GVIrish

I would go one step further. We wouldn't have had to close schools for so long or at all if we had responded aggressively to Covid before the outbreak got large. South Korea largely controlled their outbreak without lockdowns because they aggressively tested, contact traced, and quarantined in the early days of the pandemic. Today, South Korea has something like 1/300th as many deaths even though it has about 1/5th the population of the United States.

The US had its first confirmed case on the same day as South Korea but was much slower to respond. Had we had a more robust response, we might not have had to make these tough choices about closing schools.

Amazon can be one of the most productive companies ever, and still be doing self-sabotaging things that will erode their long term success.

Truth is that any given time no company is perfect, they can simultaneously being doing things that give them an advantage in the market and doing things that undermine their own efforts. As long as the advantageous stuff outweighs the self-sabotage, they can be successful.

Some of the trouble is that people see success and assume that 100% of the things they are doing are the correct thing to do. Not considering that maybe the reason they can get away with one sort of bad behavior is because they have such a huge advantage in some other area.

So for Amazon, the soaring stock price serves as a big financial incentive that allows some employees to overlook the work environment. But that may not always be the case, and the more people share negative experiences about the work environment, the more new people avoid joining altogether. The negative reputation and the turnover may not be enough to doom the company, but on the flip side they'd probably be even more successful in the short and long term if they didn't have a firing quota.

I think the email can be inappropriate and Dean's response can be problematic at the same time.

As others have mentioned, clover can be a great substitute for grass that still allows your kids to play. You can mix in wildflowers along the edges or certain areas of the yard, and flowering shrubs that attract pollinators. Berry bushes can also be a great addition.

If you really wanna provide an educational experience for the kids, add butterfly host plants for butterfly/moth species that live in your area. I planted milkweed for Monarchs last year and it was a very rewarding experience to raise the caterpillars through the lifecycle with my preschool aged kids. This year I've planted a lot more milkweed, as well as dill (for Black Swallowtails).

The concurrency is a major reason for massive cost overruns. If you're building production aircraft before the testing and evaluation phase is done with prototypes, every time you find a major issue you have to retrofit dozens or even hundreds of planes.

But, like a lot of things with the JSF program, concurrency made it much more difficult to cancel. Sunk costs and all that.

> I think the point of the F-35 is it's one jet that can do it all.

That was the idea, but it is also why the program has performed so poorly on cost, timeliness, and capability.

The F-35 was supposed to achieve 80% parts commonality among the three variants. This would have delivered massive cost savings. Instead, the reality is less than 25% parts commonality. Also, the compromises made to accommodate all three requirement sets means the F-35 has worse aerodynamic performance and a worse radar cross section than it otherwise would've had if the Air Force and Navy could've had their own dedicated air frames from the start.

The much lower degree of parts-sharing wouldn't be so bad, except that the JSF program eschewed a lot of real world testing in lieu of computer simulation. And to make matters worse they employed "concurrent development", which meant that production were getting made while the testing phase was still in progress. The result was that as problems were uncovered, expensive retrofits had to be applied to all the airframes that had already been produced.

In a more traditional development strategy, the vast majority of teething issues would've been found before series production began. But concurrent development was used to try to speed up the timeline, but also make it more difficult to cancel the program.

The F-35 has a lot of capabilities but it is fundamentally compromised because of the attempt to make it a jack of all trades. It has had an extremely long gestation period, very high development costs, very high operational costs, and compromised performance on several fronts. Had the DoD at least split off the USMC STOVL requirement it seems like this project would've gone a lot better.

Seems unlikely that they're participating in a large scale fabrication like this but it's possible. I think it's more likely that there is some black project that uses novel propulsion systems and they're covertly testing it against our own military to evaluate how effective it could be. Or it could be another nation that made a break through in propulsion. And of course, the extraterrestrial possibility.

One thing that will be interesting is to see if any other nations have had encounters like this and can supply video and sensor data evidence.

The alleged affair would have occurred while he was still CEO. It's definitely an issue if the CEO is having affairs with employees.

> There is a fair amount already written on it but the insinuation that laughing a names leads to genocide ended up in the picture.

