In the Netherlands it costs around a grand, as for maintenance... Haven't needed to do any in more than 15 years. The actual screen retracts into a weather proof metal casing, so there's not that much that goes wrong, whereas fixed awnings are exposed to the full weather gamut 24/7.
Let me put it this way: it's cheap enough that a lot of social housing and other cheap forms of housing inhabited by the "lower class" feature them.
A government paying for a thing does not in any way imply that the thing is a good use of money. How many decades of fabric replacements could you get from the savings of bolting on a simple metal frame as compared to an elaborate electromechanically actuated arm mechanism?
This is such a silly argument. A movable awning isn't some complex apparatus, it's literally a hinge and two sticks. You're trying to frame this as some kind of an expensive problem when it really isn't.
Connected to a gear that needs oil, a chain that needs oil and can rust, or a rope that withers. Being overly dismissive of failure modes isn’t a good look. I don’t claim that fixed awnings are God’s gift to humanity, just that they don’t have some of the drawbacks associated with moving parts. The amount of emotional reaction I’ve received to that completely factual statement is frankly ridiculous.
You're overlooking the fact that these are incredibly common in the Netherlands, yet the massive problems you describe are nowhere to be found. Most people get away with giving them some love maybe every few years when they get creaky, if even that. Your argument is about as reasonable as saying we shouldn't have door hinges or door locks because moving parts have drawbacks. It's silly, these systems are so simple that they require next to no upkeep for years at a time.
Indeed we shouldn’t have hinges or locks because moving parts have drawbacks, in contexts where that matters. For instance portals that don’t need a door at all, or walls that don’t need to open. Would you argue that every open passageway should have a door blocking it, and every wall should have hinges installed? No, that’s ridiculous. It’s equally ridiculous to get this angry about the simple fact that fixed awnings have upsides, and depending on the context they might be a better choice than retractable ones.
All I said is moving parts have drawbacks. That’s true. Then a million people kept on the thread to try to claim otherwise, yourself included. Now you’re resorting to 4chan style comebacks, so that’s fun.
Even a working family, if they're earning very little, may be living in subsidized public housing.
Renters have lots of rights over here, allowing them to customize a lot about the apartment. Awnings are usually owned and installed by the renters themselves.
So a family that has so little income that they need to live in subsidized public housing may still have enough income to buy a retractable awning.
> A government paying for a thing does not in any way imply that the thing is a good use of money.
Agreed, nor is the inverse implied of course. But what is your point?
> How many decades of fabric replacements could you get from the savings of bolting on a simple metal frame as compared to an elaborate electromechanically actuated arm mechanism?
That's what I'm saying, fabric doesn't really need to get replaced in 15 years and going from personal experience. The mechanism is simple enough to be reliable as well.
Ultimately, it's impossible to analyze the cost benefits of this. It's a matter of personal taste and what the harshness of the local climate allows. I don't doubt that fixed awnings are cheaper - but actuating awnings fix their drawbacks, and the maintenance they introduce is minimal in my experience. And frankly, for the price of giving up a single vacation in 15+ years, it's not that expensive. Again, cheap enough that those in social housing can make the choice to get them installed.
ETA: my point of mentioning social housing is to say that people with lower income can still get them. The government doesn't pay for it. I just wanted to paint a picture of the relative cost.
What is your point in stating that public housing uses them? (aka the government buys them).
No clue why this turned into a huge debate. I don’t have a dog in this fight, all I’m saying is that america has retractable awnings, they have some downsides, and a government (or a “low class” individual) buying something doesn’t convince me it’s a good investment.
> What is your point in stating that public housing uses them? (aka the government buys them).
Who said anything about the government buying them? The renters in public housing usually buy and install them by themselves. That's why usually every balcony has a different type of awning, in a different state of disrepair.
While I'm nowadays in IT, when I was a child our family lived in this type of public housing, and we had a retractable awning of exactly that kind that my parents had installed themselves.
Northwestern Europe usually gets a storm at hurricane level 2 every one or two years and several at level 1 per season. There's a reason the name for these storms – Orkan – is derived from hurricane.
For comparison, that's similar or slightly higher in strength than hurricane Sandy when it hit the northeast of the US.
That's why if you have fixed awnings in this region of europe, they're usually removed as soon as fall hits (which compromises on the fixed part) or made of metal (which compromises on the "awning" part IMO).
While this is true, awnings aren't that expensive, and while I don't have the knowledge to do the maths, they will earn themselves back over time with how much heat they keep out and how much you'll need to run the AC.
