InclinedPlane

"Some reason."

Could be, and now I'm just spitballing here, but it could be the use of government backed currencies, the heavy degree of government oversight and regulation, and the federally insured deposits.

The idea that electric vehicles will completely replace ICE vehicles is a hopeful one but faces a lot of roadblocks to get to 100% (or even 80%) and may ultimately be unrealistic. As such, it is dangerous to bank utterly on that goal in efforts to curb net CO2 emissions. So this is not just a stop gap but a backup plan, and more.

Additionally, as a replacement for "drilling oil out of the ground" as the first step in everything that makes use of gasoline and similar products (so jet fuel, heating oil, diesel, gasoline, lubricants, plastics, etc.) this is a good thing, not just from an emissions standpoint but also from a pollution and environmental impact (drilling, crude oil transport, etc.) aspect.

Even more importantly, this is a way to bridge the "energy storage" gap for green energy sources like wind and solar. Base electric power generation is a very second by second thing, hydrocarbon production can easily be an "average output over a week or a month" sort of thing, which is where wind and solar do well.

There's a learning curve, but it's not that bad. The biggest constraint is that you are in a very limited "world" in Arduino land, it's very systems programm-y. You don't have a proper OS, you don't have a filesystem. You don't have near unlimited resources. Depending on the chip you use you may have a small amount of RAM. Also, arduino enforces a basic structure on you of having setup() and loop() functions. Once you get used to it it's fine, but it takes some experience to get the hang of it fully.

And even if, for some reason, you have no withholding, and aren't expecting a refund, you may still be required to file just because your income is above the threshold (which is about 12k I think).

Quick question, do you know the difference between paying taxes and filing taxes?

Also, do you understand how withholding works and how you pay taxes with every pay check not just every year? And that if you have too low of an annual income to actually owe any federal tax you need to file in order to get your withholding back?

Yeah, this isn't just a dark pattern, this is a black hole pattern, this is a scam. With a dark pattern there is a way, if you're careful, to navigate through things and get to the desired outcome. Here there was no such route, you had to have entered from the correct starting place to begin with to have a chance at all, and that entrance was hidden from the public.

> "The idea that the value and utility of the automobile is diminished because everybody has one is absurd."

You missed it entirely. The argument is that it is unreasonable and unsustainable to expect that everybody should own one. We have normalized many of the costs of near universal automobile ownership today, but in many ways it is unsustainable, particularly as urbanization increases and particularly as cities are the main economic drivers in the modern era. We're killing ourselves with the idea that everybody not only should own a beach house but has to own a beach house in order to function in society and the economy, and there just isn't enough beach front property for that to be realistic.

Not really. In this case the commodity is transportation. What are modes of transportation? Walking, bikes, trains, buses, and personal automobiles (among some others). In New York City the automobile industry doesn't have a monopoly on daily transportation needs, millions of people take the subway every day. In Amsterdam transportation needs are partly met by people who ride their bikes a total of 2 million passenger-kilometers on an average day. Similarly, walking is a bigger share of daily travel needs in pedestrian friendly cities than it is in many automobile focused cities.

That is an important point, especially in the 20th century, because the common nature of the automobile naturally leads all automakers towards sharing common cause on certain big issues (like road building and use; parking availability and cost; petroleum production, use, and taxation; land use; and so on), many of which differ strongly from the desires tied to other ways of meeting transportation needs or of the public at large. "Monopoly" is the wrong term, but oligopoly is accurate, and equally concerning.

Additionally, a low stress non-crunch environment is better at retaining talent, which is significant on the short term but even more so on the long term (in a whole host of ways). Keeping people around longer means more retention of experience, less disruption to the corporate culture over time, more predictability in execution on projects, a more stable work environment (and less stress) for everyone else, etc, etc.

No, it's not. A pyramid scheme works with net zero productivity. It's just a rearrangement of resources, that's it.

Life is a resource network. There is production, and consumption. Economically people contribute to the economy and are paid money which is used to "take" goods and services back out of the economy. This is very different from a pyramid scheme.

