verbify

I think the phrase 'proofing yeast' in bread making has the same connotations - you're testing that the yeast is still alive.

Anecdotally I recall the beer aisles being relatively empty during the so-called panic buying, except for corona which were untouched.

Companies spend a lot of money to associate their brand with a good feeling, I can't imagine that the people who bought it as a joke outweighed the negative association.

Abuse detection is more important at scale. If you have a local app servicing a single city, they're less of a target than Uber.

Tragedy of the commons

His companies are marketing/branding companies. They lease the name Virgin and in exchange they handle the branding. Virgin Management doesn't actually own the hotels or planes.

That's a pretty bad statement, but not close to "kill the Jews".

Not SEC, but US attorney for the Southern District Preet Bharara apparently made his fame by going after Wall Street bigwigs. I don't know much about him besides his Wikipedia page (which could be edited by a PR firm), but it seems that was his career trajectory.

Reagents generally test for presence, not purity, so all you can conclude is that there is some ketamine in there.

> "Every single ancestor I had from my parents back to algae had offspring. What if I don't?

A large proportion of your ancestors offspring didn't themselves have offspring.

Presumably they specialised in coronaviruses because of the proximity to a bat population with coronaviruses, making sample gathering much easier? Are there other areas with significant coronavirus hosts? Are there other labs that specialise in coronaviruses to the same extent? The two seem linked to me, although I have no background in this area.

So we'd a priori expect coronavirus to originate in the area with coronavirus hosts, whether it was through the lab or the market...

You can restore a foreskin to some extent, an early form of this was practiced in the 8th century BC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreskin_restoration

The NIKKEI would've given you a positive return if you bought and held and reinvested dividends. And picking the worst point in one of the worst indices does not mean much - most investors are not investing a lump sum (they're usually putting into a pension over the course of decades) and they shouldn't be investing in just index/asset class (all-world diversification and having bonds as part of your portfolio is recommended).

Not only that, but 24% of the ruling Conservative Party members of parliament are also landlords, including the housing minister.

Partly that, but also partly that in a constituency based system, there will be a bias towards those who are in the constituency longer. I have to register to vote every time I move constituencies (a fairly regular event for a renter), while those who buy only register once (and can be considered returning customers for the member of parliament).

Wealth (which is correlated with property ownership) is also correlated with voting.

In the UK there are lots of government policies/incentives by the Conservative Party to encourage people to buy a home. These policies can be revoked.

I think it's generous to attribute reusable rockets to Musk - the Space Shuttle Columbia went on 17 missions - Musk didn't develop the first reusable rocket.

As for electric cars, I believe the limiting factor was battery technology, which has improved in leaps and bounds in the past decade. Tesla wasn't the only company developing electric cars - Renault-Nissan Alliance achieved the sales milestone of 350,000 all-electric vehicles delivered globally in August 2016, ranking second was Tesla Motors with over 139,000 electric cars sold between 2008 and June 2016. It's also not clear that Musk founded Tesla, but I'm not clear on the history there.

Tesla do have the strongest branding in electric cars though, and I would attribute that to Musk's ability as a showman.

Electric bikes mitigate some of your concerns.

Sorry, you're right I meant marginal.

The 60% effective tax rate is only on earnings between 100k and 125k, and only because of the loss of certain tax benefits. After 125k it drops back to 40%. It's really silly that it exists, but isn't representative of UK tax rates, it is just a weird side effect of the loss of the personal allowance.

And I reckon most earning between 100k and 125k would avoid that 60% by contributing to their pension, so I don't think many are affected by it.

They do, I'm thinking of certain Ultra Orthodox sects (not all, but Skver for example). Most of their literature is religious in nature (the plays of Sholem Aleichem would be anathema to them), and religious books are traditionally written in Hebrew (Tseno Ureno is a notable exception, but it seems the author intended it for those who aren't scholars).

But the point is that it is silly to talk about Yiddish being a dying language when it has so many native speakers with a very high birth rate (if I recall correctly approximately half the population are under the age of 18).

Yiddish always borrows from the local language.

There are more native speakers of Yiddish today than there were 10, 20 or 30 years ago. The trajectory is going in the opposite direction.

Couldn't they have implemented mute in software? There would be little outrage if they had (users don't care about the difference) but spy agencies (e.g. NSO Group) would have a backdoor.

The fact that they used a hardware switch means they did it the right way.

By contrast my Logitech camera has a light to show when the camera is running - but the light can be disabled via their software which makes me uncomfortable with fully trusting the light.

What about the cost of gas? Larger cars often have worse miles per gallon.

The remaining Western wall of the Temple mount today was rebuilt by Herod almost 1000 years later (20 BCE). You can tell by the distinctive stone-dressing - the border around the stone known as Herodian masonry. You can also see this feature on the cave of the patriarchs.

The reason why you get better yields from being a landlord or investing in shares than from keeping it in the bank is because you also accept risk. These people accepted the risk, and their reward during normal times is a better yield. By bailing them out (and specifically only the ones who also get income tax)

Definitely, that would be a better outcome. However the rent isn't being forgiven - it will possibly be sold to a collections agency, who would hound the renter to get something back from some of the renters.

Chromium is open source, so there's no chance they can be called a monopoly.

Encryption is not future proof (encryption that was previously thought of as secure has been broken). Writing zeros is future proof.

Sure, but that can happen if:

1) Shares were massively overvalued compared to their yields. E.g. if P/E ratios were 50:1 then I wouldn't buy the market

2) There's a fundamental issue in the economy. Plague, war, asteroid, climate change. Whatever the issue, you probably have bigger things to worry about than your retirement fund, and you have no better bets to place

The stock market is just made up of businesses. Businesses make money. Owning part of a business gives you a return. There's no magic to it, no massive extrapolation based solely on past performance. If you think there's a decent chance businesses aren't making money, then you ought to become a prepper.

If you reinvested your dividends you'd be up 25% without taking into account inflation, or down a total of 1.5% if you took into account inflation. Not ideal, but not much different than when you started.

I personally buy an all-world tracker, the Nikkei is an outlier. There could be issues that affect the global economy long term, but if that were the case, I'd have other things to worry about in addition to my investments.