generj

A recession is defined as whatever NBER says it is.

2 quarters is a useful shorthand that frequently is wrong. The 2020 recession lasted all of three months; not anywhere near two quarters. The 2001 recession did not have two consecutive quarters of GDP decline.

They explain why they do not use the two quarter method here: https://www.nber.org/research/business-cycle-dating/business...

Even worse, in some jurisdictions the incoming pipeline for hires routes through running the jail or prisons.

The mindset behind being a good cop and a good prison guard are totally different. Exposing hires to the corruption and violence inside prisons right before sending them to police the streets creates a very adversarial mindset against the public.

We are definitely off topic but since we are just leaving the MLK Jr. Holiday so hopefully the forum will indulge our sidebar.

I wish I had a good book for you. My friend probably has six, I may ask him for a recommendation later. There’s a growing movement that says nonviolent actors received too much of the credit for the Civil rights movement, with MLK Jr in particular getting outsized accolades. Giving him credit was very convenient as he was dead and could not directly condemn the current conditions.

40-60% is probably about right for general support for civil rights, but with major caveats. For example, 58% of people supported the Civil Rights Act but only 19% wanted it to be vigorously enforced [0]. So you see for example a backlash to school bussing, NYC schools not being integrated for decades after civil rights, etc. Northerners mostly supported civil rights so long as it only impacted those backwards Southerners but were not ready for real integration. Support for interracial marriage did not reach above 50% approval until in the 1990s despite being allowed nationally by the Supreme Court in 1967. That’s a good example IMO of how civil rights bypassed the slow change in opinion via the courts.

The Harris poll [1] near his death had him at around 75% disapproval and only 50% black approval. Critically this was after he pivoted from a civil rights focus towards anti-war and anti-poverty (both in his mind an obvious extension of the civil rights movement - others did not agree).

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/01/16/50-years-ag... [1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-martin-luther-kin...

He largely did not win hearts and minds. What he did win was the court and a loud enough minority that politicians had to cave. When your cause can sign up an innumerable amount of clean dressed people to volunteer for mob attacks and imprisonment, society has to respect you lest these same committed souls decide dying for the cause might as well require enemies to the cause die as well. The Black Panthers and others had about reached that point, and the implicit threat that if society doesn’t create a true peace society doesn’t get peace was what created a civil rights victory.

MLK Jr. was among the most controversial and least liked members of the country at his death and throughout his campaign for civil rights. Most people would have described the civil rights campaign as flipping a legislative switch deciding for the population.

They definitely will if China (both Chinas) have anything to say about it.

I wonder if Twitter is in breach of contract by restricting API access to their customers (the third party apps).

There’s a decent argument the President is constitutionally obligated to ignore the debt limit.

If Congress doesn’t want the money borrowed, they shouldn’t authorize spending more money then was collected.

To expand on this, it is really hard to even get data sheets on e-Ink unless you have serious cash and are going to order tens of thousands of units.

Unlike LCDs, e-Ink has complicated voltage waveform requirements. The voltage waveforms are what allow partial refreshes and all the other unique benefits of eink - and they are all proprietary.

And there aren’t multiple competing manufacturers, so even though some of the key patents have expired we have not seen a renaissance of display modules.

The situation has actually gotten better - there are a few modules available now for tinkerers from Pimoroni, Waveshare, and AliExpress. But when LCD modules cost 1/10 the price (particularly for larger displays) it becomes hard to justify e-ink.

The largest untapped market for eink is replacing segmented LCD displays for many products. They did not make many inroads because the costs were higher and LCD segmented displays are commodities that even amateurs can order prototypes of for less than $100 with standardized connectors and controllers. E-ink displays were thus only pushed for by aesthetic reasons by product designers.

Many countries and do not allow passengers to wear headphones during take off or landing for this reason.

I was quite shocked at it when an Air Canada flight attendant asked me to remove mine. I now always follow this practice, it’s a reasonable safety precaution.

