cjensen

This is a good first start, but won't work for everyone. E.g. we got a new roof with solar. The solar is tax deductible. But is the roof? My options are (a) no (b) the portion with solar on top (c) all. Asking around, different people have taken different options, and no option is un-taken.

Option (c) will probably never get audited and we all know it. I won't be taking it.

At night and sometimes on weekends, the demographics shift on hn. Usually it's more of a subtle problem than this thread.

"He only served as its director for 14 months in the 1970s"

This is utter ignorance. He served at a critical time. Ford installed him very early after Nixon's resignation. It was a low time for the CIA having been blamed for the all the terrible things they did at the previous President's explicit direction.

I don't actually think it is ignorance. This conspiracy-mongering website is intentionally "forgetting" to include anything that would detract from it's conspiracy theory. Theories about actual reality aren't afraid to mention inconvenient facts.

Why would they talk about this? The solution is obvious, and the US has practiced the solution for a very long time now: immigration at a sufficient rate to make up for the decline in population.

This is really mostly a problem for Japan and Korea where they don't play sufficiently well with immigrants.

Don't dismiss too easily the real needs to homeschool for some people.

I have a friend whose child had some learning disability. The school district's "solution" was to put them in the disabled class with an overwhelmed teacher and call it a day. Homeschooling allowed the parent to ensure their child had a full education at a pace the child could handle.

Another friend had a gifted child who was pretty bored. Homeschooling let the child plow through the material at a more challenging pace and then continue to challenge themselves with material no high school would have taught.

Homeschooling is an alternative that some people pretty much have to take for their children's sake. Homeschooling is harder for the parents than regular schooling and is not a decision taken lightly.

In theory, productivity gains on automobiles leads to cheaper cars and increased car sales. So an increase in workers is possible.

But I agree that looks like a questionable assumption. If the productivity improvement changes car prices from $250K to $25K, sure the assumption will work out. But not sure $25K to $24K would work out.

This is nonsensical. The Baumol effect is just supply and demand for labor. The monetary system in use does not change whether or not supply and demand work this way.

You also appear to be conflating the notion of "hard" vs "soft" money and the notion that one should be paid based on the economic gain of your output to others. Those are orthogonal concepts. Their only commonality is that the economic consensus on both notions is that they are wrong.

You seem to be arguing against something no one has suggested. No one has suggested they have to document every conversation or thought. However, if the conversation is chat/text/email then it is considered a written record that may not be destroyed. So the rule is "do not destroy records you have create" not "record everything."

If the Bank is federally insured, it's not a problem that the bank won't be able to make it work. That's why generally speaking bank runs only happen on uninsured banks in the US. SVB is not, as far as I can see, insured and should definitely be careful in their choice of words.

AIS[1] is basically an airplane transponder, but for vessels and I think it broadcasts position along with identification. For safety alone, seems to me that any commercial vessel carrying paid passengers should have one.

But the Reason article is so vague I literally can't tell if they are talking about AIS, or some other bespoke system.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_syste...

SCO the "cool UNIX vendor" was not the company that sued. In 2001, the cool UNIX vendor was struggling and sold its UNIX business to Caldera. Caldera renamed itself "the SCO Group" and filed the lawsuit. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Operation

Personal favorites

"Salt" about the salt ponds around the South Bay. https://blogs.chapman.edu/huell-howser-archives/1999/01/08/s...

"Drawbridge" about a ghost town in the marshes of the South Bay. To me, it was more interesting as a glimpse into how people lived a hundred years ago. https://blogs.chapman.edu/huell-howser-archives/2002/01/08/d...

And because I think it's important to remember the ugly parts of history, lest it be repeated, I'd recommend "Manzanar" https://blogs.chapman.edu/huell-howser-archives/2002/01/08/m..., "A Tale of Two Cities" about Colonel Allensworth State Park https://blogs.chapman.edu/huell-howser-archives/1992/12/10/a..., and "Weedpatch" about the 'Okies' https://blogs.chapman.edu/huell-howser-archives/1995/12/10/w....

Composting does not sequester carbon. Yes it would replace mineral carbon, but that is not what sequester means.

I completely agree that a more advanced model would use confidence levels too.

And I forgot to mention this isn't my idea at all. This framing of what is a prediction was invented at USGS. Mea Culpa.

That's not a prediction that can be evaluated. For example, I could say "there will be a 7+ magnitude quake somewhere in the Pacific Rim tomorrow" and if I publish the same prediction every day it won't be long until my prediction is true. I might even be right the very first time.

A real prediction should include exact time period, magnitude, and geographic area. And every prediction made must be documented. This lets you do two things: first it lets you clearly decide which predictions came true. Second, we can look at historic probabilities for the predicted quake and evaluate the chances of blind guessing being correct for that exact set of predictions.

In this particular instance, if you look at the predictions made on his twitter stream you'll find that he's clearly a quack who predicts stuff constantly. Not super surprising he got one right. EDIT: Also... surprise! There was a foreshock a couple of hours before he made the prediction.

