fancyketchup

Because the set of events that could "wipe away" your (reasonably-intelligently diversified) assets has a large intersection with the set of events that could "wipe away" your saving account in a bank. Things like nuclear war, global pandemic, etc.

Yes, the FDIC does insure savings accounts, but that's only useful so long as the FDIC exists.

Spacecraft Attitude Determination and Control, edited by Wertz, is another classic. Used copies are available for around 35 USD, but new copies usually over 200 USD.

Yes, and in states with a 'basic speed law', or similar, you can even earn a ticket for driving substantially below the posted speed limit. The Utah driver's handbook and license test, for instance, explicitly call out that road conditions may be such that the maximum safe speed is 0 mph.

The test protocol is a fairly specific schedule of engine power demands, is it not? It seems like one could look for any behavior outside of what is expected from the test, and then activate the 'defeat device.'

Because that's how money is defined. At least, the first few hits on Google for "money definition" are:

1) <Google> "a current medium of exchange in the form of coins and banknotes; coins and banknotes collectively."

2) <Merriam-Webster> "something generally accepted as a medium of exchange, a measure of value, or a means of payment: as a : officially coined or stamped metal currency b : money of account c : paper money"

3) <Investopedia> "An officially-issued legal tender generally consisting of currency and coin. [...]"

I think different people may have differing ideas of what "counter-steering" means. That said, the correct way to ride a bicycle down a curvy mountain road is for the rider to put his weight on his outside foot and inside hand (pushing forward against the drop) until exiting the turn (and, in fact, the bike will feel "unsettled" if this technique isn't used).

That's a silly question. Of course it doesn't have AirWave. AirWave is Nest's trademarked name for the very simple technology of continuing to run the fan a bit after the compressor has switched off.

But even old cheap digital thermostats with chicklet keys know to run the fan after turning off the furnace or AC[1].

[1] http://inspectapedia.com/heat/Thermostat_FAN_Switch.php

I'm not so sure they were 'dangerously close' to stall speed.

While I can't find specifications for the N2Y biplanes hosted by the Macon, keep in mind that the N2Y is a two-seat inter-war biplane trainer with a 115 hp engine--it was not a fighter or pursuit plane. Additionally, it would have been designed to use the short, unpaved runways characteristic of pre-WWII airfields. All these factors point to low stall speeds.

So if we wanted to estimate the stall speed based on comparable aircraft, we'd be looking for a 100-ish hp, two-seat trainer. Aircraft of that description typically have a stall speed in the 35 to 45 knot range.

The source of all truth (Wikipedia) lists the cruising speed of the Macon as 55 knots / 63 mph with a max speed of 75 knots / 86 mph (altitudes not given). The Macon's cruising speed would be right around the recommended approach speed for aircraft like these, and it could have certainly accelerated to higher speeds to perform heavier-than-air aircraft operations.

Maybe they were talking about net[1], or maybe they have a large number of short trips? From memory (from talking with drivers), the formula is:

driverDollars = (fareDollars - 1)*0.8

If a driver is mostly taking people one or two blocks, the fares are going to be in the $3-5 range. That means the $1 "safe ride fee" (or whatever it's called) is already 20-30% of the fare, so Uber's total take on short rides is closer to 50%. It's one of the reasons drivers don't like short rides.

[1] edit: By net I mean after driving expenses, not after Uber's take.

> avoiding untenable population density

San Francisco is already at an untenable population density. You can have a livable city by going light or going dense, but being in the middle is what kills you (which is where SF is right now).

The light scenario is your classic suburbia, where you drive across the street. Dense is New York City, with many amenities in walking distance and copious public transportation. The middle (San Francisco) doesn't have enough people to support good public transit (buses/trains stopping every 5 minutes or less) 24 hrs a day, but has so many people that the roads are gridlocked.

SF needs to thin out or get dense if it wants to survive. What force do you think will decimate the population by 50%?

> I'd think that for $300K you could have demanded an API. Perhaps on the next one?

"Why certainly, sir! We can provide that for only $EQUIPMENT_COST * 10. Do you prefer floppies or a CDROM?"

I wish I was joking.

As are many of the PIC series of microcontrollers.

But the top prize is one million miles, which would get you lifetime status. Delta and United don't (yet) have spend requirements for lifetime status, AFAIK.

Conferring lifetime status isn't necessarily even that expensive to the airline--you only get the benefits after you give the airline your money for tickets. It also creates an incentives to buy tickets on one particular airline, even when they might be slightly more expensive (which is the whole purpose of frequent flier CRM programs).

