jartelt

They already get a decent amount of flak for investing a lot of money in their Other Bets. Imagine how much shareholder animus there would be if they started investing 10s of billions more?

Fungi, bugs, bacteria, etc. break down the tree. Some CO2 gets released during this process and then CO2 gets released when the bugs die and decompose. CO2 also gets released if the dead forest burns.

There is no set rule that says you need to get x% of your power from a stable "base load" producer. In many regions of the US you could cover daily demand using a dynamic combination of wind, solar, hydro, and natural gas. The base load power story has been pushed by coal/nuclear advocates to try to maintain skepticism about renewables.

In reality, power sources that have little to no flexibility in power output (coal and nuclear) are not ideal either. They either produce at near capacity or they are offline. You can't throttle a nuclear plant from 80% capacity to 50% capacity. As a grid manager, this doesn't always make things easier.

Plus, the fact that the grid survives when a nuclear plant or coal plant goes offline for maintenance shows that there is flexibility available.

We just need to stop looking at "base load power" as only an advantage and acknowledge that only being able to produce 0 watts or 1 gigawatt of power output is also very inflexible and not always an advantage...

Most electric forklifts use lead acid batteries. These batteries are only warrantied for 1-2 years because they fail unpredictably after that time frame (hence why they get replaced on that time frame). They also take forever to charge and their performance and lifetime is highly dependent on temperature. Basically, they are a pain.

EV buses will not be using lead acid and will use longer life battery tech (e.g. Li-ion), so your reason #2 will not be as big of an issue.

No one wants to make the investment to build a plant that costs several billion dollars and will take up to 10 years to build. There have been attempts to build new plants in the US but the cost over runs have been huge. Rate payers are fed up with billion dollar cost increases.

Plus, many of the plants that are currently operating in the states are losing money because their electricity is too costly. We have had a series of nuclear plant bailouts in the past few years. If you can't make money after the construction costs have already be amortized, how can you make money on a new plant?

It's just a very poor financial investment to build a large reactor in the states (unless something changes).

At the same time big tech companies are always complaining about not being able to find qualified engineers.

A portion of those people who were filtered out because they get nervous during interviews or got stumped by a riddle or esoteric question, could have been entirely qualified to be a good or great engineer.

Big tech companies should be designing interviews that don't find just people who are awesome at interviews and riddles.

Many buyers often neglect that they put $50k into their kitchen remodel, bought a new roof, and repaired the water heater/AC/washer along the way. So that $100k check feels like pure profit, but often is just reimbursement for past expenses.

In many high cost of living markets rent for a modest apartment is much cheaper than the cost of a mortgage on even the smallest house you can find.

For example, you can rent an apartment on the peninsula in the Bay Area for less than $3,000 a month, but buying the smallest house you can find on the peninsula will cost you at least $4,500 a month for just the mortgage.

If you rent in this case you can take the $1,500 in savings (plus the savings from no property tax, maintenance, homeowners insurance, etc.), and save/invest it.

Agree that the Spotify discovery is bad. I find myself going back to Pandora, which is sad considering I have Spotify premium.

Deaths from solar and wind are almost entirely due to falls during installation and service. I looked into this a few years ago while writing my thesis and death rate per TWhr for different energy sources was: coal (29), oil (18), natural gas (2.8), biofuel/biomass (4.6), hydro (1.4), solar (0.11), wind (0.06), and nuclear (0.052).

Yet AA, Delta, and United are each still operating and each valued at over $10B today. The point is that the airline industry has several players operating and competing and has not totally imploded and fares have not skyrocketed. Many are predicting Uber and lyft will either raise fares a ton or the companies will totally fail and be worthless. I'm saying there is a middle ground where they compete without killing each other.

Many farmers in the Midwest are actually millionaires that own large swathes of land. Yes, they work very hard, but they also like to complain a lot despite the fact that many of them are better off than many non-farmers in the Midwest.

How do Delta, United, American Airlines, and Southwest all operate within the same market and not have fare wars constantly leading to bankruptcy? If you were correct, it seems like it would be impossible for several airlines to operate within the US. Yet, several airlines somehow manage to set prices that allow them to operate. I'm not saying Lyft and Uber will ultimately be successful (I don't know), but it wouldn't unheard of for multiple players to operate in the ride sharing market and not constantly have a fare war.

The investors from the last funding round paid about the same share price as the IPO price, so they haven't really made or lost any money. It certainly wasn't a good investment for them (0% return), but I don't think they have taken a haircut yet. It will ultimately depend on where the stock price goes.

People in some countries have been cooking with indoor wood-fired stoves forever, yet we know for sure that these stoves are bad for respiratory health. That doesn't mean all the research is wrong!

I think the big take away is that you should pretty much always turn on the exhaust hood over your stove top when you cook. Doing so removes many of the particles generated by cooking.

In the article it says "Another perk of consistent refrigeration is shelf life: It jumps from about 21 days to almost 50 days."

> If you don't care about showing off then you won't publish anything. People who are actually altruistic won't tell you about their altruism.

