iterance

Most people can buy an opinel and be happy for decades. You don't need anything fancy for a general purpose knife. $50 max, and that's if you're feeling like getting something special.

Expensive steels are, by and large, incremental progress over cheaper knife steels, provided it got an appropriate heat treatment and has good edge geometry. In almost no applications will an end consumer notice the difference.

“Rereading, an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society, which would have us ‘throw away’ the story once it has been consumed (‘devoured’), so that we can then move on to another story, buy another book, and which is tolerated only in certain marginal categories of readers (children, old people, and professors), rereading is here suggested at the outset, for it alone saves the text from repetition (those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere)..." - Balzac

Consumers may do this, but consumers also hate shrinkflation with a passion. Raising a price is understandable and a consumer can rationalize inflation, but shrinking the amount given can feel deceptive, untrustworthy, or exploitative. Brands that do it are playing with fire. They may not yet get burned.

While it's OK if this truly is what you need, be mindful that you're not making a decision you'll come to regret. There is no shame in crying at a funeral. Helping each other through death is one of life's innate obligations. One of the few things we have no choice but to do as humans is die.

That seems like a risk, but not a validation method, unless you are feeling particularly bold.

In context I wouldn't assume so. An opt-in experience assumes someone has provided proactive, affirmative consent. An opt-out experience assumes no such consent.

By saying "opt-in by default," author is making the subtle point that positive, affirmative consent is assumed - not just that the features are literally on by default.

I have to wonder whether they are tracking changes in consumer confidence. Subjectively, I have noticed a significant drop in confidence from my peers. I do not know whether my experience generalizes, but if it does, they are playing with fire.

I don't think this is a "fear sells" issue. Arsenic green is remarkably toxic. In the 19th century, the toxicity just wasn't known or recognized as serious. Now, we know better. Medical diagrams from the time period show hand injuries on people who worked with arsenic compounds regularly (deep sores that won't heal, e.g.)

How on earth did you come to the conclusion that this person is "affiliated with Israel"? Surely not because their username is Moshe, right?

I do not think you are aware that most people's process of writing good poetry is quite involved. It's okay not to understand, but be cautious about implying that another person's artistic work could be done in a spare hour here or there between coursework. It is disrespectful to the hard work of the written word.

If the purpose of the exemption were only to reduce the labor cost of importation, some other scheme (such as prohibiting the importation of cheap goods entirely) would be far more effective. Several other options would be at least equally effective. Factors besides labor are clearly also considered.

In your view, what are the factors in addition to customs labor costs that were weighed in 2016 the choice to increase the de minimis exemption? I'm curious, because you seem to feel very strongly that global economic integration is not one of them.

I don't think this is exactly correct. One purpose of a de minimis exemption is to clear the way for small overseas businesses to integrate more easily into the national economy by minimizing border wait times and overhead importation costs on cheap goods / goods only found overseas. It has the dual benefit of reducing customs labor costs for the taxpayer. From an economic perspective, business models like these are a desirable and purposeful consequence.

We focus on businesses like Temu because everyone agrees they sell cheap garbage, but a lot of overseas businesses sell high-quality or even essential goods. (And clearly, for many people, whatever Temu sells is good enough.)

Supply and demand is one driver of economic pricing, but not the only driver. Efficient pricing is a complex topic and not as black-and-white as it seems. As demand falls, the price may be expected to fall, but there is an inelastic limit set by material, labor, transport, and taxation cost. A company may elect to decrease their profit margin per sale to offset increased costs, but there is only so much margin to eat.

In the current circumstances, though, companies do not have a choice to lower prices. The basic cost of taking an item into inventory from these suppliers has risen significantly, in most cases well above 2024 margins.

The net effect is that, despite the market's best effort to correct prices to within an affordable range, costs may rise considerably and availability may still fall regardless. Under severe shock to the system, the usual maxims that account for nominal shifts in day to day trading no longer apply.

It's not just acceptability. Jokes written even just five or ten years ago often fail to land on modern audiences. That taste in humor changes is neither morally positive nor negative. It's easy to look for deeper meaning in the notion that what once was funny now isn't, but often, there isn't a deeper meaning to find. Life is different now; so too must humor change.

Many of my academic colleagues are considering emigration. A nontrivial fraction have already begun (or in certain prescient cases completed) the process. It is sad to say, but it is difficult to imagine a career in science in the US right now. I am also considering whether that future for myself is best pursued elsewhere. Or, I'm sadder to say, whether the opportunity has been foreclosed upon for good. There is no way to know yet what the future truly holds, but the rhyme history offers for our times is an unpleasant one to imagine.