I think that's a misinterpretation of what that graphic is trying to convey. The point isn't that people and groups that exhibit behavior at the bottom of the pyramid are on the march to genocide. It's that there's a spectrum of bigotry and discrimination, and each level of it that is tolerated enables worse behavior. It doesn't mean every situation is going to get to the level of mass-killings.

Normalizing bigoted behavior encourages more bigoted behavior. The same way that normalizing managers who scream and yell at people often leads to others becoming more openly belligerent or otherwise creates a toxic workplace.

> Uh, the administration Biden belonged to more or less ignored worse stuff than this that enabled attacks like this. Take, for example, the OPM "hack."

I worked at State Department during the Obama era and into the Trump era. I am well aware that the Obama administration did not impose adequate consequences for prior acts of espionage and aggression such as the Cozy Bear hack on State Dept or Mikhail Lesin getting bludgeoned to death in DC. There also wasn't adequate pushback against propaganda efforts.

The OPM hack is widely attributed to China and is probably the most devastating breach in recent memory. Who knows what the real world consequences of that have been thus far.

Either way ny point is that right now, today, there is no excuse not to act. Unless maybe they still haven't figured out what is happening and who is responsible.

That article doesn't disprove a microwave attack at all, it just says there is no known public evidence that matches up with what is described.

Fact is that if this is real, it is the work of a sophisticated adversary that may have found a novel way to attack people. Even going back to the 60's there was stuff done in spycraft that would seem implausible to most people even today.

A relevant example is the use of microwaves to activate a passive antenna through walls to eaves drop on conversations (look up "The Thing Listening Device). Again this was done many decades ago. Not too far fetched to consider that maybe Russia intelligence services found a way to weaponized microwaves.

They could try that, but it seems like personnel are being attacked outside of embassies. They'd need to equip everyone's domicile with detectors as well.

That said, State Dept and the intelligence community should've been all over this. When this happened in Cuba, everyone should've been on high alert. When it happened again after, people should've snapped into action.

It's possible that the powers that be didn't take it seriously but now there's no excuse for Biden admin not to act. Clearly the perpetrator is emboldened and will persist until they experience serious consequences.

And at the very least, those affected by this should be getting workers comp and full support to deal with the effects.

> I think what basecamp is experiencing is what can still happen even though you as a manager believed you managed it well.

But it doesn't really matter if the manager (or owner) believes they handled it well. It matters if the employees thought it was handled well. In the case at least a third of them didn't.

Even putting aside the substance of the no politics policy, the delivery and crafting of it was terrible. There was a DEI committee, and it and all other committees were unilaterally dismissed. The no politics rule was decided with zero employee input. And worse than that it was delivered via public blog post that had to be hastily edited after the fact.

Had DHH and Fried carefully taken employee input and crafted a policy that took their concerns into account, and delivered with care and respect, they could've still ended up with a no politics policy. But employees would not have been blindsided and maybe more people would've bought in.

But maybe DHH and Fried really want a company culture devoid of significant employee input into how the company is run.

The initial blog post did not make that distinction. Not only is that a significant mistake in clarity, it was a significant mistake to announce a change like that via blog post.

With that change they also got rid of the D&I committee established with employee participation. If you're gonna tell your employees 'you have a seat at the table' on something sensitive like D&I, then eliminate that group with no warning, people are gonna feel some kind of way about it. Even Palpatine didn't dissolve the Imperial Senate right away.

> Do you think people in charge of hiring, particularly outside of the SV bubble, are going to be eager to pick someone up who left their last job because they couldn't agree to stop bitching about politics on the company dime?

I think that's a big mischaracterization of what happened.

For one, it seems a lot of the issue was about the 'funny names list' and heated debate around that. It wasn't people going to war over liberals vs conservatives. It seems DHH took particular umbrage at someone brining the Anti Defamation League's Pyramid of Hate into the conversation.

Secondly, Basecamp had allowed the creation of a Diversity and Inclusion committee with at least a dozen employees joining. DHH and Fried decided to unilaterally dissolve it. If you're going to give employees your blessing for a D&I group then just axe it with no discussion or warning, some people will be put off.

Then there's the fact that employees found out about this group of changes via blog post. That betrays a lack of empathy/care for employees when implementing a set of big changes.