My point is that I think your thesis is too cynical. Many people start out writing their blogs or answer questions on public forums with the intent of trying to help other people out. The motivation can be of the form "I solved this problem and I am going to write about it because maybe my solution will save someone else time" rather than "I solved this problem and I am going to write about it so that everyone visits my website and I get famous." Maybe they become more motivated by vanity and blog metrics later on if their blog takes off. But, many people write stuff online with the intent to help others out and not solely out of hunger for respect, admiration and recognition.

> Today, anyone can broadcast. But that doesn't mean that everyone should broadcast. The old gatekepers weren't perfect but they served a necessary purpose. Who are the new gatekeepers?

You lost me here.

I think your view is too cynical. People also can be motivated by altruism or by wanting to pay it forward. I've answered plenty of questions on facebook/reddit/etc. and do so because people have answered my questions in the past.

The part you are correct about is that it is easy to then get wrapped up in how many visitors your blog gets or how many upvotes your answer gets. Those vanity metrics definitely pull on the vanity strings. But, some people definitely do not care about "showing-off" when they put something up online.

Seems like if you don't change something you are potentially losing out on a lot of great students. Maybe you do not need to change your e-mail service, but I would hope you are at least warning applicants about this issue somewhere in the application process.

Commute, plane rides, going for a walk, cleaning the house... pretty much any time I otherwise would listen to music or nothing, but instead I want to be entertained and learn a little something.

This is correct. The odds that a VC investment fails because the company copied work and gets caught/sued is very low. Thus, there is little incentive to dig through all the weeds to ensure that absolutely no work was copied.

Ultimately, the VCs probably just ask the founders "Hey, your product looks very similar to product A, how is yours different and did you develop it on your own?" If the founder denies copying and gives a reasonable answer for how they developed it on their own, the VC then makes a judgement. They also may hire some consultants or have some outside experts look at the tech stack to make sure no red flags pop up.

However, you can't dig through every line of code and every document in diligence and compare it to several other companies code/docs. It would take too long and everyone involved (VCs, lawyers, start-up) would be annoyed.

If you are the university dean or administrator who hires the professors, you maybe prefer the hot-shot professor who brings in a boatload of research grant money over the professor who gets the best teacher ratings.

The university gets a cut of the grant money and gains a bunch of reputation points for putting out cutting edge research. High teacher ratings are great, but the big universities care less about these and more about the number of Science and Nature papers a professor produces.

I imagine it is just hard and annoying to try to enforce a time limit. You don't want your cashiers and baristas to have to keep track of how long each person has been sitting at a table. Plus, your cashiers may not be comfortable asking a homeless person to leave the establishment since it could lead to a confrontation.

On top of that, I could totally see a time limit rule being implemented poorly. The well-to-do looking businessman probably never gets asked to leave, while the young non-white person gets asked to leave...

I'm not saying cash-less is a good system, just saying the other policies have their issues as well.

Yes, the board could have absolutely done that. And Bezos could have asked the board to do that as well, but chose no to. If the company did that, I argue it would have been just as successful (if not more) and many of their low wage workers would be more loyal and would have more wealth. The primary difference would be Jeff Bezos having a smaller fortune.

For profit companies can pay their workers better and still prosper. No one is suggesting Amazon should have been a non-profit. The suggestion is just that their CEO could have shared the wealth more with his workers. Workers who helped him build his fortune.

Amazon also wouldn't exist in their current capacity without all their warehouse workers. I think the idea is that Bezos could have either sold some of Amazon stock over the years and paid his warehouse workers a better wage or he could have put some of his shares into an options pool for his warehouse workers. If he did that maybe he would only have $10B in wealth today, but many warehouse workers would be better off.

Instead, he kept all those shares and has more money than he could ever spend and many warehouse workers have worked incredibly hard and been unable to build any wealth over the years.

If they are ultimately successful, branding will be part of it. Everyone knows about Uber and thus many people have the app on their phone.

Furthermore, having a large network of riders and drivers enables lower wait times and better carpooling utilization.

More accurate pickup times would really help. I've rushed outside numerous times after being given a 2 minute ETA. Pretty much every time I end up waiting outside for 5-10 more minutes after the ETA changes to a longer time.

If I knew the ETA was accurate, I would be more vigilant about being roadside at the correct time.

They plan to sequester the CO2, not "unburn" it back to carbon and oxygen. The CO2 reaction you posted has nothing to do with the cost of capturing CO2 and sequestering it.

Trees are scalable in that you can keep planting them at low cost, but no where near effective enough at sequestering carbon. Even if you cover all agricultural land in the world with trees, you won't sequester enough carbon to prevent climate change.

It would only be notable if pundits can accurately predict if there will be a recession in the next year. I doubt they can because these things are difficult/impossible to predict (otherwise no one would have lost money in the Great Recession in 2008).

You say it is obvious that we are at a peak of a growth cycle. Maybe you are right, but you also could very well be wrong... People have been saying we are at a peak for several years now.

My point was mainly that your analogy was a stretch.