TheSocialAndrew

I doubt Michael Malice and Ari Shaffir requested their episode be removed. Also, it's unlikely that such a concerted effort would take place within days by a large number of Joe's guests.

> [Ulysses] was banned for “obscenity” in both Britain and the US. In Britain, the director of public prosecutions Archibald Bodkin read only the last section, Molly’s monologue, and confirmed that “there is a great deal of unmitigated filth and obscenity”. In 1922, 500 copies were seized by customs at Folkestone and burned. Eventually, a 1932 court judgment in the US allowed it to be published in the country.

100 years later we're still fighting over what gets to be published or broadcast.

It was a Mythbusters episode, and they concluded that you needed to be following the truck extremely closely (I believe within a couple of feet) to see a gain in fuel efficiency. The driver was unable to keep that small distance consistent for a continuous period of time causing more speed variations, resulting in a loss of fuel efficiency.

You might be thinking of the UI as of a month ago. They've updated it last month and botched both the look and the experience, that's what this thread is mostly about.

It's a quick read and an interesting peek behind the curtain at Apple during the development of the iPhone, with a focus on designing elements like the keyboard and predictive text.

What I took away from it is that the design decisions at Apple are in the hands of a few. The chain of command is small, it takes countless iterations until it "feels" right and you obviously can't consult with too many people when it's a secret project. A/B testing is out of the question.

The same argument can be made about any TV station. "Political propaganda" is a broad term and "harmful" is subjective. Using these labels to censor content / deplatform you disagree with is the antithesis of free speech.

What really happened here is that Neil Young is so woke that he deplatformed himself.

And I'm usually a defender of most interface updates, I know most people resist change especially when it impacts their muscle memory. But I think that change is good for the brain.

That being said, the new interface is terrible. So many things now take 3 taps as opposed to one.

I wonder if Tesla made the mistake of using A/B testing instead of vision-driven design like Apple. (Side note, just finished reading "Creative Selection" by Ken Kocienda of Apple, an interesting read on Apple's approach to design and why it is so successful as opposed to Google's).

If hypothetically this would happen, wouldn't gaining access to everyone's wallets render it useless since BTC would no longer have value? If so, the goal would just be to disrupt the financial markets, not necessarily to gain directly.

Also, wouldn't we be able to restore everyone's wallets from the latest snapshot on a new blockchain?

I've been trying Nova for the last couple of months. Native it may be, but the performance with larger files is not on par with Sublime. Also it has some weird bugs (mostly in Git and in the handling of files) and it does crash occasionally.

It's very promising though and if anyone can stick by a product it's Panic. Also their apps are classic Mac -- eye candy but with thought out UX.

We're switching over to Zoho for our latest startup. If you have more than one Google account the switching between personal and business is a nightmare. Some features are unavailable for one or the other, and it keeps switching between the two accounts seemingly randomly. It constantly asks for a password when you want to switch back. It's more headache than it is worth to be signed in to Google.

Not to hijack your thread, I'll give this a try, but I've recently started using Sorted for this type of task management and the feature I find most important is the ability to shift the time blocks easily just by selecting them and scrolling the mouse cursor to defer them all to a later time by +30 minutes, +1 hour, etc.

I was in England last week of December and no one but a handful of tourists were wearing masks, so it probably will not make much of a difference. I was only asked once for a vaccination card. Stark difference when coming from California.

It seems like back then people were smiling to a passerby and not to the camera. They'd keep a stern face when they were knowingly photographed.

Now we smile for the camera, but not so much to a stranger.

Caffeine is delivered quite differently based on the brewing method. I find that 4 or more shots of espresso a day will lead to an eye twitch, while one or two cups of Philz deliver the caffeine far more smoothly.

French press seems to be somewhere in between, the extraction is different than pour over. Philz's extraction time is even shorter than a regular pour over. They use a lot more beans than Blue Bottle but the water flows through the grounds much quicker.

If you can't go cold turkey, try avoiding espresso and French press and the jittery feeling might subside.

There are different types of platforms:

If you sell something through Amazon and the buyer commits fraud, Amazon will still pay you provided that it was credit card fraud.