That doesn't really make sense.

Electric utilities require capital investment proportional to peak usage, but only earn returns on average usage. This will only increase the ROIC of an electric utility by reducing the peak:average ratio.

Additionally, electric utilities are in a constant cycle of capacity upgrades to keep up with increasing demand. Customers adding distributed storage allows utilities to delay capital investment (which makes the company look better in the near-term).

Not necessarily. The x87 implementation (which is relevant to everything PC, prior to SSE) of IEEE 754 internally uses an 80-bit extended precision representation for floating point numbers. Numbers are rounded to 64 bits for loads and stores of course...

Now, what do you suppose happens during a context switch, when a second process wants to use floating point math?

Suunto's watches have done that for a while now (5-6 years?), though they use a capacitive chest strap, rather than the optical method used by smart watches.

Edit: And as far as I know, Suunto was really the first company to pursue measurement of HR variability. They have some interesting whitepapers, if you use the Google.

Certain functions in a bank (any bank) require sign-off from a person who is an officer of the bank. That is usually equivalent having the words "Vice President" in their title.

The result is that, to get anything done, a large fraction of the staff are VPs, and many VPs do not have any direct reports.

> In the article it states that drivers have been fired for not taking a certain percentage of passengers. While it isn't a strict hours, it is firing someone for not meeting their determined amount of work.

Drivers are only fired for not taking a certain percentage of rides offered while the driver is logged in and active. That's an enormous distinction.

Drivers don't have be active, and they can go inactive at any time. In fact, over half of the drivers with whom I've ridden are logged into both Uber and Lyft while waiting for a fare, and then log out of the other app when they accept a fare from one. (Yes, I quiz my drivers on the particulars of driving for these services and keep track of what they tell me).

The whole point of threatening to fire (and actually firing) drivers for not meeting acceptance rates seems to be to incentivize them to log out during the times they aren't actually willing to take a fare.

Well, the heart-rate monitor for starters (and I suspect, based on the optical design of it, that it was built with an eye toward measuring blood oxygen content in future incarnations). Extant activity trackers on the market don't really do it for me from a value standpoint--but I do own a Garmin cycling GPS. The Apple Watch also has enough computational oompf that they should be able to implement Suunto's Firstbeat HR algorithm for better calorie burn estimation (this is all speculative, of course).

Strava is a killer app for those who already have an iPhone: Watch Sport costs about what I would pay to upgrade to the latest Garmin Edge, plus it tracks non-exercise activity (which is something I like but am not willing to pay for by itself). On top of all that, Apple Watch comes with maps (and turn-by-turn directions) for free (something you pay for out the nose with Garmin).

Then there's the mobile payments piece. Taking out your phone is fairly low-friction, but double-tapping a button on your watch and holding it up to a terminal is even less so, plus the idea that I could go out with just my phone and watch is pretty appealing.

> Why does it have to be fair to the landlord?

Well, it doesn't have to be.

But prospective landlords tend not to build new units (or maintain old ones) when they don't feel they are getting a fair deal. It leads directly to the situation they have in San Francisco, where property owners only rent to family, coalesce many smaller units in to few larger ones and sometimes withdraw their units from the market entirely.

Landlords are investing capital and their own labor in their properties. If the expected return on that investment is less than what they could get from government bonds and a 9-5 job, don't plan on a big expansion in housing stock.

> [...] losing farms in California would be a huge loss:

CA produce is not evenly geographically distributed. Production in the coastal ranges is less affected by the drought (compared to the Central Valley), but coastal production is skewed towards fruits and vegetables.

Central Valley production is skewed towards Alfalfa (most of which is exported to China) and Almonds. Both of those are extremely water-intensive to produce and contribute almost no calories to the average American diet (and even less to the poor).

So, cutting off water to Central Valley farmers will have a smaller effect than most predict.

Anecdotally, what you're saying simply isn't true on many counts. On my twice-weekly airport run, I usually ask the drivers what they think of Lyft and Uber. Their characterization of the relationship is diametrically opposed to what you wrote.

One of the benefits I hear most frequently mentioned is being able to simply shut off the app any time they like (while not actively carrying a passenger, of course). Drivers, in other words, have complete control over their working hours. In addition, drivers, not Uber/Lyft choose where to work: They can hang around the airport, downtown, or out in the suburbs.