There's plenty I could say in answer to this but most of it is unnecessary.

There is no excuse for a company such as Boeing, working under the regulation of the FAA, to produce any version of any model of plane which is fundamentally unsafe to fly. Period. None.

We're done here.

They do. But there's nothing special about the gravity of a black hole versus the gravity of "ordinary matter". The vast majority of the matter in a galaxy is in orbit and won't get anywhere near close enough to the central black hole to fall into it. This is true of stars, planets, gas, and dust just as it's true of dark matter.

This is bonkers. Nobody anywhere in the world should expect that one buys an airplane which is unsafe by design. Also, the idea that there are two versions of a plane, one that kills people and one that doesn't, and if you buy the wrong one that's completely your fault is just insane.

Capitalism as it exists today in the US (and other parts of the world) is a paperclip optimizer. The pressure is for those with power to leverage that power toward their maximum short term financial benefit. One consequence of this is that health care has essentially been parasitized by profit seekers who extract money from the system as if it were a strip mine. You can easily see the impact of this in the gross statistics in the form of the extremely high spending on health care in the US vs. comparatively poor return on that spending in terms of overall health outcomes. This is a corrupt system which today produces health care only as a side effect of its main purpose of wealth extraction. That is a natural consequence of our culture, economic incentives, etc. combined with the vast power imbalances between health care "providers" (hospitals, drug makers, device makers, etc.), insurance companies, employers, and individuals. There's no such thing as a patients or insurance holder union, the imbalance is enormous and there's very very little to tip it back from being dominated by the interests of the powerful.

It's important to remember that it was their job to be mindful of the risks. These weren't folks working at a bake sale or something, these were trained professionals who had been entrusted with significant and weighty responsibilities, and they did not take those responsibilities seriously enough. No, they weren't idiots, and that makes it far worse. Negligence is a common human failing, we should remember what it looks like and how it happens, we shouldn't pretend that it doesn't exist or that it should be excused.

They are not 3rd party review sites, they are 3rd party sites for algorithmically analyzing the reviews on amazon for a given product.

Not only that, it caused people to die. Diesel emissions are one of the most dangerous kinds of emissions from a public health perspective, especially in populated areas. Because of this emissions testing fraud diesel emissions pollution was worse in many major cities than it would have otherwise been, and the result has been unquestionably a vast loss of life (DALYs, if you prefer), no different than if someone had poisoned a water supply or sold tainted food. But because it has been so diffuse that aspect hasn't gotten quite the attention it deserves.

Absolutely. And note that in other areas (such as payment fraud) they put in a lot more legwork because the consequences actually hit them directly instead of just their customers.

There are many 3rd party sites (like fakespot.com) which do a better job than Amazon does and are not incredibly sophisticated. Amazon just doesn't care, that is the only conclusion that is possible to draw from the available data. They are not even doing a half-assed job, we're talking about a fractionally-assed job here, perhaps even milli-asses.

Amazon could easily do at least as good a job as fakespot, and then followup with consequences for review fraud. They could also implement various policies and use the huge amount of data they have available to go well beyond that level and make some headway against the problem. But they haven't done so. Because they can't be bothered. Because people being suckered into buying shitty products hasn't hurt their bottom line yet. They are complicit.

Right, I'm sure that works often given the massive power imbalances at play.

Why not just write in double your own salary while you're at it? Aim high.

Yup. It's just... shitty. I subscribe to a lot of channels and well more than half of the videos on the recommendations list are just recent videos from my subscription feed. I recognize that they are trying to create some sort of dumbed down landing page experience, but it just sucks. I feel as though there was a period of time when it was much better, but that time has sadly long passed.

It's worse than that. YouTube tries to maximize engagement, so it will preferentially recommend videos watched by highly engaged viewers. Guess what category of viewers are highly engaged? Indeed, conspiracists, polemecists, etc. Imagine walking into a college campus and asking the registrar for some recommendations on classes to take and them telling you to go listen to the crazy religious nut shouting from atop a milk crate, because they were so much more engaged with their material than anyone else on campus.

