DavidAdams

You misunderstand. Indoor cooking fires are a major source of indoor air pollution that sickens the families, and particularly the women. Not to mention, many women spend hours per day gathering and hauling wood for their fires.

My biggest question is this: did the idea for this originate with the pun, or did they think up the great pun afterward?

San Francisco is has extremely low population density across vast swaths of its territory for a city with such a high demand for housing. And, unlike other world cities, most of the buildings are not architectural masterpieces with historic value. They're cheaply built, ugly little boxes. The only things that will reduce this tension would be limiting the number of people allowed to move into the city (obviously not legal) or increasing the supply of housing. There isn't a lot of new land, but it would be easy to increase the density by a factor of 2-3x by giving developers incentive to raze lower density housing and replace it with larger buildings. The could be compelled to pay impact fees and fund neighborhood improvements to ensure that transit capacity, parking, public amenities, and street life are actually improved rather than degraded.

Unfortunately, the current regulatory climate in SF is 180 degrees opposed to this solution, with NIMBYism run rampant and any improvement or expansion of existing housing stock subject to a thicket of roadblocks and regulations.

A similar thought occurred to me when I read this article. By not making a clear distinction between innovative, true "startup" enterprises and new small businesses following established business models, it's easy to make a grave error when looking at the data. Yes, there may be fewer small businesses starting. But I think a lot of that has to do with consolidation in industries such as retail, hospitality, and food services.

Back in the 1970s, there were thousands of small, independently owned grocery and retail stores that have been pushed out by large chains. I don't fault people for preferring to buy their food and clothing from large, brightly lit, lavishly appointed and stocked stores with low prices. Personally, I wouldn't choose to buy my groceries at a rinky-dinky corner store that was common in this country forth years ago when I had the option of shopping at a modern Super Target. But that means that people aren't opening small stores and small restaurants, and small inns like they used to.

But the loss of those businesses as entrepreneurship opportunities may have drained a little bit of the color out of our country's culture, it hasn't affected our innovation engine very much. If anything, the demands that larger scale enterprises like Target and Kroger and Chipotle and Holiday Inn Express for efficiency and logistics have spurred American innovation on, and the expansion of these companies have made the average US consumer's life better by bringing them a better selection of higher-quality products and services at lower prices, increasing everyone's standard of living. (Admittedly, at the cost of a degree of homogeneity).

So we could have fewer opportunities for entrepreneurs to start successful new businesses, but still have expanding opportunity for a certain type of entrepreneur to start truly innovative companies opening up brand new markets and doing that "disruption" thing. We'd have to take a closer look, and separate out new dry cleaners and dentists offices from technological innovators.

We started with Lob in July 2013. Having done a lot of startups, I knew there was probably a hamster wheel powering everything behind the scenes, but they did a good job fulfilling some rather enormous orders with grit and professionalism. Looking forward to sending out a bunch of prints this fall. Hopefully, they are now powered by a massive grid of hamster wheels.

I agree with you that for the most part the suggested alternative conversation starters range from pretty bad to hilariously bad. But I was very glad to read this short article because the larger idea put forth in the article is very thought-provoking, and is really good advice. You'll have to use your own creativity to try to spark an interesting conversation, but I feel a little energized by the challenge.

Why do you suppose people are so interested by self-help and "life hacks," but in general we're not actually that motivated for self improvement?

(see what I did there?)

Which basically sums up the setup for the film Galaxy Quest, which lampoons the Star Trek cast archetypes masterfully.

I built my house using insulated concrete forms (ICF), which work just like giant foam lego blocks that you fill with concrete after assembly. They're already in wide use and have been for decades. The material described in this article is different. I can't judge whether it's better, but ICFs work pretty darn well. Their big downside is that you get a very strong, very well-insulated concrete house, but it costs a lot of money to make a concrete house, and unless you live in a hurricane or tornado area, you might be better off building a flimsier house.

The thing that's missing from almost all discussions of making a "Silicon Valley" somewhere else is what I think is the key to the original Silicon Valley's success: intergenerational investment. That is, a bunch of guys hit it big on semiconductors in the mid 20th century, and instead of just buying boats and joining the country club, these people set aside a portion of their fortunes to invest in the tech-related businesses of the generation that followed. And, crucially, without extracting onerous terms from those investments. That established a culture of relatively permissive angel investment that encouraged innovation.

Trying to get a startup off the ground in most other places it too hard because raising seed money is too hard, and even if you raise seed money, raising a series A is too hard, and so on. To make a Silicon Valley, you have to seed the ecosystem with an initial generation of successful entrepreneurs who are wiling to adopt the ethos of the SV angel investor, then provide an investment infrastructure to make sure that promising startups don't die on the vine.

And, as many others have pointed out, an open spigot of government money was necessary for the original SV to develop, so that's probably necessary for any copycat.

