In general I'm inclined to agree, but in this particular case given Jacobin's ideological lean, I imagine they see their audience as being mostly either in the first camp or agnostic as to this issue, with vanishingly few people in the second camp.
This, 100%. He has become very successful by showing up as an outsider to a couple of different industries and successfully challenging entrenched conventional wisdom, in ways other people had failed to do previously. It sort of seems like this has led him to (mistakenly, in my view) decide that all conventional wisdom in all domains is wrong, and that he is uniquely qualified to challenge it, which seems to have then led to him saying lots of demonstrably false things and generally looking like an idiot.
But it doesn't seem like there's any fundamental tension in assessing that in some domains he has done good/useful work and in other domains he's acting like an idiot. It needn't be the case that he's either an all-around genius or an all-around fraud/charlatan/megalomaniac/whatever.
Almost certainly not. Nobody can match Youtube's payout of 55% of revenue to creators, or come anywhere close to it; Tiktok's monetization model is both worse at the outset and destined to continue to get worse still over time (creators are paid fractions of a fixed pie, so with more creators, each creator's share diminishes). Tiktok also has a notoriously opaque moderation process that has a reputation for censoring much more aggressively than youtube (doing things like banning profanity, which has never been a problem on Youtube).
> In-flight wifi (and otherwise all other transmissions) have pretty much always been air to ground
Would be curious to see a citation. My understanding was that of the major providers of in-flight Internet, only Gogo was air-to-ground, and that pretty much everybody else (Thales, ViaSat, etc.) was either Ku- or Ka-band satellite, which has been winning out because it still works over water.
I assume airlines looking to outfit whole fleets aren't finding out about pricing through the website, and probably aren't paying sticker price for either the equipment or the service. I guess the Gulfstream set probably isn't price sensitive, so may as well charge a boatload for these kinds of one-off installs for rich people?
Yeah, there are steep hurdles, but the hope eventually with at least some of the smaller gen IV designs is that a design can be approved once along with any requirements for siting, etc., and that then at each site where they're to be installed, installers will only need to show that the site meets the already-approved siting requirements rather than starting a whole new process from scratch, which should seems like it at least has the potential to make the regulatory burden more sane. The NRC is already working on a revised approval process that aims at this goal, and is set to be ready in 2024. Who knows if it'll pan out, but there's at least the possibility of change.
I suspect that this person wasn't talking about PWRs vs. BWRs, but rather, PWRs vs more-exotic gen-IV-ish designs (molten salt cooling, gaseous helium cooling, etc. etc.).
Quickwit is another project aiming at this sort of stateless search: https://quickwit.io/ . I've been keeping an eye on it for a possible project that would involve wanting to offer search over a lot of data for an application that wouldn't have very many users, such that keeping a big ES box around all the time would be needlessly expensive; I had been looking for a search situation where my only always-on costs were for storage, and I could pay for compute as needed (and ideally also separate paying for indexing compute, which doesn't happen often in this application, from search compute).
Interesting that ES might also end up with this kind of an offering.
With a vehicle, probably not. Moving form one satellite's orbit to another is extremely fuel-intensive (you'd typically need ~thousands of km/h of velocity change to do it), so it's not really practical to have a single vehicle up there moving from satellite to satellite.
But maybe there'd be some other way to do it? There have been proposals for de-orbiting little pieces of debris from the ground with lasers, and I suppose it's possible that those approaches would scale to bigger objects (or maybe you could do it with lasers from other satellites whose orbits were fixed, or something).
I think GP is talking about a more specific thing, and it's one I experience all the time too: that I'll visit a website briefly one time, by accident, or to satisfy some curiosity, or look up the specifications on something I already own, or to get a link to send to a friend, or whatever other non-purchase reason, and then get shown ads for their thing over and over and over again until the end of time despite the fact that there's a 0% chance that I will ever buy it.
I'm sure it's true that, in the general case, advertisers want to show ads to customers multiple times, but in these particular cases, they shouldn't want to show them to me -- I'm definitely not going to buy the thing, and they're wasting their money, and it seems like Facebook ought to be able to better differentiate between users like me who will definitely not convert and users who might (like GP said: seems like there ought to be detectable patterns in the way I do or don't engage with the content that should signal my lack of interest).
It looks from the diagrams like the plan once the keywork is done is to have some of the keys operate what look to me to essentially be bicycle cables (Bowden cables), which for some reason I find totally delightful.
In case anyone's looking for more background, there's a great book from a couple of years ago called "Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America," by NYT reporter Conor Dougherty, that covers the history of the YIMBY movement in California (and to some extent more generally). Sonja Trauss has a prominent role in the narrative.
"Turkey" is also a country, and yet through a combination of context and capitalization, we don't seem to have any trouble telling whether that or the bird was intended. This seems like a non-problem.
Obviously a very US-oriented perspective, but: yes, to the extent that the US has historically attempted at least sometimes to be a global police power, they're significantly constrained when the country they're trying to police has nuclear weapons. The US response to Russia invading Ukraine has been fundamentally different in kind from, say, Iraq invading Kuwait, in which Iraqi forces were pushed back to the border in a matter of days. There are lots of reasons for this (much greater asymmetry in conventional military forces, etc.), but at least in part this is because of US concerns that direct conflict with Russia would escalate to nuclear war. Similarly, can already start to see how US posture towards North Korea is starting to change and will likely continue to do so as a result of their nuclear advancement.
