NickM

Nor does it make this donation somehow responsible for stopping those other good things from happening.

I'm not saying we need to like, bow down and praise Bezos over this, or that it erases any other bad things he may have done...but let's try to acknowledge that hundreds of millions toward this kind of charity is an actual good thing and not just a pointless PR stunt.

Yes research has found improvements when you put people on SSRIs, but double blind placebo controlled studies generally find that about 80% of the benefits also occur in the placebo group, so the actual benefit over placebo is only about 2 points on the HAM-D scale. [1]

On top of that, SSRIs have well-known side effects that are pretty noticeable for most people, so it’s hard to know how much of their benefit vs placebo is due to loss of blinding and/or the “active placebo” effect.

It is, however, notable that one study found a loss of effect when subjects were deceived and told that the SSRI they were given was an active placebo with similar side effects to an SSRI, and the differences were visible on brain scans, not just in their subjective reports.[2]

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo... [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-021-01682-3

I mean, sure, but there's a pretty stark difference between "oops, this didn't turn out to be useful after all" and someone who keeps hundreds of dirty plastic takeout containers "just in case". Maybe to some extent it's a spectrum, but it feels like there's a hard line between someone who keeps things that legitimately might be useful vs someone who is literally delusional.

This hits the nail on the head. It's tautological to say "the problem of inequality is caused by there being rich people that cause inequality". It pins the blame on individuals rather than the system they exist within.

That’s a big “if” though.

1. Acquire commercial software, or; 2. Hire a paid preparer to file it, or; 3. Use "Free File Fillable Forms" (but this isn't an option if you fall into one of the numerous special cases that it doesn't support)

So, basically, mailing in a paper return is the only free option for some people (myself included).

I genuinely don't understand why paid preparers can e-file directly with the IRS, but individuals can't. There's nothing in the linked article that says this will change, so if they go ahead and ban paper filing in a couple years, I'm not sure what options are left for people like me.

Yes, I can easily afford to shell out for software or a paid preparer if I really have to, but I'm very much against doing this on principle, since the whole tax prep industry in the US is a huge rent-seeking racket.

I was with you until this part. I used to be a Musk fan but he's done a lot of things to make people legitimately dislike him over the last few years. I agree it doesn't make his past accomplishments less impressive, but people don't just hate him "because the media basically tells you to".

Sure, if the complaint rate per mile is constant, but the number of driverless cars increases exponentially, then yeah we might expect the number of complaints to increase exponentially. That doesn't mean this isn't a problem.

they say it's "incomplete"

Okay, so maybe there are more problems than are represented in the chart, but that doesn't seem to paint any prettier of a picture here.

We can split hairs all day about what constitutes an order of magnitude or what percentage increases mean or whatever, but this doesn't appear to just be statistical noise.

The article actually has quantitative data that shows reports of "incidents where driverless cars disrupt traffic, transit and emergency responders" rising by a couple orders of magnitude in a year.

Yeah, the city officials have to cover their asses and make disclaimers about what they can and cannot conclude, because all they know is that they're getting more reports of incidents; they don't have access to Waymo's data. But given that we know driverless car activity has increased substantially, it seems silly to assume that it must just be a random coincidence that people are now reporting correspondingly more problems.

Maybe you have radiators that require higher temps than can be efficiently produced by heat pumps. Maybe you live in a place where the air gets too cold for air source heat pumps to be cost effective. Maybe you want to install ground source, but you live in a city and don't have a big enough yard. Maybe you have a big enough yard but local geological conditions aren't conducive to digging deep enough.

Not to mention all the people who just don't want to bother switching, or who don't have the money to switch, or prefer the reliability of the natural gas over the electrical grid, or...etc.

Or just look at the culture wars that are already starting over gas stoves, when nobody has even been required to get rid of their existing gas stove, and people are just talking about changing the rules for new construction.

There are just so many edge cases where it's hard to get people to switch off natural gas. If we can make green methane, all those problems are simultaneously solved with zero disruption to anyone's homes/lifestyles/etc.

Simplest chemically != simplest to use in practice. There are already millions of miles of natural gas pipelines leading directly to peoples' homes, and those pipelines cannot be used with hydrogen (not to mention all the appliances they feed).

Renewable methane is a dead simple drop-in replacement for natural gas. None of the other alternatives you mentioned share that property, and I think you're seriously under-weighting the importance of it.

Even if public perception weren't an obstacle, and even if you didn't have to deal with waste storage, and even if building nuclear plants wasn't a glacially slow process, it just doesn't make economic sense to focus on nuclear anymore.

Unlike methane, coal is mostly just used for power generation, and there's relatively little infrastructure associated with transporting it. Natural gas is used for furnaces, stoves, dryers, hot water heaters, etc. and there are millions of miles of pipes and associated infrastructure used to transport it directly to peoples' homes.

The complexity and cost for retrofitting hundreds of millions of homes and electrifying all the associated appliances is immense, not to mention all the backlash you get from people who love their gas stoves and grills. If we could just switch to generating renewable methane it would be a huge win in terms of logistical simplicity and would minimize disruption to peoples' day to day lives, which would probably make folks a lot more willing to accept it without putting up a huge fight.

I don't know, I'm definitely no expert in this area, and haven't looked for any similar studies for other toxins, so I'm not sure if other similar research has been done.

If the load shifting that this feature enables lets us avoid building out a proportional amount of utility-level battery storage, that is a pretty non-trivial savings in money and resources. A single GWh of utility-level battery storage costs on the order of half a billion, so the return on investment for coding a feature like this into iOS is probably pretty good.

It's not gonna save the world on its own, but it's still a nice win.

But that didn't happen. Eggs became more scarce, and therefore more valuable, and thus prices universally went up. People who still wanted eggs badly enough and could afford the high prices paid a premium for them. Other people bought and ate something else instead.

And then when the supply came back up, egg prices came back down. This is how the system is supposed to work, and it's exactly what I would expect to happen in a situation like this.

You're saying you really think that whole story had nothing to do with supply constraints, and it's all a big corporate class warfare price fixing conspiracy?

I could go on. I agree consolidation is a problem, but it's certainly not the only one.