aodin

I assume OP meant "last 4 reported financial quarters":

    2019 Q3   139.48M
    2019 Q2  (702.14M)
    2019 Q1  (408.33M)
    2018 Q4   143.00M

Total of (827.99M) [1]

[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/tsla/financials/...

For 2013-2017, PG&E had a total net income of $6.1 billion, or about $1.2 billion a year from an average revenue of $16.9 billion [1]. Only in 2018 did they incur a loss of $6.8 billion, mainly because of the $11.5 billion in charges for their role in starting wildfires.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PCG/pacific-gas-el...

What gives you that impression? Arguably, it was his early $700 million parachute that undermined the WeWork IPO.

For an article with quite a few numbers, it seems to be missing some basic ones:

* Taiwan, area 36,197 km^2, population density 651 / km^2 [1]

* California, area 403,932 km^2, population density 97 / km^2 [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Taiwan

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories...

I think the best summary of Yang's view of UBI comes from his own FAQ [1]:

> We are experiencing the greatest economic and technological shift in human history, and our institutions can’t keep up. Without the Freedom Dividend, we will see opportunities shrink as more and more work gets performed by software, AI, and robots. Markets don’t work well when people don’t have any money to spend. The Freedom Dividend is a vital step to helping society transform through the greatest automation wave in human history.

[1] https://www.yang2020.com/what-is-freedom-dividend-faq/

> over the very long term, automation probably has played a role in limiting manufacturing’s share of employment in the U.S. Factories really have become more advanced and efficient since, say, the 1970s.

Can anyone at Slate read a chart? US employment in manufacturing as a percentage of non-farm labor dropped from 32% post-WW2 to less than 10% today [1]. This change didn't start "sometime in the 1970s", but has been a consistent downward trend post-WW2. The low hanging fruit of automation (from mechanical feedback mechanisms to programmable logic controllers) are all pre-1970s inventions.

And so what if different jobs are created for those that are lost? The article itself admits those jobs will either be lower paying or require more advanced education. Job re-training is mostly a myth [2]. No matter what, an entire generation of unemployed will suffer. I grew up in Detroit. I know what happens when the jobs base shifts.

[1] https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2014/04/the-decline-of-manuf...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/magazine/retraining-jobs-...

You can read the study here: http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/driverless/

"Autonomous trucks could replace as many as 294,000 long-distance drivers, including some of the best jobs in the industry. Many other freight-moving jobs will be created in their place, perhaps even more than will be lost, but these new jobs will be local driving and last-mile delivery jobs that—absent proactive public policy—will likely be misclassified independent contractors and have lower wages and poor working conditions."

PG&E filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protections on Jan. 29th of this year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Gas_and_Electric_Compa...

You're arguing against a straw man. I agree with you: PG&E has acted terribly. The attempted executive bonuses (currently being denied by a court) and stock buybacks ($250MM in F'18, $395MM in F'17, and $968MM in F'16) are especially egregious. The company should no longer exist.

But PG&E are not the only offenders here. You seem to be arguing that there's regulatory capture (correct me if I'm wrong), but the Public Utilities Commission still exists, and they have the authority to regulate PG&E. If the commission is neglecting its duties, then it should be restructured as well. A president of the commission has been forced out before, and it should probably be done again. If they neglected such an obvious case of greed and mismanagement because of bribery (sorry, lobbying), that should be a criminal case, too.

Public officials can throw PG&E under the bus all they want, but if systematic changes aren't made, we'll be doing this song and dance again in a few years with a different utility.

Exactly, the question we should all be asking is how it got to this point. I reckon you'll find a lot to blame with both the utilities and state government, and the existing incentives for both.

However, to your point about LADWP, I think you're making an overeager classification. It's not a matter of being "geographic adjacent", but being liable for the infrastructure that would start wildfires in at-risk regions. Take a look at the difference in coverage areas of Californias utilities: https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/maps/serviceareas/Electric_Service...

edit: it is tangential to this issue, but LADWP does not have a very glamorous history, either.

