bmismyname

I don't work at Amazon, but I have a few insights here through insider backchannels. It basically all comes down to numbers and the amount of money spent on opposing the union versus how much money they will save on suppressing wages if the union fails. In other words, it's pretty good ROI to invest in union busting at all costs because the cost of a few lawyers and consultants is much lower than paying living wages.

It's unlikely that Amazon employees will be reprimanded or whatever, but they probably will use a different law firm next time around.

Good luck and I hope you succeed, but the (unfortunate) reality check I'll give you is that money rules everything, and if you get even the slightest bit of traction, there is more than a trillion dollars in market cap behind ensuring you (and nobody else) will ever succeed.

The only way to get ahead these days is to either 1) flout the laws or 2) have enough capital and political influence to force your way to success, such as with regulatory capture.

Can we please just have high quality public transit, including high-speed inter-city rail?

Technically Apple doesn't issue the card, Goldman Sachs does. It's also a pretty damn good product as far as credit cards go (and I've used them all). I ended up canceling all my other cards. The only feature the Apple one lacks is the ability to generate card numbers like privacy.com or whatever.

Do you really trust the people running local governments to not mess things up? I certainly don't. I wouldn't trust them to look after my house plants.

Puts aren't a good way to hedge against this because in the event the US empire does collapse, your US dollars won't be of much use. In fact, I'd bet that the stock market will actually shoot up to insane levels because the government response will be more money printing to fund military endeavors.

Probably better to invest in land in places with a (relatively) stable climate, good fresh water supply, and far enough north and high enough in elevation to be protected from the most obvious effects of climate change.

I agree with most of what you said, but Apple is still one of the few big techies that is relying on making better products to increase revenue. All the others have gone down the path of "how do we trick people into transferring their money to us?". In that sense, Apple is exceptional. Their consumer grade hardware, for example, is still unmatched and try as they might nobody has come close.

If I had to bet on one big techie I'd choose Apple, which is probably why their stock has been so resilient. Simultaneously I hope regulators come down hard on the anti-competitive behaviour by Apple (and the others), but I think we're far more likely to see an increase in corruption than a decrease over time.

The cops have way too much money, too much power, and are basically immune from responsibility. Plus there is a ton of evidence to show police don't reduce crime. You reduce crime by improving quality of life, which seems like the antithesis for capitalists these days. The people in charge only want to "help" the poor insofar as it helps move the money into their own pockets.

First it's slow, and then suddenly it's all at once. We're still in the slow phase, for the time being.

Did you read the book? Or at least the wikipedia page?

Here's a fairly recent paper with recent data comparing actual historical data to the book's predictions: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jiec.13084

Quoting from the abstract:

> The two scenarios aligning most closely with observed data indicate a halt in welfare, food, and industrial production over the next decade or so, which puts into question the suitability of continuous economic growth as humanity's goal in the twenty-first century.

I could dig up more sources/data but I'm guessing you aren't going to read them since you certainly haven't read the book.

Plus most of the "innovation" in the west involved outsourcing all the manufacturing and pollution to places with cheap labour and lax environmental and labour laws.

Did you forget a /s? This comment reads like satire.

It'll keep working until it stops. You'd think that with Wikipedia and all the information at our fingertips people would be able to tell a sheep from a wolf, but instead they're more likely to believe the authoritative talk show host because that person makes the tribal signals they like the best.

Fun fact: many major US cities still have lead pipes[1]. It costs about $20,000 to replace a lead service line from the water main to your home if you live in an older home/building, and the cities are not exactly working hard to replace lead mains.

The cheapest way to lower your risk of lead exposure is to install an RO filter if you believe there are lead pipes (there are many different brands, but the one from APEC is popular and affordable). It has the added benefit of reducing exposure to other nasty things which have pretty much contaminated all the drinking water on earth like PFAS.

I have an unsubstantiated pet theory on correlation between lead poisoning and crime in poorer neighbourhoods due to landlords refusing to replace these (why bother if you don't have to drink the water? landlords have no incentive so long as they can extract rents).

In many cities you can get your water tested for free by the city, just do some searching. They've usually got an online form you can fill out and they'll send you a kit that you have to send back.

[1]: https://www.nrdc.org/resources/lead-pipes-are-widespread-and...

I think the scheme they used was to require a phone number to set it up the first time, and after that you could switch to TOTP or whatever. Authy also harvests phone numbers.