Lastly, saying 'no politics or societal issues' because you, as the owners of the company felt uncomfortable, is a recipe for ruining the culture of a company like Basecamp. For some employees, they can't get away from politics and societal issues because it affects them every day and their very existence has been politicized. More savvy leaders could've established a better climate of respect and politeness around any 'political' discussion rather than a heavy handed and clumsy edict.

This wasn't about a bunch of people endlessly bickering about politics at work, it's about company owners who took a manageable issue and turned it into a public crisis. Companies several orders of magnitude larger manage to accommodate employees having political conversations without making messes like this.

Huh? There are flights arriving daily from India, India was where the strain was first detected months ago, and in some parts of India it is the predominant strain. Neither of the two mutations that strain has acquired match the mutation that the B117 (which now dominates the UK and in process of dominating US) strain has.

Multiple trails of evidence pointing to it's emergence in India, and right now the UK is not restricting travel from India so the most likely scenario is that it arrived in the UK from someone who traveled to India or another country where that strain is spreading.

One word: variant. Variant B1617 has emerged and India and seems like it could be driving a surge.

There's not a lot of data yet on that variant's transmissibility and lethality but it has already been detected in the UK.

Thus far it doesn't seem to be as dangerous as the Brazilian P1 variant, but could be trouble just the same.

Potentially. Sometimes a bike commuter is someone who would've taken the bus or subway to get to work.

That said, it still depends on commuting patterns, road topography, etc. Some cities have a majority of workers driving in from distances that would be impractical for most people to bike. Making a big shift to bike lanes without making other changes to reroute and accommodate traffic would just cause gridlock and frustration for most.

If shifting city centers to being bike centric is done on a longer timeline then capital improvements and redevelopment can be done to support it in a way that makes it more efficient for everyone. Some cities can do that on a shorter timeline based on current constraints, others would take longer. Ultimately I think it's the right direction to go in.

> Roads have such limited throughput that a new bike lane might inconvenience only a few hundred people in cars, while opening up the city to thousands of people on bikes.

I think that is massively underselling the disruption to traffic. Depending on the city and the traffic patterns, hundreds of thousands or even millions of people could be commuting into a city on a given day. Reducing the car throughput on a significant portion of roads will cause backups to spread across the road network, affecting thousands.

Maybe switching to bike lanes can be a net positive, but it all depends on the commuting patterns of people living and working the city. Then again, maybe if car commuting is made painful enough, it will accelerate shifts in commuting patterns.

With careful planning the interests of vehicle commuters and cyclists can be balanced for maximum benefit, but I think in the long term changing zoning and development strategies will be what's needed to really make the shift.

While you have the right idea, the problem is that taxi laws are not enforced enough to deter ride-discrimination behavior. Plenty of times before Uber/Lyft I had cab drivers refuse a ride because they didn't want to drive outside of the city at the most lucrative hour, or they'd just refuse to stop.

My first memory of Red Bull was in game advertising in the PS1 game WipeoutXL. As a teenager living in Panama at the time I had no idea what it was, I thought it was a made-up product just for the game. Looking back they were way ahead of their time even then.

The way I would state it is that you need to understand the tradeoffs of given best practices and whether those tradeoffs justify implementing those best practices on your project. It also gets into what best practices should be prioritized over others and on what timeline.

> I hear this a lot from people online. But how realistic is this really? Say we enter 4 degrees of warming. I assume that we will experience food losses in both agriculture and fishing. The expectation seems to be that we will make no adjustments to our supply chains, no adaptations, no restrictions on food waste (currently over 50% in the developed world) or any other attempt to mitigate these factors.

It's hard to put in context the scale of the problem, but you have to understand that certain forces of nature are far beyond our ability to adapt to in a way that avoids widescale misery and death.

The plants and animals alive today have evolved over many millions of years to live in a climate that operates in a certain range, on a certain schedule (seasons). Shifting climate across the planet by 4 degrees C means millions of species will be put into a climate they are not adapted for, and along with other pressures of pollution, and habitat loss, these species will go extinct.

As far as fisheries go, higher seat temperatures will cause hypoxic zones with mass fish die-offs and at a certain level of acidity, phytoplankton can't form their shells and that whole food chain collapses. It also means coral not only will die off, but it will dissolve the reefs.

