Just curious, what’s the male:female ratio of the typical winter crew?
186 karma · joined January 17, 2020
Yes, there could be a hit to overall investment, and it could be argued to set a lower bound of allowing deductions for up to 50% of interest paid or something.
The way out is a gradual reduction in the amount of. Interest allowed to be entered (e.g., 1-2% reduction per year) to avoid spooking markets.
You can hire top tier college educated talent in the Philippines for $30K/yr. They work US hours and are hard working. A friend runs his entire US operations for a $5M/yr revenue company with just one other US-based employee.
And how is that being managed this time?
From the paper's abstract: "The treatment had the largest effect on reduction of raptor fatalities; no white-tailed eagle carcasses were recorded after painting. Applying contrast painting to the rotor blades significantly reduced the collision risk for a range of birds."
A cursory Internet search reveals that raptors (and bats) are particularly vulnerable to wind turbines[0], and many raptor populations have been threatened for a long time due to a variety of threats and biology (they take longer to reproduce and recover).
And if one were to describe all the threats to birds listed here, they are basically iterations under the "loss of habitat" super-category.
Yes, power lines are also a big threat to raptor and other threatened avian populations, but wind turbines (and the power lines they use) are still being built, so reducing avian deaths from both sources seems worth researching and implementing. Especially when the parent article notes how little it would cost to paint the blades during manufacture (vs. post-installation).
As an optimistic college freshman in 2000 (dating myself, I know), I had the privilege of taking a class where once a week, a successful business entrepreneur would come in and expand our minds about a company/product/vision they had created.
Being the height of dot com frenzy, I still remember one class where a guy described how the Internet offered the potential to revolutionize advertising in a way that would be a win-win for everyone. He described a world where ads might even be enjoyable to watch because of the Internet’s potential to show each viewer/user ads relevant to them: because every beard trimmer ad shown to a woman was wasted time for her and money for the advertiser.
So far, his predictions have broadly become true, but stick with me.
The coolest part of his vision to my 18yo self was that each of us would have a personal ad software agent running on our PC/TV (the most personal devices at the time) that learned our desires and went out and found ads for stuff we might want. It was a completely different paradigm to the ad model of the day and one that was potentially privacy protecting because your personal ad agent would be the automated broker for your time and attention, and everyone would want this because a good agent would delight you with new services and products that you found useful and maybe didn’t know you wanted. There would be a healthy market of personal agents to choose from, too, because the costs of switching were minimal and companies would complete to create the best personal agents.
Alas, the optimism of the early Internet morphed into magic Google and Facebook/Meta pixels, and we got personal ad agents, but they are oligopolies with extreme network effects that are incompatible with privacy.
The Brave browser has come closest to the vision described by the dot com entrepreneur who spoke to my class, but I’ve always wondered whether anyone else would create personal ad agents, and of all the candidates, Apple is probably best positioned. I’m curious to see how they do it.
The problem here is that these thermostats have NTP-synched clocks and come with default schedules out of the box and failed to consider the importance of staggering over a 5-min time period. It’s understandable from a consumer acceptance standpoint (“I set it to start at 6a, why did it turn on at 6.03a?!”), but that could be solved with some messaging.
Better still would be for future thermostats to be required to connect to the Internet and to the grid’s price signals or utility’s servers in order to receive rebates. This would see them base behavior on pricing signals, which would include a device-specific random offset to the price taking effect.
Resideo (formerly Honeywell Home) acquired some very cool tech that would solve this issue, too. Developed by Whisker Labs (formerly WeatherBug) It combines a weather feed with a custom thermodynamic model of each home to adjust the start time of each setpoint. This provides both energy savings and more comfort. For example, if it’s an abnormally cold Feb day, it would start the heater earlier to reach the desired setpoint rather than a normal thermostat starting at a precise time and hitting the setpoint later in the morning.[2]
Final fun fact: ~40% of smart thermostats never get connected to the Internet. Many people are price insensitive enough to buy a communicating thermostat and just slap it on the wall without bothering to program the Wi-Fi settings. There are sneaky ways some manufacturers and ISPs are trying to overcome this, though it’s a borderline dark pattern. [source: I used to work for a large ISP’s connected home ecosystem team]
[0] https://zigbeealliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/docs-0...
[1]https://standards.ieee.org/ieee/2030.5/5897/
[2] https://www.resideo.com/us/en/corporate/newsroom/all-article...
It looks more like a catalog entry of peppers, which presumably has been done many times before and which is why I was hoping someone could help explain the significance of this paper/post (i.e., why?).
Could someone pls explain why this is interesting for HN? Was there a new species added to the canon (if so, this is a textbook example of burying the Lede)?
It reads like a Wikipedia entry, which makes me wonder why it’s not posted there.
I don’t know how air freight is factored into fuel efficiency calculations, but it has become an increasing part of passenger airlines’ business models in the past decade, too.
(Source: I spent way too much time keeping tabs on Delta as a top level frequent flier)
(I’m a FF fan but this seems off brand to me)
Assets tend to become inflated when interest rates are low or lots of financial leverage is used to acquire them.
To counteract this, one solution might be to eliminate the deductibility of interest for tax purposes, which for mortgages in particular, is a regressive tax subsidy that benefits higher earners.
It could be implemented gradually (e.g., reduce the deductibility by 1-2% per year until it reaches zero) to avoid immediate shocks to the system and provide investors with the ability to plan.
It could also be implemented to apply only to non-primary residences if we want to keep a popular middle class tax subsidy. This would target 2nd, 3rd, etc. homes and property and assets owned by corporations.
