alphakappa

Exactly $0 of high speed rail infrastructure was funded by sales taxes. State dollars came from prop 1a and cap and trade funds. About 12B over a decade and a half for heavy engineering, land acquisition etc. if that money was not spent it would have a negligible impact on your taxes.

The Noe valley bathroom was enough of an anomaly that it made the news. Do you have actual evidence that California taxes are not well spent?

That is OP's point. The underlying technology has gotten faster but the computer you use feels the same as 20 years ago because the software that utilizes it does a lot more too.

Thank you. The original website is a uniquely awful ad-infested page.

tangent: ridiculous that a site called designbloom has such an atrocious user experience. popovers, things that take over your reading space, and just general shiftiness all over the page that's unrelated to the content you are reading.

It is stunning, particularly so if you read up on the history beforehand and then see all the elements in the painting. It’s the first time I was able to appreciate a Picasso for all the complexity he put into his paintings.

I was similarly stunned by one of the Anselm Kiefers at the Bilbao Guggenheim. Some paintings can only be appreciated in person.

Just look at the size of Kinect and compare it with faceid embedded in a phone. The word “just” is doing a lot of work in the parent comment.

If a country enters and leaves accords and organizations on a whim, at what point does it become a liability to have that country be at the table at all?

That’s an odd comparison to make. The ‘school system’ isn’t a monolithic system that is actively refusing to acknowledge or take action against sexual predators. Is there an example of a school district that has been shielding predators on an ongoing basis and refusing to take remedial action?

It's also crazy that people are buying into the idea of 'Founder Mode' when Airbnb is one of the companies that is very much riding on the moat it created a while back while not doing anything much that can even remotely be called customer-obsessive (which is the lesson they could really learn from Steve Jobs)

This is great. You are missing True Nutrition.

Also if you could add a simple way to reset the filters, that would be great.

Any product that uses this is more than just the chip, so you cannot get a proportional change in battery life.

Worth mentioning the depaving efforts in Mexico City, particularly in Pedregal in an effort to replenish the ground water. In this case, for the lava bed, not earth and plants.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/depave-paradise/

Curious to know where in SF you lived. Generally there’s bodegas all over the place and you can find fresh produce there. Not to mention, the city has good bakeries everywhere. Fast food (the well known chains) are quite hard to find in most neighborhoods.

Sorry to be pedantic, but not up until, but from the 15th century or so (Babur) until some time in the 18th century (Battle of Plassey). And not all of India but a northern region. Indian history and geography are just too vast to be contained in simple phrases (including what I said above)

Article gift link (if you cannot get past the paywall): https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/health/coolsculpting-side...

Having read many of his books, that’s absolutely not the case. His book ‘The Anarchy’ (and the podcast) goes into great detail about the excesses of colonialism.

So interesting to see William Dalyrumple pop up on HN. He has been writing fascinating history books for decades, particularly about India. He’s currently hosting a podcast called Empire[1] (season 1: British Empire, season 2: Ottoman Empire). This podcast is one of my favorite things

1. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/empire/id1639561921

Tangential to the article itself - the page is fairly unreadable, at least on mobile due to the silly number of ads, an overlaid video ad that doesn’t seem to have a close button and so on. I understand that this is a business that needs ads for revenue, but how do publishers feel good shipping such awful experiences and somehow expect users to want to return to their sites?

It doesn’t always work that way. We sometimes have friends we might not stay actively in touch with, but are able to pick up where we left off when we are back in contact. Friendships are complex.

>California has the same age-adjusted excess mortality as Florida, so the destruction was wrought for naught.

Seems arbitrary to compare with Florida when the linked data shows California ranked 38, and nearly half the excess mortality of states at the top that seemingly didn’t take the same COVID-19 precautions.

When the article begins with such a false premise, it’s hard to take the rest of it seriously

>San Francisco has replaced its DA and now re-funded police

When was SF police de-funded? Budgets have only increased [1] each year, any rhetoric notwithstanding

1. https://abc7news.com/sfpd-budget-defund-the-police-departmen...

The 87,000 additional auditors is a misleading interpretation [1]

Summary: - IRS used to have over 100,000 employees a decade back. This number has fallen due to funding cuts etc to less than 78,000 today.

- The employees are not just auditors - they are support people for tax filing, IT etc.

- There will be further employee attrition over the next decade that would need to be backfilled.

- What Congress has given them is funding to cover hiring of 87,000 employees over the next decade. This will cover backfill for employee attrition + new employees that will include auditors, enhanced support, IT etc. The total growth (again over the next decade) is expected to be 20-30,000 with will bring the IRS back to last decade levels.

TL;DR: IRS isn't going out and hiring 87,000 new (and in some misleading reports, gun toting) agents tomorrow and doubling their workforce. Instead, they are bringing their employee count (auditors and others) back to last decade levels and also replacing departing employees.

1. https://time.com/6204928/irs-87000-agents-factcheck-biden/

Unrelated to the product itself, please make pricing/licensing clear upfront. “Try for free” leads to a page that says “signing up is free”. Great, but what comes after that? Please don’t leave your users guessing.

EVs have plenty of mechanical parts that are not brakes and wheels. It will need servicing, just of a different sort.

Correct. The smart inbox puts in ads. As in the YouTube example here, it's fairly unpredictable if they appear, and when they do - how they appear.

Google products have been incorporating a frustrating amount of dark patterns. In gmail for example, if you load one of the smart inbox tabs, it shows the rows of unread emails at the top. Right when you attempt to click on the top row, it rearranges the rows to show a few rows of ads instead (and the ads are fairly indistinguishable from the unread emails) so you end up unintentionally opening an ad.

Now, there’s no good reason for this loading pattern - since they intend to show the ads, they could have allocated a few rows, shown a loading skeleton, and then asynchronously loaded ads and emails in their expected place. Instead they now get a ton of extra ad clicks, but I wonder how happy their advertisers are to pay for these unintended clicks.

You are mixing in random headlines that were not the results of my scientific consensus (cellphones and cancer?) and headlines that warned of the bad possibilities if nothing was done. The fact that scientific and other advancements have helped avert some of the issues we were warned about shouldn’t be misinterpreted as a failure of the warning but the opposite.

Perhaps there’s a difference between a country that hasn’t implemented mail-in voting yet, and a country that has had it, people using it, and now has efforts to take it away.

Also, before dismissing the racism concerns around voter ID laws, it would be instructive to look at why this is so. The history of the US is steeped in race, and the concerns cannot be dismissed without understanding history.

The Hans Zimmer interview is fascinating. However it was jarring to see him introduce one of the singers doing the rhythmic singing as something unique when it’s essentially the percussion singing that’s common in Indian classical music. I guess even the greats have their blind spots.