Isn’t Postgres a fairly capable IAM provider, all things considered? I’d their access control mechanisms at least as much as a run of the mill external backend’s.
For basic auth it works well, but the challenge comes when you need to integrate with oidc, need to enforce mfa, enable sso etc. session invalidation is also quite complicated.
You need an identity middle man in front of the Postgres identity to tackle these and validate that the session is still active. Last time I looked at electric it was a big challenge to integrate such a service. This might have improved since then however
Apple doesn’t have a reputation for letting engineers slack. I have to guess they are working like dogs to meet some standard before they are willing to release.
They don’t have a reputation for releasing hardware without software to back it either. One way or another, an unprecedented process failure has occurred.
Well, the phone’s software works great. They just haven’t released those new AI features - which are supposed to come out on some older devices as well. And it’s hardly the first time Apple delayed a release.
IMO, the only thing weird here is the way the iPhone 16 demo day kept talking about these unreleased features front and center instead of the actual capabilities of the new phone. Probably that’s because the phone is so incremental and there was not much to talk about.
Can you name another time the software team has lagged so far behind the hardware release and marketing? Nearly every ad I’ve seen the world over has touted “Apple Intelligence” as if it’s a thing that exits, not some Coming Soon^{TM} pipe dream.
My money is on it being a massive failure if it ever does come out, the only thing stopping me from buying options is I don’t have a clue as to the timeline for when they’ll give up and ship whatever they have.
Seems like a page from the Tesla playbook. Musk kept promising customers that if they buy a Tesla _now_, they will have full self driving and can make money having it go to work as a robotaxi Next Year (TM). Without these promises, a Tesla would just be another car.
Not quite the same Ponzi scheme, but they promise a device "built for AI", so that when those features are ready, you'll get them. Without these promises, the thing would just be another tablet.
Do they have to necessarily keep that promise? Musk seems to be doing fine without. What's the alternative, holding firm against the hype? Not sure that'd do wonders for their stock price. Maybe Jobs' Apple would have done that. But I suppose the current Apple doesn't see much choice around riding hype cycles.
It clearly wasn't ready. My guess: the powers that be decided they had to make a public showing of being an AI company, hence the giant marketing push ahead of release.
It's unknown how useful any of this will be in day to day use-cases.
Apple of yesteryear would issue a patch update model and let this feature cook until it was ready for release. Current approach is sloppy in a decidedly un-Apple way.
Your link specifically states that no long term storage option exists, but it does so in a rather weaselly (“until {a future date}, there was not {safe long term storage}”) way that seems specifically crafted to confuse the reader.
In the US long term storage absolutely exists, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant [1]. It only stores nuclear waste of military origin (i.e. from the making of the nuclear bombs). But there is no technical reason this storage can't also accommodate civilian waste. By the way, the amount of military waste exceeds the civilian waste by a factor of 3 or so.
In one sense it does exist (i.e. it's buried in salt beds 2,000 feet below surface), but is it safe?
In 2014 there was an explosion of a waste container and radioactive particles were spread throughout the facility and up to the surface by the air processing equipment in the mine.
It seems like it's not just a binary choice, but more of a continuum of how safe is the particular solution compared to others.
Nope. No nuclear energy supporter will state that nuclear energy is perfectly safe, clean, secure or reliable. Nothing is perfect, why would the bar for nuclear energy be perfection?
Nuclear energy is not perfectly safe for the obvious reason that we've had Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. It is not perfectly clean, since it produces nuclear waste. It is not perfectly secure, just look at the Zaporizhzhia power plant. It is not perfectly realiable: there are times when a lot of French reactors went offline because the water in rivers was too warm.
In practice you’re most likely to be collaborating with other folks on your school project group, work team, close family, etc. Sure there are exceptions, but generally speaking picking a service location near your first group member ensures low latency for them (and they’re probably most engaged), and is likely to have lowish latency for everyone else.
On the flip side, picking US-East-1 gives okayish latency to folks near that, and nobody else.
And the corollary to that is that often your collaborations have a naturally low scale. While your entire app/customerbase as a whole needs to handle thousands of requests per second or more, one document/shard may only need to handle a handful of people.
Better is in the ears of the beholder. Personally I prefer AM because I can hear multiple stations at once, and hear sources of wideband EM interference in my environment.