Yes, tungsten. Oops

Several friends and I have been tossing around the idea of sending a solid billet of osmium in a small flat rate box, matching its size. "One rate, any weight," right?

Sadly this experiment would cost in the high tens of thousands of dollars. We may try with titanium some day. That would only be ten thousand dollars.

The primary difference is that CVE was unexpectedly killed by the US Government yesterday and the program terminates today.

I am not sure I entirely understand the game. In typical Fermi questions, the goal is to arrive at the appropriate order of magnitude. In this game, the order of magnitude appears to be provided for you. The extrema are ~220k and ~1.8M for the question regarding passengers in the air, and these extrema are less than an order of magnitude apart. Am I misunderstanding something...?

Firefighting in the US is not (generally?) done by private corporations.

> Wikipedia could fund Oka or other organizations.

It's possible, though I do not know if this is sufficient to cover their legal risk in this scenario. Likely it would require analysis of details beyond what could be reasoned through in hypothetical.

There are labor law concerns. It is very unwise to be paying people to do for you what others do for you for free. As the boundary between a volunteer and employee blurs, the difference between paid and unpaid labor must remain clear and well-defined, or one risks running afoul of the law.

As a general practice, it's liable to devalue volunteer contributions. Money poisons the good will of a free exchange in the mind of a volunteer. Strict remuneration policies are an important part of making volunteer labor feel fair, free, and balanced. I suspect there would be room for targeted bounties on specific articles, but it would nevertheless irrevocably alter the emotional economy of contribution.

A 3rd party paying editors introduces a host of other concerns, but is probably not as harmful to the emotional economy. But I'm sure Wikimedia's community team has thoroughly discussed this topic.

For what it's worth, very few locations and processing styles result in significant doses of fluoride in tea. Within the United States, these types of tea are not typically consumed. For example, Tibetan brick tea is consistently high in fluoride, to the extent that fluorosis is actually somewhat common in certain regions. But it's a bit tricky to even buy a brick (meant for consumption) within the US. Bagged tea, more commonly available, has to be drunk regularly in very significant volumes to have a deleterious effect.

Put another way, for issues to rise to the level of public policy, they have to affect a meaningful number of people in a region. In the US, tea-induced fluorisis is extremely rare.

Frankly the commit message is usually the important thing. I care about why a change happened. Give me a Jira ticket, or a line of reasoning, or some documentation. I need to know this far more often than I care who literally typed the code in the computer.

To provide a little grounding for the author's writing, most novelists don't publish until their 40s or later. Most young novelists who publish don't publish anything that sells until their 40s, too.

Which isn't to discount the author's point. Their writing is introspective. But our perceptions are not always right, and it screws with our self-perceptions, especially of what success means and looks like. We are drawn to exceptions and anchor our expectations for ourselves within their stories.

Imagine also knowing that if you don't teach your language, few else can, and fewer will.

Modern physics has actually done it quite well. This is because the core of many physics concepts revolve around general principles which can be taught directly or by example. A modern undergraduate education in classical mechanics teaches concepts around symmetry and energy that generalize to other areas in physics (for instance, the notion of a potential well giving rise to bound states reappears several times in different problem domains). A modern undergraduate optics education generalizes enough that students should readily understand concepts like evanescent waves and acousto-optical modulation.

It's only when one moves away from these principles to something more subtle or less well-understood that the education becomes hairier. But as these are further characterized, compression again becomes possible. Landau & Lifshitz, for example, attempts to do this at a graduate level. Many concepts they discuss are increasingly available to the advanced undergraduate due to better compression and better physics principles / pedagogy.

Nine missed meals.

Edit: Incorrect.

Original comment: Any plane crash in the US is unusual and significant.

Yeah, that makes sense. I guess I just don't worry about it that much these days. What you're describing - the fear of overburdening or burning bridges, the uncertainty about what I can give back - I dunno. I had that, at one point, too. A LONG time ago. Middle school, high school maybe. But many years of being shown I can count on the people around me, and that I'm better at giving support in kind than I think, has made it less of a serious worry.

Of course there are limits, and they have to be respected. "Do not discuss rope in the house of a hanged man." But that's why there's so much breadth. If I can't talk about it with my partner, or my close friends are involved, I can almost always find someone willing to hear me out. Someone it's appropriate to go to support for.