If you sell something on your Shopify store and integrate with Stripe, you are responsible for your KYC, and will have to take a loss for fraud.

The former takes a larger percentage of your sale for handling KYC, while the latter lets you keep more, but you're responsible for KYC.

The problem with Upwork, Airbnb, etc. is that they act like the merchant of record but not when it comes to fraud. They try to pass that onto the seller.

It is the same with Airbnb. The platform does not allow you to perform your own guest verification, there isn't any fraud detection score that you can see (like Stripe Atlas would have), and worst of all the full name on the account can be changed at any time without additional verification. So as a guest you could create an account on someone else's name and book using their card, then change the name to match your ID before checking in (in case the host does ask for an ID) and you're all set.

When this happens and typically some time after the guest completed their stay, you receive an email from Airbnb saying "Problem collecting payment for reservation [XXX]" that explains how Airbnb will do their best to collect payment but they are not obligated to.

Basically these are platforms that will give you no choice in payment processing, but will also take no responsibility when it comes to fraud, nor give you any tools to fight fraud.

If the mutations continue, at some point the mortality rate will likely meet the mortality rate of the seasonal flu. Hopefully we can then compare COVID to the season flu on any large media outlet / platform without being canceled, so that we can accept it as such and not rework our lives a dozen times a year around restrictions.

In large cities on the east coast we didn't run into this problem because nearly every new development had a doorman.

In the Bay Area and LA many apartment buildings don't have a front desk, they have a leasing office that may or may not be open, and typically keeps odd hours.

With the exception of high-rises, new developments in SF and South Bay with under 200 units typically don't have a front desk.

They do have security patrol come in for a couple of hours nightly, but they're not supposed to get involved and just take notes of suspicious activity, then email it to the leasing office to review the next day. Security will call the police if it's blatant theft of break-in, but they rarely catch it because this is one person patrolling a garage and endless hallways for just a few hours each night. When the security patrol car is by the building entrance, they can return a couple of hours later to steal packages, break into the bike room, break into cars, open lockboxes, etc.

However, things got out of hand significantly during the pandemic. Package theft and mailbox theft started happening during daylight hours. At one building in Mountain View they stole the USPS master key as the mail carrier had the boxes open putting in the mail. One leasing agent was assaulted during a tour and the keys & fobs were stolen.

You can't fight this type of crime by having a security guard in every area of every building. The issue is rooted in that the thieves and squatters know that they will get away with it. The criminals became bolder and even if confronted by a security guard, they have no more power than your average citizen has. They can just observe and take notes.

Short-term housing is different, if you lower rates below a certain threshold you are competing with local motels but you are offering a residential space governed by a different set of laws.

In other words, low-cost short-term housing attracts people that can book a stay for one month that will continue to occupy the space and stop paying until the eviction is processed. Eviction is a 3 to 6 month process in most counties in California, and it typically costs $10k-$15k. That was before the pandemic, evictions were completely suspended since.

Short-term housing / corporate housing does not require proof of income, credit check, etc. That would create a barrier of entry that would deter the majority of the clients; they would flock to the first available Airbnb. These travelers are typically staying for a couple of months and don't want to go through the hassle of lease approvals, agreements, credit checks, etc. Many of them are foreign and unable to provide the documentation necessary for a typical lease agreement.

You do make a valid point, however. Rent should be driven down as the market dictates.

For long-term rentals (your typical 1 or 2 year lease agreement with the building) there is another reason why rent does not drop significantly: most of the large rental buildings are owned by banks. There are clauses where if the rent per unit drops under a certain amount, the interest rates increase. There are several other clauses that disincentivize rent decreases. In addition, not every investor in a real estate investment trust has the same terms. When things go south (rent drops, operating costs increase, rate of evictions increases), investors that hold a fraction of the REIT will be the ones taking that loss, while institutional investors that provided the majority of the loan are protected. Thus it's in the interest of the more powerful investors or lenders to keep the rent where it is, and let the smaller investors take the loss.