If you're ever in Tucson, you should go for a tour. It's a fascinating place, and they've repurposed the facility to do a lot of worthwhile and interesting science.

What used to happen routinely is that when an insurance customer developed an expensive condition a "rescission" team would do a detailed audit of their initial application and medical history, looking for a pretext to break the contract. So if they went to the doctor prior to enrolling and complained about back pain, but didn't disclose that in their application, if that back pain could in any way be connected to their later cancer diagnosis, the contract can be voided and the insurance company could drop the customer and not pay for their treatment.

The insurance companies were consulted and included while the law was being drafted (over decades, because remember a lot of the groundwork was laid by the Republicans during the Clinton Administration). But it's not all rosy for them. They accepted the downside of this approach to healthcare reform because they saw potential alternatives as being much worse. A single-payer system would put the lot of them out of business, so they were willing to take some lumps to ensure that they're part of the American healthcare system moving forward.

Could be a bullshit stat, however, bikes with suspension lose energy because the rider's pedaling energy is absorbed somewhat by bouncing the bike up and down on its shocks. Because a wheelchair's operator makes it go by cranking directly on the wheel, a similar loss of energy wouldn't happen. A free-rolling vehicle is going to lose energy on a bouncy surface because some of its potential energy is expended bouncing up and down, so I'd say that smoothing out the ride will help.

As the article explains, though, including some realism in the way a movie depicts computing achieves the very same goal as the noisy explosion in space or banking starfighter. If there's too much physics realism in a space movie, people will notice that it looks "fake" and their suspension of disbelief will be disrupted. Space movies have dogfights because war movies have dogfights, so people know what to expect, and the plot is advanced. Back in the 1960s when computers were unknown quantities, you could put whatever bullshit you wanted up on the screen and that was fine. But now that the majority of the movie-watching public has a pretty good idea of how computers work, having a "hacker" enter some kind of 3d virtual reality world to hack the NSA is perceived as ridiculous, even for Joe Sixpack, as if the movie depicted a scene in a McDonald's wherein the characters talked to a Maitre'd and ordered Steak Tartare and Chicken Tikka Masala. We all know enough about restaurants to know that's bullshit, even someone who's never eaten in a four star restaurant.

Even though the answer to the article's question is pretty easy (there are really very few athletic or show business fields of endeavor that you can actually make a good living doing), as I was reading it and watching the videos I was really glad that it was posted to HN. I think it's fascinating to learn about someone who's the best at something incredibly difficult.

There's a relatively simple fix for lane markings, that would help autonomous cars even in good weather. You know those reflective lane marking doodads they embed in the road surface? We start replacing them with magnetized nails that are pounded into the asphalt in intervals. Sensors in the car could recognize the lanes even in deep snow or pea-soup fog. And homeowners could easily outfit their driveways with a trip to Home Depot.

An IPO provides liquidity for the stockholders. That's almost always the reason for an IPO when the company doesn't need the cash.

Yes, I'm pretty sure this is where the FBI comes in. So the solution to this is: you agree to buy back your stolen property using an escrow service, then the FBI tells the escrow service not to release the money to a thief. Eventually you get your money back.

The rules for health insurance brokers are a little antiquated. If you're going to sell health insurance online, someone in your company needs to be a licensed broker, and that person's name needs to be "on the building" so to speak.

(My startup helps companies navigate healthcare reform, so I'm a bit of an expert on this)

The key to your question are the terms "guaranteed issue" and "age bracketing." I'm going to guess that you're pretty young and at least at the time that you enrolled in your health insurance, you'd never had any health problems. They way that individual health insurance worked prior to 2014, insurance companies would offer extremely low rates to individuals, and keep their expenses down by refusing to insure anyone with even the most dubious "pre-existing condition." So if you'd gone to the doctor complaining about a pain in your side, that would be considered a disqualifying event, and they'd turn you down. Or, much worse, you'd get the insurance, pay premiums for years, then if you ever developed cancer, they'd later comb through your health records, find where your doctor wrote down that you'd had a pain in your side, cite it as an undisclosed medical issue, and refuse to cover your cancer treatment.

Needless to say, that's a very effective way of keeping the cost of coverage down: only insure healthy people who never go to the doctor. As you aged, the insurance company would start jacking up your rates to cover their increased exposure. If you ever developed an illness, you'd have no choice but to pay what they asked, because you wouldn't be able to get insurance from another company since you now had a pre-existing condition.

Healthcare reform's two boldest and most popular changes are guaranteed issue (health plans must accept you, regardless of pre-existing conditions) and outlawing "recission," or retroactively searching for disqualifying health records to deny claims. So what that means is that insurance companies can't cherry-pick the healthy people anymore, which means that the young, healthy minority is going to see higher prices for individual health plans.

Second, the ACA reduced the number of allowable age brackets, meaning that plans for the oldest people can only cost 3x what the youngest people pay. So that hits younger people again, since they have to be roped in with an older age contingent than before.

