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notable_user

133 karma · joined October 13, 2015

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notable_user··on The First Credit Card Ever (2016)
Merchants have to pay a decent sized fee on every transaction, and that fee is definitely passed on to the consumer via higher prices. But it’s also (arguably unfairly) equally passed on to consumers paying cash.
notable_user··on About the Apple Card
Household income.
notable_user··on California fault capable of producing a magnitude 8 earthquake has begun moving
Almost certainly they detected the earthquake and decided not to notify people because it was too small to warrant a notification.
notable_user··on Chinese spies stole trade secrets from Dutch chip machine maker ASML: report
Not just Silicon Valley, Boeing has had similar problems. I imagine every industry with manufacturing has been affected.
notable_user··on Major survey finds worms are rare or absent in 20% of fields in England
The article makes it seem like this hasn’t been studied in depth before (maybe just in the UK?). Sound like they were just trying to get baselines, and the next step would be to understand the whys.
notable_user··on DoorDash and Amazon Won’t Change Tipping Policy After Instacart Controversy
They explain _exactly_ how it works in the 2nd paragraph. 100% of the tip goes to the dasher, and then the base pay scales to hit the “minimum”.

That’s obviously lame, since you’d have to basically tip over the minimum to see the pay change. But they lying when they say “100%”.

notable_user··on Many popular iPhone apps are recording user sessions without asking
The real take away is that they’re sending all text typed in, including credit card and social security numbers, unencrypted to a third party.
notable_user··on Amazon Ruined Online Shopping
Even “ships from and sold by amazon.com” products are comingled with potentially conterfeit products, unless a brand pays extra money for them not to be. No way for the end user to know if they’re getting comingled product.
notable_user··on The game-day caffeine routine that powers the NBA's most frequent flyers
Baseball is a very local sport, you play the teams nearby you considerably more than you play any other teams. Also, as others mention, they’ll play multiple games in one location.
notable_user··on The game-day caffeine routine that powers the NBA's most frequent flyers
Most people probably shouldn’t have coffee after 4PM.
notable_user··on Letter from Tim Cook to Apple Investors
I’m not sure what you mean by “address the root issue”.

The root issue is that batteries degrade over time, for everyone, not just apple. iPhone’s did a good job hiding that away by degrading performance along with it.

The same thing still happens with new phones, but now apple just tells you when it happens. My X crashed in the cold and it said something like “your battery couldn’t provide peak power and your phone is now in degraded performance mode. Disable this setting in the settings app.”

notable_user··on Elon Musk's tunnel project is a bad joke
You’ve clearly never lived in a city like LA or New York. Sometimes it takes 45 minutes to drive a few blocks.

And Boring Company plans on using parallel tunnels, for safety and for increased capacity (two directions of travel).

notable_user··on Lime and Bird are growing rapidly
It’d be fairly easy to designate a spot on every block for scooter/bike/etc parking. Much easier and space efficient than creating parking spaces.

Here’s an example that Santa Monica is trying: https://www.10news.com/news/santa-monica-creates-parking-spa...

notable_user··on 4,000-year-old termite mounds found in Brazil are visible from space
Most things outdoors are visible from space with a high enough resolution/zoom camera. I’ve always thought the statement “viable from space” was closer to meaningless rather than exaggerated.

“Visible from space with the naked eye” would be more meaningful but rarely is that claim made.

notable_user··on MythBusters Results – List of Myths and Summaries
Sails are crazy efficient, and are most effective when wind is blowing across the bloat. So if you point a fan across the boat you’ll get a forward force vector and sideways force vector.

Edit: Based on the summary of the episode provided it looks like mythbuster didn’t exploit this property of modern sails.

notable_user··on The War Inside 7-Eleven
Prices will go up and it’ll balance out.
notable_user··on The Curse of the Honeycrisp Apple
I’m not a grafter myself so I don’t know the specifics. But I do know it’s not cheap. Labor intensive and I don’t think the branches are cheap, despite them growing on trees.

And yes, loss of production is a huge hit to an orchard.

notable_user··on The Curse of the Honeycrisp Apple
It’s a curse if you were a small orchard happily growing another apple variety. No one wants your apples anymore so you have to rip out all your trees an plant new one. (Side note: Really you’re grafting new branches.) That’s a lot of capital investment for a family business that might have been eeking along already.

And, as the article says, who knows when you’ll need to switch to the next variety.

notable_user··on Decoding Utility Markings Spray-Painted on City Streets
There’s not many options for what it could be, so it’s pretty easy to figure out. The color is most important, with some additional info like utility (which are few and welol known) and width.
notable_user··on Feeding cows seaweed cuts 99% of greenhouse gas emissions from their burps
Milk is pasteurized differently in the US vs Europe. I’d bet that has the most impact on taste.
notable_user··on Apple's T2 chip will prevent hackers from eavesdropping on your microphone
This only protects when the lid is closed, but many people leave the lid open on their desk.

I would love to see a light come on if the camera or microphone is receiving power, and then only turn on power to these devices when a program requests it.

notable_user··on US election system reveals frightening vulnerabilities at almost every level
Gay marriage rights and now weed legalization are two recent examples of policy that I don’t think would have been possible in America (at least for a long time) without decentralized government. People got used to the idea in some more progressive states and it’s bubbling outward.

Many states experiment with election law as well. California with top two primaries. It’s yet to be seen how that will play out, but we likely wouldn’t try on a national stage.

notable_user··on Big tech products are mostly useless
SpaceX is a Los Angeles based company, and Elon Musk also lives in Los Angeles. I’m not sure if that counts as Silicon Valley.
notable_user··on How Shipping Containers Changed the World
The dockworker union is too strong.
notable_user··on GammaThingy – Open Source f.lux for your iPhone
It's NOT open source as per the readme: "I purposely have not added an open source license to the project and am intentionally retaining copyright for the code, meaning that it may not be redistributed (in code or compiled form) without my permission."