jartelt

People were mainly just annoyed that rather than getting a free phone or some cash as a gift, they instead got the ability to choose a charity to receive a donation from Google (which has "value" but not monetary or physical value to the employee). The expected to receive a phone/cash so it felt like less compensation/bonus when they didn't receive it.

I doubt anyone was thinking about donation related tax breaks or anything like that. It was simply "sure I will have Google give $500 to this food bank, but why don't I get a new phone or cash bonus?"

If I recall correctly, the employees just picked a charity and Google gave the donation. The "gift" was being able to pick the charity. I don't think there was any employee tax break.

At least for me, the key was to keep it capped at 10 hours a week. With more hours than that I would have struggled to balance coursework, social life, work, and sleep.

You definitely can't pay for everything on 10 hours a week, but it at least pays the bar tab...

Totally agree. You can graduate from your state school with <$100k in debt easily. You can get much lower debt levels if you don't stay in the expensive dorms (with expensive meal plans) after your freshman year, if you plan ahead and graduate in 4 years, and if you apply for many local/state scholarships (in my experience the national scholarships are a waste of time).

As an engineering student, you can also get paid internships each summer (can often pay >$10k) or can be a paid research assistant for a professor during the year for ~10 hours week (pays for groceries each week).

Again, it's just not true that existing nuclear is extremely cheap. States in the US have recently had to bailout nuclear plant operators because they are struggling to compete against solar, wind, and cheap natural gas (see Illinois and Ohio as examples). These plants were built 30+ years ago, but still struggle to operate profitably today! In the past 10 years, something like 20 plants have been decommissioned for cost reasons.

Now I totally agree that we should keep existing plants running for as long as possible for climate reasons. I am fine with subsidizing them to a certain extent because they produce carbon free power. But even the existing plants are expensive to run and you should acknowledge that instead of saying otherwise...

Just for context, numbers I have been told from multiple fertility doctors are:

20-30% of eggs extracted will fertilize and grow to day 5 blastocysts (aka embryos). The rest will die before reaching day 5.

If the eggs were preserved before the women turned 35, each blastocyst has a roughly 70% chance of being chromosomally normal (which means it is a "good, viable embryo"). For women above 35 years old, the percentage of viable blastocysts goes down (e.g. for a 40 year old, ~40% of blastocysts are viable). This is why is it is important to preserve eggs early.

Each chromosomally normal day 5 blastocyst has about a 50% chance to result in a live birth after it is transferred.

So... if you are 35 years old and start with say 12 frozen eggs, you are maybe going to end up with 2-3 viable day 5 embryos, which are likely to turn into 1.5 children.

Note that this presumes everything is in working order with the woman's reproductive system. Egg quality issues or other issues can make the probabilities for each step decrease.

The fees and dilution companies take on when doing a SPAC are typically higher than if they had done an IPO. SPACs also can and often do pop up just like IPOs.

When you go with a SPAC you are basically paying more fees in exchange for a faster route to go public and more price certainty. In most cases high flying companies with great numbers are better off doing a direct listing or IPO than a SPAC.

One issue is a lot of retail people bought GME options. If those expire in the money, these people will be on the hook to buy 100s of shares of GME and likely don't have the cash on hand to purchase the shares (which leave RH holding the bag).

On one hand, you could say RH shouldn't let people buy options if RH doesn't believe those people can pay up when the option expires. On the other hand, you have people buying options who maybe don't understand that you need cash to buy the shares if the option expires in the money.

My wife went into anaphylaxis at an urgent care facility. The doctor there administered an epi and then called 911 to get an ambulance to the nearest hospital.

We ended up getting a >$2,000 bill for a 10 minute ambulance ride because the ambulance company was out-of-network. The ambulance company then had the audacity to send the bill to collections before the 30 day pay period even expired...

So yea, even if you have good insurance you can still get bit by these issues in emergencies! Unfortunately, this new bill does not even address the out of network ambulance issue.

