DontGiveTwoFlux

Most of the top areas actually have really good transit, with the exception of Midland (on the list from west Texas oil money) and maybe Des Moines (I’m unfamiliar with it so I’m making an assumption).

San Jose and Sunnyvale have the cal train, linking a 50 mile long area into about an hours worth of travel. Bridgeport and Stamford have the metro north train, enabling commutes of 40 miles for tons of people to New York.

Consider what would happen to the South Bay if the Cal Train closed, or to Connecticut if the Metro North shut down. Way fewer workers would be able to to live their, and the populations would shift.

A cleric in 1200 might have said that the masses could never read, and that illiteracy will always be a feature of our society and that it is natural. Yet, here we are today, all reading. Maybe Einstein’s talents can really elude nearly everyone, but don’t short change your fellow human. If you do, you will be all the worse off for it.

With electricity going towards renewables, it seems clear that the best strategy will be to get the other major uses of energy on electricity as well.

Vehicles have a clear (if long) path to electrification. But what about heating buildings? My understanding is that electric heating is not cost effective compared to carbon based fuels. Lower costs driven by renewables can help here, but will it be enough? Are there alternatives being developed to tackle this major energy use?

These new mind enhancing drugs need not go down the path of adderall or other ADHD drugs. From my understanding those are based on amphetamine salts, with a host of well known societal issues like you mentioned.

Maybe they would follow the route of birth control instead. Initially seen as a moral repugnancy by many, but eventually accepted pretty much universally. It alters the body in significant ways achieving the desired effect as well as a few other hard to quantify ones.

We should be cautious of bad side effects, but they are not a given.

On the other hand, consider how rare the Enron case seems to be. Since it's implosion, how many other companies were based on total fraud? Theranos is all that comes to mind and it wasn't even public.

It seems like the system mostly prevents massive Enron style fraud.

In college about 5 years ago, I heard a presentation from some recording industry people who worked at a studio. They saw Spotify as the reason their industry would still exist in five years. I think at the time total recording revenues were still declining, but the streaming growth was really picking up.

Spotify has brilliantly convinced many people to spend $120 per year on music. The average CD-buyer spent much less than that. It's become normal and acceptable to have a subscription to this stuff. It was hard to imagine in the early 2000s when so many pirated their music for free.

A swipe against excessive civil forfeitures succeeds. These aggressive actions require citizens to forfeit property far in excess of any harm committed. In the court case, a man had his car seized when caught selling a few hundred dollars of heroine.

We have laws to punish illegal behavior, but it’s not right that all your property get snatched up too. The most egregious of these cases often involve no due process at all. People who are stopped and found to have large amounts of cash simply have it seized, even if they are never charged with a crime.

Recourse is often slow and expensive. It’s unlikely that this ruling will immediately change the rampant unconstitutional practices many police departments and towns rely on. But it is a step in the right direction. Hopefully, they will be taken to task in time.

You mischaracterize the article. It mentions the FDA, and perhaps more importantly other disincentives.

Hospitals desire more expensive solutions because they get paid more for them. That is a second, enormous barrier.

The incentives are clear here. The costs are high, between regulations, marketing, out-maneuvering rent-seeking incumbents, and cultural issues. The reward is low. No one will become a billionaire for doing this work.

Having worked on desktop software, I much prefer the services model.

There were endless conversations about a support matrix and patching older versions for customers who refused to upgrade. We were hamstrung by old design decisions and backporting fixes making any change onerous. We couldn’t add value for new customers as fast because we spent a majority of the time supporting older customers. Now those older customers probably preferred it that way. They had software that worked (until a new vulnerability was discovered at least) and that they had paid for and liked. But as the decades (literally software that old) dragged on they became like technical debt that we couldn’t detach.

As a developer, the incentives were clear. If I’m spending half my time supporting people who had already paid and weren’t likely to pay again, then I can be more productive elsewhere, creating more additional value at a company that had a services model. So I left.

My general impression is that worker safety was pretty much disregarded compared to modern standards.

A quick search turned up this piece[1] on 16 deaths around 1904 during construction of a NYC subway line. There are famous pictures such as this one of construction of high rises in New York[2] without any safety equipment whatsoever. But it was built in 14 months! All that safety gear is expensive and slows down construction. In climbing, we often joke 'no belay, no delay', because of how fast you can climb when you don't take the time to fix your ropes, etc. [3]

[1] https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-died-during-the-constr...

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=empire+state+building+constr...:

[3]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urRVZ4SW7WU

This is wrong. Is there nothing to know or learn about nutrition? Yes, it’s hard and there is a lot of bad stuff out there, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

I wonder if any company in a similar position has just done a total liquidation and turned over all cash as a one time super dividend. That seems like the honest and fair way of doing it. Though it's probably less lucrative than a debt-fueled stock buyback and dump strategy.

Apparently they will add sensors to continuously monitor the concrete for failures.