I think this article is focussed on broadcast radio, where crosstalk and em interference are both considered negative properties (not that they're not useful in other applications)
Yes, but for good reason. This is an almost religious topic at this point, everyone’s opinions have been locked in for years and all debate ends in fire.
> And you can be certainly be Jewish without having Jewish DNA, but there’s some controversy as to whether the reverse is true.
What's the controversy? Biologically there's no such thing as "Jewish DNA". It's just a shorthand for "Human DNA haplotypes (AKA markers) that occur at significant frequencies among populations that identify today as Jewish".
For example, the YDNA haplotype J1, while it occurs at high frequency among Jewish populations, occurs at even higher frequencies among many non-Jewish groups in the Middle East and surrounding areas[1]. It's only somewhat distinctively "Jewish" in areas where Jewish people are a minority like Europe.
Furthermore, the emergence date of this haplotype 17-24k years ago predates the existence of the ethno/religious/cultural identity known as "Jewish" by almost 20,000 years.
Therefore the reverse/opposite of the statement, something like "you can have Jewish DNA and not be Jewish" is either trivially true or nonsensical.
Scientists have no right to declare what does and does not exist based on what their machines are able to detect. Did gravity not exist before the LHC was constructed and the Higgs data analyzed?
Jewish DNA is that which has descended from Abraham, through Isaac, to Jacob and the Jewish nation. Gravity is an attraction between masses. These things exist – regardless of your machines’ proclivities.
> Jewish DNA is that which has descended from Abraham, through Isaac, to Jacob and the Jewish nation. Gravity is an attraction between masses. These things exist – regardless of your machines’ proclivities.
Including the term "DNA" in that statement is an anachronism.
Cultural identification isn't a physical law like gravity, regardless of how aggressively or emphatically that may be stated. That doesn't make it unimportant or irrelevant, but it is not a biological fact, but instead a social fact.
> Are you specifically claiming that a common ancestor does not exist, or that genetic information does not spread to offspring?
I'm not making either of those claims. The first is an article of faith, and the second is trivially true.
I'm stating that one can't claim a particular set of DNA patterns makes someone "Jewish", because DNA is a biological phenomenon, and ethnicity/culture/religion are cultural phenomena.
I'm aware of family line tracing for establishing tribal identity. It's not something unique to Judaism.
DNA patterns often reflect the history of rigid social organization patterns like tribes (and indeed are essential for genetic risk management provided by organizations like Dor Yeshorim).
But nobody was tracing ancestry using DNA until the latter half of the 20th century, so claiming DNA as a basis of tribal identity seems quite anachronistic.
What is your claim exactly? It seems as if you think somehow DNA didn’t exist as a means of transferring genetic information to offspring prior to it being discovered. I can’t imagine you actually think that, so I’m at a loss for what your point might be.
> It seems as if you think somehow DNA didn’t exist as a means of transferring genetic information to offspring prior to it being discovered.
No that's not what I said. I said that DNA, though inherited, is irrelevant for determining cultural identity.
If I discover tomorrow that I carry YDNA haplotype J1, that doesn't make me Jewish, either culturally or ancestrally. Nobody could claim me as ancestrally Jewish based on that either.
Having a documented lineage stretching back many generations, however, would possibly do both, should I choose to embrace it.
You’re the only one here fascinated with this haplotype. Which is odd, considering you yourself call it inconsequential. Nobody but you has equated it with anything, and you have specifically said it does not equate to anything. So all in all this is just a textbook strawman, which I have no interest in further considering.
> You’re the only one here fascinated with this haplotype. Which is odd, considering you yourself call it inconsequential.
Then substitute it with haplotype G or E1b, or include all of them. Or swap out both the haplotype and the cultural group for different ones, i.e Y Haplogroup R1b among people from Iceland.
The particular haplotype is irrelevant to the argument, which is that genes don't define cultural identity, and at best are trailing and largely low resolution indicators of historical social patterns.
Again, you’re letting your machines decide what information exists, rather than accepting they might not have the capability of deciphering all that is out there.
Even if Abraham _did_ exist, at this point in time it's like trying to distinguish a drop of water from the ocean it's now living in. That's how little would have remained of Abraham's DNA so much later.
I was replying to the claim that Abraham's DNA (if he existed) could be traced in today's Jewish population. And that _is_ impossible.
