joelwilliamson

Wasn't the Seattle interurban torn up in the early 1940s? I don't think you can blame that on the boomers.

The Russians didn't keep the doomsday machine secret to improve its effectiveness. The Russian ambassador says:

"It was to be announced at the Party congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises."

You don't want to announce that you are building the machine before it comes online, because that gives the adversary an incentive to strike before it is finished; you want to bring it online and then make the announcement shortly after.

If printing money doesn't cause any net inflation, then what is your theory about what does cause inflation?

A family from Costa Rica just moved in down the street from us, and the wife was complaining that the bananas here are terrible compared to her home.

I suspect that's mostly because Indian labour is much cheaper. Making a loaf of home-made bread uses about $0.30 CAD of flour, and yeast, salt and water don't add much to the cost.

(Edit:) Also of course anti-competitive behaviour by the bakery cartel drives up prices in Canada.

In 2019, 84% of the S&P 500, 69% of the S&P MidCap 400 and 53% of the S&P SmallCap 600 paid dividends. I would not characterize dividends as "relatively rare", and I'm curious why you think they are.

https://www.streetinsider.com/Dividends/S%26P+500+Companies+...

Shouldn't the objection be to anything less than Level 4, rather than Level 5? Level 4 requires that the vehicle can safely stop itself and wait for a human to take over when it is faced with a situation it can't handle.

(There's an argument that if you take away the routine parts of driving, humans won't be able to deal with anomalous situations, but that's a different argument than the attentiveness one.)

In the hands of a master like Plato, this style is heuristic; that is, it allows the reader, indeed leads him, to discover things for himself. [...] "A master like Plato," we said - but there is no one "like" Plato. Other philosophers have attempted dialogues - for example, Cicero and Berkeley - but with little success. Their dialogues are flat, dull, almost unreadable. It is a measure of the greatness of Plato that he was able to write philosophical dialogues that, for wit, charm, and profundity are the equal of any books ever produced by anyone, on any subject. Yet it may be a sign of the inappropriateness of this style of philosophizing that no one except Plato has ever been able to handle it effectively.

Mortimer Adler

It doesn't superconduct at 300 K, the metastable phase can survive heating to 300 K and superconducting will resume when cooled back down to 26 K.

Bernanke used it in a speech for the first time in 2002, but it was coined back in 1969 by Milton Friedman.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_money

Just use an adblocker. The only time I see see ads on YouTube are when I'm using someone else's browser.

The Shadowstats methodology is to take BLS CPI and add 3%.

If your theory about what's wrong with CPI is "BLS is subtracting 3% from the true value" that is a useful fix. If you're concerned about the basket of goods they use, or deflators for quality improvements, or substitution effects, or any other technical concern it isn't clear that Shadowstats provides any value.

100 MW for 10 ms is 28 Wh.

There's no waste heat with resistive heating, but heat pumps use electricity to move heat from outside to inside, and they can add more than 1J of heat using 1J of electricity.

It's useful for any Unix that has BSD sockets, not just Linux.

Khwarizmi was Persian, not Arabic.

I think it's Window Animation Scale, Transition Animation Scale and Animation Duration Scale.

That article was rife with errors. Notably "recall that the seed for a 32-bit random number generator must be a 32-bit number" is quite obviously wrong, the seed size is constrained by the generator's state size, not its output size.

Rogue is two years older than River Raid and also used procedural generation.

That 10x figure doesn't sound right to me. Between the Taliban and government forces, Wikipedia says there were over 130,000 killed. Have over a million Mexicans died in the drug war?

Otherwise, (as I assume) you are comparing foreigners killed in Afghanistan to Mexicans killed in Mexico, which doesn't seem like a fair comparison.

A buyback is just a way to structure a dividend for better tax treatment. Do stock buybacks and dividends form a larger fraction of corporate earnings now than they did historically?

> The idea of explicitly returning value to investors wasn't common until the 1980s

Dividends were very common pre-1980. What makes you think they weren't?

> I think stock is supposed to be like gold, you invest in the value of gold.

The value of a stock comes from the possibility of capital return from the company. If the company never gives anything to shareholders, the value of a stock is no more than the paper it's printed on.

That's the whole point of a joint stock company. If capital is never returned to investors, why would they invest in the company in the first place?

Civ3 and Alpha Centauri both have separate Build Road To... and Build Railroad (or Magtube) To... automation modes.

Just an FYI, Algonquin is the third largest Provincial Park in Ontario. The largest is Polar Bear (3x larger than Algonquin), but it is only reachable by air and you need special permission to visit. Wabakimi is also a bit larger than Algonquin and has road and rail access.

China is also quite decentralized. The provinces have an enormous amount of power to resist central government demands to do things they don't want to do. Look at how much trouble they are having trying to crack down on highly polluting power and industrial plants. If Beijing wants something, and the provinces don't, it's probably not going to happen.

"[The sun] blasts unimaginable quantities of energy into space each instant, and virtually every joule of it is wasted entirely. Incomprehensible riches can be ours if we can but stretch our arms wide enough to dip from this eternal river of wealth."

- Nwabudike Morgan

I recently upgraded from an Aura to an Aura ONE, and the backlight is much better. It can be amazingly dim, and at night it uses a hue that has almost no blue light.

In 2016, China had 70 GW of installed solar power, compared to 40 GW in the US. They installed another 50 GW in 2017.

China has 320 GW of installed hydro power, compared to 80 in the US.

China had 160 GW of installed wind power in 2016, compared to 80 in the US.

American universities being fairly conservative architecturally is hardly a new development. Look at how popular faux-Gothic is at any Ivy League school. They are all full of modern buildings trying to look like Oxbridge.