TheMagicHorsey

It's very difficult to come to simple conclusions that are accurate in the case of California power generation.

One of the reasons it's so complicated is that the State in California intervenes in the market in so many (sometimes contradictory) ways. The incentives are often perverse and exactly the opposite of what you would expect.

In attempting to protect consumers, California in the long run has created a market with almost the highest prices in the nation. Simultaneously, and surprisingly, those high prices have not translated into some kind of futuristic or resilient grid. California has not had power outages not because California is better than Texas in terms of technology ... rather California is blessed with a climate that doesn't really suffer state-wide extremes.

As bad as California's public schools are, I think within twenty years we will realize that the thing Sacramento politicians fucked up the most was not the schools ... it was the power grid. Talk to anyone that runs a power intensive manufacturing enterprise in CA. They have already moved their facilities to another state or they already have a plan to do so.

California imports from other states all the energy-intensive inputs and exports its pollution and smugly pats itself on the back. All while taxing its citizens with some of the highest residential power pricing too.

I've read both and both are 10/10. But if you use a 100-point scale then Vinge's book is 99/100 and Tchaikovsky's is 95/100.

The only reason I'm buying a new iPad Pro is the screen and because the battery on my 2021 iPad Pro is slowly dying.

I could care less that the M4 chip is in the iPad Pro ... all I use it for is browsing the web, watching movies, playing chess, and posting on Hacker News (and some other social media as well).

I never understood how PE firms get blamed for rising costs in doctor's offices and vets. If a PE firm can just unilaterally raise prices, then why didn't he mom n pop practices do the same? Where is the competition? Why is there a barrier to entry that prevents some new young doctor or vet from coming in and undercutting the PE business?

If the PE firm is charging more than a vet operating alone would, then why wouldn't a vet operating alone just undercut the PE firm's veterinary practice?

There must be some barrier to entry in the market that prevents that, and that's what I would target. Because the PE firm isn't the root cause. After all, if you can't just enter a market and charge whatever you want as a standalone vet, what makes a PE firm different?

I bought a couple of M5Stack Cardputers to build my daughter a pair of wireless texting machines (over LORA). I have to say, for about $50 a pop, they are amazing little computers.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/bx4Mef6K23o

Great article. But I hesitate to call feathers one of evolution's cleverest inventions. The natural world is chock full of amazing evolved engineering from the huge (the hearts of blue whales) to the intricate (the brains of hominids) to the diverse (the various forms of eyes from compound to pinhole, to lensed), to the tiny (white blood cells). Everywhere you look there are feats of engineering that would awe anyone.

This is great. But I hope they do the same thing to so called "legitimate" universities who have long deceived students as to the value of the degrees they grant.

I recently met a liberal arts student from an Ivy League university who has been under-employed for twenty years. She still has unpaid student loans and she graduated in 2007! She has had to work in retail positions from time to time. And she's considering retraining via a vocational school to be an electrician because that's what her father and brothers do and they make 300K+ a year via the family business.

Talk about useless government nonsense. If we need a strategic reserve for Maple Syrup, then why not strategic reserves for everything else? Why not one for sugar, playstations, shoes, jockstrap itch cream, etc. I'd rather go without my breakfast syrup than suffer jock itch with no remedy ... right?

There is some special interest at play here. Nonsensical.

This makes me so sad. He was my favorite sci-fi author. I was looking forward to more books in the Fire Upon The Deep and Deepness In The Sky universe.

No. It seems you were incapable of understanding what I was saying ... which is MORE IS WORSE. In other words, the only people who think MORE IS WORSE is a meme are people who think the exceptions are the rule.

Almost always more regulation doesn't work in complex markets. Incentives are very very difficult to get right ... the exceptions where the regulations work are extremely rare. And for the most part people don't get them right.

How’d that work out for you with the Brexit vote? Still placing your undivided faith in polls by people that benefit from presenting a particular ideology as being popular?

Spoken like someone who has never seen the waste, lack of reason, and counterproductive incentives of a highly regulated market such as healthcare and telecoms in the US.

Also, if you are not selling in the EU you would never start a high tech company in the EU. Whereas people travel across the world to found high tech companies in the US that are not even selling product in the US.

I'm hoping something like Mojo makes it so the CUDA lock-in fades over time. Its never a good thing to have one company, like Nvidia, have a stranglehold on the hardware the whole ecosystem evolves on.

I don't think that's what that stat says.

For instance, if Amazon hired ten people in January, retained 5, fired 5 in February, and replaced them. Then, I fired 3 in March and replaced them. Then fired 2 in April, and replaced them. Then, fired 1 in May and replaced them. That's consistent with having candidates that only meet job requirements 50% of the time. But it would show up as 100% turnover.

That's not the same thing as people not wanting to work there. Warehouse jobs are demanding, but pay relatively better for unskilled labor than other jobs. And the workforce that is available for those jobs is often not the best in terms of skills and work habits.

These are things you learn when you run a small business. The American domestic high school educated workforce in most cities is very unreliable. You have more luck with immigrants, but if for some reason you can't hire illegals (like Amazon) then you are kinda at the mercy of having a workforce that often doesn't show up for shifts, has difficulty reading and following instructions, etc.

I encourage everyone that wants to fight for more worker rights to start a business that uses unskilled labor and provide those workers with some more rights.

Hiring American top-25 college grads to work in a startup isn't the same thing.

Seems inevitable. Newspapers no longer have a business model that works. Even the "savvy" ones are overly reliant on display ads ... and display ads are getting less and less desirable to advertisers vs other modes of marketing (such as paid placement in the content of influencers).