This is important because most people “losing weight” have made one change to their diet and exercise program while simultaneously eating more or otherwise cheating. However it feels like they are more healthy, and the trend line seems to agree. (Often they are much healthier, just not changing weight but redistributing it, but measuring that is far harder).

People eventually get jaded of the false progress cycle and give up on weight loss because it feels impossible. An app implementing this system would be of great help.

Second Migadu, great company.

Never worry about deliverability. If your DNS provider has oddities that make it annoying to setup they will run your DNS for you.

For $30 a year (domain plus Migadu) you control your email domain. No possibility of being randomly banned by Google either.

If you worried about fines being used to deter activities society doesn’t want, and that fine money being collected as tax revenue, you are at least 200 years too late.

Only down by 1% so far. S&P is down .4%.

Probably people think him being back at Tesla more of the time is better for the company. I have my doubts about that. My big hope is he doesn’t screw up SpaceX close to Starship launching.

And the new poll has a longer time period, so his bots can come in and rescue him (or he can have more time for a Twitter employee to modify the count).

As a bonus if he actually runs the poll for 24 hours before acting it’s effectively a 1 day ban, which was the “Tomorrow” option from the prior poll. It’s just laughable.

That’s a very fair point. Also possible his ex-wife had a false memory as well.

I’m reading too much of my disbelief Elon is a good parent into that story. I think I am retroactively applying modern Elon (weird breeder thing, arguably abusive child naming, repeated attacks on his daughter) to an earlier stage of his life. And that’s also not likely fair or accurate to who Elon was at the time his son died.

And even worse than that, he would have had to have been deposed before paying for it. A bunch of his conversations about the deal were already released in discovery. Twitter lawyers were salivating about catching Elon in a lie at the deposition. It’s notable Musk was willing to deal juuust before the deposition was finally going to happen.

I read the other day that Hughes suffered pretty severely de-habilitating mental illness, and that it isn’t fair to him to compare his decline to Elon. He had severe OCD, allodynia, and other things driving his increasingly erratic behavior.

Several. Some got banned for posting screenshots of an LAPD statement, or just discussions of other journalists being banned.

He claims it did.

But there’s no evidence the dangerous situation happened at all (and even the counter evidence of there being no police report). He’s previously lied about another son dying in his arms (to justify not unbanning Alex Jones) so it’s very feasible the entire incident is made up.

The last flight tracker post was several days before the alleged incident. Totally unclear what link exists between the flight tracker and the alleged incident, unless an ADS-B transponder is on the car and the car is flying.

Even if there was a link, a dedicated stalker is perfectly capable of retrieving the flight information themselves from government websites or other tracking websites. Elon hasn’t even asked for it to be restricted information - which just requires asking the FAA, most flight tracking websites voluntarily comply with the list as well, though not all. That would be a reasonable first step to make, along with privately discussing the incident with the account holder.

Good point about margin. I imagine a good chunk of that margin is from eliminating dealers from their sales model.

Even with the higher margin, Tesla would need an insanely higher volume to justify their market cap. It’s never going to reach those volumes.

I also suspect Tesla will not be able to maintain all of their margin as they face increased competition. Some of that margin doubtlessly comes from selling their FSD - and I think it’s unclear if they will be able to keep selling that at a premium as other car makers catch up and/or regulators investigate some advertising claims around it. Tesla’s highest margins appear to be in China, where operations are distinctly delicate for someone owning a large social media company.

The Semi may legitimately make a difference; we’ll have to see how many they are able to produce and their market uptake. There are going to be other competitors in that space who are more aligned to the trucking industry. The current Tesla Semi seems to be a niche for short haul runs (which is still a big segment).

Any new model introduction has problems, there’s a reason it is popular to avoid the first model year or two.

It’s unlikely these car makers wouldn’t fix these quality control issues after that. By comparison Tesla quality is abysmal and took many years to improve to meet other car makers. It’s hard to stand up large car factories for the first time alongside a new car model.

