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Submission + - Elon Musk admits DOGE was a waste of time (and money) (yahoo.com)

Submitted by echo123
echo123 writes: Elon Musk appeared to admit for the first time that his work at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency was a total waste of time—which also destroyed his reputation.

He told Katie Miller, who is married to Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, that he would not take the controversial post in Washington, D.C., if he had his time over again.

“I think instead of doing DOGE, I would have basically built—worked on my companies, essentially," he told The Katie Miller Podcast.

“If you could go back and start from scratch like it’s January 20th all again, would you go back and do it differently? And, knowing what you know now, do you think there’s ever a place to restart?”

After a deep sigh, Elon Musk, 54, replied, “I mean, no, I don’t think so.”

“You gave up a lot to DOGE,” she said.

“Yeah,” he conceded, sadly.

DOGE oversaw a $220 billion jump in federal spending—not including interest—in the fiscal year, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Bill Gates has warned Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts will cause ‘millions of deaths’

Comment Re:Wait, AI missing from this news (Score 1) 58

by echo123 (#65825631) Attached to: Airbus Issues Major A320 Recall, Threatening Global Flight Disruption

News I get is some big airlines performed all updates in an evening and are back to normal, but a small fraction of planes will take much longer time. I assume these are the oldest planes and they need specialised hardware for the update (e.g. floppy disks, emulators).

Schiphol handles a lot of those Airbus planes every day. From the moment I heard about this immediate requirement at roughly midnight UTC Friday/Saturday I followed all the flight departures for Saturday and only about 4 flights were cancelled.

I didn't bother to check what aircraft they were because 4 cancelled flights seems about normal on any given day for all I know. I checked several times throughout Saturday. Schiphol has many, many flights every day.

Comment Elmo wanted SpaceX to take Verizon's FAA contract (Score 2) 58

by echo123 (#65824573) Attached to: Airbus Issues Major A320 Recall, Threatening Global Flight Disruption

Just out of interest, did DOGE go after the FAA at any time?

Elon Musk says upgrade of FAA’s air traffic control system is failing and SpaceX needs to take over Verizon’s contract

  February 27, 2025

New York CNN —

Elon Musk said Thursday that Verizon’s efforts to provide a critically needed upgrade to the FAA’s air traffic control system is failing. And he said that it is important that Starlink, a unit of his SpaceX satellite and rocket company, take over.

“The Verizon communication system to air traffic control is breaking down very rapidly,” he said in a post on his social media platform X. “The FAA assessment is single digit months to catastrophic failure, putting air traveler safety at serious risk.”

“The situation is extremely dire,” Musk added.

It was not immediately clear what FAA risk assessment Musk was referring to in his post.

Verizon has a massive $2.4 billion contract to provide a long-sought upgrade to the FAA’s communications system, known as the FAA Enterprise Network Services, or FENS, program. Asked about Musk’s statement, the FAA issued a statement saying “Regarding the FENS program, no decisions have been made.”

- - - - -

Elmo has given many hundreds of millions of dollars to keep Trump from dying in prison and was rewarded with DOGE chainsaw status for his gesture. Elmo isn't exactly philanthropic, and the first thing he did was kill USAID just because USAID was investigating its relationship with Starlink.

Comment Re:Is military right-to-repair unrealistic? How so (Score 2) 62

Thank you for your excellent explanation, which I especially appreciate since I have been an open-source developer for quite a while now, with a fair amount of experience working for the Feds. The economics are different, as you make clear to me.

Comment Is military right-to-repair unrealistic? How so? (Score 5, Insightful) 62

The taxpayers paid for the goods along with their research and development. That fact alone should give the taxpayers more rights than the defense contractors.

That's also an argument for funding Ukraine, (R&D among other reasons like the furtherance of democracy and stuff).

Submission + - UPS MD-11 Lost No. 1 Engine On Takeoff, NTSB Confirms (aviationweek.com)

Submitted by echo123
echo123 writes: The UPS Boeing MD-11 that crashed while taking off from Louisville International Airport Nov. 4 lost its No. 1 engine before the aircraft cleared the airport perimeter, the NTSB said in its first briefing on the accident.

“We have viewed airport CCTV security coverage, which shows the left engine detaching from the wing during the takeoff roll,” NTSB Board Member Todd Inman told reporters during a Nov. 5 briefing.

Photos of the airfield taken after the accident scene show what appear to be a heavily damaged GE Aerospace CF6-80C2 engine. Parts of the nacelle, including the inlet and fan cowl, are also visible in photos and appear to have detached during the accident sequence.

“We do believe that that is the engine from the left side of the plane,” Inman said. “It is actually on the airfield, so it’s not off the airport property.”

The engine appears to have come to rest on the right side of Runway 17 Right (17R), the aircraft’s departure runway, and an adjacent taxiway. The engine is about 8,700 ft. from the Runway 17R departure end, Aviation Week analysis of publicly shared images show.

“That correlates with the video that we’ve seen of it detaching from the airplane while it is in flight,” Inman added. “We also know that fire was occurring during that time, so we’re analyzing that.”

Comment Re:Nice forest... (Score 1) 19

by echo123 (#65775034) Attached to: Brazil Proposes a New Type of Fund To Protect Tropical Forests

shame if something was to happen to it! This has common sense written all over it - after all the UK for example used to be heavily forested and it seems hardly fair to make other countries freeze development at some arbitrary level/time. You just know this is just going to devolve into greenwashing and extortion though!

This is a serious plan to pay the state government to literally do nothing, and to value nature and habit, and to enforce this understanding into the future. This means the value of doing nothing is greater than the value of development which is only worthy of a short term valuation.