Apparently they originally only looked at techniques that had been used before in the US. Agreed that the big contractors and old bureaucracies such as the MTA could probably use a round of inspiration.

But there will be way less work to do with the new plan. The old plan was to totally gut the tunnel, the new one is to hang replacement cables and patch the concrete only where needed.

The press conference had lots of details. Last I checked no recording has been posted.

The old plan called for replacing all of the bench walls along the length of both tunnels. Bench walls are the short concrete casements which house the cables needed to power the train and provide communications. Replacing them was necessary because of leakage to the cables which corrodes them. It would have been a total gut removal.

The new plan is to 'rack' the cables along the walls, which will improve access and be way cheaper. It's some kind of hanging cable system. Some of the bench walls are damaged, so they will be removed or patched on an as needed basis. Otherwise they are obsolete, so the important bit is that they don't fall onto the tracks. There will be sensors to monitor for problems with the remaining benchwall.

These techniques have been used in new tunnel construction outside the US, but never to rehabilitate an existing tunnel. It seems like a much needed improvement over the old plan which will have less costs and inconvenience.

That’s not really an issue. They can just buy a copy at Walmart, no permissions needed.

Try audiobooks or podcasts! Listen with a soundtrack. You won’t regret it.

I'm a former last pass user as well. I made the switch about a year ago, and haven't really looked back.

That being said, there are a few things that annoy me about bitwarden.

For some sites or apps in iOS, you can launch a password manager to retrieve your credentials. This sometimes but does not always have bitwarden available.

Sometimes when launching bitwarden from an app, it will only show you the logins associated with the URI for your current page. But if you're launching it from an app you can't search for the right login.

These are small issues, which I usually mitigate by just launching a full on session of the app and copying the password.

I had to break a habit (I guess I picked it up from last pass) with the extensions as well. If you click away from the extension box, it will lose your context, and you can't restore it. I have had to restart filling out the credentials more than once because I didn't click save. Also, I think it takes too many clicks to create a new login with a generated password and save it.

Overall, these issues are minor for a good free product, and I would recommend it. I use bitwarden on FF, Chrome, and iOS, for context.

Is it right for the staffer to physically remove the mic from his hands though? Is that normal behavior?

Well, it’s not like what they were doing was legal and there’s nothing that can be done about it. In fact, America’s aggressive anti-bribery laws seem to be semi-working here with some folks slated to go to jail. I saw semi-working because they didn’t prevent it in the first place.

I don’t know if you can sketch a broad condemnation of capitalism based on this case. After all, the opposite party was a government owned fund.

What’s interesting to me is how susceptible to bribery government affiliated programs are. I guess it’s a combination of lots of money being handled by people who are not officially compensated very well. These kickback stories never seem to involve big companies bribing other companies. I assume that’s because of stricter controls and less incentives for those on the receiving end of a kickback.

The regulation exists to keep people safe. Poorly handled foods kill people.

Now, if there are high capital requirements for starting a restaurant, it sounds like there is a market opportunity for someone to make a low-capital way to try out restaurant concepts. That's sort of what has happened with food trucks. In Austin, many storefront restaurants existed as food trucks first. Presumably, they got to see that they were a hit without having to spend a ton up front.

You should care because society will be worse off without a media to hound those in power.

There will be thousands of small abuses of power that go unnoticed without a watchdog.

From the video linked in the article, it looks like they are using the music, and characters from the show. The content of the screens also appear to be copies from the show. I am not a lawyer, but those do look like infringing elements.

Still, maybe with these elements removed they could have a case.

The parent's comment still applies. If the progressive brackets were just swapped for a flat tax, the tax man still needs to know how much each employee had as deductibles, e.g. number of dependents, donations to charity, mortgage interest, etc.

But aren’t most subsequent rounds, Series A, B etc putting money into the company, and not transacting with existing shareholders for an exit?

One con of the pay per article is that it siphons money into the money making kinds of stories. The sports and celebrity pages can do a lot of funding for the slow grind investigations that are important for holding those in power accountable.

It’s not like an a la carte model couldn’t also fund profitless journalism, but I think it might push things even more in that direction.

I think they do understand what people want, but they have a healthy, eat your vegetables kind of take on things too.

The doomsday clock is a human institution of scientists, though hardly scientific. They see it as their duty to raise alarms. But ask yourself- are we really closer to civilization ending Doomsday than at the height of the Cold War?

There’s a balance to strike between the fear monger if news cycle and the Steven Pinker-esque wave of progress.

As Pinker notes, progress is not monotonicly increasing. While it is true that things have gotten better on average across the world, we should be wary of those who do not champion enlightenment ideals, particularly in autocratic China with the apparently life term of Xi Jinpeng. We should be wary that those without our interests at heart don’t overtake us.

That's right, 'real' tech companies such as Apple, Intel, Samsung, and many others can sell as many products as there are bits streaming across the network.