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An untouchable subject.

The reason Uber initially blew taxi companies out of the water is because taxis greatly limited their service to what was profitable and we're incredibly difficult to work with should you be outside one of their comfort zones. You could always count on Taxis near an airport or for an intra-downtown route but good luck getting a cab to pick you up at your house to take you to another suburban destination. It's not that they'd ignore your call because they sucked at customer service, it's that your call is only worth it to them if there's literally nothing else going on. Even then they might not show up if your request isn't going to end with them back in a profitable starting point for another ride.

The unfortunate part of modern American medicine is that the pharmacy isn't likely to know all the medications the patient is on either. I'm currently going through a minor situation but have discovered that health insurance has, in some cases, switched to a model of partnering with specialized pharmacies for certain treatments. You're forced to use a specialized pharmacy for one specific condition while your day to day corner chain is completely excluded.

Room & board is practically mandatory and costs $17.5k. That cost cannot simply be ignored and was a fraction of that 20 years ago.

"I worked there over 20 years ago."

Enough said. Tuition today is a hair below $40,000 for an in-state student* compared to a hair below $5,000 in the mid 90's. They can afford every penny.

: https://admissions.berkeley.edu/cost

*: https://www.dailycal.org/2014/12/22/history-uc-tuition-since...

"The obvious problem is that I can’t see customers paying that much for delivery - ie. at those wages Door Dash can’t exist."

I am 100% ok with DoorDash and that entire market not existing. We somehow managed without it just 3-4 years ago and it's not like Americans need another ridiculously unhealthy eating option provided with even greater convenience.

How can you compete on quality when every delivery has been sitting in a box for ~10 minutes prior to pickup and ~15 minutes awaiting delivery? Pizza delivery companies like Dominoes spend $$$$$$$ to develop ingredients and methods that ensure that 25 minutes cold pizza is still palatable. That local hibachi or taco joint can't do the same. A cold, premium taco is just as unpalatable as the janky one from the cheap place.

There isn't infinite labor on a global scale but there sure is infinite labor willing to work for what first worlders consider a pittance. This basically highlights why I consider open borders immigration to be worse for everyone overall. The first world gets dragged down the societal ladder while the rest of the world is robbed of everyone with initiative plus the lost productivity they'd glean from uncompromised first world economies.

"However, if a worker rejects too many jobs too frequently, they may receive fewer job offers as a result."

They take those jobs because they lose all access to the chance of profitable jobs otherwise. The people working for door dash aren't exactly the sort of person with the ability to fully understand probabilities and statistics either. I'd say it's fair to assume their business model works by bullying the same psychological behaviors as videogame loot crates, lottery tickets, and casinos. That one huge order that pays $30 after tips quiets the anxiety of losing money on the previous ten orders even if the actual math places the driver in the red. Most people have a very poor sense for overhead costs like vehicle maintenance. The link between miles driven and the rate of repairs required just isn't there.

"However, if a worker rejects too many jobs too frequently, they may receive fewer job offers as a result."

They take those jobs because they lose all access to the chance of profitable jobs otherwise. The people working for door dash aren't exactly the sort of person with the ability to fully understand probabilities and statistics either. I'd say it's fair to assume their business model works by bullying the same psychological behaviors as videogame loot crates, lottery tickets, and casinos. That one huge order that pays $30 after tips quiets the anxiety of losing money on the previous ten orders even if the actual math places the driver in the red.

>We will see an economic depression, also caused by energy problems. The current quantitative easing is actually the first sign of the problems with energy:

One of the only realistic takes in this thread. The current, generationally low price of oil is built entirely upon the output of North American fracking. Fracking is the most capital intensive business on earth at the moment and most players are actually losing money. They are bouyed by the current, generationally low interest rates which are built upon politicized central banking policy. When interest rates rise, fracking grinds to a halt. When fracking stops, the price of oil shoots to 2008 or greater levels and the global economy grinds to a halt. The century scale economic depression that will result entirely invalidates each and every prediction made by the author of the article we're discussing.

