jartelt

I've read that part of what they do is effectively steal affiliate referrals from other websites. Say you click on an affiliate referral link from a blog that takes you to retailers website. Normally that blog would get a cut of whatever you buy at that retailer. However, if you then use your Honey extension, their affiliate link takes over and gets credit for the sale. Honey can then give you a small discount that is a portion of their affiliate commission.

In some sense Honey can steal the affiliate commissions from blogs and other websites since you use Honey right before the sale.

The midwest of the US is neither a desert nor wild. It's mostly farm land.

There is no requirement that the grid requires "baseload" sources of power. The grid can operate with flexible sources of power that can ramp (gas, some hydro, etc.) in addition to wind and solar. If anything nuclear and coal, which can only run at 80-100% capacity or 0% capacity are inconvenient and inflexible sources of power.

The grid survives fine when nuclear and coal plants go offline for several days for maintenance/turn-arounds!

Most homeless folks do not have drug addictions or serious mental disorders. The majority of them just recently lost jobs or were evicted for not paying rent and live in their car for some time in between shelters and figuring out how to get housing. These transient or temporarily homeless make up the majority of the homeless population (~75%) and can definitely be helped out with temporary housing and other measures.

Chronically homeless folks make up only ~25% of the homeless population and of them less than half have mental illness or addiction issues. So, most chronically homeless people can be helped with housing and other measures.

My point is just that the crazy yelling homeless guy you see on the street in SF is a minority when it comes to the homeless population. You are just much more likely to see him because he is yelling on the street in SF. However, for every crazy homeless guy yelling, there are >5 people living in their cars who just need some temporary help to get back on their feet.

Silicon Valley Power still relies on some PG&E transmission lines to bring power in that is generated outside Santa Clara. My point is just that PG&E has an influence on most every electricity user in its territory (even those with community or county run local distribution grids).

Would your home be worth more if the single family home next to you was demolished and a multi-floor apartment building was built next to you?

The situation you describe is applicable to the apartment complexes and new developments being built along El Camino Real on the peninsula, but you are ignoring the issue of single family home zoning. There is a ton of opposition to upzoning in pretty much all neighborhoods on the peninsula. No body wants a duplex next to their single-family home, so they prevent any zoning changes.

I think it's more likely that a typical $2M house on the peninsula is paying much less than $27,000/year in property taxes because of prop 13.

Only the homes that have been sold in the last ~5 years are actually paying 1% of property value in yearly taxes. Many homes are paying much, much less because they haven't been sold in 20 years and/or were passed down within the family. Or, the owners move out and rent the home and continue to get artificially low property taxes (while increasing rent higher and higher reach year).

Just an FYI - Google Maps doesn't get traffic or user data from Waze. Maps gets it's data from Android and people who have Google Maps open on their phones.

https://fortune.com/2019/10/11/waze-google-maps-how-it-works...

I am talking about investing in battery installations for grid services (i.e. buying and building battery installations) instead of building natural gas peaker plants or building other more tradition infrastructure. I am not saying they should have made equity investments in battery startups.

I don't see a reason why they couldn't rate base and make a return on battery installs. Instead they only wanted to building the same stuff they always built (more power plants and more transmission).

Some areas only have one transmission line feeding them power, so there is no way to reroute. If that transmission line goes through an area with high fire risk, PG&E will cut the line and then everything fed by that line loses power.

I imagine people would like PG&E to have a functioning website that shows where power is going to be turned off, to have a more predictable warning system so people can have more than a few hours notice of impending blackouts, to have better managed community centers so people can access essential resources during blackouts, etc.

This is relatively basic stuff that a large corporation should be able to figure out with a ~year of notice. Instead there first few blackouts have been very poorly managed despite the fact that PG&E knew this was coming.

They pretty much refused to invest in and install any forward looking technologies (microgrid tech, tech to quickly cut off power to damaged lines, battery storage, more distributed generation, more switches to help isolate parts of the grid, etc.). They just wanted to continue building new natural gas plants and to fight against distributed solar.

