mdavis6890

Actually I think that's exactly the concern - that people won't be allowed to keep their carbon-fuel heating systems, even as a backup.

Don’t worry! You would replace that with a new white knuckle anxiety that misconfiguring your infra deployment would exhaust your four figure cost limit, causing AWS to helpfully shutdown ALL of your infra to avoid any accidental overspend.

Ah, the good old days!

I’m all for websites collecting less personal information. But I wish they wouldn’t base it in child status.

Now all I read is “websites must collect a ton of personal information about you and send it to the government to verify your age, and also tell them all the websites you visit.”

Why are we so worried about corporations getting our data? The worst thing they’ll do is try to sell me something. It’s the government I’m worried about - they can do far worse.

I wonder if charges can be configured to wait for a given time to begin charging. That way you could plug in your car whenever you want, but still get the benefit of waiting.

Not necessarily - reducing the workforce and closing stores may well be a healthy consolidation. Taking on debt may perform the same function on the balance sheet. You should worry if they take on debt to expand stores or the workforce.

This is likely simply due to the fact that more homes have AC now:

... "By 1980 that number had risen to 63%, and in the 40 years since then air conditioning has grown exponentially and is now present in a whopping 95% of homes in the US according to the most recent US Census." https://www.fixr.com/blog/2021/06/22/presence-of-air-conditi...

You might say that this is because we need it more now, but I think it's actually just that we can afford to install it now in every new home and so we do. It's just considered standard equipment.

The issues with these articles is that they focus on money, and the price of energy, which leads people to believe either consciously or not that something can be helped with money. It can't. There is a fundamental supply constraint that has nothing to do with money.

People will consume less, either because prices rise and they choose not to pay them, or by rationing, or by random blackouts (gas-outs?).

Instead of what? Making the switch will require tremendous effort that must come from something else, which Germany will necessarily lose (not produce). Likely this would be distributed through the economy so that there will be a bit less of everything else - shoes, haircuts, food, etc.

"I will do everything that's in my power"

Will you pay money for the content you consume?

I personally like it when the text is presented as a gif. Especially a gif of cursive scrawl, containing a long URL.

The problem with the word “costs” is that it’s too easy to conflate this with money, and just think it means spending more of an abstract and essentially unlimited resource (money).

The reality is that it means we will HAVE LESS STUFF, food or otherwise, because we are increasing the effort required to generate a unit of food.

Thanks for the level head and second-order thinking. Still outrageous - but beware the knee-jerk reaction as you said.

I don’t know, I think there are a lot of people that might not want to be owners anymore, but they just can’t bring GM themselves to sell and pay the taxes. Especially if they are, say, 60 and in dubious health anyway. So they hold, and hold, and hold some more for decades. I could see my own parents on this situation possibly.

Or I have a neighbor house that’s a rental, but it’s still owned by the same (now) 90+ year old woman who used to live there, but who moved out 20 years ago. Her 70+ year old son is managing it now… Does she really still want to own this house, or is inertia and fear of taxes holding her back from selling? I don’t know.

It provides a large artificial financial incentive to hold onto a property that you otherwise would sell.

I also think it's not right to create this kind of arbitrary, large tax break that only applies in specific circumstances. I think if we're going to have a capital-gains tax (and maybe we shouldn't), then we should keep it simple and not have carve-outs.

If I sell my house while I'm on my death bed, I pay all the taxes. If I wait a week to die first, and then my heirs sell, no tax. This is wrong and unnecessary.

Really the only problem here is the step-up cost-basis at death that you mention. This is indeed a big problem, and the fix is simple: Your heirs inherit your cost-basis as well (likely $0), so that when/if they sell it they have to pay taxes on the whole capital gain. We could also force the payments over some years, by increasing the cost basis and taxing on that amount. e.g. I inherit a property worth $1M and zero cost basis. After one year, I have to pay capital gains taxes on $100k, but my cost basis also goes up by $100k. Repeat each year up to $1M.