There are questions about the efficacy of some meniscus surgeries performed for knee pain. Outcomes are rehab are often similar to outcomes after surgery + rehab.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28522452/

Regarding something like your rotator cup issue: it's not simply a question of doing no treatment (you just having a painful shoulder) vs. having your surgery. It is more does having your rotator cup surgery and associated post-op rehab statistically work better than having a "sham" placebo surgery and doing the associated post-op rehab. People can begin to feel better after having placebo surgeries where nothing was actually repaired.

Below is a study seeking to measure the efficacy of rotator cuff surgeries. The point is that even this surgery, which I think you had performed and were happy with, does not necessarily have clear, proven efficacy vs. a placebo surgery.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6530362/

In this case, the mRNA just gets your body to produce a part of the spike protein that is on the virus. Once the spike protein is floating around in your body, your immune system recognizes the spike protein and starts an immune response. The spike proteins themselves cannot actually replicate and attack the body. They are just a small part of the virus structure.

If you inject with virus, presumably the virus would begin to replicate and attack your body.

The directions on extra strength tylenol say:

-take 2 caplets every 6 hours while symptoms last. -do not take more than 6 caplets in 24 hours, unless directed by a doctor.

It's not too crazy that someone in pain or feverish could think "maybe if I just take an extra pill or two I'll feel better and it will be totally safe..."

But when they are in session, they focus on important issues like playing revisionist history with your children's school textbooks...

Sure for the more rural parts of IL, you could just as easily live in WI, IN, or IA. A small town in one of those states is not that much different than one in a different state.

But if you want to live in Chicago or the Chicago suburbs, moving to Milwaukee, Madison, or Indianapolis is not the same. Those cities are smaller and won't have the same job opportunities. You also have a major airport in O'hare which allows for easy travel, while airports in WI and IN are smaller with fewer direct flights.

Plus IL has Northwestern and the University of Illinois, which are top tier research universities supplying a lot of jobs. UW-Madison is also a good school, but not in the same league and the past governor in the WI was not good for their university system.

You can also take a look at how WI and IA handle the COVID situation and it tells you a little about the state governments in those states.

Tylenol is surprisingly easy to overdose on and is well known to cause liver damage. This is especially true if you take extra strength tylenol. It is recommended to stay below 3,000 mg of tylenol within 24 hours, which is only 6 extra strength pills. If you take a bit extra and get over 4,000 mg per day for multiple days, you can get major issues. There just is not much margin for error with tylenol.

I think people often get confused because you can typically take a bunch of ibuprofen pills for pain and there are rarely serious side effects. But ibuprofen and tylenol are much different in this regard, despite the fact that both relieve pain and both can be easily bought in a drug store.

You don't leave billions on the table to generate hype. You could just as easily raise the extra billions in the IPO and then spend $100 million in ads to generate hype (and it would be much cheaper).

They sold X number of shares in the IPO at at $68 per share price and then the next morning, shares were selling at >$130 per share. The money left on the table is due to them selling at $68 when they likely could have sold for high (given the pent up demand).

Some people argue that they wouldn't have been able to sell all X shares at $130 per share. That may be the case, but it's really hard not to think the $68 price was way too low.

You can issue more shares to raise more money and drive the price down, but you never can undo the discount you gave the IPO investors.

And... spinning up that trillion dollar market would likely be worth every penny if it prevents continued warming, prevents further significant sea level rise, prevents migration crises due to flooding/droughts/etc, and prevents further ocean acidification.

Oil and gas companies (and many companies) are going to continue to use fossil fuels regardless of whether or not we invest in direct capture. By your logic, I could say that investing in soil remediation also incentivizes people to keep driving their ICE vehicles...

The point is that we are almost certainly going to blow past the 1.5 degree C (and likely 2 degree C) mark if we continue to decarbonize at a slow pace. To avoid this fate, we need to do rapidly electrify everything AND we need to remove carbon from the atmosphere.