They could have spent the last 20 years working to make the grid for nimble, flexible, and safe. They also could have actually done the tree trimming they were supposed to do. Instead they slow walked all innovation and are now scrambling to make up for it.

The book doesn't simply say that practicing something for 10,000 hours will make you a master. The point is that people who are masters at something (or known as brilliant or experts in their field) didn't just magically get to that point by having a particular talent. They got there by having a particular talent, being born into particular circumstances, AND THEN putting in a ton of work (hence the 10,000 hour reference).

Bill Gates wasn't born a great programmer and businessman. He was born smart and into a situation where he had access to a computer and then he worked his butt off to learn. Similarly, great athletes are both talented and work like crazy to hone their craft.

The point I took from the book is that hard work and many, many hours of study and/or practice is essential in order to get to the top of a field. Doing the hard work will not automatically get you to the top since at some point lack of talent or lack of resources may get in the way. But, you need to do the hard work in order to give yourself a chance to make it to the top.

The company believed it was ready for an IPO, but all the potential IPO investors disagreed after reading the S-1 and doing some diligence. In a sense the system worked well in that regard.

The big issue was with the private investors letting the CEO do whatever he wanted and pushing the valuation up very high.

Self-paid insurance plans only work if you require every one to buy a plan. Otherwise many healthy people choose to go uncovered and the insurance pools get a higher portion of sick folks. Obamacare tried to get around this by using the individual mandate penalty. However, that was taken apart by the republican congress, so I think it's safe to say that self-pay insurance was/is not straight forward.

The most straightforward way is to have a universal coverage provided by the government (funded by tax revenue). Then we get rid of the whole problem of some people skipping out on coverage and free riding on the system.

California air quality regulators have stated that we shouldn't have any housing within 500 feet of freeways. Living near freeways increases your risk of a host of negative health effects (asthma, heart issues, etc).

https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-freeway-pollu...

I imagine a lot gig economy workers sit in their car between orders. What else are you going to do between uber rides? You either listen to something, watch something, or read a book. Maybe you are seeing some of those?

Running shoes are typically only designed to last for at most 500 miles. It's just hard to make a foam material that can provide cushion but also not break down over time (and still not cost a fortune).

I think the best practice is to only use your running shoes when you run. Wearing them around town as you do errands just adds the amount of time you are compressing the foam in the soles. That said, the old running shoes still work fine for walking around after the 500 mile mark. They just don't provide much cushion to absorb impact.

For anyone considering where to go to graduate school...

One's PhD experience is highly dependent on the university one attends and especially the professor that one works under. Each lab has a different culture and each professor treats students differently. It also matters a lot whether you are on fellowship or not (someone funded directly from a professor's grant is easier to bully/exploit).

Just like you should speak to employees at a company before joining it to get an idea of culture and work/life balance, prospective graduate students should speak to current graduate students to get an idea of life at a given lab. Most graduate students are openly aware of which professors are known for treating students like indentured servants and which are known for being hands off and generous with research funds. If you are trying to pick a university/lab, definitely go to visits and speak to 4th/5th year grad students (preferably over a beer or two). Typically by the end of their PhD, graduate students are willing to tell you the truth about the different labs/professors.

Also, remember that is often totally ok to switch labs within 1-2 years. Yes, it may set you back some on your progress, but it can be much better than being miserable for 5 years.

Many peoples' photos can be improved by 1) trying to be more still while the HDR photos are being captured, 2) resist the urge to zoom, 3) tap on the area of the photo you want to be in focus before shooting, and 4) generally stick with landscape mode.

This is especially true when taking a picture of someone in front of a mountain (or something similar). Don't zoom! Take a picture of the mountains with the people in view, not a close up picture of the people with a sliver of mountain in the background.

Pumped hydro storage is the gold standard for large scale storage, but it is only cost effective in certain geographic areas. Many of the prime areas for pumped hydro are already being utilized in developed countries. So, we can't really implement a ton more pumped hydro.

Melting and re-solidifying salt or water is done at smaller scale, but has not been used for large scale storage. Some grocery stores use systems like this to shift cooling loads a few hours, but nothing at grid scale.

