greeneggs

This is a pretty good article on Mercer and Renaissance: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/the-reclusive-... https://archive.ph/8Iuyh

> Magerman told me, “Bob believes that human beings have no inherent value other than how much money they make. A cat has value, he’s said, because it provides pleasure to humans. But if someone is on welfare they have negative value. If he earns a thousand times more than a schoolteacher, then he’s a thousand times more valuable.” Magerman added, “He thinks society is upside down—that government helps the weak people get strong, and makes the strong people weak by taking their money away, through taxes.” … Another former high-level Renaissance employee said, “Bob thinks the less government the better. He’s happy if people don’t trust the government. And if the President’s a bozo? He’s fine with that. He wants it to all fall down.”

It doesn't have to be traded globally. The US could ban oil and gas exports, and that would decouple local prices from the global market.

> I doubt anyone would dispute that public benefits flow disproportionately to those 72 million households for obvious reasons.

I would dispute it. One of the main public benefits, if not the main benefit, is protection of property rights. Those with the most property disproportionately take advantage of this protection.

Are you deliberately confusing taxes with federal income tax?

I think everyone drives less in California than in Florida. (Google says ~14,500 miles annually per licensed driver in Florida, versus ~12,500 miles in California.) Gas prices are a factor in this.

FYI, the last sentence, "Start building today on GroqCloud – sign up for free access here…" links to https://conosle.groq.com/ (instead of "console")

> Edit: You can also "hand feed" your jumping spider with a cotton swab dipped in sugar water. They drink flower nectar in the wild, so my wife and I tried this and it worked!

But don't they need live protein, like flightless fruit flies? I feel like the need to raise prey is the biggest downside to having a jumping spider pet.

> Our existence as a field pretty much hinges on classical computers not being able to simulate all quantum mechanical problems efficiently.

I don't think this is quite accurate. It could be that many of the kinds of quantum simulations we care about can be done efficiently classically, even if the worst-case quantum simulations are classically intractable. Certainly, classical simulation algorithms are steadily improving.

This is a nice composite (not mine) showing the relative sizes of various deep sky objects:

https://www.reddit.com/r/astrophotography/comments/19do9iu/c...

Do you have a link for that, or are you just making up numbers? (Please don't make up statistics.)

These sources both give the civilian labor force participation rate as 62.5% in December 2023.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART/

https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...

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An Adobe employee wrote on Reddit that they plan to allow an unspecified limited number of generations per month, included in the current subscription (even if your subscription is annual). Beyond that there would be an extra fee for more credits, which might or might not roll over to the next month.

Unfortunately, the posts have now been deleted, but you can still see other people's reactions:

https://www.reddit.com/r/photoshop/comments/13qtntz/generati...

I don't understand this argument. The Kenyan is exporting essays to the United States. Would you also call it bad for Kenya if she were building cars for export to the United States? What's the difference? And an American who exports software or cars to Kenya—is this bad for the United States? I don't understand why.

I don't understand why everyone doesn't do this. I'd buy a Tesla if I could get a $7500 credit (I'm income limited).

I feel like your cited article [0] loses most, or all, of its heft when the author admits that 47 percent of the growth in "admin positions"---more precisely, of non-teaching employees---comes from hiring at Stanford's hospital. Doctors, nurses, and other hospital employees shouldn't be counted as part of the university's administrative bloat.

Note that the CDC collects statistics on assisted reproductive technology success rates. Here is the 2019 report: https://www.cdc.gov/art/reports/2019/pdf/2019-Report-ART-Fer... . See especially Figure 3 on page 29 (Percentage of embryo transfers that resulted in live-birth delivery, by patient age and egg or embryo source). There is more data, including from individual clinics, at https://www.cdc.gov/art/artdata/index.html .

To put 15 billion gallons of water in context, that's about the same amount of water as used by 15 to 30 square miles of alfalfa. Arizona has ~400 square miles dedicated to growing alfalfa, worth ~$400 million per year.

(Maybe someone else can put this in terms of Libraries of Congress?)

sources: https://wisdomanswer.com/how-much-water-does-an-alfalfa-plan... https://civileats.com/2021/09/15/climate-change-could-put-an...

In 2019, Toyota also sued California to take away its EPA waiver (dating from the 1963 Clean Air Act) to set its own car mileage standards. Aggressively suing your customers to make their air quality worse goes well beyond lobbying.