Direct air capture will never be free, but compared to the cost of future negative climate change impacts the cost of direct air capture could be totally justified. At the very least, it is worth investing in the technology to see if it can become a game changer.

The climate models clearly show that carbon capture is needed to meet the 1.5-2 degree C target. Without carbon capture of some sort we will very likely have >2 degree C.

Once you come to that understanding, the question is not how do we pay for carbon capture. Rather, it is why wouldn't we pay for carbon capture now so that we avoid the massive costs and negative consequences associated with a >2 degree C rise in global temperatures (droughts, more intense storms, massive human migration, sea level rise, etc.).

You can't just criticize the cost of carbon capture without acknowledging the costs associated with not doing carbon capture.

The problem is that even if we do everything you propose - rapidly deploy renewable energy tech, replace natural furnaces with heat pumps after the furnaces break, quickly transition to EVs, etc. - the best we can hope for is only 1.5 degrees C warming.

Perfect behavior from here on out is not enough to prevent significant warming. There is simply too much carbon in the atmosphere and too many carbon emitting machines in use today that will emit until they reach end of life. They acknowledge this in the IPCC reports and have already baked in aggressive use of carbon capture technology in order to meet the 1.5 C target.

Simply put, we need to continue to invest in carbon capture technology. This includes direct air capture, remediating soil to retain more carbon, preventing deforestation, etc. If we do not do this, we are going to blow past the 1.5 degree C mark.

The Pfizer press release reported a week (or so) ago said the vaccine was "over 90% effective" in the preliminary data. They did not explicitly say the vaccine was 90.000% effective.

The 6.1M miles was self-driving in real life, with a safety driver in the car.

The simulation portion only comes into play if the safety driver intervenes in a real life situation. In this case, they go back and simulate what would have happened in the safety driver did nothing.

>> But that may lead to unfairly low ratings for the restaurant.

> If (say) 30% of the restaurant's patrons choose to get the food via food delivery, why shouldn't those folks' ratings of the food be factored into the restaurant's rating?

If the restaurant has chosen to focus on dine in service because that generates the much of their revenue (alcohol sales, desserts, etc.), it would be a shame if their ratings were damaged by delivery customers. People check ratings/reviews before dining out, so having a bunch of bad reviews due to unwanted delivery could really affect dine in traffic as well. It's not fair to expect the restaurant to cater to these delivery customers when they not actually chosen to run a delivery service.

You may be correct, but I would just note that Uber and Uberpool are not perfect by any means. I've had a good number of ubers that are dirty or smelly, that have poor drivers, that have inadequate trunk space, or that have little to no leg room. Sometimes it is great with ubers, but it can be very hit or miss.

Customers may be willing to trade off on ride speed if Waymo gives them a better user experience in terms ride quality and vehicle standardization (i.e. the roomy Waymo minivan).

In the hot markets (e.g. bay area), homes already have an inspection done and all potential buyers are able to look at the inspection report. In that case waiving inspection contingencies is not as wild/crazy as it sounds.

At least in the bay area, several homes I looked at had clear disclosures stating that they were in "very high fire hazard zones."

The bigger issue for us was what to do with this info. The best the realtor can do is say your homeowners insurance may be more expensive. But, the realtor won't know if insurance companies will decide to stop covering homes in high fire danger zones.

I think many people see the high fire danger zone disclosure and just hope that the state government will force insurance companies to keep covering their homes.

This isn't a flagship cost. It is $700 for the Pixel 5 vs. $1,000+ for an iPhone.

The only solution to the wildfire problem offered by Trump is that California should do a better job raking up leaves/pine needles and should remove more dead fuel from forests. I think that is much more intellectually dishonest, especially given that Trump is in control of the US Forest Service, which is the agency that would be in charge of raking the leaves and removing the dead trees...

If Trump drastically increases the budget to the USFS and starts a new and improved forest management program, I will gladly applaud the effort. Sadly, I doubt that will happen.