The dangerous combination that warrants blackouts is high winds, dry brush, and exposed live wires.

While this combination is more likely in a desert, it's not true of all. For instance, the Salt River Project that oversees electricity transmission in Arizona switched to building underground lines in the 1970s. https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/asked-answered/20...

The intensity of these blackouts is driven not just by weather, but by a major change in risk assessment by the utilities. PG&E, the utility that services most of northern California, was sued by a number of insurance entities after it was found that their equipment was the cause of several major wildfires over the last few years. Most notably the 2018 Camp Fire, which was the deadliest and most expensive wildfire in California history.

But most importantly, it's what didn't happen: the state of California did not bail out or grant PG&E immunity from these lawsuits. PG&E settled with the insurance entities and has since filed for bankruptcy protection, since the possible liability is larger than their market cap.

The blackouts are a way to minimize further risk and liability. But I would also guess that the intensity of blackouts is a not so subtle middle finger by the utilities to the state government for its resigned treatment of these issues.

The issue at hand is dry brush and trees being blown across live wires and sparking wild fires. The blackouts are targeted at the areas where this is most likely to occur. Namely, not heavy urban areas.

Although not as widely reported, SoCal Edison is also doing rolling blackouts in at-risk areas https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-10/l-a-face...

The failure of gendarme knights at Mohács is probably the most salient point to the original topic. The Hungarian forces were clearly obsolete. That fact had been profoundly demonstrated over a year earlier with the French failure at Pavia. So why did they still field the forces they did?

If my understanding is correct, the existence of gendarme knights was deeply entwined not only with the concept of nobility in Europe, but with the economic foundations of Feudalism. The structure of which was primarily focused on a how a unit of population could field a single knight into battle. In short, a different army would require more than just additional training or logistics, but an underlying societal shift. Just as Feudalism rose because Martel recognized the effectiveness of armored cavalry, it would take the adoption of gunpowder, which specifically made armored cavalry ineffective, before there was need for another restructuring: one that led to professional armies and eventually nation states.

It would be pure hubris to believe we're done with these sorts of societal shifts. Just as nuclear weapons made large-scale warfare between nation states pointless, we may find that drones, and other weapons that allow cheap, asymmetrical force projection, may make even smaller engagements an exercise in mutually assured destruction. And that could challenge the entire nature of the American military-industrial complex and its global facsimiles.

> The Houthi spokesman, Yahya Sarea, told al-Masirah TV, which is owned by the Houthi movement and is based in Beirut, that further attacks could be expected in the future.

> He said Saturday's attack was one of the biggest operations the Houthi forces had undertaken inside Saudi Arabia and was carried out in "co-operation with the honourable people inside the kingdom".

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-49703143

Over 660 years before the Battle of Nicopolis, the French under Charles Martel defeated the Umayyad Caliphate at the Battle of Tours[1] using phalanxes of heavy infantry against lightly armored Arabian calvary. The difference being that the French forces purposefully took a defensive position on top of several hills instead of initiating an attack up them.

The battles are an interesting echo through history. Perhaps the lesson is simply "hold the high ground".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tours

The change in job description from just "operations" to "developer operations" over the past decade is best captured by the growing number of systems that must be managed per person, often larger by a factor of 10 times or more (e.g. going from 10 systems per person to 100+).

I appreciate the self-reflective views on this "new" job role, but they often seem to miss the rather basic market forces at work. More systems, more automation, new skills and demands.

RemovedInDjango30Warning inherits from the python built-in DeprecationWarning, so it can ignored on the command line with:

    python -Wa -Wignore::DeprecationWarning

The above, however, will ignore all DeprecationWarning warnings. You can further filter this ignore if you know the module where the warning originates: https://docs.python.org/3/library/warnings.html#describing-w...

