whyenot

I think bicycles work very well in a dense and flat city where people respect traffic laws. I am highly skeptical that they are the answer everywhere. Take for example San Francisco with all of its steep hills, or Rio where you have both hills and low adherence to traffic laws. How about Mexico City with its at time horrendous air pollution. In the United States, where many cities didn't really mature until after the automobile, you have low density to deal with, for example in Houston or San Jose. How about for someone who is older? Bicycles may be great if you are in your 30s, but what about for someone in their 70s?

Bicycling is a great solution for some people in some cities, but it's not going to work as well everywhere or for everyone. Public transit, cars, walking, etc. will all have to continue being part of the mix.

Just a counterexample:

At Stanford, 36% of graduate students are international students (2024-2025 AY). While there are very good reasons for this, I think it's hard to argue that international students are not displacing US students, at least in grad school. For undergraduates, the number is 9% (2023-2024 AY). Stanford has tremendous financial resources and a main campus that is more than 12 square miles in size. They could grow the size of their student body if they wanted to.

Yes it could potentially be very dystopian for human drivers. That doesn't mean it won't happen. Police departments could make a lot of extra money from the additional traffic tickets; there is a financial incentive for them to do this.

Each Waymo is equipped with multiple cameras (potentially LPR), LIDAR, etc. The car knows when the vehicles around it are breaking traffic laws and can provide photographic/video evidence of it. Imagine if Waymo cars started reporting violators to the police, and if the police started accepting those reports. Someday they might.

In the late 1970s, my dad purchased an S-100 bus computer from Thinker Toys for about $3,000 (would be close to $15,000 today after adjusting for inflation). It had a Z80 microprocessor and ran CP/M. As was true of many hobbyist computers from this era, it came with full source code (in beautifully documented assembly) both for CP/M and for the BIOS. This was important because if you wanted to add peripherals or make other modifications to your computer, you had to edit the source code and recompile the BIOS.

A few years later my dad decided to buy an Epson MX-80 for his computer. The daisy-wheel and the plotter at work (he worked at SRI) just didn't cut it, I guess? This required buying a serial card for the S-100. In order to get that printer to work, he had to first, wire up a cable because the data lines from the card were on different pins in the printer. I believe there was a version of the MX-80 that came with a serial port instead of a parallel port which made some things easier. I was recruited as his assistant. Then he had to modify and recompile the BIOS. Then he had to also make some changes to CP/M. This was a process of trial and error that lasted for weeks. I remember I was away at summer camp and he sent me a letter he printed out on that printer. He was so happy that he finally got it to work.

Anyways, this resurfaced that memory and I thought I might as well share it. I still have the printout he sent me somewhere.

There is also Michael Scott, Apple’s first CEO. He didn’t necessarily ride out into the sunset as much as being pushed out into it after some very controversial mass layoffs. He’s a neighbor and purchased several homes near me. One, a large estate, he demolished and turned into a pond and fruit orchard. Another he turned into an office and lab space for his interest in gemstones. It’s actually been quite a while since i last saw him. I wonder if he is still living over there.

> The US has shown absolutely no willingness to carry out antitrust cases the past many years

Lina Khan's FTC brought cases again Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Mastercard, and more. They also prevented mergers (consolidations) in a lot of different industries. Could they have accomplished more? Certainly, but they did certainly did display a willingness to bring antitrust cases.

You may be right, but even if the concessioners aren’t great, the valley can still be a wonderful, quiet, peaceful place to be. Especially in late spring when the dogwoods are in full bloom, the waterfalls are full, and the summer crowds haven’t arrived yet. After Labor Day is also nice. Summer crowds aren’t fun, but I do feel like there is another way of looking at it: so many people going outside and enjoying nature instead of looking at the world through their phones. There was a time pre-Covid when attendance and interest in national parks and state parks was kind of on the wane, and it’s nice that so many people want to come and enjoy these places.

> However, until people would rather camp than stay at the $600/night hotel, and cook over a campfire rather than eat overpriced food

I think this borders on "gatekeeping." There are other lodging options in Yosemite Valley which are much less expensive than the Ahwahnee. Yosemite belongs to the American people, and everyone should have a chance to enjoy it, not only those who want to sleep in a tent and cook on a fire. There has been paid lodging in the valley since before Yosemite was a park.

Food and lodging in the valley are expensive. The shuttle bus system is currently a joke. Aramark, Delaware North, and YP&CC (especially in the malaise years 1970-1993) have not always been good stewards, but in spite of that, the park is a national treasure that all should have a chance to enjoy, not just those in the "rock climbing scene" who want to stay at Camp 4 and rough it.

Aramark's contract should be cancelled. It happened at Crater Lake, and the NPS would have justification to do it in Yosemite, but the last two transitions between concessioners was pretty bad; there is good reason for the NPS to be cautious. If there was the capacity for better NPS oversight, the best move would probably be to break up the contract into smaller pieces and have more than one main concessioner. The Ansel Adams Gallery and Yosemite Mountaineering School are already under different contracts and there is precedent from other national parks (for example Glacier).

Maybe I’m just sentimental, but My Thinkpad x300 was the toughest, most productive laptop that I have owned. I took that laptop deep into the Amazon where it was exposed to near 100% humidity for months. It’s plastic / polycarbonate shell stood up to a tremendous amount of abuse, and it’s keyboard was awesome. Times have changed and now I mostly use Apple products, but they are not nearly as tough, or have as nice of a keyboard as that X300.