To make a serious impact we need big scalable solutions. Batteries are in the lead here since the price keeps coming down. They also have the advantage of being able to discharge at both high power and low power.

I understand that one is privileged to some extent to have been able to pay off student debt. But, I can't help but think it could be problematic to cancel all student debt and in effect penalize all those who worked hard to save and pay off their debt.

Only a couple years ago it was advantageous to pay off your student debt quickly to avoid interest. Now it seems beneficial to pay the monthly minimum only and hope that the debt gets forgiven by the government at some point...

Does any one know if any of the Democratic candidates have talked about this issue?

Commercial solar is more expensive than solar in a field or utility scale solar. The lowest costs for solar you see quoted in the press will always be for large-scale utility solar installations that are ground mounted.

Anytime you put the solar panels on a rooftop, the price goes up. That said, putting an installation on a commercial property with a large, flat roof allows for lower prices when compared to residential rooftop solar.

Many physical labor jobs require applicants to take a drug test and breathalyzer on their first day of work. For some reason, a fair number of workers do not realize this and end up failing one of the tests and get fired on the first day.

The devil is in the details (who is selling shares, lock-up period, etc) and in how the stock does over the next few years, but...

-Having a high price allows the company to raise money in the IPO with less dilution. A high price is also good for anyone selling stock in the offering or selling stock after the lockup (assuming the price remains high until the lockup)

-Having a low price causes more dilution for the same amount of capital raised, so this is worse off for the company stockholders. It is good for people who want to buy stock in the IPO though.

-Accurately priced IPO is harder to define. Some say an accurately price IPO is one that pops up 50% on the 1st day. Others say that IPOs with large pops are not great because they show the company left money on the table.

-Ultimately, the most important thing is that the company and stock perform well over the next several years. Bankers make their fees on the IPO, but pretty much everyone else wants the price to be stable or rise through the lock up period and then wants it to keep doing well!

The amount of power incident from the sun is roughly 1000 W/m^2 in a sunny area. Good Silicon PV panels will capture 20% of that power generating 200 W/m^2 at peak. Getting anything more than that is going to be too expensive for a car application.

Pulling 600 W/m^2 from a PV panel may be theoretically possible, but the world record efficiency for a PV device is still less than 50%. To get above 40% efficiency you need to use very expensive multijunction devices and solar concentrators (i.e. not going to work on a car).

I believe the point is that you if you don't need to raise any money, you can do a direct listing instead of an IPO. Then you allow investor liquidity without selling equity.

Assuming you want to keep Tumblr running, you are also buying the ~200 employees and the costs of running the site. Assuming the 200 employees cost $100k each (salary + benefits) and you are already at $20M in costs.

Cost. We can make single junction GaAs solar cells with efficiency close to 30% (damn close to the theoretical limit for a single junction cell of ~33%)and we can make GaAs based multijunction cells that have efficiencies above 40%. It's just that those cells are so expensive that they really are only useful for niche applications (e.g. space).

Meanwhile silicon and CdTe solar cells continue to decrease in price and increase in efficiency year after year. At this point the current technology is cheap enough to be profitably used to supply power in many regions of the world. Any one who says we need a break through in solar to make it economic is wrong. At this point the solar panels themselves are less than half the cost of a solar installation.

Nearly all press releases talking about efficiencies over 50% are just talking about unpractical theoretical limits that would require cooling the solar cells to freezing temperatures or other schemes (i.e. talking about the carnot limit instead of the shockleyy-quiesser limit).

Any one should be able to visit any national park, wilderness area, or other beautiful place and take as many pictures as they want... as long as they follow the rules and regulations.

Park your car where you are supposed to, stay on the trail, don't use a drone if it's not allowed, carry out your trash, don't feed the animals, don't leave your toilet paper under a tree, etc.

Sure I get annoyed when people take too long to snap their photo, but I also get annoyed at people at the grocery store, on the train, etc. You just have to deal with it and go on with your life! Just because some one else likes to take pictures, doesn't mean you should shame them for being a "millennial influencers". But we all should shame the people who don't follow the rules (and these people have been around since before instagram).