US new car sales are still more than 2,000,000 fewer per year than pre-pandemic (about a 12% drop) [1], mostly because of restricted supply. A less than .5 percentage point change in default rates is not nearly enough to close this gap.

[1] https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/usa-auto-industry-total-sales-...

MSCI ESG ratings:

Tesla: A

https://www.msci.com/our-solutions/esg-investing/esg-ratings...

Exxon: BBB

https://www.msci.com/our-solutions/esg-investing/esg-ratings...

All the more reason to leave them be. Free admission at the British Museum, versus €10 at the Acropolis Museum.

The Future Forest Company spreads basalt on forestland for carbon sequestration [1].

Wren offers it as one of its carbon offsets [2]. However, it is currently the most expensive of their offset programs, per ton of carbon offset or removed, and significantly so.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90642582/this-company-is-crushin...

[2] https://www.wren.co/projects/mineral-weathering-in-scotland

I don't buy this analogy. Bankruptcy isn't the only market discipline. If a firm is underperforming, then it will be bought up and sold for parts. This happens all the time, and low interest rates only make it easier.

Anyway, the article's main mistake is in thinking that the Fed controls interest rates. It can only control nominal interest rates, not real interest rates (adjusted for inflation).

Like any other competitive market, real interest rates are set by supply and demand. If companies, entrepreneurs, and investors see few ways of investing cash to increase revenue or improve efficiency, then interest rates must be low. Better investment (real) returns can come from new technologies and innovations, or from demographic surges.

Yes, we all want better investment opportunities, in real dollars. But the Fed can't control this.

That's not exactly true. Free filing is also opposed by influential conservatives. The argument goes that if paying taxes were easier, then people wouldn't pay as much attention and oppose taxes as much. (I'm paraphrasing as best I can.)

Here's an old article from 2013 on it, for example, and a letter from Grover Norquist (sponsor of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge) and others.

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax...

https://www.atr.org/taxpayer-advocates-issue-joint-free-file...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_for_Tax_Reform#Taxpa...

This perspective seems to be incredibly optimistic. Oil-rich dictators can live a long time, even as they drive their countries to ruin. I don't know that there is much of a power base against him, and he still seems to have broad support from the populace (which might or might not matter).

Take for example Saddam Hussein. His 1980-1988 failed invasion of Iran cost 100,000 to 200,000 Iraqi lives (plus wounded and 70,000 Iraqi POWs held by Iran). Then the 1990-1991 failed invasion of Kuwait cost another 20,000 to 50,000 Iraqi lives… And yet he might well have never lost control, short of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.

Sure. From Kepler's third law, assuming that the Moon's mass is negligible (it is actually ~1.2% of Earth's mass), the semi-major axis of the moon's orbit is given by (mu T^2 / 4 pi^2)^{1/3} [1]. Substituting T = 27.32 days and mu = G M_Earth = 3.986004418×10^14 m^3/s^2 [2], gives a distance of 3.83 x 10^8 m. Estimating the Moon's apparent angle at 31 arcminutes, its diameter is estimated to be 2 * (distance) * ArcSin[31/2 arcminutes], or 3.46 x 10^3 km. According to Google, the right answer is about 3.47 * 10^3 km.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_period#Small_body_orbi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_gravitational_paramet...

[3] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28%28%5C%5BMu%5D+T%5E2...

Having skilled people spend their time on this is exactly why it is suboptimal. Had Bezos spent $500 million on Bitcoin or, say, gold bars, it wouldn't matter much. Up to rounding errors, it is just moving numbers around. Here we have $500 million dollars' worth of people's time and effort going to waste. For all the good this yacht does, they might as well be digging holes in the ground and then filling them up again.

Yes, of course it can. And this doesn't seem like cheating. I would be interesting in knowing how the difficulty (worst and average case) for the different models changes over time.

Of course, on the last day (in 2027?), there will only be one word left, so the game can be solved with one query.

That's not interesting, but for how long will the game stay interesting? How hard will it still be in 2023, 2024, etc.?

It enables differential pricing, which is not zero sum.

Indoor rowing

Physically separated bike lanes are even worse. You can't get out of them easily if you come across a lot of debris. And they are harder to street clean, so debris accumulates more.