Not saying where I learned this from, but the Amazon fulfillment services (fulfillment centers and their 1st party delivery services) have a greater than 30% month over month turnover in my region. No one taking these jobs has any intention of making a career out of it and most aren't even planning to work them for more than a couple months at most. That is exactly the kind of environment that encourages gaming the system in the way you describe because the risk of getting fired within the expected time period employment is so low that it isn't worth doing the job right.

The joke about Juggalo facepaint is both true and funny but I think there is some actual merit to that idea. Camo clothing (and I don't mean the kind you see everyone wearing at rural WalMartss) goes in and out of fashion every couple years. Military-style jackets, boots, and caps (think of a stereotypical anarchist style) are also perennially in style with certain crowds. I don't think it's too far fetched to imagine a future where camo facepaint becomes fashionable enough to be widespread, there's also a lot of artistic potential available in non-traditional patterns and colors.

I can't really see a way for AI cameras to get around properly applied facepaint, especially varieties that are IR absorbent or reflective. I hold the human brain in very high regard when it comes to pattern/symbol/shape recognition and if facepainting techniques are good enough to trick human visual processing, it's going to be good enough to fool any existing AI. For an example of what I mean by proper technique, refer to this video: https://youtu.be/YpzUr3twW4Q

The trick is in getting enough people to adopt such a strategy that you can't be identified through simple exclusion. I think the idea of camo/other facepaint isn't so foreign and unappealing as to never come into common fashion.

That's a pretty clever idea and an easy way to clean $200k a year.

And how much of that 75nm feature is getting picked up by a diamond stylus? The stylii used in metrology grade surface roughness and contour analyzers can't pick up features even remotely close to that size and those are far finer and more sensitive that a turntables stylus.

Pension funds have been allowed to decay so far in such an unseen manner that there is now a universal aversion to peering behind the curtain because the naked truth is too terrible for anyone to process. That there are only a handful of small, independent journalists/bloggers willing to touch the subject, as is the case with this article, is a sign that there is fear at the highest levels of a national conversation on the issue which would be born from honest reporting by mainstream sources. The ramifications that stem from exposing the pension system as utterly broken beyond repair would threaten to topple the whole house of cards propping up modern society.

CalPERS in particular has become subject to multiple mini-scandals recently. The first of which is the competency of their latest CEO and the thoroughness of their hiring practices (1). Even the most charitable interpretation of her resume and skillset would arrive at the conclusion that Marcie Frost is a figurehead/cheerleader type CEO at best. Combine that with the recent announcement of Yu Ben Meng's return to CalPERS as CIO and there is certainly room for concern (2). Meng left CalPERS in 2015 to serve as deputy chief investment officer of China's $3.2 trillion State Administration of Foreign Exchange. We are now facing a situation where the nation's largest public pension is managed by a man considered so trustworthy by the country we are currently waging a trade war against that they placed him in charge of their largest capital fund. Even if everything is financially and legally above board, this kind of tone-deafanagemeny by the CalPERS board does not induce great confidence in their leadership or stewardship abilities.

(1): https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/08/marcie-frosts-shoddy...

(2): https://www.pionline.com/article/20190204/PRINT/190209951/ne...

The police via Red Flag laws which are incredibly easy to abuse.

I wonder if there might be a way to utilize the same effect that creates a Prince Rupert's drop to create that sort of stress in a superconductor. Sure, it would be fragile but it would also be stable without external forces applied. The stresses contained within the surface layer of the bulbous end reach as high as 700mpa which might be increased by using better materials and colder "shock" processes.

So the chiplet strategy is clearly paying dividends for AMD but I'm curious as to what has changed to have allowed this idea to be so effective? It's not like the concept of multi-die CPUs is new, Intel even implemented this on their legendary Q6600 CPU which was basically 2 Core 2 Duo dies on a single chip. The issue with the approach used with the Q6600 was that communication across cores on separate dies was orders of magnitude slower than communication across the cores sharing a die. Is AMD's success down to recent advancements in brand prediction and core scheduling optimization?

