GhostVII

It sounds like this is just a van fully owned and operated by an independent contractor though, not Amazon, so I don't really think it speaks to any kind of inefficiency within Amazon. Prime vans generally have graphics on the side, no? And Amazon sometimes just has random people delivering packages from their vehicles.

Seems kind of like talking about the inefficiency of Uber for not dealing with an Uber drivers abandoned car.

I suspect that the slightly lower confidence in the workforce would outweigh the cost savings, Google has lots of cash.

If a supplier changes locations I would definitely expect prices to change in future contracts. Of course the current contract shouldn't be changed if we had already agreed on a price for some number of units.

People making hundreds of thousands of dollars complain because they don't get to keep their insane salaries when moving to less competitive areas.

Those prices are not at all representative of what an average Canadian will be spending though, so probably not relevant to the overall trend. Very few Canadians are going to be spending $40 on cooking dinner for two people unless you want to have steak every day.

But for big tech companies at least I don't think money is really a significant concern. It's probably better for them to pay 10x for an engineer if that engineer has twice the chance of being a very strong performer than the one they could hire for 1x.

The title says Mac pro, not MacBook pro

I don't think that is really misleading, at least I wouldn't consider Medicare/social security as a part of my federal income tax. When I think of income tax I think of tax brackets and deductions, not payroll taxes which are deducted before I ever receive any income, and which I never really have to deal with.

Based on the headline, I would have assumed that 57% of people had enough deductions/low enough income to be below the bottom income tax bracket. Which is correct, based on what you said.

I think it would be cool if you could have some kind of combo human+ML system, where you use ML to actually detect the different objects and track them between frames, and a human can choose what color to use for each one. In a couple shots at least the Hindenburg showed as fully red instead of silver, and I don't think it is always possible for an algorithm to actually know the correct color without external data. If the algorithm could just say "I've identified this object between frames", and then the human can choose the correct color, could be best of both worlds.

Or maybe you could feed in some reference photos with the same objects, but already colorized. And then the algorithm could match objects from the reference photos to those in the black and white ones to get the colors.

Being vegetation obviously has a huge impact on your footprint, but I'd imagine that buying from a local organic farm actually has a much higher footprint than buying from a larger non-organic farm, since non-organic can grow more in a smaller space.

Yea I guess I was more thinking of a kind of blimp, where it still has some solar to allow it to maneuver around, but not to actually stay up.

If the aircraft needs to stay in one place maybe that would be less efficient though, since it would be harder to fight winds.

What's the benefit over something like a weather balloon?

Pretty interesting thought, tape a few hundred micro SD cards to it and you've got some impressive bandwidth.

It could do the opposite, borrowers may feel that the late fees justify them keeping the book for longer, since they are paying for their excess usage.

To clarify, I wasn't saying that it literally just goes in a straight line without any additional collision avoidance logic, just that from the drivers perspective all they have to do is make sure it continues in it's lane, as opposed to FSD where there is an order of magnitude more decisions the driver has to monitor. There is a huge difference between the focus required to make sure your car driving on the highway stays in it's lane and doesn't run into stopped vehicles, vs the focus required to make sure your car doesn't turn in front of other cars or take a turn to wide and hit something.

I wasn't including Navigate on Autopilot as a part of that but even with Navigate on Autopilot, the driver has far less to monitor than with FSD, since it just changes lanes on the highway occasionally rather than having to turn across traffic, frequently switch lanes in the city, or manage stop signs and lights.

We could also introduce safety features that use the FSD hardware and software, but only to avoid accidents rather than drive the car. Once you have a system that you know does a better job than humans at avoiding accidents, it is safe to introduce a system that actually drives the car.

The problem with level 2 "FSD" is that the better it gets, the more dangerous it is because the driver gets complacent. Autopilot is already being investigated because drivers don't monitor it enough and hit emergency vehicles, and all autopilot does is go in a straight line. FSD is making far more decisions, and gives the driver far less time to react to it behaving badly.

Tesla FSD has several situations where the car regularly performs maneuvers that, if the driver didn't intervene, it would likely kill the driver and other people on the road. It also has many types of routes where it can operate without any disengagements for a long period of time. I think that is a very dangerous combination.

If they really wanted to reduce deaths due to driving, they could use this FSD software to add better collision avoidance technology. Once you have that, introducing self-driving should be safer, even if it doesn't always make the right decisions it will be caught by the collision avoidance tech.

They probably designed the car with Europe regulations in mind first, and then rather than try and design an entirely new brake light for the US just took the lazy/cheap way and lit up the other two available light bars.

Just because something is annoying doesn't mean it should be regulated. Especially when that regulation is going to stifle innovation.

And right now we don't have a tonne of different chargers, we have two, both of which are good in different ways.