They're one of the only trees that use C4 photosynthesis (more commonly employed by grasses like bamboo) than the C3 process most trees use. This lets them grow up to 20ft/6m per year, and they're able to be harvested commercially within five years.
They're also good from a woodworking perspective: traditionally, parents of daughters in southern Japan would plant a kiri tree on the birth of a daughter and then cut it down to make chests, drawers, and boxes for their daughter's marriage ceremony.
I has a higher strength:weight ratio than balsa wood, and is pest and rot resistant.
Other fun fact: they resprout from the stump after cutting, similar to coast redwoods.
The coastal redwood forest still needs lots of ecological thinning.
Here are some articles and papers you might find interesting from non-profit and governmental organizations:
San Vicente Redwoods [1]
- SV Redwoods is a collaboration between The Nature Conservancy, Save the Redwoods League, Sempervirens Fund, Peninsula Open Space Trust, and The Land Trust of Santa Cruz County
- One goal is to accelerate the return of the forest to old-growth, increase fire resiliency, and improve biodiversity and habitat.
Mill Creek Restoration Project in Redwood NP and CA Redwood SPs [2]
- A collaboration between Save the Redwoods League, Smith River Alliance, and Redwood National and State Parks.
-Video link[3] showcasing the forest restoration segment (starts at 4m00s and runs until 6m20s; it continues into road removal and salmonid benefits if you’re interested).
Thinning Stands Boosts Wildlife Diversity [4]
- Conducted in Redwood NP and Del Norte Redwood SP and supported by Save the Redwoods League.
- Found that small mammals and birds increased dramatically within five years of areas that were thinned vs. unthinned areas.
- “At a minimum, thinning results in vegetative developmental and ecological trajectories that are several decades, if not substantially longer, ahead of stands that were not thinned,” Slauson said. “The overall result is that restoratively thinned stands have begun to develop the understory vegetative complexity and productivity to support small vertebrate communities that much more closely resemble old-growth stands than stands that have not been thinned.”
Old Redwood Forest Restoration: Quantifying Forest Characteristics and Development of Initial Restoration Treatments [5]
- Funded by Save the Redwoods League.
- How do you move toward old-growth characteristics most efficiently? “With judicious thinning,” said Joe McBride, University of California, Berkeley, Forestry Ecology Professor. “You can look at old-growth stands as representing a process of natural thinning that took hundreds of years. You have a few survivors per acre that are now the big trees—they’ve outcompeted adjacent trees over time.”
- The results showed that at the better-watered sites (both in Humboldt), large, medium, and small redwoods were all randomly distributed. At the drier site (Armstrong), small and medium trees were clumped and large trees were randomly distributed. “One has the idea based on the fairy rings you see in redwood stands that the big trees are all clumped,” McBride said. “We found that not to be the case.”
[0] https://collaboration.worldbank.org/content/usergenerated/as...
[1]https://openspacetrust.org/blog/redwood-forest/
[2]https://smithriveralliance.org/millcreek/
[3]https://youtu.be/t_vWK7Kyix8?t=240
[4]https://www.savetheredwoods.org/grant/thinning-stands-boosts...
[5]https://www.savetheredwoods.org/grant/old-redwood-forest-res...
This has given us dense forests with more vigorous, younger trees competing with mature trees for water and nutrients. Coupled with drought and higher temps from climate change, the mature trees become stressed and susceptible to beetle infestations and disease. The younger trees also serve as ladders for low intensity ground fires to become high intensity crown fires.
To answer your 2nd question: yes, Sempervirens, Save the Redwoods League, The Nature Conservancy have all partnered on projects to carry out ecological thinning to remove small diameter trees and promote a return to healthier forests that resemble the pre-1930s norm. It also happens that these practices maximize carbon sequestration.
It can also be made less alkaline with better, more sophisticated production technologies (i.e., reactors) that minimize ash.
Info@madronus.com
If the US spent a fraction of what it spends literally lighting money on fire with missiles and bombs, I’d bet we’d see a big decline in non-geostrategic hostilities or non-rogue actors (i.e., except for China, Russia, or the Saddam Hussein’s of the world). Terrorist movements arguably win support because of the lack of good government and economic opportunities of the populations they purport to rule.
The worry then becomes how the money is spent, which companies win the contracts (e.g., Buy American provisions), and perceptions of vassal states, but historically, it has been a successful strategy and is similar to what China is doing with its Belt and Road Initiative.
If armed insurgency means the loss of a decent percentage of GDP thru wealth transfer, then it’d lessen some of the incentives and reasons for armed conflicts. It’d also be important to make sure funds are distributed equitably with a country and not under the World Bank model.
What’s interesting is why SF appears to be the most affected county. It might be because it continues to elect soft-on-crime City Attorneys or that it fails to investigate organized crime rings that then operate with impunity. My favorite example of this is Fremont PD doing SFPD’s job and busting an international auto theft ring mostly operating in SF[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_California_Proposition_47...
[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/01/31/thousands-of-stolen-l...
Does ND acquire Patch/Hoodline for quality content? This would only work in metro areas they cover.
Or perhaps ND partners with local newspapers and pays them for content? This is more difficult to scale but offers a lifeline to local newspapers who’d otherwise continue to decline in the digital era.
I lament concentration of media, but one can’t deny there are economies of scale in digital media and algorithmic advertising on a national level. It has largely come to pass already in local TV news with Sinclair Broadcasting. I don’t know how these trends can be reversed.