> For specific use cases, we support other languages, including Java, Erlang, Haskell, and Go. These languages are currently not widely supported outside of specific use cases.
48 of 50 states have a thing called a "county," but they're not all necessarily the same concept. In many states, counties are the division below the state but above cities, and have edge-to-edge coverage (all points in the state are in a county). In some states, however, counties and at least some cities are peer administrative entities (Virginia is an example), so there are some locations that are only in a county but not a city, some locations that are only in a city but not a county, and some locations that are in both.
As in the article, I think it depends to some extent on what question you're asking. "What is the population of the US?" is almost definitely intended to include Alaska and Hawaii, but if someone asks "what is the geographic center of the US," they probably intend for the answer to be something in South Dakota, not the point off the coast of British Columbia that you get if you include Alaska and Hawaii, or the point out in the middle of the Pacific if you include Guam, etc.
I definitely feel like there's a bit of a Gell-Mann Amnesia effect going on with Wirecutter reviews: when they review things in areas I happen to know well, I often notice errors or missteps in their thinking in the review, but for some reason I still blindly trust their reviews in products that I know less about, even though obviously it's not particularly likely that they're uniquely inexpert in the areas I happen to know well. Posts like this are a good reminder to be skeptical of all of it.
> The vast majority of users of music notation are amateurs
I'm not sure the claims you and OP are making here are actually in tension. They said:
> the most common users of music notation (experienced musicians)
which is ambiguous, and might mean something like "of all the people that ever do any music-reading at all, the majority are experienced musicians," which would indeed be the opposite of your claim. But it might also be "of all the people that are reading music at any given moment, the majority are experienced musicians," which would be a proxy for "most hours spent reading music are spent by experienced musicians"; this could be true simultaneously with your claim (it stands to reason that experienced or professional musicians spend comparatively more time reading music than do novices or amateurs).
I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that the thing you want to optimize for is maximizing the average quality of experience for all users regardless of how much they use the thing, vs. maximizing the quality of the average hour of use.
> rich developers will all be getting a huge property tax break
These proposals would generally be revenue-neutral, so the same amount of total tax would be collected, but assessed by parcel (adjusted for demand) rather than by parcel + improvements. An area where there was demand to house lots of people might still have high taxes because the land would be in high-demand because of its potential to host big buildings, whether the buildings were there or not. In other words: they'd have to build the building to afford the tax, because if they put a parking lot on it or whatever, the taxes would swamp any revenue.
As to small businesses/homeowners: ideally in such a scheme, improvements they might want to make would be more affordable than they are under the current system, because they wouldn't owe taxes on the increased value. Ultimately though, you're right: systems like this are meant to address a circumstance where nobody can afford housing because there's way more need than there is supply, by incentivizing increasing the density of housing in such areas, which means some small structures will need to be torn down and replaced with bigger ones, and people unwilling or unable to do that will be incentivized to sell to someone who can. Their well-being gets weighed against the hypothetical well-being of the larger number of people that might otherwise be housed by the larger structures that would replace where they live now.
... sucks to be them? No tax scheme is truly neutral, and any tax scheme is going to favor certain behaviors and disfavor others. If the behavior you wanted to undertake isn't the one a given tax system incentivizes, that's probably unpleasant, but somebody had to get the short straw, and as a society we may as well pick a short-straw-holder in such a way that broadly pro-social outcomes are maximized, like increasing the likelihood that more people have places to live.
> 1) Zoning laws have to change as well to actually allow development of the land being taxed toward more productive ends.
This is addressed to some extent, with the argument that zoning reforms are more practical because existing property owners are incentivized to support rather than fight zoning updates that allow more development, so they can fully maximize the ratio of their revenue against the tax. (“It turns NIMBYs into YIMBYs,” she quotes a researcher as saying.)
> and given the dollar is still on offer (the work's still gotta get done) someone else will earn it instead
Maybe, maybe not. The supply of work to be done isn't static. It might well be that the work is unpleasant, and everyone qualified to do it would now earn less than they did before because of the increased taxes, and it's now no longer worth it to any of them, so you can only get anyone to do it by paying more... but maybe now whatever the work product is isn't worth the higher cost, and you decide to just not offer the service or make the widget anymore, or it becomes worth it to automate it and not employ anyone, etc. etc.
> much more strongly driven to show up because the focus is on what they lose. Character of neighborhood, traffic, safety, noise, etc. and the threat against the status quo seems more likely to trigger that visceral defense mechanism.
Not just those. For most home-owners, their homes are by far the highest-value assets they own, and especially given the lack of strong social safety net in the US, they often represent a large store of value that home-owners expect to be able to support them in retirement, in the event of unforeseen emergencies, etc. The thread of homes losing their value can be much more tangible than just fears about neighborhood character (and those aren't nothing).
Not doing the development doesn't prevent the gentrification, though. It's not like desirable places to live suddenly become not-desirable because there's not enough housing to go around. The rich people just outcompete the current residents for the existing housing stock. Unless housing supply actually keeps up with demand, someone's going to get squeezed out, and it'll almost invariably be whoever has the least money.
In fairness to them, the ultimate plan is for something at least slightly less gun-like. They're using these gunpowder charges during testing, but eventually plan to move to some kind of electromagnetic mass-driver setup to make the projectile go. (So, maybe like a railgun or coilgun, which... I guess are still guns, but not like, gun-guns).