clairity

i haven't used windows since 2008. the writing was already on the wall back then about which direction microsoft was heading.

you see the same thing happening with apple now. they have enough market dominance that they're no longer constrained to advance tech for the consumer, but rather just for themselves (i.e., their head-long dive into content and advertising). this is exactly what antitrust regulators should be heading off at the pass, but they fail time and again (and again and again).

that's true for any sociopolitical system, and the reason why i push back on dichotomous thinking, especially "left-right" or "democrat-republican" in political discussions. this is the central exploration of Wisdom of Crowds, which i recommend to everyone even though it's considered 'old' now.

it's important to differentiate though. climate change is largely mediopolitically-driven narrative playing into the aims of the fossil fuel industry to delay action (e.g., carbon pricing). pollution is a concrete, immediate issue that kills millions of people annually. we should be attacking pollution like a freight train, not CO₂, which is a gas that's essential to life on earth.

that would mean getting rid of coal, oil and gas as a first, and biggest, and maybe even only, step. we could have already been solving this issue if we hadn't stopped allowing nuclear to be built in the 90's, as in, we could be completely coal free by now and on the road to eliminating gas in our electricity infrastructure. then as grid-scale storage is developed over the next few decades, we could move steadily over to solar and wind over the next century (for both electricity and transportation) as the nuclear plants go out of commission at the end of their 50-70 year lifecycle.

the climate change narrative is amorphous and far in the future, so it's easy to deflect criticism and solutions. not so much with pollution, which has been a problem for over a century already. care deeply and fiercely about pollution, not CO₂.

> "...'the missing middle' (i.e. 20-30m high buildings)..."

the missing middle isn't just what's between two extremes, so here, it's not 20-30m (~65-100ft, or roughly 6-10 stories) as you've stated, though i'd certainly prefer cities to adopt zoning that allows much more density too (along with the mixed-zoning, public transportation and micromobility upgrades needed to support that density).

the missing middle specifically refers to 2-6 story stick-framed buildings that can be built quickly and cheaply while also providing ~4-10× the density of single-family zoning. 6-10 story buildings don't fall in this category since they usually need at least a concrete podium for the first 1-4 stories, which puts it in a different (higher-priced) construction category.

the missing middle is literally the space between single-family homes and the 6+ story buildings that require more expensive construction techniques.

> "I don’t measure or actively mitigate carbon dioxide; however, we do run particulate filters 24/7."

this is the right order of concern. pollution (particulate matter) is much more damaging to our tissues than CO₂, which is basically inert in comparison (e.g., people die of smoking, not working in a stuffy office). life evolved alongside CO₂, but not so much alongside NOₓ, SOₓ, CFC/HFCs, dioxins, and the like. but in every thread about air quality, the majority of the discussion is on CO₂. the mediopolitical narrative is driving hard in this direction, to our detriment, as plainly evident here.

exactly, this is the kind of essential detail that gets glossed over by climate zealotry, and also one of the reasons why we direly need to shift the conversation away from CO₂ (a gas that is essential to life on earth) to pollution (shit that kills millions of people right now).

CO₂ and climate change is a diversionary tactic implicitly endorsed by the fossil fuel industry to focus us on an amorphous, far-future issue to grind away progress on pollution reduction now. and it's working, as evidenced by the fever-pitched focus on climate change rather than pollution, particularly by the neoliberal news outlets (npr, nyt, bbc, etc.).

dave's doesn't seem to do so any longer, but makes you sign a "waiver" for the hottest spice levels now even though they've toned it down quite a bit at this point. howlin' rays (which dave's copied) still uses carolina reapers and is no joke with it's howlin' spice level.

there seems to be two main issues: (1) the uploading of thumbnails regardless of user settings and (2) the ability to watch a video stream unauthorized. the discoverer only details the first, to give anker time to investigate and fix the latter. besides their potential use for image recognition, the thumbnail images are used in notifications. i don't think any devices are powerful enough to do facial recognition on device yet. we've just started to get voice recognition on device, and that entails much less information and a lot smaller problem space. but if someone says they don't want to use cloud services, no data at all should be sent to the cloud.

