a2tech

Tesla is a meme stock. Its being buoyed up by retail investors (Elon Musk fanbois) and, its been said, by Saudis and others who were trying to curry favor with him (possibly to try and get Trumps ear or other greasy bullshit). The stock is completely divorced from reality, which also attracts further investment--as long as its disconnected from the fundamentals of being a company that has to make a profit, you can argue its worth 100 million billion dollars or a googel, both are just as valid.

Yes, they’re called clean out companies. They’ll swoop in and put everything in a dumpster. You can engage an auction house-+cleanout company if you think they have anything worth selling.

Between this and Minneapolis I guess the water temperature just keeps on being turned up, and us frogs are just chilling out in our warm baths.

I mean, they could, but there's no incentive for the builders to sell them. You can make way more money with rentals (if the demand is there) then you can with condos. Condos are a way time hit of money, rentals are smaller profit, but comes reliably.

The only problem is that in the US, if you let apartments and townhouses to be built, homeowners will get muscled out by large builder concerns and single family homes will be converted into dense housing--which sounds great, until you realize there's no way those housing concerns will SELL those units--they're going to be rented forever. There's no incentive to actually sell those to people and every reason to keep them as rentable apartments forever.

So you have attractive locations being completely dominated by rentable corporate owned housing and the net outcome is that people are completely boxed out of home ownership. There's no way pricing comes down because they do this in areas where people are willing to pay top dollar to live.

I live near Ann Arbor and we're seeing it play out right now--more dense housing in the inner core is being allowed (as current thinking says should be done) and whats happening is that smaller old-timey landlords and homeowners are being pushed out and their homes and apartment buildings are being replaced with brand new high dollar rentals. Not condos (although there are some of those as well, but fewer), rentals. And the rental prices are going up! Normal people get pushed further and further from the attractive areas to live, and pressure from these people moving out pushes up rent in the surrounding areas.

You're right. It doesn't matter though. People love 'big fixes', the reality of systemic change is hard to present in a 2 minute sound bite or Instagram reel. This is the kind of 'fix' that gets implemented, then when things don't magically improve people will just give up.

They’re already straining to truck in enough water for survival now WITH some of the wells still working. If the ability to source water locally stops the people of Tehran will either need to move or die. With aquifers running dry from iran to Afghanistan they’ll have to migrate even further. I think we could see the entire region plunge further into chaos as the water crisis worsens.

In 10 years there won’t be a regime in Iran because Iran won’t exist as it does today. With the collapsing water table people are going to be forced into either death or migration.

I don’t want to be a doom and gloom guy, but the climate change collapse is starting to happen in front of our eyes—and not just in a far off ‘eventually this will be a problem’ way.

It’s because this is a very simplified view of a classroom. What is presented above is the best case scenario, not a realistic one. For example, there’s no consideration of costs associated with any sort of handicapped student, or student with special education needs.

Real world costs completely spiral out of control when you look at the actual system—for example, the buildings are all built during the rapid expansion of the country so are now old enough to need expensive maintenance, and there isn’t money or interest from the community to tear them down and build new ones.

Also something else that isn’t being covered is that involved parents are pulling their kids out for home schooling, and well behaved kids are increasingly being pulled out and put in charter sschools. This is leading to a rapid collapse of the school system. Public school is being left as a place for students who’s parents don’t care enough to do anything with them, or with enough behavioral or special needs that charter schools won’t handle them.

Any nation made up of human beings is going to be flawed. The way forward is via incremental change and compromise. Forcing societal change does not, and never has, worked.

The fallacy is believing the country has ever perfectly embodied the principals of its people. Unlike your and others dismissive talk of my 'bright eyed idealism' I and the people that I interact with fully understand the missteps and failures of our country.

That does not stop us from working towards making the nation a better place. I'm stubborn and loud and I talk to politicians and others when I see things that I don't think are right. Maybe (probably) I'm tilting at windmills. But I'm not giving up on what I think the United States should be.

I’m an American and I can safely vouch that myself and most of the people I know deeply believe in the American ideals that have been presented as gospel for decades—fair play, hard work, rule of law, loving our neighbors (regardless of legal status), and to a one, believe that as soon as you swear your oath at the immigration court, you’re an American, regardless of the circumstances of your birth.

The situation we find ourselves in is that the American of today does not represent us well. I have hopes for the future, but time will tell.