Drivers are also not penalized for refusing individual fares--only for refusing greater than some threshold fraction of fares offered. Uber. Uber and Lyft do not prescribe the route a driver must follow, either. The app does offer a suggested route (which is not usually the best on Uber--maps in their driver app are notoriously poor), but the driver and passenger have the flexibility to use a different one.

This is how it works in practice, and frankly it seems to me that they are bona-fide contractors.

> If you're rich and you get fined doing well over the specified speed limit but you only have to pay at most a few hundred dollars for potentially putting someone else's life in danger, what is the deterrent?

Many US states have a system of "points," which are assigned based on the severity of the driving offense. You might hear someone say "He got three points on his license for speeding."

The points expire over time, and points can be subtracted by attending driving school (and possibly other ways, too), but there are some limits on how quickly and how many points can be expired. Accumulating too many points at one time (the limit is usually an integer in the range 5 to 10) will lead to having one's license and driving privileges revoked.

The number of points earned for drunk driving is somewhere close to the maximum (in my state), and there are more restrictions on retiring these points, so being caught driving drunk puts one perilously close to losing one's license.

I'm not sure that either income-proportionate fines or license points are better. Just different approaches to the same problem.

Edit: Actually, after thinking about this a little more, I feel that the proportionate fines are probably better. Not all states have points systems, and points generally do not transfer between states. So someone from another state could come here, be caught speeding, and not face any long-term consequence (because the points would expire before they return).

The article did say that the ice is kept below ground. Perhaps, if it is economically efficient, it is because below-grade real estate is less valuable? I'd imagine the ice could be in places that are difficult to use for other purposes.

Do cars typically run on plastic and fertilizer where you're from? If it's true that a Volt can drive 25ish miles on the electricity used to refine a gallon of gas, then substituting electric miles for gas ones is a wash in terms of net electricity usage. Or are you trying to say something more subtle that I'm just missing?

I wonder if a whole-house version of a lamp timer would be useful in this situation? Suppose there were a device that turned off power on a schedule, and which could only be reset from inside the apartment. Power would turn off automatically 12 hours after the lease terminates to "save power in an unoccupied unit."

That way, the owner isn't turning off power to constructively evict, but the power is off all the same.

Ah, I see. Sounds like the author was just confused then.

But I'm afraid I still don't see the advantage of having a fuse or (circuit breaker) in the plug itself. What is the rationale behind having two over-current devices in series? Circuit breakers and fuses (c.f. ground fault interrupters) don't really do anything to prevent a human from being zapped: They're there to prevent fires. You can easily stop a heart (or cause burns) without drawing anywhere near enough current to activate the protection. If Britons think circuit breakers are so unreliable that they need two, why put on on the plug instead of both in the distribution pane?

These are really not very strong arguments:

Prong Design (probably the strongest of the bunch): I'll grant that it is possible to accidentally electrocute oneself with North American plugs, but I've never heard of this happening to anyone in real life. I'd be curious to know how many injuries or deaths can actually be attributed to this design before declaring the extra complication and expense of the British design to be worth the trouble.

Socket Design: We have shuttered outlets in the US, too, and they work the same way. Sure, not every building has them (particularly old buildings), but they are available at any hardware store and easy to install. In any case, shuttered outlets are not specific to the the British plug.

Built-in Fuses: This really had me scratching my head. How is it a good thing that English houses don't have fuses to protect the infrastructure? What happens when a wire shorts inside the wall? Don't worry! Your vacuum cleaner will be completely safe as your house is burning to the ground around it! Maybe the author just didn't express his point very well, but this frankly sounds downright dangerous.

Circuit Design: This is a standard feature on the regular NEMA 5-15 plugs we use in the US (at least for the replacement plugs you can buy at the hardware store). The lug for the ground pin is closer to the cord end so that the ground wire will have more slack than the live and neutral wires. Again, not specific to British plugs.

Also, as a rule of thumb, fuel consumption per unit distance is proportional to speed squared. According to the chart, the "Double Bubble" cruises at 490 MPH, while the 737 cruises at 596 MPH. The "Double Bubble" achieves 145 MPG, while the 737 achieves 100 MPG.

(490/596)^2 * 145 MPG) = 98 MPG

737s are already on the slow end of airliners, but it seems like all the fuel savings in this design study come from just flying slower.

Well, the sort of obvious explanation is that amount of BTC in active circulation is much smaller than bitcoin proponents claim.