploys.

When I was 25, my girlfriend complained about buying the same bra, same size, same material, same URL, from the same company, on their website, 2 years apart. The first ones fit really well, the second ones didn't fit at all.

Meanwhile, there's a shoe that I buy a pair of every few years. They release a new "version" about once per year, but the fit has been consistent, so I'm over a decade, and 6 pairs, into my purchase of them, with no problems.

The 13th ended slavery. You're probably thinking of the 12th which says that no person constitutionally ineligible to "be" president can be elected as vice president. Importantly, the 22nd only places limits on being "elected" as president, so it's not (necessarily) creating a constitutional requirement to "be" president by some other means.

Like I said, it could be an interesting legal fight if it even came up.

You can only be elected as president twice. You can probably hack the system by getting multiple other presidents to select you as vice president, then resign. If you serve more than 2 years of the term they were elected to, that reduces the number of times you can be elected as president to one.

The 22nd amendment doesn't say that someone that serves 3.99 years of another president's term multiple times can't still be elected, and it doesn't say that someone not qualified to be elected as president can't be elected as vice president, but the 12th amendment might. Either of those could be an interesting legal fight.