If I had to relate this to an HN related topic, I'd say this is closest to the theory of "technical debt". The further your code base moves away from the origin, the more difficult it is to address issues in the foundational code. Fudging around with the basic building blocks of life is extremely risky in an evolutionary perspective, gains can be made but they are going to be smaller (less advantageous) than gains possible by fudging around with top level code. By making base level changes, you effectively halt top level change until everything is proved out. By the time a base level change would have stabilized and the gains realized, the more nimble organisms making top level changes will have long since outcompeted the base changer into oblivion.

Who's going to set things right other than the children of the talented and capable?

Email as a standard is a neutral vector for mass communication but email in it's real-world form as a service provided by large 3rd-parties is not. Email service providers have monopolized the market for personal emails for two reasons, the first being the difficulty of setting up and maintaining a personal email server, and second being the enormously difficult challenge of filtering "spam". Google's Gmail service has a near monopoly over the personal email market and their highly effective spam filters played a huge role in the early success of that platform (large amounts of free storage was the primary reason but their spam filters were also the best at the time). Yes, that's plausible but the context in which it occured does raise questions. On a more anecdotal note, I have noticed that particular emails (membership renewal reminders, specific call-to-action campaign emails, etc) coming from 2nd Amendment groups wind up in my spam folder whereas other, less activity inducing emails from the same groups pass through without issue.

The manner in which emails are classified as spam is something that will always be highly subjective, leaving room for malevolent manipulation to occur. I'm fact, there may be precedent for this dating back to the 2016 election. There was a brief period where all Trump campaign emails were being flagged as spam by Gmail's filter algorithms. Google had plausible deniability in stating that it was a glitch caused by their algorithm's ability to globally flag senders whose emails are overwhelmingly deleted before being opened by users.

I get your point about walking but running? Every personal reason to be running outdoors ultimately ties back to the exertion involved. For example, running to "clear one's mind" is predicated on the effect physical exertion, cardio exercise in particular, has in calming/resetting/clarifying one's state of mind. I guess I could have clarified my original point better as I meant it more in terms of someone choosing to derive personal benefits from physical exertion.

It's easier to consume those things... until winter arrives. Unless you support the massively carbon intensive process of shipping ~80% of each hemisphere's food supply to the other during winter, this isn't viable. Even if that is acceptable, it isn't sustainable.

Doesn't that defeat the entire point of fitness training?

How many people will watch the hearing on C-Span and how many will watch the condensed and heavily editorialized version released by the news source most closely aligned with the preexisting political opinion?

I'm glad to see that article is slowly making the rounds through circles such as this. The implications of the facts presented by that author should terrify anyone concerned about the future of the US and yet the clearly detrimental practices of a company like TransDigm are virtually unreported despite investigations conducted against them at the highest level. The picture painted by Stroller and Kunce is very bleak, so bleak in fact, that I'd say part of the reason issues like this go unreported is because there would be mass panic should the public at-large ever become aware of just how broken everything is.

Interesting, I was always under the impression that chipmunks were susceptible to heart attacks. I can't remember where I read it and I can't find a current source but you are apparently not supposed to harass chipmunks because they can experience stress induced heart attacks when threatened/chased. I've also seen potential evidence for this when my cat chased one around a parking lot only for it to collapse after sprinting around for a solid minute. It was immobile, looked short of breath and eventually died at some point between when I brought my cat in and the next morning.

The problem with bare 18650 cells is in their chemistry. A bad charger + good cell = nasty fire and a good charger + bad cell = the same. Considering the fact that every major online retailer including Amazon has trouble policing fake cells, the liability risks are fairly extreme. If there was a way to completely block all non-UL rated products as well as those with fake UL stickers, I'd say your idea has merit. Unfortunately, the near frictionless world of online markets allows for too much counterfeit risk to enter the picture for such an idea to be workable.

Oh, hey! I know how this story ends: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...