For terrestrial crops, we have some ability to engineer crops that are more drought resistant and can stand some level of heat waves. Not only that, but the pollinators that many crops depend on will be severely impacted. When droughts wild fires, floods, sudden cold snaps, and the like are frequent and severe, it is very unlikely human kind will be able to sustain agricultural yields in a way that won't result in famines, particularly in the developing world.

There are already parts of the world that are unstable and have difficulty supplying resources to their populaces. Add these stressors and it is all but certain that basic order will break down in those parts of the world on a scale that is hard to fathom.

Widespread crop failures due to extreme conditions during growing seasons and collapse of pollinator populations Collapse of fisheries globally due to ocean-acidification. Some 1 billion people currently rely on seafood as primary protein Frequent extreme weather events cause frequent large scale property destruction Higher sea level + extreme weather ravages coastal cities, which will also disrupt global supply chains *Heatwaves will push into lethal territory in parts of the world

All of these things put together will put severe strains on unstable parts of the world first, but if the trends are not abated and we end up in 'Hothouse Earth' territory, modern civilization will not be sustainable.

The worst stuff comes when we're talking 3, 4, 5 degrees C of average warming. But the tricky thing is that we don't have a full understanding of all the planetary feedback loops and tipping points.

I think when experts are wrong it negatively impacts their credibility. If they're wrong often enough, or wrong on something important enough, sometimes they lose enough credibility that people no longer solicit or listen to their input.

This may not happen often enough, but that is part of the scrutiny and accountability that should come part and parcel with being a renowned expert.

> The experts in baseball for a long time thought baseball should be played a certain way. Bill James starting proposing radically different approaches that were later put into practice by Billy Beane (described in Moneyball) and later by Theo Epstein (who led the front office for the Red Sox and Cubs organizations when they won the World Series the article mentions). The story of baseball over the past 10-15 years has been about ignoring one set of experts as the industry has developed a new set of experts.

The emergence of analytics in sports is an example when the old prevailing thinking was displaced by new and better approaches rooted in data. I think a lot of people struggle with the idea that science or experts can be disproven over time by better science and approaches. Sports is easy because the results are very easy to evaluate. But in other areas it can take a very long time for the results to an approach to be apparent.

Still, the problem being discussed is not that there's a competition of experts and scientific approaches, it's that sophistry and ignorance is being promoted to the same level of experts.

> Another problem with experts I would have like to see this article address is when experts overstep their area of expertise. Experts can tell us facts from their area of expertise, but when we have complicated problems that involve trade-offs from areas outside the expert's area, that can lead to bad decisions.

This is true, and he touched a bit on this with his Vietnam War example.

I don't think the answer is to step on the rights of people, I think it's that culturally we have to expend a lot more effort on challenging ignorance and elevating the voices of reason.

I also think we have to stop promoting ignorance and bad faith actors at the same level of people coming to the table with real knowledge and a good faith desire to engage. The current media landscape features a lot of promotion of people promoting misinformation to argue with actual experts because it's entertaining. But the effect is corrosive. On the personal level more people have to push back on the same phenomenon.

This. Reverence for celebrity also engenders a weird trust in celebrity viewpoints even when they are wildly misguided and completely divorced from a particular celebrity's training/knowledge/experience.

Not to say a tennis player and former MTV host started the anti-vax movement, but celebrities can fan the flames of ignorance pretty easily because of how much people pay attention to and trust them.

I don't think that undermines his point at all. Experts can be wrong on things, experts can disagree, experts can change their position.

I think that's one of the big problems with how people are approaching experts in this climate. 'Dr. Fauci was wrong about that one thing, now I'm only going to listen to Dr. Oz!' We're in a weird place where people expect experts to be right 100% of the time in situations with murky or evolving information or in subjective calls. When experts are wrong people turn to people with no expertise who say things they like.

There's room to disagree with experts, there's room for experts to be wrong sometimes. But the problem is people lining up to follow people who have little to no expertise at all and elevating them over experts. Even worse, people are growing actively hostile to expertise when it advocates something that they don't like.

> If you were just doing car to car communication for automatic driving and didn't need to send ads, track, or remotely update the car, the way to do it would be through the vehicle radars.

In a vehicle application wouldn't that suffer heavily from line-of-sight problems?