This is why I use a fake phone number when I'm forced to provide one, especially when ordering stuff off the internet. Good luck with your business, but I don't want to be in your database. It's quite annoying how every retail establishment tries to onboard you into their data harvesting scheme with their "points" and "rewards". No thanks, if I have to pay extra I'll do that. Phone numbers are terrible in particular because they are PII and can be used to link various data sources together to "enrich" them when selling that data to the brokers.

I do miss the days when you could just go through life not feeling like an NPC in someone's scheme to extract money from your pockets.

You can tell Twitter (and the other techies) don't care about "security" when they force you to use SMS for 2FA when we all know they're doing that to harvest phone numbers because they're a pretty o.k. way to link identities.

Surely they don't mean the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 10th amendments, or the Comity Clause. Maybe there is another amendment that says ICE can kick in your door if they saw non-white people loitering?

Don't get me started on traffic laws. People lost their minds on the roads around the time the COVID lockdowns started. I've always been anti-car, but the kind of insanity I see all the time now (people running red lights, driving on the wrong side of the road to go around traffic, driving on the shoulders on the freeway to bypass congestion) happens almost every single time I get in a car now. In particular, people here run red lights and drive on the wrong side of the road to make left turns constantly.

It sounds anecdotal, but there's plenty of data to back this up: https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-tra...

Good point. Another thing is that much of the big AG "food" crops (corn, soy, etc) are used for industrial purposes, such as cattle feed and ethanol.

California is the biggest producer of food in the US, by a huge margin (about 50% more than Iowa, the #2 producer).

https://data.ers.usda.gov/reports.aspx?ID=17844

I would like to see how it breaks down by red vs. blue, and I suspect there might be a slight edge for team red, but California in particular fills an important niche of supplying most of the non-grain foods, and can produce food year round.

However California is probably going to lose its status as #1 as aridification continues.

Call me a "doomer" or whatever, but I think the inevitable demise of the US empire starts with balkanization (i.e., the states splitting into their regional factions). Basically like a second civil war, except it will look quite different and probably won't involve actual warfare. More like a slowly escalating defiance of laws at a regional level. Without wading into the trap of specific examples, I'd say we're already seeing this play out.

2 books I recommend for anyone interested in the history of this stuff are "Acid Dreams" and "How to Change Your Mind". The latter is a bit more pop-sciency, and the former is probably more factually accurate (though who can say, it's a lot of he-said-she-said). For a fun read on the topic, "The Doors of Perception" is a classic.

There are already libraries that make it easier to do vectorization, which are equivalent to compilers that take generic instructions and convert them into SIMD equivalents (though it's somewhat more nuanced than this). The issue is not so much the compilers, but rather having a standard language for describing how to do the maths on vectors.

It's a lot like the difference between writing C or assembly. Even today, sometimes you need asm to make the code go real quick because what the compiler spits out isn't always optimal (but for the general case, it's quite good).

Same, I absolutely love this extension. You can whitelist the websites you use frequently, and for everything else it's like a groundhog day every day.

The cookie banners can be super annoying sometimes, but they are easily removed with uBlock Origin. I also frequently have to solve captchas, but it's not so bad. For example, every time I visit amazon.com to order toilet paper or whatever, it thinks I'm a bot, but at least amazon's captchas are less annoying than some of the others.

Another one from WaPo mentioning 5 different 1-in-1000 year flooding events, in the US alone:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/2...

One or two events is a coincidence, 5 unlikely events within the span of a few weeks is a pattern.

Good question, there are several, but the one I've played with is this tool from the NOAA: https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/

I've used this tool to inform my decisions with regard to planning for my climate mitigation strategy.

It's worth noting, the last time there was this much CO2 in the atmosphere (>400ppm), sea levels were significantly higher. Estimates are all over the map, but most of them put global sea at least 10m above our current levels.

A few sources:

https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/carbon-dioxide-now-more-th...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1543-2?proof=t

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1233137

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2012.029...

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/200...

EDIT: Fix words.

It depends on who you ask, but I've seen estimates that suggest at least 10m of sea level rise is already "priced in", so to speak.

In the climate crisis discussion communities there's a saying that things are happening "faster than expected", which also applies to the fact that most of the accepted climate models are much more conservative than they should be. The IPCC models (for example) largely ignore tipping points and methane emissions, and their contribution to the exponential rate of increase in climate change.

At this point we're not going to do what's needed to make things less bad (i.e., keeping the carbon in the ground) so my suggestion is to plan for the worst and hope for the best.

Which is why the carbon needs to stay in the ground. But we're taking it out and pumping it into the atmosphere as fast as we can so that we can get a new iPhone every year.