> "the stuff covering the bones to prevent bone on bone contact in joints"

that's a meniscus, and coats the articulating surfaces (called condyles). synovial fluid in the joint capsule acts as a lubricant for the menisci.

a nodule is a lump.

first, it uses "PM" in the title, but note that upbase is a project management tool, not a product one. project management tooling could be viewed as a subset of product, but in other ways, project management is a related, but separate discipline.

second, if your product management processes deliver no value to your colleagues, then you may need to work on that, perhaps more as an organization than an individual pm. the product management process and tooling should absolutely deliver value to developers, designers, and other individual contributors. most pertinently, tracking velocity is for the team first and foremost, and secondarily for others. it's like keeping score in basketball--it's how the team knows how it's doing.

third, it may be big and "enterprisey", but jira is just fine for product/project management. when folks complain about jira, ~99% of the time, it's a complaint about the process and people involved, but turned toward the tool because it's hard to criticize the offending party directly.

i do agree that product management tooling is secondary to sales, marketing, finance, accounting, etc., and so must interface with those other systems for "truth" rather than being a system of record.

that’s called the income valuation method and is used extensively for commercial property valuation (along with the comparative approach). in residential, it’s usually a combo of cost approach (replacement value of house plus value of land) and comparative. that’s because in many less dense areas, both rental and property comps are hard to come by (to the level of statistical significance).

for perspective, i built a personal crm that told you who to engage next (via a dynamic contact list powered by interaction data streams). it failed[0] because this was not actually the biggest pain point of sales people (folks most likely to use and pay for such a tool), and it was too important a decision point for users to rely on it solely.

a smart tool, it turns out, isn't all that useful, even though it has wow factor. it may even be enough of a wow to be an effective marketing tool, but an effective marketing tool is not an effective productivity tool.

[0]: we found more success as a general sales team dashboard based on the underlying realtime data

looks like css nesting is really coming! "Chromium as of 109.0.5394.0 is updated with the new syntax."[0]

the syntax has been finalized to allow an implied "&" so that it matches scss more closely than the initially selected syntax, to avoid copy-and-paste errors when moving from scss to plain css with nesting.

found this via "A Brief and Probably Only Partially Correct History of CSS Nesting"[1]

[0]: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/7834#issuecomment...

[1]: https://chriscoyier.net/2022/11/09/a-brief-and-probably-only...

i used to tutor mba students on such topics. i'd be happy to address your questions at my standard hourly rate.

what you're saying makes sense (that this process difference could lead to differences in outcome) but i'd still hesitate against extrapolating to industry-wide conclusions from it. there may be other ways that checks & balanaces are incorporated into the chinese system that we're not seeing or hearing about. and you could as easily flip it around and note how amazing it is that there are so few extra buildings being reported as exhibiting problems despite this missing review process. without survey data, it's hard to know for sure how impactful the review process is (relative to cost in both time and money).

i think my critique is more about the idea the process differences have led to materially different outcomes between chinese and american building projects. i've seen some projects in my neighborhood being made with cheap materials and relatively unskilled labor, that lead to water issues too. i spent 9 months with habitat for humanity building an apartment complex and was surprised at how tolerant the process was to completely inexperienced volunteers showing up for a couple hours and doing all kinds of shoddy work.

when i visited beijing about 10 years ago, i was astonished at how much construction was going on, and i could see that the sheer amount of construction happening would make it seem like there were more issues than here in the US. without more concrete data, i'd be skeptical of that kind of anecdote simply playing into our own biases.

you can't simply classify servers or employees categorically as direct or indirect costs, but must consider how the inputs contribute to outputs. a janitor is a direct cost for a cleaning business but not for most others. if you're aws or ibm, then yes, (fractions of) servers are a direct cost. but servers are too course of an input, and non-linearly related, in most saas businesses (e.g., stripe or hubspot) to be apportioned to individual customers. that's not the same as being able to statically divide server costs by the number of customers to reach a per-customer cost, which you can do with any business and any cost.

take an accounting or pricing class if you're really interested in this stuff. that will explain it much better and more in depth than a few sentences here can.

that could be a confounding factor, but it's hard to know for sure without really digging into their data and methods. they may have tried to correct for that. in any case, this study actually seems to suggest that while vaccination probably has a marginal benefit, the effect size is too small to really matter.

it's the accounting/finance profession's fence you're quibbling with here, not something i just made up. those are indirect costs. in marginal analysis you only consider direct costs, not indirect ones (for background: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/directcost.asp).

perhaps consider chesterton's fence here. the topic at hand is pretty boring accounting 101, not some exotic double-dutch irish sandwich with a macau cherry on top. in most cases, you don't (and typically can't) attribute the costs of a given server to a single customer, and the licensing cost discussed here is not what you're charging, but what you're paying to provide the service (e.g., your database licensing costs are not 1:1 mappable to each customer).