Newspapers have to evolve and evolve quickly to survive. Unfortunately, the type of people that have grown into leadership positions within newspapers and the type of people that work in newsrooms, are typically not the kinds of people that can evolve (or even think evolution or change is desirable).

Take the typical hostile reaction of mainstream journalists towards any new tech development out of silicon valley. Will that breed of skeptic be able to move fast and find a new model that works?

I think the last gasps of the existing media behemoths will come not with them innovating, but with them going to Washington DC and trying to legislate their existence back into relevancy via various attempts to break the open internet.

I think we should take these stories with a grain of salt given that workers still seem to prefer to work at Amazon Warehouses over small mom-and-pop stores in many markets that have thriving economies and worker shortages.

Not to mention, Amazon has programs that encourage you to upgrade your skills and shift from line worker to supervisor ... and ultimately even out of the warehouse into management and operations. These are not career paths usually available in other employment settings for workers who did not prepare adequately after high school for work.

Anyone that has owned DJI drones and compared them for quality and cost against US and EU equivalents should continue to be very worried about Chinas ability to build smart munitions at scale for warfare vs the West.

And sustained smart munitions manufacturing capacity is proving decisive on the battlefield in Ukraine.

What if people ran their own local gateway that forwarded messages to a third party message broker?

Godot is awesome, but I wish that when people start ambitious new projects that are meant to last for decades they’d choose a language that has more modern conveniences than C++. The compile times suck. The language is such a complicated mess you have to basically ban whole parts of the language from being used in the project to make development palatable. I would even prefer C to C++. I know Rust is probably a hard sell though.

This is a heavily subsidized project situated by geopolitical concerns ... not a practical calculus based on economics.

Even so, even after so much government coddling, it has an uphill battle for raw materials and labor flexibility.

I wish it well as its one of the few Western projects that can rival the gigafactories of China. Its a very bad outcome for the democracies of the world if China remains the only hardware supplier for our automated and electric world.

Read this.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/11/job-losses-likely-at-vw...

And I don't think Volvo is in much different condition.

On a related note, I think you have to consider very carefully whether or not you can manufacture in Sweden. For some companies like Teenage Engineering, Elektron, etc.,it can make a lot of sense as your labor cost is such a small fraction of the total value of the product. But if you are in some kind of competitive market where the labor cost has the potential to erase your margins (and therefore return on the project investment) then I don't think it makes sense in this globalized economy to base in Sweden.

Where do electric vehicles fall on this spectrum? I don't know TBH. I would suspect the Model S and Model X it doesn't matter really ... but say for batteries or the Model 3 ... maybe Sweden is a bad choice. The Chinese are very smart about how they base their manufacturing. Tesla should be smarter too. You can't just get around 50 years of labor interests.

And paying workers a lot is not enough ... labor interests want more than just high pay ... there's lots of other restrictions and controls on what you can do. You have to let them control how labor works in your plants. You can't just innovate on process however you like if you are at large scale. That's how Europe works. Everything is slow and deliberate with a pace that runs over decades or sometimes generations. You can't just fire/hire/automate/reconfigure on the fly as you evolve processes. Go to China or Texas if you need that.

Isn't being level a requirement for the condenser pump?

OP is underselling Brother. My Brother printer takes bulk ink from bottles and doesn't require stupid expensive cartridges. My Brother printer can be left off, turned on for a print job, connects to WiFi with no issues, and prints from every single device in the house from a ten year old Raspberry Pi to a brand new iPad.

My Brother printer doesn't treat me like I'm some kind of asshole. Just try an HP printer and see how it abuses you.

My wife had a roommate when she was younger who lost over 100 pounds over the course of two years. The woman went from being just average-looking to quite conventionally beautiful. It was almost comical to see her completely confused by the new behavior of men in her presence. This happened in her mid-twenties, so she had already spent a quarter of her life being unattractive before she was suddenly deemed marketable in the dating market.

The unfortunate thing is that she did not learn about the insincerity of men who are in the pursuit of sex when she was younger (because she was not really pursued ever) and so she was quite blindsided by it in her twenties and got into some relationships which were not particularly healthy.

But she managed alright and now in her late thirties she seems to be quite well adjusted and happy (but still single). Her career has also done quite well.

She sometimes jokes with us that had she known the advantages of beauty she would have shed the weight decades earlier. But she was from a very liberal and accommodating family that always told her that people will be judged on the content of her character and not their appearances ... and it took some time to realize the world is not that way.

This is a troll lawsuit. We really need to get rid of patents for software in this country.

I saw one that was similar except that it used triplets of pi digits (3.xyzxyzxyz..) and drew line segments with direction (x,y) and magnitude z.

The way you should think about it is they didn’t want to spend the money on a full employee for that position. If they were forced to do that they just wouldn’t hire for that position. Or that position would be as competitive as any other job at Google and probably would not be the same people that are currently red badges.

There absolutely is a caste system in Silicon Valley based on how you can jump through credential and interview hoops. Which doesn’t necessarily correspond to job performance, which is frustrating for everyone. But nobody can figure out a better way to predict on the job performance. There are some emerging signals like open source contributions but not everyone uses that either because it can also be gamed.

What level of “rich” triggers the law?

What level of “harm” triggers the law?

Am I harming you if I make an online store and you browse it too much? How do I know what too much is? How much browsing of a social network is too much?

I don’t understand how you think this is all crystal clear :)