Wait isn't unbundling the sale of the charger the thing everyone got mad at Apple for? And now they are legislating it?

Am I the only one who thinks this is completely insane, just based on principle? How have we reached a point where we think it is OK for the government to tell me that I can't buy a phone without a specific charger. This isn't a safety issue, and there isn't any massive infrastructure requirement, let people make their own decisions.

If I want to make a crazy phone that is 2mm thin and needs some special charger, I shouldn't be banned by the government from doing so. And if I have some charging port that I think is better than USB-C, I shouldn't have to lobby the government to get it implemented.

Right now new phones either have lightning, or USB-C. Seems pretty reasonable to me. USB-C is not faultless - imagine if we had been stuck with micro-USB instead.

How about the government leaves us alone and lets us make our own decisions. I think that would be nice. Just make people pay for their externalities.

Hopefully in practice, all this means is that Apple will include a lightning to USB-C converter in the box.

I think doing some kind of cost benefit would be preferable to just spending money on what types of death people are most afraid of, which is basically what we are doing now.

I'm not saying that we need to do super intense cost benefit on every way of preventing death. But if we are spending far more to prevent a particular type of death than another just because of public sentiment I think that is a problem we should fix.

And doing that kind of analysis can actually save far more lives by using resources more efficiently. Orders of magnitude more people die from obesity than terrorism, yet we don't spend orders of magnitude more money on promoting healthy lifestyles. Or to pick a slightly absurd example, if we replaced security screening with cancer screening it could be far more effective in preventing people from dying in ways that aren't their "fault" (false positives aside).

Of course high speed limits aren't the only factor in traffic deaths. But if we set every speed limit to 25mph and enforced it, I'm pretty confident we would see a significant drop. Obviously we shouldn't do that, but the point is that we are allowing some people to die so we can get places faster.

But we make those choices every single day, gathering data about it doesn't change that fact.

Most people who die in a car crashes would have been saved if we made the speed limit 25mph and enforced it with speed cameras, but that would be inconvenient for everyone else. There are plenty of very rare diseases that kill people each year, we don't spend as much money on them because it isn't worth it to just save a few lives each year relative to what we could be spending it on. Many flu deaths could be prevented each year if we just closed down every nonessential business during flu season, but we are OK with some people dying so we can gather socially, even if we don't have to.

I think doing cost benefit analysis for deaths and lost years of life would be great, and would allow us to make more logical decisions. Of course no one wants their child or family member to die, but the reality is that if you want to setup society to just stop deaths at all cost, you are going to have a pretty miserable population. And if you don't do any cost benefit, you will actually be allowing more people to die by spending money in places where it isn't the most effective.

We should have some kind of dashboard tracking how many people die from terrorism, car crashes, heart disease, COVID, etc., and how much time and money we spend trying to prevent these deaths. We are just so terrible at evaluating risk, for some reason it is OK to waste everyone's time with over the top security to stop a tiny portion of terrorism deaths, while still being OK with high speed limits that kill thousands of people per year. Not that I'm advocating for lower speed limits, just that there is a contradiction here.

I bet that if instead of having people go through security at sporting events, you had them all do 20 push ups, you'd save more people from dying of heart disease than would die of terrorism.

When the majority of the country doesn't have internet access, a "currency" that you can only transact in via the internet seems like a poor choice. It makes it a lot easier for the government to track people though given that they are getting their citizens to download the government-sponsored wallet, which I'm sure is convenient for them.

My guess is that most people in El Salvador will download the wallet, get their $30, and then abandon it and just continue to use USD.

Wow, based on that study masks are way less effective than I thought. They couldn't find any significant impact on COVID from cloth masks, even though the study was quite large. And increasing usage of surgical masks by 30 pp reduced the number of cases by 10% - which is pretty good, but still not nearly the numbers I've seen floating around, especially when considering that villages with masks also had increased social distancing.

Not to say that the mask mandates were entirely useless, at least for indoors (outdoor masking seems kind of pointless), but it doesn't seem like they are as significant as we thought.

Sure, but I guess I'm wondering if that is just a convenient effect of the centering, or if it is actually necessary to prevent the wheels from skipping.

Are the cones mainly for keeping the train centered, or for allowing the outer wheel on a turn to be effectively larger? Not sure if the differential effect is an added benefit that isn't really necessary, or if it is the main goal of the design.

If the browser was to just disable the cookies API until the user allowed the site to store data in cookies, it wouldn't be something that the site would be able to ignore.

It's also not in the interest of websites to show the cookie popups either, but they do it because they are legally required to do so.

I mean I think regulating it in either place is a bit silly, but if we are going to force users to accept cookies on each site, putting it in the browser is far easier to enforce (since you don't have to go after each site that doesn't do it), and a much better user experience.