The drinking water is just part of the issue (as you said). Water is used in countless industrial processes, farming, EVERYTHING. if the water goes, so does everything else.

And it’s not just water going away—it’s impingement by salt as well.

I assume marketing. I’m wondering what will happen when they force the afghan refugees back over the border into Afghanistan since they don’t have the water to give them.

Climate change and bad decisions from the last 50 years are starting to bite now. It’ll just get worse. Expect migrations and countries collapsing as millions of people are pushed to migrate for survival.

With the amount of time he spends with Trump and Peter Thiel..probably

My understanding is that the correct plural for a Canadian goose IS Canadian gooses.

People in prison in the US use the same method to boil water for ramen/drinks on 120V household current.

Google is not getting a cut of that sponsorship money. They don't care if it wrecks your deal. They want your ONLY source of income to be Youtube. If you're fully beholden to Youtube, there will be no escape, no way for you to leave and take your viewership with you.

Remember how Youtube used to be a nice cage with lots of air holes and fun toys to occupy you? Light ad enforcement, tools to help you build your viewership etc? People are starting to feel the pinch of those being removed. That cool room is starting to look like what it really is--an industrial cage.

I don’t know if you watched those videos but even if he did commit a crime the marshals are way way over the line when they arrest him.

They're sweet well meaning people. They're very familiar with the realities of working in Africa, but they always assume people will try and do the right thing at the end of the day.

I felt really bad for them. They're super nice people and I don't think the contractors set out to take advantage of them, it ended up being an bad experience for everyone.

The non-profit works in Africa and is all about using local resources when at all possible. They knew some people that worked with a group out of Nairobi that talked a good game and they liked the people they met and the non-profit folks are NOT technical, they jumped on it. It's a classic story really--I've been on this side of the table many times before with outsourced work.

If they had brought me in before hand I could have saved them a lot of work by asking the hard questions and reigning in the tech overspend.

Exactly--bad work can be from anywhere. However working with contractors at this kind of distance, through a language barrier, with different societal norms (for example, the US project manager was a woman, and the programmers just completely ignored things she said. If myself or another man was present, they completely changed their tone and would immediately act on things we said. Our project manager was pretty much ignored or steam rolled at every turn) is extremely difficult.

It was running when they accepted it. However they didn't realize that the group was running the Django/Postgres 'backend' on a managed Digital Ocean instance, then there were two different Vercel 'projects'. It was costing hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month to run for a project that was VERY lightly used.

They paid them on the strength of seeing it working, but then the consulting group basically ghosted when the customer asked to adjust it to run on cheaper hosting (probably because they couldn't), then the site got shut off because the hosting was all in the consulting groups name and they stopped paying it. Digital Ocean nuked the database for non-payment and they lost tons and tons of manual work putting in data.

Working with a client just last month that hired an African engineering group to build a tool for them. What they got delivered was a Next.js train wreck that was so coupled to Vercel's hosting that I couldn't make it run successfully anywhere else. The customer was a non-profit and didn't want to/couldn't afford Vercel's hosting so asked if I could try and make it run and I (naively) thought 'its just javascript, it should run anywhere!' and I took a run at it.

After a week of futzing with it I just threw up my hands and said 'no can do'. I couldn't untangle the spaghetti JS and piles of libraries. 'Compiling' would complete and if you looked at the output it was clearly missing tons of bits but never threw an error. Just tons of weirdness from the toolchain to the deployment platform.

They don't make them end to end either. Their jet engines are made up of parts supplied by thousands of suppliers.

Just wanted to watch a relatively recent movie yesterday (Antichrist) and the only place that has it is a streaming service called Mooby. Not signing up for a service to watch one movie. Would have gladly paid 4 bucks to watch it, so had to find it in the usual places instead.

This is interesting--do you have a link to the sale or instructions as to how that was working?

What’s the gaming industry look like when you remove mobile gaming from the equation?

This is not helpful, funny, or intelligent. It’s a child’s rant about the world.

At the end of the day, the reason more housing isn’t built is that the incentives are greater to not build it. You can build a high rise with shoebox apartments that have to be aggressively managed and make a profit. Or you can build a high rise with half the units, higher reoccurring revenue and less hassle and make 2x the immediate profit.

At the end of the day as long as there is demand for more expensive housing that’s what’s going to get built.