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People shouldn’t be tricked into taking on tens of thousands of dollars in depreciation by committing to many years of monthly payments. Yes this system is good for car manufacturers, but no I don’t think that’s worth how much it ruins the finances of a good chunk of the country.

To my mind, a freezer is a pretty low priority item if you are trying to mitigate “shit hits the fan” tail risk. You can easily survive without a freezer, and a dependency on a freezer isn’t a good thing in that scenario. Then you just have a bunch of food that’s doing to go bad if the power goes out.

IMO calling someone your direct report carries with it the connotation that you also have non-direct reports. Maybe I’ve been misinterpreting but I’ve been hearing it as a subtle way someone can bring up how high they are on the org chart.

I believe that illiilliiililil is expressing a somewhat complex set of opinions:

1) They genuinely don’t like the 1619 project.

2) They understand that the Pulitzer is supposed to be an award for good journalism.

3) They believe that journalism about some subjects is more likely to win a Pulitzer without being the best by illiilliiililil‘s standards. You could compare it to the concept of an “Oscar bait” movie: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_bait

I’m not sure I agree with this criticism - I think exploring tough subjects can lead to great work that is especially deserving of praise.

The fact that some risks don’t bite us is not a reason to ignore risks.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/14/a-failure-but-not-of-p...

ChowNow and qMenu are apps that restaurants can pay a small fee to use, that provide a similar experience to users as the big apps. The selection of restaurants is more limited but there are enough options for me on there in the Bay Area. Some restaurants do offer delivery on these apps, although I’m not sure if it’s restaurant employees doing delivery or people hired by the app.

It seems safer for a big person to ride a too-small bike than a small person to ride a too-big bike.

It’s interesting that you can call the clerk to determine that a record is sealed - it sounds like a potential vulnerability where sealed records can be exposed by social engineering.

If you look at the Uber 2019 annual report, page 64, you can see that revenue was $14.1B, cost of revenue was $7.1B, and sales and marketing was $4.6B.

$14.1B - $7.1B - $4.6B = $2.4B

Driver bonuses fall under cost of revenue, and user promotions fall under sales and marketing. It’s only after subtracting other overhead that the company becomes unprofitable.

Other overhead includes operations and support, research and development, and general administrative. If you read the descriptions of these categories it becomes apparent that they are going to need to lay people off if they cut spending there. Sales and marketing also includes a lot of headcount.

All the above math includes both rides and eats. There are other numbers in the annual report that show that rides is making more money overall while other areas are losing more.

In a world of multinational conglomerates, it’s very common for a business to have a supplier that is owned by the owner of a competitor in a different line of business.

The way to falsify it is to track down the identity of the human author of every internet comment. Simple!

To get philosophical I won’t say that I “know” it’s happening. Most of the world consists of things I don’t know about. The best I can do is build a mental model based on what I do know.

That theory is discussed in other threads. I’m just responding to the “funding the competition” argument, which is a different angle.

If the amount of revenue you are going to give is a rounding error for AWS, you are not going to move the needle on the funding of their other projects. This should be a non-factor in your decision-making process.

A lot of people are used to eating at a workplace cafeteria or eating out as part of their normal routine. In my case I’ve shifted to ordering delivery or takeout for some meals which I almost never did before. I recognize that I’m privileged to be able to afford to do this, but I think it’s common among a big chunk of the population. People are checking on local restaurants and spreading the word about which are offering takeout to try to keep them going. I feel like it’s the least I can do to help.

People would say things like “losing money on every ride” but this didn’t appear to be correct based on the released financials. It was more like “making some money on rides overall, but spending tons of money on overhead”. Losing ride volume only makes that situation worse.

I’m a pretty successful Silicon Valley SWE. I enthusiastically use psychedelics, but I’m not going to mention them to my coworkers.

I’ve heard, I think many years ago, this fact there is not much risk or star collisions when galaxies collide. But I wonder, given more recent knowledge of how common exoplanets are, if there is a more significant risk of disruptions to the planetary systems that surround the stars. These planetary systems are much larger than the stars themselves.

Have you been reading the mass comments/tweets on political stories lately? Some of it does seem bot-like to me. I don’t have a strong opinion about how much this is happening. But I know I could personally run a bot that generates political spam with GPT-2. I know a lot of people want to influence the political conversation. I mean, people get paid salaries to write comments online. So I can’t help but suspect that someone is using tools that allow it to be done a lot more cheaply.

