They sound like such lovely people /s
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Here’s my thing - you are millionaires. You have a spawn. Your approach to getting a nanny, run an ad on Craigslist???
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Where else are you going to find someone with a professional background in pedagogical research who will be willing to work as a nanny for peanuts?
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The fact that it’s on craigslist screams that these people aren’t actually running a $100m business portfolio, but imagine that they are…
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Everything about this screams “crypto.”
Sooooo 100 million bitcoin (as priced at its peak, because hodl gang).
Ish.
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Yeah - I can see that.
Also, the whole advertising on craiglists to get someone to raise your kids is… wow. WTF?
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Where do they turn when every representative of every nanny agency stared at them unspeaking until getting up and getting coffee and otherwise busying themselves about the office.
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“I’ll be right back…”
[gets up]
“SECURITY!!!”
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Paging Roy Moore.
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You rang?
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Noooooooooooooooo! I swear, I didn’t mean it!
I feel like the apprentice sorcerer who accidentally summons a demon.
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Bum! BUM! Ba-da-da-dum da-dum da, da-da-da-dum da-dum da, da-da-da…
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Any time something is called Project Phoenix, it’s bad news.
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This was initially a bit of a gut punch the first time I heard about it, but it occurs to me that I don’t really know enough about the mechanics of recording and distributing music to really understand the scope of what’s been lost with the destruction of those master tapes.
Part of me feels like this is what we get for relying on for-profit companies with histories of abusive business practices to preserve and protect our musical cultural heritage. And part of me recalls Sturgeon’s Law and understands that you can’t keep everything and that you sometimes don’t know the value of what you’ve got until well after the fact.
But galaxy brain me feels like if the Library of Congress can archive every flipping tweet since 2010 (or whenever), then it shouldn’t be that hard to hire a few a few editors and historians and start tying intellectual property rights to archival copies of master tapes.
And as a data professional-type person, this is both depressing and entirely unsurprising:
[…] it was clear in the immediate aftermath of the fire that the company would never have a complete accounting of what was lost. Decades of slapdash inventory practices — the company’s failure to invest in complete records of its holdings — had resulted in an insoluble discographical puzzle. UMG knew what labels’ masters had been stored in the vault; they know, broadly, which artists’ recordings had been on the shelves. But the knowledge got fuzzier when it came down to individual albums or songs, especially given the presence in the vault of an indeterminate number of masters containing outtakes, demos and other recordings that were never commercially released.
Everybody always wants to have their cake and eat it too when it comes to legacy data. 
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One possible problem with recording tape – how fast can you digitize it, or even copy to backup tapes? Seems to me it would have to be near real time.
But I agree we need better than this.
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I’d guess that a good bit of those, even some of the older stuff, were already duplicated in other formats. But if stuff that’s pre-world war 2 was in there (or into the 1950s, perhaps) there is a very good chance that it’s gone (because there was a policy of melting down 78s during the war) so some more obscure stuff might be lost. That might be true of more obscure artists into the 50s, when 78s were still some decent portion of the market.
Keep in mind also, that stuff that was by less well known artists today might never have been remastered from the original master, and now that opportunity is lost.
Well, their is the world we want and the world we have. As long as people assume that art and culture are not something that is nice to have, but fundamental to humanity, we’re going to allow for profit corporations to do that work.
But the Smithsonian does a good deal of work preserving musical works, including finding ways to preserve and digitize the very earliest recordings. Anyone who files for a copyright on music sends a copy to the LOC, so they have copies there of many, many recordings.
I don’t see music and culture as data, but as who we are as a people. Part of the problem is viewing it as a data problem instead of a culture and heritage problem.
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Reuters, which first reported the new issue, said during an FAA pilot simulation in which the stall-prevention system was activated, it took longer than expected to recover the aircraft.
Other sources said the problem was linked to the aircraft’s computing power and whether the processor lacked enough capacity to keep up.
I have a feeling the lead engineer on this project is that Castleton guy from Time Chasers with his Commodore 64.
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We’ve known how to build airplanes that fly straight and go up and down for about a hundred years. They used to have wings that stuck out at 90° from the center of mass and tails that made a nice symmetrical cross shape. They had more-or-less linear and predictable flight characteristics. People used to fly them without any electronics at all.
Fuck the 737 Max. If there was ever a case for the Corporate Death Penalty this is it.
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There was a whole bunch of stupid that went into the Max, most of which are a direct result of the fact that Boeing rested on their laurels while Airbus was creating a new, more fuel efficient version of their plane in the same class. By the time Boeing clued into the fact that they couldn’t compete with the new Airbus plane, they were years behind and in a hurry.
The main feature of the 737 MAX class is the much larger, more fuel efficient jet engines. Unfortunately:
- those engines are so large they can’t fit under the wing of a 737
- the landing gear can’t be extended any further, to raise the wings off the ground so that the engines will fit, without an extensive redesign.
Since a clean sheet redesign was out of the question, they moved the engine forward, so that it’s basically in front of the wing instead of under it. Unfortunately, that changes the aerodynamics of the plane, making it more prone to stall.
And they didn’t have the time to fix it properly, so they half-assed it by fixing it through software, creating a system to set the trim if it detected the conditions for a stall.
And then they didn’t document that software properly or train anyone on it, because if the plane handled substantially different from the old 737s, they’d have to get a new airworthiness certificate, instead of piggybacking on the old one.
It was just horrible decision after horrible decision, all in the name of, “We don’t have the time to do this right if we don’t want to lose business share to Airbus.” And all of it could probably have been avoided if they had started designing the MAX five years sooner.
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