In any case, it's not like you identify Ashkanazi Jews from DNA, instead it's that when DNA-checking people who self-identify as Ashkanazi then you find Middle Eastern ancestry. To recite Wikipedia's citation: '.. while certain detectable Middle Eastern genetic components exist in numerous Jewish communities, there is no evidence for a single Jewish prototype, and that "any general biological definition of Jews is meaningless"'
If you personally are a direct descendant of Abraham, or any other specific individual who lived approximately 3000 years ago, statistically you do not carry any DNA from that ancestor. While there are some nuances relating to differences in how the different sexes pass on their genes, as a rough approximation you carry half the base pairs of each of your parents, who each carry roughly half from their parents, and so on. So you carry 1/2^n base pairs from an individual n generations before you. The human genome is 3 billion base pairs, meaning in 31 generations the odds of having a single base pair from a specific ancestor is about 50%. 3000 years is about 120 generations, so your odds of having a basepair from a specific ancestor that far back are about 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. The only exceptions that matter on that timescale are the y-chromosome along the male-only line descent and the mitochondrial DNA along the female-only line of descent.
No one has any DNA that can be traced to a specific Neanderthal, no.
Of course people have DNA in common with their ancestors as a group, hell we share a lot in common with fish. But it's because these genes are common that they enter and re-enter your family tree at multiple points.
And your mitochondrial DNA definitely doesn't descend from Abraham, a male incapable of passing on mitochondrial DNA, so there's a reason I gloss over female line descent.
Your pseudoscience above would make it seem nobody has any DNA from any ancestors at all, as there were not your 10^Whatever creatures ever in existence. Once you figure out the bug in your logic there, you will perhaps see the failure of the rest of your argument. Hint: inbreeding.
It's actually called pedigree collapse, but it doesn't really change anything - the fact that the same ancestor may appear in multiple places in your family tree makes it harder to trace a gene back along any given line, not easier. You undoubtedly share an enormous amount of genetic similarity with Abraham, it's how you got it that is forever scrambled.
Aside, Jewish line is determined by matrilineal descent. By your own logic the mitochondrial DNA is shared, which is a rather significant aspect to simply gloss over.
Is it? I'd imagine they all share many common ancestors, but that those common ancestors are probably shared by many others as well so it's not very unique.
30 generations back (a thousand years?) you have over a billion ancestors, which is way more people estimated to have lived at the time, meaning your family tree at that depth contains the same people over and over. Of course your ancestry probably isn't uniformly distributed across the globe, but without modeling it mathematically my guess is that if you go back ~3700 years to when Abraham ostensibly lived you can find multiple people that appear in the ancestry of virtually everyone from the Old World.
Anyway intuition can often be poor when dealing with large numbers so if anyone has concrete math or research to share I'd be interested in being proven wrong.
It is indefensible to make arguments of likelihoods without and understanding of context and priors. If I listed 1,000 people from around the world at random and claimed we all had a shared great^N grandfather (with N not so large at to be trivially true), I’d need some rather significant proof to back up at that claim, and barring that we could say it was unlikely to be true.
If on the other hand I consulted my family’s genealogical records that had been painstakingly maintained for generations, including only those matrilineal lines that are most solid to trace, and from that listed 1,000 folks who have the same grandfather, then my claim would not be very unlikely at all.
This case is much closer to the latter than the former.
Converting to Judaism can be easier than many people assume, sometimes even simpler than earning a high school degree. It's important to note that Judaism is not a proselytizing religion, meaning it doesn't actively seek to convert others. Instead, conversion is a deeply personal choice, and those who pursue it are welcomed after a meaningful process.
Judaism is actually one of the major world religions, though it's much smaller in terms of population compared to Christianity, Islam, or Hinduism [1]. Despite its smaller numbers, it has had a significant influence on Western culture, ethics, and religious thought, particularly as the foundation for both Christianity and Islam.
Christianity requires (depending on who you ask/sect) - believing in Christ as your savior, or baptism, or being confirmed. Generally not an arduous process.
Hinduism, you believe in the Dharma, and as long as you aren’t angering people enough they kick you out, you are Hindu. Some would argue, as long as you don’t believe you are something else, you are Hindu. Notably, caste can be tricky. There might also be a form you should fill out.[https://hinduism.stackexchange.com/questions/407/is-it-true-...]
Buddhism, you join the Sangha (show up), or follow teachings. There is no test or anything. Many Buddhists don’t directly do those things, and I’ve never heard anything say they ‘weren’t Buddhist’. Maybe a terrible Buddhist, but what else is new?
By those standards, is not Judaism the toughest and most difficult? Personally, I’d take it as a point of pride.