EVs share probably 90% of the non engine parts with other cars. The big components which are different are the drivetrain (simpler), motors, battery and charging equipment. Motors are a commodity and far simpler to manufacture than ICEs. Batteries are the difficult component right now but will likely become more if a commodity as well. EVs are much easier to build than ICEs.

Ultimately we can expect far higher car quality going forward (from our current period of already excellent car reliability).

Rivian is another insane valuation.

Requiring a non-dealership EV removes all but a handful of companies. Those are the companies that as sibling commentators have pointed out are delivering EVs in volume.

The valuation is just insane, and being propped up by a weird cult of personality.

A combination of higher interest rates, traditional automakers fielding some good EV options in mass, and Elon’s personal instability seem to all be hitting at once to get towards a more reasonable valuation.

I imagine anyone expanding into a new state expects title issues and budgets for goodwill for the first few customers.

I agree. People underestimate the scientific abilities and flexibility of a highly trained technician, particularly on solid planets and moons.

A human living on Mars could operate multiple geographic exploration rovers at much higher speeds than currently (existing rovers get 0.1mph max). This is the benefit of having a 60ms ping time instead of 6-20 minutes. Plus the ability to troubleshoot, clean off solar panels, run slightly different analyses without needing to build it into the probe 8 years ago, assemble sensor stations, etc.

Yes the mass budgets for manned missions are titanic. But with even half-way good mission planning we can get more science done than the equivalent mass of robots - at least for Mars and the Moon. Food and life support mass for long trips to the outer planets (or shielding for Mercury) mean robots will win there.

I was super interested, but the link highlights they are unfortunately shutting this down Classes next month.

You jest but fascism was and is super contagious.

The Nazis went from a fringe political movement to a solid minority voice (with 20% of the seats and about 33% of the vote). Then came the Reichstag Fire and heavy repression of opposition - getting them to 44% of votes in a “free” election. And then came the Enabling Act and there were no more votes.

What this saying means ultimately is that enabling fascism via silence makes people anti-democratic. It does not take many people passively sitting out of the way for authoritarian regimes to take power - and they are only removed by the bullet box not the ballot box.

I will note I can’t find the providence for this saying actually existing in post WW2 Germany and it is likely a modern invention. It is nonetheless a true sentiment of some of the soul searching German and other fascist ruled societies made after WW2.

There are literal fascists within the alt-right, and the conservatives as a whole have failed to distance themselves sufficiently from them.

“If there's a Nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 Nazis.”

Nick Fuentes is a fascist. He has complimented Hitler and Putin - even saying the media comparing Putin to Hitler “as if that wasn't a good thing.” He holds a variety of other repugnant views which are tightly associated with fascism and Nazis.

When Ye and Nick Fuentes (an actual fascist) have dinner with a leader of a party, and that party didn’t immediately abandon that leader, they all qualify under the 11 Nazi’s category. See also: no abandonment or even major pushback against the leader saying “very fine people” were chanting “blood and soil” at Charlottesville etc.

[edit] also in the context of social media moderation, most people moderated hold extreme views, so when talking about conservatives who have been moderated, they are more likely to be fascist. Same as how of moderated left users, they are more likely to be Stalinist’s or other extreme groups when compared to the left population as a whole.

The difference is, sometimes when conservatives have complained about moderation, the examples given were of prominent alt-right fascist adjacent figures being banned. Christian Nationalists and White Nationalists are fundamentally fascists, but some of them are defended in cultural wars by a good chunk of conservative voices. E.g. Alex Jones received conservative op-Ed’s in his support when he lost a lawsuit.

I believe the poster above was suggesting the client browser, not the user of the client, could assist.

So Safari knows that a user is under 13 (due to information entered at sign up by guardians) and will block the user from creating an account if a page has the appropriate HTTP header. Or iOS could do the same for app signups.

It’s been bizarre to see the increasing anti-vax sentiment on Hacker News the last few months.