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aplomb

40 karma · joined October 14, 2016

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aplomb··on Mark Zuckerberg Calls for a Universal Basic Income
I'd be willing to pay for UBI if the people receiving perform work for it at market rates (not artificial minimum wages). Otherwise it's armed robbery​.
aplomb··on Arduino board adds Sigfox low power wireless for IoT
If only the US had decent coverage!
aplomb··on Rents in Megacities Can't Go Up Forever
Prices are driven on the margins - that is the last transaction
aplomb··on Good News on the California Drought
Comes in cycles, always has - certainly more severe due to nature and more people on this last go-around.

I remember in elementary school being taught how to properly brush our teeth and conserve because the drought at the time - decades ago.

aplomb··on Employees who decline genetic testing could face penalties under proposed bill
I wasn't questioning right or wrong of socialized medicine, just calling out what ultimately happens and the viewpoint of those who truly control/manage the system
aplomb··on Employees who decline genetic testing could face penalties under proposed bill
People with poor genetic dispositions are significant cost to our socialized healthcare systems - this is the end game and always will be when costs are shared or mostly paid by someone that is not you.

In the benefactor's view there are a few actors crashing their cars everyday and others who have never had a ticket - currently they're all paying the same.

aplomb··on As obesity keeps rising, more Americans are just giving up
We're at a point where there is so much technological, cultural, malicious disruption that people don't know how to live anymore and are trying to find their way on the fly or based on some diet/lifestyle du jour.

Yes personal responsibility and all, but we've made it awful easy to fall into this trap.

aplomb··on Why taxing robots is not a good idea
It's hard to say how much of what Gates says/does is truly what he believes or is a branding exercise for legacy purposes. The robot taxation seems like populist appealing nonsense...
aplomb··on Why Do Americans Refrigerate Their Eggs?
Would take much longer for condensation to evaporate at room temperature
aplomb··on Why Do Americans Refrigerate Their Eggs?
Raised chickens for some time. Noticed my eggs would "sweat" when I'd take them out of the refrigerator vs store bought which do nothing at all; after a time at room temperature they'd reabsorb. I'd imagine that's pretty dangerous if you're running a cesspool operation - pulling in liquid contaminated by whatever is on the shell.
aplomb··on I’ll never bring my phone on an international flight again
If you have a Nexus Android phone, just change to guest mode or add another user. It's a seldom used feature and limits what people can see or do with your primary account - inspectors are unlikely to know as it's fairly low-key when users are swapped
aplomb··on Shopping Becomes a Political Act in the Trump Era
Agreed on the deal with the devil notion.

Jumping on the anti-Trump wagon is the virtue signal du jour, but care should be taken as Trump is not a one-off event - it is a worldwide trend

aplomb··on Tesla – Lithium-ion storage is ready to power the grid
Says Tesla who bet the farm on lithium-based batteries.

There are better processes and chemistries hitting the market in the next year - they just need to reach volume.

aplomb··on Army Picks Sig Sauer's P320 Handgun to Replace M9 Service Pistol
Agreed m9 was due and the p320 is a great weapon. But $17mm and two year trials is silly for pistols that were largely already on the market.
aplomb··on Building affordable housing
One angle to make housing affordable is to outlaw mortgage products beyond 15 years (along with ARMs), require 20% down, and eliminate the tax deduction on interest - of course you can't do this overnight.

Housing is a basic necessity and we need to get the rampant speculation and financialization out - we're all stuck in this game of musical houses waiting for the music to stop.

aplomb··on Army Picks Sig Sauer's P320 Handgun to Replace M9 Service Pistol
Article touched on the subject at the very end, but the decision was pushed across the finish line just before inauguration. Tremendous waste in the program and would have been easy fodder for Trump.
aplomb··on Army Picks Sig Sauer's P320 Handgun to Replace M9 Service Pistol
Glock was out of the running because lack of a "real" safety and their unwillingness to add one
aplomb··on Trump bans EPA employees from giving social media updates
Best guess is the group in the EPA isn't toeing the line he set, so he's keeping a lid on things while he cleans house.
aplomb··on The Women's Marches maybe the largest in US history
Slightly more than pocket change
aplomb··on The Women's Marches maybe the largest in US history
Well so long as Soros keeps footing the bill in the shadows for all these "grassroots" organizations...
aplomb··on Obama Strikes Back at Russia for Election Hacking
Regardless of political views, it has been disheartening to see so many organizations and leaders throw tantrums on the public stage - it deligitimizes authority and erodes trust.
aplomb··on The hunt for dollars to build the $64B bullet train
Our culture is incapable of building anything meaningful without extortion pricing.
aplomb··on Voice Is the Next Big Platform, and Alexa Will Own It
Use Alexa professionally and although we can do some fun stuff with it, the interaction model is totally unnatural - invocation words only work if really short, dealing with multiple devices of the same sort (eg fireplace) without any location or contextual knowledge.

They've tried to get around this awkwardness by special casing home automation type devices (thermostat, etc.), but it's still only a stop gap.

aplomb··on Caesarean births 'affecting human evolution'
Modern anything affects human evolution - food production, social programs, culture, etc.
aplomb··on Don't Lower Corporate Taxes, Abolish Them
Increased wages (for the average worker) is the last thing companies will do with more cash - it's the gift that keeps taking if incentives are considered.

We Americans manufactured and believe in a host of fables to explain the prosperity of the last 70 years...

aplomb··on Stateless 3.0 – A State Machine Library for .NET Core
Great library and have used it on a few production systems.
aplomb··on Dear Democrats, Read This If You Do Not Understand Why Trump Won
If there is one thing made clear - there is no such thing as journalistic objectivity. It's just a feel good myth we all tell ourselves as we consume our value affirming sources in a feed back loop.
aplomb··on Why the Midwest Is About to Become America's Next Silicon Valley
There won't be another SV just like there won't be another NYC for Finance in the US - they become monuments and the skills gradually disperse till it just becomes what everyone does (FL, NC, NJ have seen significant uptick in finance from NYC).

The next X is going to be a field currently undervalued, it'll be small companies because the initial opportunities are too small, they'll likely be in an area that is balanced to low cost-proximity to market (if applicable) (does anyone remember what a ghetto Palo Alto and Milpitas was a few decades ago?), and it'll be largely unregulated (that comes after when the big boys want to shut the door behind them).

I'm thinking this next wave could be a few things, but summed up by machine intelligence - machine learning underpinned by IoT, alt energy, energy storage, next gen comms, etc. Or it's local maxima and time for a WWIII board clearing.

aplomb··on iRobot says robot vacuums now represent 20% of worldwide vacuum market
When he decides to lie about the share of robot vacuums within the market (which you can infer from iRobots "70%" marketshare) he should make sure their financial filings coincide - complete BS.

There is no reasonable interpretation of the public data (and estimates for privately held vacuum mfgs) where 20% becomes true. Perhaps the dataset is their employees and found only 20% own their product? ;)

aplomb··on Man hacks Alexa into singing fish robot
Had a great laugh at this, nice work.
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