Submission + - Bank of America faces lawsuit over alleged unpaid computer boot-up time (hcamag.com)

Submitted by Joe_Dragon
Joe_Dragon writes: Bank of America is facing allegations that hundreds of hourly workers performed up to 30 minutes of unpaid computer setup work daily for years.

A former Business Analyst filed a class action lawsuit in federal court on October 23, claiming the banking giant systematically shortchanged remote employees who had to boot up complex computer systems before their paid shifts began.

Tava Martin, who worked both remotely and at the company's Jacksonville facility, says the financial institution required her and fellow hourly workers to log into multiple security systems, download spreadsheets, and connect to virtual private networks—all before the clock started ticking on their workday.

The process wasn't quick. According to the filing in the United States District Court for the Western District of North Carolina, employees needed 15 to 30 minutes each morning just to get their systems running. When technical problems occurred, it took even longer.

Here's how it worked: Workers turned on their computers, waited for Windows to load, grabbed their cell phones to request a security token for the company's VPN, waited for that token to arrive, logged into the network, opened required web applications with separate passwords, and downloaded the Excel files they needed for the day. Only then could they start taking calls from business customers about regulatory reporting requirements.

The lawsuit says Bank of America enforced a strict "phone ready" policy. Employees had to be prepared to handle calls the moment their scheduled shifts began. Anyone who clocked in but wasn't immediately available to take or make calls for too long risked poor performance scores and possible disciplinary action, up to and including termination.

Yet the company allegedly discouraged workers from reporting any time outside their scheduled hours. Martin's paystubs routinely showed exactly 40 hours per week, or exactly 32 hours when she missed a day—suggesting the bank paid for scheduled time rather than actual work performed.

The unpaid work didn't stop at startup. During unpaid lunch breaks, many systems would automatically disconnect or otherwise lose connection, forcing employees to repeat portions of the login process—approximately three to five minutes of uncompensated time on most days, sometimes longer when a complete reboot was required. After shifts ended, workers had to log out of all programs and shut down their computers securely, adding another two to three minutes.

Martin earned $46.17 per hour through a third-party staffing agency, though Bank of America controlled her schedule, training, and employment conditions. Like many of her colleagues, she regularly worked full-time hours, meaning the uncompensated startup and shutdown time should have been paid at the overtime rate of one and a half times her regular wage.

The lawsuit points to 2008 guidance from the Department of Labor that specifically addresses call centers under the Fair Labor Standards Act. That guidance explicitly states that an example of the first principal activity of the day for call center workers includes starting computers to download work instructions and applications. It also requires employers to keep daily or weekly records of all hours worked, including time spent in pre-shift and post-shift activities.

The filing suggests Bank of America either didn't bother to determine whether the computer time was compensable or knew it was but failed to pay for it anyway. The lawsuit notes the company has faced factually similar cases from other employees about time spent loading and logging into computer systems.

For the week of March 11 through March 17, 2024, for example, Martin was paid for 40 regular hours but no overtime. With unpaid pre-shift, meal-period, and post-shift time of at least 20 minutes per shift over five shifts, she should have received an additional 100 minutes at her overtime rate of $69.25 per hour. Similar calculations apply to other pay periods cited in the complaint.

Business Analysts were interviewed by company hiring managers and assigned to Bank of America managers upon hire. The bank provided supervisors who oversaw their daily performance and gave them training and technical support. The company controlled work schedules and retained the ability to discipline and terminate employees. The positions were hourly, non-exempt jobs with rigid schedules requiring at least eight hours per day, on average five days per week, and up to 40 hours or more weekly.

Martin seeks to represent all current and former remote hourly Business Analysts who worked for the bank during the three years before conditional certification through judgment. She estimates the group includes hundreds, if not thousands, of workers who performed essentially the same tasks using the same or similar computer programs under the same timekeeping policies.

Many Business Analysts, including Martin, were employed through third-party staffing agencies but were required to comply with all Bank of America employee handbook policies, including those covering attendance, timekeeping, and overtime.

The case remains in early stages, with no court ruling yet on whether it will proceed as a class action or on the merits of the allegations.

Submission + - New Drug Kills Cancer 20,000x More Effectively With No Detectable Side Effects (scitechdaily.com) 2

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: SciTechDaily is reporting that researchers at Northwestern University have redesigned the molecular structure of a well-known chemotherapy drug, greatly increasing its solubility, effectiveness, and safety.

For this study, the scientists created the drug entirely from scratch as a spherical nucleic acid (SNA), a nanoscale structure that incorporates the drug into DNA strands surrounding tiny spheres. This innovative design transforms a compound that normally dissolves poorly and works weakly into a highly potent, precisely targeted treatment that spares healthy cells from damage.

When tested in a small animal model of acute myeloid leukemia (AML), an aggressive and hard-to-treat blood cancer, the SNA-based version showed remarkable results. It entered leukemia cells 12.5 times more efficiently, destroyed them up to 20,000 times more effectively, and slowed cancer progression by a factor of 59, all without causing noticeable side effects.

“In animal models, we demonstrated that we can stop tumors in their tracks,” said Northwestern’s Chad A. Mirkin, who led the study. “If this translates to human patients, it’s a really exciting advance. It would mean more effective chemotherapy, better response rates and fewer side effects. That’s always the goal with any sort of cancer treatment.”

Comment Re: Good (Score 1) 55

The US is about to take over Venezuela and its huge oil reserves, eliminating its dependence on Canada for oil.

While you might be correct about %$#@! 'US persons' desiring Venezula's oil, I do not think the US is in any way dependent upon Canadian oil.
 
...and don't get me started about the %$#@! 'logic' behind such a gross incursion as if no one ever learned anything ever. Oh wait, again I underestimated the overarching stench of the great orange turd.

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