The other stuff (depreciation, 1031 exchange) are very sensible accounting. Depreciation applies only to the improvements (buildings) on the land, not the value of the land itself. This reflects genuine loss of value over time (buildings wear out). And in the event that you sell the property at a profit down the road, you have to pay back all that tax savings at higher regular income rates (not lower capital gains rates). This is called "depreciation recapture." So depreciation can defer taxes, but not eliminate them.

Likewise, when you do a 1031 exchange, your new property ends up with a lower cost basis based on the previous property, so that when you later sell it you still have to pay all that capital gains tax and depreciation recapture. It defers but does not reduce or eliminate taxes.

Of course - if you die while holding these properties, then your heirs get the cost basis reset ("stepped up"), which does indeed eliminate all these taxes. This is what we need to fix.

Like gigawatts?

Probably expressed as an expected average, rather than peak (or both).

I think there is very little meat on the bone here. Possible? Sure! Certain? Hardly.

Of course we’re going to start turning up chemicals in our bodies that weren’t there before we started using them. And the increased prevalence guarantees that they will be there more often when you look for them in people with e.g. liver cancer. But so what?

And taking about a rate of a disease is easily confounded by more frequent and more sensitive testing.

Likely this is just in the very large bucket of studies that pick up spurious correlations. But like all of them - maybe it’s not spurious!

Gizmodo can say what they want about Epson, but right now the thing I am most irritated by is the adware on that page.

I would buy an Epson printer if it would remove Gizmodo's ads.

And I didn’t advocate either way of doing it in any case. I just offered an alternate that may or may not be better.

This is a form of rationing in the face of reduced supply. Another option would be allow electricity prices to rise and people to make their own choices about how to respond to that.

I still do not understand how any human-developed carbon capture techniques is going to be better or more efficient than just planting a tree. A (living, growing) tree can capture quite a lot of carbon for almost no cost, directly from the atmosphere. More generally, vegetation biomass growth is carbon (and hydrogen) capture in action on planetary scale - almost for free.

Did they give you your money promptly? How?

"Today I decided I would try to change Google."

The best part for me is "try to" rather than the much more common and nonsensical "try and" that I see all the time. I think I would pay for a Chrome extension to automatically replace all occurrences of "try and" with "try to."

It takes a librarian...

Also, thanks for changing Google for the better, and helping those who need help the most!

Yes - for clarification I'm talking about using a stove-top whirly-pop style pop-corn-popper. I can do about 250g at a time.

I think 2 weeks off roast is close enough to 'fresh' that the difference is going to be subtle. I'd love to see an experiment like this with 3-day old vs 2-months old. I'd guess most people could tell in that case.

And maybe then bring that two months in and see where the cutoff is that people can/can't tell. I'll guess it would be 3-4 weeks or so for most subjects.

I've never heard of a "triangle test" before but I like that format!

I don't think anyone is telling you to throw away old beans - the author is just providing accurate information that beans go stale in a couple of weeks and that you should try to plan accordingly if you care about good coffee. Avoid buying old beans. And don't overbuy fresh ones thinking you're going to keep a 2 month supply around.

Just buy what you think is a 2 week supply, and when that's gone go buy another 2 week supply.

And if you don't care about optimizing your coffee experience - that's cool tool. Most of us have better things to worry about.

I endorse Sweet Maria's! I've been ordering from them every few months for many years, and I think they're great. Aside from good raw coffee, they usually add a little postcard or other nice touch inside the package as well. Last time I got a whole (empty) burlap coffee sack that must have come from the grower. Neat!

I also use the popcorn-popper roasting method and with just a little practice turns out excellent results. I've been doing it this way for 10 years. While I could upgrade to a fancier roasting method, I've never found the need. If this seems like too much time/work considering it's 15min of constant attention over the stove, consider whether it's any faster to go out and buy pre-roasted coffee.

One word of caution on the espresso section of the article: I think his price-point thresholds are too low. I don't think you will have acceptable results less than double those numbers. You might get away with a $300 grinder, but even $500 is at the very lowest end of an acceptable espresso machine. You're better off with pour-over then.

Can you imagine a service whereby the government provides table saw for use by the general public? I just do not think the government is equipped to manage this kind of risk.

Unfortunately, the supply and demand curves do not cross. I wonder how much of the operational cost is insurance.