Its assets. They claim to own so much commercial paper that they would be one of the top owners of the class, yet no one who sells paper for a living has heard of them.

The kinds of audits it has had.

The amount of regular money it has in the banks.

And even lying so badly that basic fourth-grade math says that month-to-month reports from binance cannot be truth.[1]

[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2022/11/11/tether-required-recapit...

Yes, but since Binance routinely lies about things, that doesn't mean much.

Indeed. Transmission failures, bearing failures, tire blowouts, and throwing a rod all can cause a car on a freeway to stop quickly. The onus of avoiding this is entirely on the following car.

Be aware that MacOS/Safari still has occasional bugs where the cursor shape gets stuck on whatever the web page switched it to. I know how to deal with that, but it's an annoyance when it happens.

I assume this van is meant to have shore power for AC and Heat.

Bigger issue is the current range limit of 108 miles. Not really sure why they bothered to design an interior before solving that minor issue.

This paper starts by assuming that the different neuron density of birds vs non-avian reptiles is due to birds being endothermic.

That's... quite an assumption. EVERYTHING about the evolution of birds is about flight. Specifically, it's about keeping weight down. Loss of teeth, for example, is a tradeoff where birds have worse digestion in exchange for losing the weight cost of teeth. Birds frequently get leg injuries because of how small their legs are: again a tradeoff between durability vs weight.

Seems to me the first burden of proof for this theory is to show that birds have wildly more compact neurons due to endothermy rather than the usual weight issue. Their own data is not helpful to their point as it shows differences between bird clades suggesting significant evolution on this point since the initial evolution of birds.

I agree with you. Apple making this an author choice avoids some authors being angry while enabling more sales for lower-volume books that as you point out, will otherwise not have an spoken version.

Much of the issue here is from using, in my opinion, terms that are misleading.

The article defines resources as all known mineral deposits. It defines reserves as resources which are economically extractible.

Here's the issue: when you already have plenty of reserves, you don't go looking for more. None of the charts which detail existing resources and reserves tell you anything about the quantity of lithium which exists on the planet. These numbers are only really useful when mining companies ask themselves "should I prospect for more?"

If mining companies are actively prospecting and not finding enough to fill anticipated needs, then you have a problem. Not before.

Amazon at one time tried to add voice reading to Kindle books. Authors were absolutely livid. Audiobooks are a significant income source, and taking that away from authors is going to make authors decline to sell digital books on your platform. Apple is doing this right by making it an author's choice.

Regarding where I'm "getting this," it's in the original tweet that this thread links to :-)

No because it violates the WARN act. [1]

IANAL but if they paid 60 days severance as Musk promised, that might legally be considered 60 days of employment and would not violate WARN. But they didn't actually do that despite Musk's assertions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...

It will be 3 inches of rain on fully saturated soils. This will lead to 3 inches of pure runoff on a landscape that rarely experiences such runoff.

So hillsides, channels, creeks, rivers, and so forth will all be experiencing record run-off levels. This is why the forecast calls for significant hillside failures: it will be more water on a hillside than many of those hillsides can bear. It will flood beyond the normal flooding limits. It might... be historic. Maybe. Huge if. But super-dangerous if it happens.

3 inches in the Olympic Peninsula would be less of a big deal because that's routine. All the hillsides that can fail with that already have. So you're right that 3 inches is not a big deal in most places. But on landscape where that doesn't ever receive that much, it suddenly is a big deal.

The fear I have with these recent atmospheric rivers is that we have a lot of snow in the Sierras now. If we get an atmospheric river which is too warm, bad things could happen[1]. Fortunately as we get deeper into Winter it's probably too late for that disaster to be possible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARkStorm

"However it's not enough to sequence"

I'm not sure what you mean by that. The nice thing about DNA is you can make more of it if you don't have enough. [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction

There is also a safety concern with overly cheap tools.

For an example, the adjustable wrench in this article. What happens when you apply a lot of force on a stubborn nut? If the wrench experiences rapid unscheduled disassembly, you now have broken pieces flying in random directions.

In the US, the thing that most prevents this from being a problem is the threat of liability lawsuits. That doesn't apply to a tool made by a small company in China and sold by a fly-by-night outfit on Amazon's marketplace. I'm guessing Amazon is unknowingly the liable party here, but I'm not a lawyer.

Yes it has made a difference. In white-collar crimes, prosecutors have to prove intent. That means they have to somehow find evidence that the defendant meant to do various things improperly. SBF has literally given interviews where he has stated the required intent for some of the crimes.

As an unrelated aside, note that this is also a way of punishing lower classes of people more severely. If you shoplift, prosecutors don't have to prove you meant to do that rather than just accidentally failing to pay. Generally laws for intent are for people that legislators can identify with, and there is no intent requirement for people legislators don't personally identify with.