right, i was going to make a similar kind of critique (but probably less lucidly). the effect sizes are tiny and the confidence intervals overwhelm the supposed conclusions. seems to be motivated reasoning rather than impartial science.

covid may cause a rise in heart disease in unvaxed individuals relative to vaxed, but this study does nothing to support, and especially doesn't prove, that contention. one thing it does reveal is that the overall incidence rates for myo-/pericarditis are pretty small, vaxed or otherwise.

what would be more interesting is a comparative study of incidence relative to similar cardiopulmonary infections like the flu. that would tell us whether heart disease from covid is something to worry more about than our ambient worry over heart disease in general (which seems relatively mild compared to covid).

in most cases, those (as well as licensing) aren't considered direct, variable costs, but rather sunk costs, as they exist regardless of the number of customers served, even if there's a rough correlation with size. this is akin to sales vs marketing costs. the former is usually a direct cost, while the latter is not, even though marketing costs often scale (roughly) with size too, but most of that cost isn't directly attributable to a specific revenue opportunity as in the sales case.

yah, this is all econ 101 stuff. what you're talking about is a specific application of marginal analysis to a firm's pricing policy, namely, making sure marginal revenue is greater than marginal cost (or, MC ≤ MR), ignoring sunk costs (like fixed costs). in software, fixed costs are high, but variable costs (e.g., COGS) are tiny, which is why software can be priced at just about any level (including "free") and still be profitable (in the absence of competition).

the other economic concept at play here is arbitrage, which is being able to buy low and sell high risk free.

yes, declarative is exactly how i'd describe css "programming". you supply constraints and the css engine applies them as best it can. the constraint declaration language of css is becoming more sophisticated, which is much needed and welcome, but it's not anywhere close to scripting (as in, providing a precise flow of instructions).

they're doing cut and cover on some fraction (maybe 1/3) of the purple line subway extension here in LA. it's still a bloated, expensive, late mess of a project, so technique matters little relative to incentive structure on total cost.

not keeping architects in the loop doesn't sound like that big of a problem, if it just affects the quality of the finish as noted. it'd be much more concerning if engineers weren't signing off on construction changes (which can happen here in the US, even with our bloated procedures).

one simplified way to visualize this: create a corporate entity with the debt raised from investors (typically investment banks)--this entity will have a bunch of cash, the debt it owes for that cash, and no assets--and have that entity buy the target company. the cash gets sent to the old equity owners to relinquish their claim on the target company but the debt (and assets) stays with the merged company.

of course it was a leveraged buyout. no single person has $44 billion burning a hole in their pocket, especially not musk, who has most of his net worth tied up in the equity of his various ventures. and that equity is too valuable to trade for a mediocre company like twitter, so it must have been debt, and you don't raise that much debt from the local credit union.

musk has access to debt and is experienced enough to know how to employ that access to limit his (and his investors') risk exposure. this is literally finance 101.

with that said, should financial systems be tilted this way to favor the wealthy and their capital? no, probably not. while musk is an outlier, in general there's a weak correlation between successes if you take out this skewed access to capital. instead of a few hundred billionaires, we could have hundreds of thousands more of entrepreneurs founding and leading useful companies.

i've had t-mobile before and even tried mint too, but t-mobile is awful in (my area of) LA. so during the pandemic, i switched to visible ($30/mo) and it's been great. no congestion slowdowns yet. it has unlimited talk/text/data, and crucially, unlimited hotspot (for 1 device at a time) when i'm out and need internet for a laptop or tablet. the only potential trip-up is that customer service is chat-/email-only (no phone).

visible just recently added a higher-priced tier for 5G, but don't fall for it. the 4G tier is more than fast enough.

"free market" is more a political slogan than an economic concept. that's why i prefer the term "fair market", which is better aligned with the underlying economic concept and conveys with it the need for a strong and independent regulatory function to rebalance concentrations of market power.

in that vein, we need to break up the three major carriers who together hold ~98% of the market (principally as a result of restricted spectrum allocation). then institute an escalating tax rate based on market (revenue) share to counteract the negative externalities[0] of concentration itself.

[0]: here's one random report (by barclays) that delves into what these negative externalities are on fair markets: https://www.cib.barclays/content/dam/barclaysmicrosites/ibpu...