Why not ask Jesus? He said it requires giving everything you have to the kingdom, following the spirit of the Law more fully than the Jews themselves do, and loving the Lord and your neighbor with all your heart. He additionally said that many who claim to be Christian are not, and will be judged accordingly.
There is not such thing as "Jewish" DNA. Is a culture and religion, but not a fully different race. Some genes could be in the past more represented, but it was just "Mediterranean dotation". A mix of European, African and Asian. Today is much more mixed fortunately.
If you can't prove family connection with paperwork, you can emigrate to Israel by means of DNA test which proves to the government that you are Jewish.
That doesn't seem to be quite how it works; apparently the DNA test by itself is not sufficient, and one does need some form of paperwork. Per an explanation by a private law office:
A DNA test can be used to obtain Israeli citizenship, but this is reserved to prove that a person is the child of an Israeli citizen. According to Israeli law, if a child is born to an Israeli mother or father abroad, they can be granted Israeli citizenship. The DNA test is used to authorize this, proving this familial link. We discuss more about obtaining a paternity test in Israel in another article.
In some very rare cases, a DNA test can be used to prove their relation to a Jewish parent, sibling or grandparent, even though the applicant doesn’t have documents proving this relationship, but said person has to have documents verifying that they are Jewish.
I would call it barely distinguishable from the genetic information from their close neighbors. Now compare it with DNA from native Australians for example and you will find a much different picture.
Having in mind that we share a majority of our genes with other mammals, and almost all with chimps, so the range of allowed variation among people is in itself small.
To exists is one thing. To be biologically relevant to deserve a new entire category is another very different.
To start, this genes aren't exclusive from the group. And it is not a monofiletic group anymore, because is a religious one and anybody can join it. So from a "taxonomic" point of view is not what we would call a "natural group", speaking genetically.
Is not different than claiming that there is a "Christian DNA". Biologically it does not have any sense.
This argument is very detached from reality. The Jewish tribe is defined as being descended from Israel, with folks independently joining as a rather rare corner case. On the other hand, Christians are defined to be those people who have heard the gospel and chosen to accept Jesus as their Lord.
It’s as if you said my family didn’t share DNA with me because an adoption or two had occurred over the centuries. It’s a bizarre argument that keeps coming up here, I don’t know what the real underlying root of it is.
If he were to be saying that, he’d be terribly misinformed. Slight specific genetic changes can have absolutely massive impacts, hand waving “ninety nine percent of us is a banana!”-type speak is brain-dead.
What you call "Jewish DNA" evolved for millions of years before Abraham, mixing freely with other Mediterranean and Middle East people for most of this time.
I'm not against the use of taxa below species level for humans; Its use is widespread on life sciences, but we need to apply it wisely. Race was a poorly defined biological term kidnapped to justify doing evil things against other people. The term may be a lost cause at this moment.
If we take a look to a Wolof from Senegal near an Aboriginal from Camberra we can always say who is who. If we take a look to somebody from Israel and somebody from Palestine, we can't. At the naked eye, both are indistinguishable. At a physiological level, both breath air and work exactly in the same way. Genetic differences between both are smaller than current genetic variability among Jewish.
If Jewish are some kind of taxon below species level, we would have to include Palestinians (and a lot of other Middle East people) on that taxon. This is how Taxonomy works.
If the reason is because they were a closed group for some time; applying the same reasoning, the European monarchies should be also a race. Is also a reproductive closed group, showing high frequencies of some rare diseases and even developed an unique look as consequence (See a portrait of Charles II from Spain).
Anthropology books should talk about Africans, Caucasians, Asians, Jewish... and Kings.
Why stop here? Should Mormons be also their own human race? Are Amish a race? Are rednecks a new race of humans?
The obvious answer is not. Maybe in 65000 years, but not now.
That would introduce a lot of noise in Anthropology, just for fulfilling a wish of "but I feel special", and should be avoided. We all feel special.
Nobody questions that the impact of those changes can be large. That still does not take away from the fact that the genetic makeup of humans is by and large nearly identical. My neighbour is still an homo sapiens and genetically near-identical to me even though he's Chinese and I am not. Whether he considers himself a descendant of the emperor Qin and, for that reason, deserves to be in a socially distinct category, is entirely a different matter.
You are wrong on this point. Genetically, Jews are as distinct as any other race (and the world's obsession with Jews mean that you can find plenty of studies on Jewish genetics). Jews take DNA tests and get marked as "Ashekanzi Jewish" (or other Jewish type) on tests like 23andme.
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