Alternatively, if you find a package import is causing this warning, you can wrap the import in a context manager that ignores the warning:

    import warnings
    from django.utils.deprecation import RemovedInDjango30Warning

    with warnings.catch_warnings():
        warnings.simplefilter("ignore", RemovedInDjango30Warning)
        import MODULE

When Jack White (of the White Stripes, The Raconteurs, and more) opened Third Man Pressing in 2017, he had the first vinyl pressing machines built in over 35 years. The machines were build by NEWBILT in Germany [1].

Third Man Pressing's about page also has a great video about the process: https://thirdmanpressing.com/about

[1] https://newbilt-machinery.com

> B Corporations have no special legal standing

You're correct that B Lab's certification has no special legal standing. A "benefit corporation", however, is a recognized legal entity in many US states [1]. Patagonia is both a certified B Lab B Corp and a private benefit corporation. I should have made this point clearer.

> No corporation is required to "maximize shareholder value"

The rise in benefit corporation legislation was in part caused by the 2010 eBay v. Newmark decision in Delaware, which included the statement, "Promoting, protecting, or pursuing nonstockholder considerations must lead at some point to value for stockholders." [2] Note that this is still a vague statement, not using "profit" or any specific timeframe. I know that this case is still hotly debated, and I don't know enough to comment on all its implications.

Outside of a legal framework, it can be argued that all corporate directors that are non-majority owners of their public companies do have a requirement to "maximize shareholder value", or, to radically oversimplify the process, they will be replaced by shareholder vote.

So I should drop the "legal" modifier to my comments, and just refer to "obligations" to the shareholders and "action" by the shareholders.

Again, I do not know what significance the recent letter has on any of this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation [2] https://www.delawarelitigation.com/uploads/file/int51%281%29...

I read your original comment as you wanting more references to 'consumer', which, of course, I found a bit odd.

Patagonia is also a B Corp [1], and it has a legal obligation to the mission statement that you've mentioned, not just maximizing shareholder value. I think the parent comment is just snidely remarking that the C Corps that have signed the letter are still required to maximize shareholder value, or they will face legal action.

I am uncertain how this letter changes the established case law regarding C Corps.

[1] https://www.patagonia.com/b-lab.html

What distinction are you making between the two?

$1.1 billion cash https://www.businessinsider.com/yahoos-board-approves-11-bil...

Women's dominance of open water long distance swimming is mostly from the higher natural buoyancy of body fat rather than any sex specific ketogenic effects.

https://www.thecut.com/2016/09/the-obscure-endurance-sport-w...

As others have pointed out, Michigan has had a 10 cent deposit since 1978 and consistently has redemption rates over 90%, even hitting 94.2% in 2014: http://www.bottlebill.org/legislation/usa/michigan.htm

The fear that these rates were the product of fraud even lead to amendments to the recycling act in 2008, namely adding a state-specific mark to bottles. Yet the redemption rate remains over 90%.

Marc Lore, the founder of jet.com, is currently the CEO of Walmart eCommerce U.S.

Are you an insider? Where have you heard that Walmart was unable to use any of the jet.com technology?

What a strange article - a discussion of Walmart's ecommerce technology without a single mention of its jet.com acquisition, which had over 1,000 employees in 2016 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet.com)?

The article is not praiseworthy enough to be a PR plant, and it lacks any substance from insiders. Seems to be tea leaf reading more than anything.

I'd also add that the acquisition cost of Flipkart was largely driven by direct competition with Amazon during the bidding process.

You're comparing a survey (NHANES), which is a questionnaire completed by volunteers, to an active treatment medical study with a placebo control group. Comparing the N count between these two is essentially apples to oranges.

As to the results of the salt intake survey (Pogoda et al.), it is describing a correlation, not a causation. The actual relationship between salt intake and migraines could also be inverted, or completely independent.

If you use terraform, I put together this example project for AWS + IPv6: https://github.com/aodin/aws-ipv6