fwungy

You can't have an over class without an under class. Rich people need poor people to do the work.

One problem is that resume reading software doesn't understand contracting usually so it lowers your scoring.

Take a long ride around Seattle, for one example.

Surprise surprise. I was going to DC a lot during 2008-2009, when the economy was not in good shape. The place felt untouched. Expensive restaurants everywhere full of people, and everyone bustling about with their little lapel pins that notated the department they worked for, like little aristocrats.

DC is a bubble. They don't live in the real world there.

Are you a doctor or scientist? What is your credential to critique his view.

Perhaps the questions about vaccine safety and efficacy have some basis in the empirical experiences of practitioners and recipients?

The human immune system is vastly complicated and not even close to being fully understood by science.

Is it unreasonable to want intelligent, unbiased answers to reasonable questions, or is that sacrilege "because we already know"?

A fundamental of science is repetition of experiments. This is how we know and verify what we know: it will be true consistently with repetition.

If vaccines are as safe and effective as claimed the sellers and proponents should have no problem defending them. In fact so doing would bolster their position, if they are being honest.

FAANG is nice, but it doesn't guarantee anything.

"Plan" is a weak verb.

E.g. - I _plan_ to marry Ariane Grande.

A Jackery 1000 is already 20+ lbs and over $1000, and it wouldn't get an EV far. Spare power packs would have to be large and very expensive.

Better idea would be a mobile fast charging truck. Ironically that truck would have to be a diesel to make sure it had the range to support distant stranded vehicles, and not be insanely heavy and expensive itself.

In my area the top realtors are Chinese and specialize in investment properties for wealthy Chinese. The white/Hispanic locals who used to live here can't afford to compete in the market and so are leaving.

Asians are the leading demographic group in income and educational achievement now. Whites don't even come close in aggregate.

Whites move in = gentrification Whites move out = white flight

A courageous woman. RIP.

In the big picture of the geologic time scale we are at risk for an ice age soon enough. The normal state of the Earth is cold and icy, but still habitable, perhaps barely. No one is sure why the ice ages happen, the most popular theory is that it's caused by perturbations in Earth's orbit.

Protip: you can fit any set of n points with a polynomial of order n-1.

This is why complex models are fraught with overfit concerns, and are poor predictors of future trends when any underlying assumptions change.

There has been so much money and time spent on battery research. We are in the incremental phase of battery evolution. There will not likely be any major leap in battery cost or performance.

A battery is a box of minerals with electrochemical reactivity, i.e. it can catch on fire if something goes wrong. More energy from the battery means more minerals, which means higher cost. More reactive chemistries can reduce mineral inputs, but tend to be more expensive or less stable.

Tldr; there are no quantum leaps available for batteries. If Toyota has a giant range EV it's either really expensive or it's a research vehicle staying far away from consumers.

He's got a compelling voice, but it's not an objectively good singer.

Private oil companies like Exxon are only about 10% of oil production. The biggies are the state oil companies, on which state wealth depends. They aren't going to give that up.

Climate Change is the essence of "Intractable Problems".

There is tremendous wealth in oil reserves that is outside the control of the G7 countries: Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia. There is also demand for this oil from non-G7 nations who simply don't have the money to go carbon free without descent into starvation, poverty and chaos.

Going carbon free on a big enough scale to impact the climate, according to existing models, requires getting these petroleum reserve holders to give up their massive wealth in exchange for little to nothing, and large developing economies to destabilize themselves to go carbon neutral.

IT ISN"T GOING TO HAPPEN.

Poor Indians and Chinese aren't going to give up their opportunity to secure better lives for themselves for the sake of the climate.

We need to be thinking in terms of mitigations and technologies that reduce climate impacts while being economically sensible.

Yes, it's not optimal, but choices made in the real world rarely are, and as adults we must learn to make them.

Carole King isn't a technically outstanding singer, but her voice is compelling. She's a bit of an outlier, and someone whose songs have been regularly covered by men.

But how many men could cover a Kate Bush song without it being ridiculous?

Tin Pan Alley was still more individually driven than what we have today where a tune is passed around between as many as 10-20 producer/songwriters who add some technical candy to the mix. Many of these songs lack bridges or even choruses, and are highly assisted by technology. T-Pain made it big because he mastered Auto-Tune very early, for example.

If you look at net worth as a measure of success women singers absolutely dominate men, especially when you consider that the high achieving men tend to be well past their prime or dead.

Modern songwriting is like a factory. There are multiple technicians adding an editing parts to give it marketable attributes.

The days of Joni Mitchell holing up in a Paris estate with Steinway grand to pour out her soul, and make it up the charts are long gone.

s/think/click/.

FTFY.

As a male singer/songwriter I can tell you that women songwriters tend to, for unknown reasons, write their songs around female vocal capabilities, which are objectively higher than men's in terms of range and fluidity.

Women cover male songwriters frequently, but who are the great female songwriters? Joni Mitchell, Billie Holiday, Kate Bush, and so on. They all tend to be excellent vocalists who write stuff that the average man simply can't match. While the great male songwriters are often weak to average singers: Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Lennon/McCartney. Women kill on those songs, with barely an effort sometimes.

As for modern Top40. It sucks. Who cares?

My first real software job, I asked how much do we charge for this thing? Sales guy told me it was $50k. I was like, what? This thing isn't worth 50k. Sales man replied "It's not what it's worth, it's what they'll pay."

Never forgot it.

Asians outscore all other ethnic groups in school.

The schools are under government order to equalize educational outcomes, but because Asians dominate in educational performance the only feasible way to get outcomes is to crush the top, i.e. it's easier to make everyone dumber than make everyone smarter.

It's not OK to harm Asians to elevate other groups when Asians have been victims of racism in America for hundreds of years.

Perhaps it wasn't free speech they cared about, but their own, and once they achieved a place where their ideas were dominant the emphasis shifted accordingly?

State oil companies are much bigger the international oil companies we call Big Oil.

If Exxon cuts back or stops there is plenty of surplus in Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran to make up the shortfall.

There are trillions of dollars in state owned oil reserves that no one is walking away from.

It's all so tiresome.

Yeah, and those tests are $5-$10/per.

So I'm supposed to spend $20 to find out I'm asymptomatic or not even infected so I can isolate myself?

People get sick. People die. It's not fair, but it also is fair because we all die. Death is actually the only fair thing there is.

I watched the university I was in for graduate school add all sorts of campus buildings, luxury apartments, and new administrative titles and hierarchies. Handing out massive contracts is a good job, but it's all borne on the students backs, and most of that stuff was not necessary for a good education.

They do a lot of catering to student egos too to get them in the door - "ooh, you're so special and wonderful, we're going to help you make it with our programs", knowing full well that most of the degrees were garbage.

There are no white people. There are Italians, Germans, Slavs, Nords, and so on. They are different groups of people with different cultures and languages.

Grouping all light skinned people into one made up ethnic group is completely disregarding their unique and special heritages, and the oppressions that happened between them.