If anyone thinks Jif is the end all be all of peanut butter I think it’s safe to say that person had bad taste.

Legislation has made it farther though.

This illustrates some of the differences in transit time.

Wow. As a car enthusiast, I have a very conflicted relationship with cars. I love them, but here in the US it’s the only way we can get around and the awful traffic situation in this article gives me flashbacks of traveling 3 hours one way, every day to commute to a job I could’ve easily done at home. It was really…

True.

Hello Wisconsin!!!

Intel is expanding their fab capacity in Arizona significantly (already have a significant presence there, Oregon, and in a few other locations around the US), AND TSMC has also announced that they are building a fab in Arizona. Both are essentially responding to US/Western concerns around semiconductor manufacturing…

Intel has been putting out press releases about expanding their fabs in the south west and getting into the fab-for-hire business.  Every time this subject comes up, people seem to be shocked that there are actual semiconductor factories in the US.

What I’m thinking of is something like TSMC just opening a fab in Kansas or something.

Oh boy does that get missed. I spent pretty much all of 1999 going from site to site all over the country doing Xenix to SCO Unix upgrades for the point of sale and inventory control system that my employer sold, because Xenix could not handle Y2K. And that was with the majority of sites already having upgraded from…

but we still use petroleum because of the ridiculous influence of

Can confirm. As a PC tech in 1999, I spent most of the year either replacing outdated terminals or updating software on computers. The industry didn’t “move past it,” they handled it.

See, that was my understanding also. Y2k, like the ozone layer, only took the massive coordinated efforts of millions of people to overcome. Remember acid rain? That too.

I worked for a bank over Y2k. My understanding was that “Y2k,” while slighly overblown, only took a several million hours of collective overtime to fix. 

I actually laughed out loud when I read that. The amount of real work that went into making sure Y2K wasn’t a massive disruption was monumental.

When you read about the effects of inhaling leaded gas exhaust in childhood on human intelligence and personality, human history since the 1920s makes a lot more sense.

Exactly. I’ve been working in software since 1996. Y2K was definitely not nothing. I was in the ATM business at the time and we had an engineering team and project manager 100% focused on Y2K readiness/compliance for 2 years prior to the rollover.

Making fuel out of corn is hideously expensive. It’s why you don’t see corn farms run solely on ethanol. The main reason for it is corn subsidies to pay NCGA members to plant corn suitable for fuel subsidies. Whatever benefits there are on the environment, tax money is what makes it profitable.

Um using ethanol for gas is absolutely not cheaper than oil, especially out of corn or anywhere else that doesnt have a crapload of sugarcane excess to make it from.

I’ve talked to some of the people who did massive Y2K compliance retrofittings for a chemical plant near where I live. They said between 1995 when the issue was first brought up and October 1998 when they had their deadline, it was a constant daily race. Reflashing BIOS chips, converting systems from 8-bit to 32-bit,…