I found this article’s central claim to be unsupported by its content. It talks about lot about how some specific uses of electricity are increasing, but it doesn’t say how the absolute magnitude of those uses compares to overall carbon emissions. This would be necessary to show that “the cloud is making a green energy future impossible”. I suspect this information was left out because cloud energy use accounts for a very small slice of global emissions.

The statistics they do cite are often misleading, and are never very convincing. For example, comparing the energy use from streaming a video to riding a train or walking. In reality, all of those energy uses are negligible. In other words, they are comparing video streaming to the most efficient versions of transportation, and ignoring the sources of most transportation-related emissions. Run that comparison between video streaming and flying to a meeting in person!

It reminds me of an article I once saw funded by the meat industry which showed that the water requirements to produce a calorie of beef are lower than a calorie of lettuce (ignoring calorie-dense plants such as grains and legumes that are much more efficient).

This one is a doozy:

> This grand ‘experiment’ in shifting societal energy use is visible, at least indirectly, in one high-level fact set. By the first week of April, U.S. gasoline use had collapsed by 30 percent, but overall electric demand was down less than seven percent.

By the article’s own numbers, energy use actually went down! Then they somehow use this fact to prove that the digital future will use more energy?

Later, they make more strange comparisons, like datacenters to skyscrapers, when of course, most of the world’s energy use doesn’t come from skyscrapers. And they bizarrely compare datacenter energy use to electric car energy use, when again, electric cars obviously aren’t yet a major component of energy usage.

Overall, I feel this article is not fact-driven reporting. It’s twisting the numbers with the aim of making people who care about the environment misdirect their concerns toward software companies.

To make a more constructive recommendation - if you’re concerned about carbon emissions, start by looking at a breakdown of which industries are responsible for the most emissions!

I think it’s important to have a solid answer to this question. When people believe that a plan is weak on the details, this is what they are talking about. It gives the impression that the promises of the plan stated upfront (we will save money by moving away from wasteful health care system) are some sleight of hand, moving costs from a well-defined bucket to a mystery bucket we don’t measure.

While this dynamic may exist in some form, I don’t think it’s a powerful enough affect to stop the spread. There is not a firm dichotomy of spreaders vs. isolators and the composition probably changes over time, such that the virus still has many opportunities to spread to previously-isolated groups.

If they’re being “taken care of”, how is the plan to eliminate their jobs supposed to save money?

My understanding is Apple has a pretty good margin while most other manufacturers are hardly profitable. It’s a competitive industry. Nobody is charging twice as much as they need to because nobody has that kind of market power.

The US has a federal minimum wage of $7.25. Maybe some state has a lower minimum wage law, but if so it isn’t in force.

If I were making minimum wage I’d probably be more in the “buy an iPhone SE every 4 years” rather than “buy a top iPhone every 2 years” category.

But if I are going to critique other people’s spending patterns, I’d start with anyone who bought a new car, not a phone.

Lots of people are spending many hours a week on their phones. And that time is noticeably more enjoyable with a better-functioning phone. I think it’s rational to compare the cost of phone to the cost of something like a car, appliance, or couch and consider how much value you get out of it for how many years when deciding whether the price tag is worth it. Personally, I’d pay at least a dollar an hour to always use a nicer phone, and that pays for a higher end phone every few years.

Consider the case of someone who is upgrading from the iPhone SE they bought four years ago. $100/year seems like a pretty good deal for their next phone.

If you liked Subnautica, try Outer Wilds.

It’s common for entities to face legal action in multiple theaters from different entities stemming from the same events. A well-known example is OJ Simpson first fighting a criminal case, and later a civil case.

Here, the SEC is an administrative entity (part of the executive branch) with the power to levy fines. Now shareholders are filing a civil suit for damages. Sometimes, the SEC will participate in a multi-party settlement that can resolve administrative, civil, and even criminal charges at the same time - but that didn’t happen here.

The site is called News so I think it’s worth mentioning when something isn’t news.

I don’t think we have a problem in this country where the interests of landowners are underrepresented.

It depends on the prospects of the company and how good investment opportunity are. For a company in a fast-growing market it’s probably better to invest and expand the empire. For a more mature company it’s probably better to return the cash to shareholders so they can invest somewhere else.