You may have heard Obamacare proponents worrying about getting enough young people into the risk pool so we don't end up with "adverse selection." They're not worried about that just because young people are feckless and think they're invincible. It's also because they know that they're the ones that are seeing the biggest rate hikes. Of course, while someone like you have to pay $200/mo instead of $90, the flipside is that a family that used to be unable to afford $1500 per month and can now be insured for $250, and that seems like a decent tradeoff, especially since, in general, young people will eventually get older and have families themselves, and they'll benefit from the changes.

The good news is that at least for the time being, you'll still have cheaper insurance, until your insurance company starts with the shenanigans and starts jacking up your rates or discontinues that line (and blames it on Obamacare whether it's true or not).

And by the way, if anyone out there is involved in a business that's having a hard time with health benefits costs, my startup is taking advantages of lesser-known provisions of the new healthcare law to save companies a lot of money. Let me know and I'll hook you up with the details. We're called Benefitter.

I'm bummed that his brother's Geocities website is no longer live.

They've paid Stanford at least $337 Million in royalties for the original Google algorithm: https://news.stanford.edu/thedish/?p=19621

Scorn may be a strong word, but the reality of the situation is that a driver faced with an unintended acceleration incident can avoid disaster by applying the brake and/or putting the car in neutral. No Toyota's engine is strong enough to keep the car moving with the driver mashing the brake with all of his or her might. Previous incidents of unintended acceleration such as the infamous Audi 5000 were usually found to be caused by the driver flooring the accelerator while thinking they had their foot on the brake.

The problem comes because when your car starts doing something completely unexpected and terrifying, most people panic, so if your gas pedal gets caught on the floormat, you won't have the presence of mind to go through a mental checklist of things you can do to stop the car. My guess is that to the extent that floormat problems caused gas pedals to stick, for 99% of the drivers, they hit the brake and kicked the gas pedal free and they were fine. But 1% of the people, in their panic, hit the gas by accident or just freaked out and froze, and crashed their cars.

Now, since it appears that Toyota tried to cover up the fact that there was a legitimate engineering or design problem at play, then they probably deserve the fine. Even if panic and driver error contributed to each and every incident, it doesn't mean that Toyota wasn't responsible for creating a situation wherein a driver had to cope with a terrifying, unexpected car malfunction.

What this whole incident proves to me is that we're very cavalier about the dangers of having millions of poorly-trained, distracted operators of powerful machines zipping all over the streets of our planet. Self-driving cars can't come soon enough.

I read something a couple of years ago about the phenomenon of expats fleeing Dubai after the economic downturn because of the Emirates' harsh treatment of debtors (no bankruptcy, pay up or be jailed). Supposedly, it was common for people to just abandon their cars at the airport and high tail it out of town, never to return. I just found a delightful article highlighting the phenomenon of swanky luxury cars being abandoned at the airport or on the streets. I suspect that this is the main justification for the imposition of an exit visa. But of course the upshot is probably that British financiers end up fleeing their debts anyway, while poor Bangladeshis suffer indentured servitude.

http://www.messynessychic.com/2013/05/21/so-in-dubai-the-amo...

Not only is the United States not going to invade Qatar, it's going to be loath to make even a peep about human rights abuses. Qatar is host to one of the US's key middle eastern military bases, home of the United States Central Command: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Udeid_Air_Base

I can't imagine anyone releasing any sort of smart watch that breaks the $1000 barrier. I think that sub $500 is probably necessary to get any kind of traction at all.

Keep in mind that when a car has a warranty or includes free service for X years, the dealership that performs that service is still paid. It's sort of like a medical insurance model, where you don't get a bill, but if your engine blows out, the manufacturer still pays the dealership for all of the labor (at a pre-negotiated rate) to do the service. Dealers love those kinds of arrangements because it trains people to get their service at the dealer, so even after the warranty is over, they keep coming back for overpriced maintenance and repairs.

When a dealer sells you a "lemon" that racks up thousands of dollars in warranty-covered repairs it's actually a bonanza for them.

The conflict of interest Musk is referring to is that dealers won't want to sell extremely maintenance free cars because their revenue on the back-end would be miniscule.

What should actually happen is that the US-based tech crowd should put together a political action committee and start lobbying. That would have a better chance of real-world impact.

Fortunately/unfortunately, there's no arguing on the phone involved. What happens is a junior staffer answers the phone and keeps a tally of which constituents come in on either side of an issue. Of course, if you're willing to make an extra effort, you can make an appointment to visit the congressperson's office, though unless you're a donor, you're unlikely to have much success meeting with the congressperson in person, but your voice would probably be heard louder nonetheless.

I get the impression that the author wanted to dispense with all of the usual preconceptions about Marxism right at the beginning, to inoculate the essay against the reflexive prejudice people tend to have about Marx.