YouTube is not trying to provide a service to you, it's trying to sell you the ad consumer, to their actual customers: advertisers. And they have it in their head that the best way to do that is to increase engagement. And the algorithms they use to try to do that analyze the habits of the most "engaged" viewers which includes a fair helping of crazy people with unlimited time on their hands and when the platform thinks it has some sort of opening to turn you into one of those folks, it tries as hard as possible to shove you in that direction. All this is just silly algorithms under the hood without enough human oversight, but that doesn't make it any less sinister.

Imagine this translated to print media, imagine YouPaper: a publisher of magazines. Going by these same engagement metric driven algorithmic based systems such a platform would rapidly spiral toward pushing tabloid content to the detriment of everything else.

Our ancestors at the time were small shrew-like creatures. The extinction event occurred in several phases. The immediate impact directly devastated the local region and created a mega-tsunami that spread yet more destruction. It also kicked up a huge amount of debris which then re-entered Earth's atmosphere around the world over the course of the next roughly hour or so. This would have heated most of the atmosphere to the temperature of an oven, sparking massive wildfires and killing off most land animals. The ash and other crud injected into the stratosphere (such as sulfur dioxide) would have stuck around for several years and reduced the effective insolation at the Earth's surface substantially, causing massive die-off of plants and a contraction of primary productivity (biomass creation) across the globe (effectively a "great depression" in the food web).

Many aquatic animals would have been able to survive the initial effects but would have been put in quite a pinch by the reduction in food that set in after. As mentioned, large land animals on the surface would have been mostly wiped out pretty quick, many of the rest would have starved as the one two punch of massive fires and reduced sunlight (and possibly global cooling) would have produced. Small animals that lived or took refuge underground (or perhaps were aquatic or semi-aquatic) could have survived the initial effects in large numbers and though they would have diminished in population in the hard times afterward could have eked through.

Scrappy little omnivores and/or scavengers would have been well suited to ride the waves of chaotic changes following the mass extinction.

This is an opportunity to look at the problem from a different perspective.

Currently, in all mechanical designs bearing losses are small, because if they were not the design would probably be unworkable or unfeasible. But consider, maybe there are new things that could come into existence which are not feasible today because of bearing losses.

The internet, for example, didn't make it newly possible to send mail to people, but it made it so much easier that it changed what it meant to send mail.

It's a super expensive jet that was touted to be a good idea because cramming three roles into "one design" would lead to efficiencies and cost reductions. Instead the end result is that there's barely 30% commonality between the 3 versions while also being hugely expensive and underperforming. Meanwhile, remember that the F-22 program was effectively cut short and cancelled because it was too expensive, at around $150 million per jet.

If they had any sense they would have cancelled the F-35 program long ago and rerun a set of competition trials for each of the three separate roles.

Not robust at all. It assumes that the person who set up the cameras and the network is basically just an amateur. Anyone with even a basic level of expertise in networking could architect their network so that cameras would be completely hidden from devices on whatever network guests would join.

Socialism.

Taxes are used to pay for things like housing assistance, welfare, health care, and so forth. Also, "minimum wages" are higher.

I think there's somewhat of a leap of logic in there. The idea that the transition to the present era is due to the end of artificial scarcity is questionable considering how many confounding variables there are.

Look at the graph of real median income vs. per capita gdp or productivity, income has been flat even while the economy grows. And this somewhat understates the problem because the economy today is different than what it was back in the 1970s. A huge segment of the working class is being pinched, economically, and they have less money to spend than they might otherwise. It shouldn't be shocking that people are spending less on things like music when they can do so. That doesn't necessarily mean that they wouldn't spend plenty if their earnings were in line with pre 1980 historical norms, however.

Standardized testing is horribly broken in multiple ways and relying on it heavily also destroys the quality of education. Moreover, if you'd read anything about this latest scandal you'd understand how much it's possible to game standardized testing.