Drugstore beetles are also a huge problem for natural history museums because they will eat all kinds of biological materials like dried plants. I am curator of a medium sized herbarium and we have been fighting beetles since 1945. PDB (paradichlorobenze; moth balls) used to be a very effective way to keep beetles out of collections, but most institutions no longer allow its use. Freezing specimens is what we do now, and it is very effective in the short term, but it has to be repeated at least every few years and it also causes some wear on the specimens. During COVID lockdowns when some specimens were not frozen regularly, the results were devastating. Pressed flowers reduced to dust, trays of pinned butterflies completely gone, only beetle grass left behind.

Once you have these beetles they come back again and again. The only really good long term solution is to store everything in what is essentially a giant walk-in refrigerator. ...or if the specimens are old enough, they may have been treated with mercury or arsenic, which is quite effective but has other problems!

> My favorite use-case for AI is writing logs

You mean like this?

    [2025-07-17 18:05] Pallet #3027 stacked: Coast‐live oak, 16" splits, 0.22 cord.
    [2025-07-17 18:18] Moisture check → 14 % (prime burning condition).
    [2025-07-17 18:34] Special request tagged: “Larina—aromatic madrone, please!”
    [2025-07-17 18:59] Squirrel incident logged: one (1) cheeky Sciurus griseus absconded with wedge.

...or something more like this?

    Base-10 (log10) handy values
    --------------------------------
    x        log10(x)
    ------------------
    2        0.3010
    e        0.4343
    10       1.0000
    42       1.6232
    1000     3.0000
    1e6      6.0000

I guess Zuck got the shaft?

Wow, $200/month for the privilege of being monetized and tracked even more closely than Chrome does. Sounds like a real winner.

I don't think it's unreasonable to demand that if you are going to live on your property in your RV, that you also have a sewer/septic hookup for disposal of your grey water and sewage. That stuff should not be going down a storm drain, which is where it often seems to go.

Ferdinand Prosche. Oh you mean the association with the Nazis, like Henry Ford?

Your are asserting a lot of facts here. Please provide some references so that those of us who are interested can learn more.

Yes, I also appreciate the skip ahead feature that lets you fast forward over the sponsorship ads that a lot of creators have started insetting into their videos.

Why are you posting this on some brand new dummy account? If you feel so strongly about this, post your opinion on your regular account.

I wish Kevin Drum were still here. I often didn't agree with his politics, but his blog posts were always insightful, and I wonder what he would say about our current situation.

Is Google your default search engine? If so, you should send them an invoice. :)

Their reckoning day is coming when Google stops paying them $500m+ a year to be the default search engine. That payment alone account for 80% of Mozilla's budget, and has made them fat, wasteful, and directionless. It's really upsetting to me personally, I gave a lot (time, code, and money) to Mozilla in the early days when they were really struggling.

What is going on with the window reflections (for superwood-facade)? It doesn't look right.

The irony is that grading blue books is something that might be a great place to use AI. Grading essays takes a lot of time and is inherently subjective. Anyone who has done this type of grading knows that there is "drift" when you compare the first essays you read to the last ones, for example. AI could be a big help.

Whataboutism like this is a rhetorical tactic to deflect uncomfortable or difficult conversations. I'm not sure I agree with OP about software engineers and business executives being the "worst thing for the planet," but it does feel like there is a growing distrust of both groups. It's something to pay attention to, especially if AI begins to really take away people's jobs or cause social upheaval. There is already a lot of anger directed at some business executives right now.

Lyme disease does exist on the west coast, including in the Bay Area. A friend in Los Altos got Lyme disease from a tick in her yard. This is the worst time of year for ticks in the Bay Area. I've picked off over 100 ticks while doing field work in Henry Coe State Park. The one advantage we have on the west coast is that our ticks are larger and you usually notice when one starts crawling on your skin and especially when one bites you.

The way I see it, this is more of an indictment of Reddit and their slow response to enforce their existing rules on doxing and witch-hunting. The influencer did nothing wrong. She is just sharing her cancer journey. The fact that she does not look or act like someone with stage 4 cancer, that's not her problem.

> Higher concentrations of CO2 enables a higher tree line.

While this may make some intuitive sense, [CO2] actually has very little bearing on tree line. The major factors are temperature and length of the growing season. Trees need liquid water to be able to transpire and grow. The growing season also needs to be long enough that trees can harvest enough energy (sugars) from sunlight to power respiration during cold nights and long winters. If you are aware of some articles showing that [CO2] is a limiting factor at high elevations, please share them :)

Tree line is tends to be higher at lower latitudes

That's kind of surprising. Jeffrey pines are most common on the eastern side of the Sierra crest where they will grow down to about 6,000 feet. I wouldn't have thought of them as growing well at over 12,000 feet, but I guess they are already well adapted to harsh growing conditions, and maybe now with less snow, it's possible for them to get a foothold. Jeffery Pines also grow on top of San Benito Mountain in the coast range (5,267 feet) where they grow in serpentine soils that are toxic to most plants.

It took me 58 minutes to do my not that simple taxes (both state and federal) using Turbo Tax. The cost was about $200. Based on your time estimate, it saved me 1-2 work days of time. That seems like a good bargain to me.

What I don't like with Intuit is the sleazy ways they try to upsell you and to trick you into allowing them to use your financial information for non-tax purposes.