knappe

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/patellofemora...

Ask Colorado how TABOR[0] is going. The answer is a 1.5 BILLION[1] deficit because TABOR restricts how money is collected and spent by the state.

A balanced budget isn't actually all it is cracked up to be. The deficit spending at the federal level we have now is bonkers, but a balanced budget every year is just unrealistic. Learn from Colorado and do not put yourself into an unrealistic corner. A budget will grow and shrink with the economy -- a balanced budget over X years seems much more realistic. It would mean we could have never, at a federal level, done the kind of spending necessary to cope with COVID, for example.

What I'd like to see is Congress be entirely unable to draw a paycheck while the government is shutdown. Shutdowns are a last resort, but are now so common we have normalized them. This is immensely unfair to federal workers and everything downstream that depends on a functioning government, like SNAP benefits. If the government shuts down over budget issues, make the people who made that decision pay HEAVILY for the action.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxpayer_Bill_of_Rights [1] https://coloradosun.com/2026/03/19/colorado-budget-shortfall...

I don't know how they paid any of their accumulated (I assume) student debt, let alone had an even decent standard of living.

They're interfering with officially gathered data, used to forecast the weather. And they're not just gambling. They're also gaming the system to make money on it. This goes far beyond 'just gambling'.

It is also a fantastic 2 player game. My wife and I have played hundreds of matches and it was our go to game during the pandemic.

PSA: don't bother with the steam edition. It has been plagued with bugs and is honestly more infuriating to play as the bugs can be game breaking. And the bugs have been around for years.

Given this is the top comment on the article at the moment, I thought it was worth at least pushing back on this sentiment at least a little bit.

[0]https://us.qcells.com/blog/qcells-north-america-completes-da...

[1] https://futurism.com/science-energy/solar-energy-china-produ...

https://apnews.com/article/trump-offshore-wind-energy-climat...

As an example terrestrial telescope mirrors get dusty. You're not going to break down the scope just to clean up the dust as this is a many days operation in most cases. So instead you would take "flats" that were of a pure white background and thus showed the dust in its full, dusty, glory. When you take your actual images, you negate (subtract from the original image) the flat and thus any noise generated by the dust. You can use this same method for removing brighter stars from an image that would otherwise saturate the ccd and wash out the background. Turns out it doesn't work for planes. Ask me how I know!

https://www.volts.wtf/p/is-the-brand-new-city-in-california

It is so bad that the state has implemented fence line monitoring. [1]

As someone who lives in Colorado, I'd be happy to see Suncor go. Especially now that I just learned the oil they're refining is Canadian tar sand oil.

[0] https://coloradosun.com/2024/02/05/colorado-suncor-air-pollu... [1] https://cdphe.colorado.gov/public-information/air-quality-an...

I buy index funds and leave the majority of my money there but allow myself to make small bets on trends in the market that I think will play over long periods. Sometimes it works, like buying lithium stocks in the 2010s and other times it sucks and doesn't, like buying solar stocks in the 2010s and watching the entire industry get shredded to pieces in the last 5 years.

They're juniors. With that kind of mentality, I'm not sure you're looking for juniors, but instead are looking for someone with a few years in industry that is apparently masquerading as a junior. But perhaps my expectation of "real systems" is different than yours.

To put this into perspective, I mentor and have mentored lots of juniors from code schools and traditional, four year university computer science majors in web dev. Having some concept of both the web stack/language and a basic understanding of good coding practices is about the most I'd expect. All thing things that sit on top of it, like scaling the stack, performance optimizations and the like are things I wouldn't even come close to expecting a junior to know. Those are things I'd expect to have to coach on.

The day I moved into the college dorms he looked at me and said "Don't move the floor tiles, ceilings tiles or the touch the large ventilation pipe outside my door in the hallway." A lot of the buildings at my university were built with asbestos, so much so that the university had a 30 year contract with the lab he worked at to analyze samples.

And it isn't only historical buildings that have asbestos. A very well known mall that was built in the 2000s had incurred some severe hail damage and while the repairs were ongoing samples were taken and found to be hot. Someone had introduced asbestos contaminated materials into the original build and rather than extensive repairs the mall had to do extensive remediation first, before continuing repairs.

Apparently there is still a large stock of "hot" building material that are sitting in warehouses and every once in a while they make it into the supply chain.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00945...

"In the Carbon Costs of Global Wood Harvests, published in Nature in 2023, WRI researchers using a biophysical model estimated that annual wood harvests over the next few decades will emit 3.5-4.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year. That is more than 3 times the world’s current annual average aviation emissions. These wood-harvest emissions occur because the great majority of carbon stored in trees is released to the atmosphere after harvest when roots and slash decompose; as most wood is burned directly for heat or electricity or for energy at sawmills or paper mills; and when discarded paper products, furniture and other wood products decompose or burn. Another recent paper in Nature found that the word’s remaining forests have lost even more carbon, primarily due to harvesting wood, than was lost historically by converting forests to agriculture (other studies have found similar results1). Based on these analyses, a natural climate solution would involve harvesting less wood and letting more forests regrow. This would store more carbon as well as enhance forest biodiversity."[0]

[0]https://www.wri.org/technical-perspectives/wood-harvest-emis...

And the original paper that introduced the idea of land use https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1151861

Forest are only carbon sinks if they stay as a forest. The second you cut one down it goes from being a sink to source. Searchinger's argument states that more forests will be grown to be cut down if burning wood pellets (that are shipped from North America to the EU) is considered renewable and that means you're now cutting down even more forests to clear land for growing more trees. The land used is not free; it could have instead stayed a forest and remained a carbon sink. When you compare wood pellets using for generating energy and compare it to other forms of energy generation it no longer holds up as a renewable resource after you take into account the land that could have been kept instead as a forest and carbon sink.

If you find the excerpt underwhelming, go read the book. I will warn you that in some ways it feels more like a memoir of Searchinger's life than a book on land use considerations, but, despite that, it still does a great job of showing how land use is still not being accounted for in all situations.

I finished Eating the Earth last week and found it rather interesting to read.

What else should we arbitrarily ban based on this criteria? It doesn't seem to hold up to much scrutiny.

I think the article shows how relevant this still is today.

Denver water couldn't force the mine to continue cleanup of the molybdenum (because they're bankrupt) and instead raised the tolerable levels of molybdenum in Denver water. The same thing happened in 2017, 2010 and I'm certain before that. And then we have things like this https://www.cpr.org/2025/06/04/free-private-well-testing-ote...

Colorado has some serious issues with mine runoff and water contamination.

https://www.pagosasun.com/stories/the-day-the-river-turned-o...