We as property managers, whether long term or short term, can only fluctuate the rent within a certain margin. It's easy to oversimplify as "why can't you just drop the price", but there are bigger players that hold the cards, and they decide what the rent is, and if units are to remain vacant, who will be taking that loss. And it's the new guy that just entered an REIT with a mere $100k.

As a short-term housing operator in the Bay Area, specializing in hosting tech workers, we've witnessed first hand the decline in quality of life and exile of the tech traveler.

It started with homeless people camping out in front of our units in SoMa and Mission (often times blocking the entrance/exit because some units had a direct street-level entrance), petty package theft and occasional car break-ins in the building garages.

Police couldn't do anything but take a report.

Then the pandemic started and the vacancy rate skyrocketed. We started getting reports from neighbors or the on-site management that are our guests are dealing drugs out of our units. Except that these units were supposed to be vacant. Our lockboxes were getting broken into, keys taken and people have been living there for several days and in some cases weeks. We often had footage of this.

We would call the police as we arrived at these units for our protection, but they wouldn't be able to arrest anyone because the people in the unit would say "so and so gave me the keys, told me this is their apartment, I don't know anything about that broken lockbox."

This scheme quickly expanded to Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Milpitas and other South Bay cities. We would call the police on a daily basis in the first few months of the pandemic. Sometimes it would take them an hour or two to come, and if the squatters saw our team at the building and got wind of what was going on, they would start packing up their car with our appliances: Apple TV, Nespresso machine, we've even had furniture and major appliances like TVs, washer and dryer rolled out while we were waiting for the police to come.

At most they would temporarily restrain these squatters if they had previous warrants (many of them did, but many others didn't produce an ID.) But even with warrants for their arrest, they would get uncuffed and released within an hour. We thought that at least a warrant would have them appear in front of a judge and we'd not have to encounter them again in a few days at another building, but the pandemic gave them a free pass.

The officers were very candid in saying that if it was up to them, they would book them, but they have instructions not to bring anyone in for non-violent crime. Theft is not prosecuted.

This is how it goes, anyone that has any doubt that crime is not prevented, pursued or prosecuted should go on a ride-along to any of these calls.

When talking to someone native to the area I would often times mention that I was taken aback by the amount of homelessness and open drug use in the streets of San Francisco. (This was pre-pandemic.)

They seemed puzzled, as if I came from a small town and wasn't used to life in a big city. I've moved to SF from NYC. Several times I would get a variation of "isn't it the same in New York?" from them. It's not, it doesn't even get close to SF. Mid-pandemic NYC at 2am felt safer than pre-pandemic SF on a Monday morning.

They almost definitely have an arbitration clause in the agreement, since companies like Amazon, eBay, Airbnb wish to avoid going to court altogether so as not to establish a precedent. This could be favorable to you because they are more likely to settle without either party incurring a lot in legal expenses, but on the other hand it's likely that the arbitration clause asks that each party split the arbitration cost (typically under $5,000 each) regardless of the outcome.

I'm not an attorney but I've dealt with situations like yours. If I were you, I would pursue the arbitration because they are likely to settle.

You have the option to choose any of the other EV makers, but this one EV maker has very fast charging stations worldwide in strategic locations, with lounges and predictable charging rates.

Of the 3 EVs that I drive, only the Tesla I would take outside the city. Even if the others had a much bigger range (they don't) I would not be comfortable outside of the Tesla supercharging network because I've encountered many difficulties with ChargePoint, evGO, etc: stations not working, backed up, slow charging, high cost, etc.

The ecosystem is its charging network because it's very reliable and eliminates range anxiety.

It’s called easy entry and it’s very easy to disable on a Tesla. Far easier than the cryptic menus that most carmakers love to hide settings under.

The Tesla Superchargers network is the network effect.

Not to worry, they have assigned the best Missouri Highway Patrolman on this as we speak. That one guy that fixed the Internet at the station by rebooting the modem has got this.

We could always invite in more au-pairs using the J1 visa. Many au pairs end up taking up college here and switch to an F1 visa. This system is tested and works well.

Bill Maher