tomcar288

absolutely on the Magnesium. Due to our diets being primary processed wheat, sugar, oil, and animals, (and partially due to soil mineral depletion) our diet is persistently low on Magnesium by quite a large margin. the impact of this on the population is not consistent. this really doesn't get enough attention in the media or many other places.

the key is to balance the number of jobs in an area with the amount of housing and to have mixed use land policy so housing and commercial and industrial can be much closer.

but it's a lot more than that. Blue cities are by far the worst offenders at anti-housing regulations. part of it must be that people are funadamentally extremely conservative when it comes to housing.

eating out at panda express or other fast food restaurants is quite the luxury and not achievable every day for most of society. I'm always perplexed that a poorer person would ask for something so costly. At costco I can get whole wheat for about 70c per pound. Which means I can make an entire days worth of bread for just 80c. Beans, 2$/day, greens are mostly free if you know what to look for and where, or grow it. These are all about x10 to x20 cheaper than panda express or other fast food.

we had no problem building houses for people in the 50s and 60s. Why all the sudden we can't do it in the last 20 years? There's plenty of land out there. Even in the CA, the most densley populated state, there are more acres in CA than people and yet somehow there's a huge land shortage and ridiculous amounts of regulation. Even 100 miles away from the city, you'll see houses squeezed together like some kind of concentration camp, with open land in every direction and a 5 lane highway to service the equally insane commuting distances created by these land use policies: talk about terrible for the environment.

>>> Why surprised?

How is the average consumer supposed to know that Shanghai/chinese labor laws are this incredibly abusive. and isn't that the fault of the legal system over there? I don't think any profit seeking western company would ever think twice about abusing the legal system if it can profit from it: just look at the entire industry of patent litigation, ISPs, insurance quoting, the list goes on, etc!

As for cheap goods. I've ordered quite a bit from that platform. they have very very good return policy, i can assure you. You just need to be smart about only ordering things where quality isn't the highest concern. For example, garden labels. you can't mess those up. Electronics are a bit iffy. but irrigation supplies, i've had good luck with.

strawberries are especially filled with pesticides: that one really tops the list for pesticides, etc. personally i have like 4 beds of strawberries at home from which I get most of them from.

and these are just the chemicals you hear about. what about all the nonsense that never even makes the front pages?

I don't trust industrialized agriculture, especially not here in the US.

personally, I grow as much of my food as I can (lots of fruits trees and very large garden), especially from the dirty 15. and those that I can't grow, I buy organic though that doesn't always save you completely.

>>> "Through this mass data collection they’re able to build advertising profiles, and spam you with ads they think match your demographic. By tracking your online activity, Google is able to make extremely accurate predictions on your gender, age, marital status, personal interests and even income!"

Are you kidding me? The ads that reach me are so incredibly untarggetted, i wonder if they know anything at all. I get ads for absolutely ridiculous stuff i don't even find the least bit interesting. some of it is straight up disgusting and repelling me from those brands. the ads i find online are incredibly ineffective on me. now, i am a pretty big outlier in terms of my values and interests. But, If I were an advertising spending money on that platform I'd be pissed off at how untargetted these ads are.

I'm just guessing but perhaps GDPR and other regulations prevent google from using all that information in a meaningful way.

I think what's going on is, we're having period of high inflation. Here's my theorey: this high inflation is effectively lowering the minimum wage level because minimum wage isn't keeping pace with the real rate of inflation. and because minimum wage is decreasing in real terms, this opens up lots of new positions that were made illegal by minimum wage. and so more and more people are finding jobs at the low end of the spectrum just above minimum wage and it's why the official reported Unemployment rates are so low and yet we have one hell of a sluggish economy.

Conclusion: the low official Unemployment rates are not a reflection of a healthy economy, they are a reflection of decreasing minimum wages.

the management techniques mentioned in the article are all valid but i'm going to play devils advocate here and say that not getting that promotion isn't necessarily a failure, rather the goal was not realistic.

Don't assume that whether or not you get a promotion is always in your control. Don't assume your performance rating is entirely in your control or even mostly in your control. sometimes you can perform really well and it won't get you anything. and sometimes you can perform mediocre and still get lots of promotions and bonuses.

and why do you really want to get a promotion? if you just want more money, the most effective way to achieve that is to look for another job. doing that, you'll get far larger raises far more quickly.

AFter 15 years, what could they possibly that would actually add to the bottom line? I mean, craigslist never seemed to add a single feature and yet they dominated for well over a decade and then some.

For some products, at some point it makes sense to hunker down and go into maintenance mode. Not every business can keep growing exponentially.

I can't imagine how heavily their product line was subsizidized. I mean, about 1 year ago I bought pretty decent shoes for, literally 4$ for a pair and no shipping charge!! Naturally I bought like 5 pairs, seizing the opportunity. Oh and gloves for 2$, neck scarfs for 2$, etc. the prices are going up now. I'm sure they've figured out I'm no longer a new customer so prices are higher now but still competitive with alternatives.

I like the fact that the author gives so many valuable tips on how to play this situation.

There's an even bigger over supply of labor now more than ever. So, META is using this to their advantage. The author states that this strategy is short sighted and will show future attrition from Meta because eventually the industry demand for SWE will recover. I'm just not sure about that last part. Musk has shown that you can profitably run a software company with 80% less staff. I would imagine other companies will aspire to this goal as well, especially now that the days of crazy growth are over. We're no longer in a growth economy anymore.

EDIT: I have not confirmed that X is profitable. And I don't know their numbers. but, I assumed after laying off 70 to 80% of staff, it probably should be right?

which is basically incetivizing even more electricity usage by subsidizing large electricity users and punishing electricity savers.

there's nothing more evil than forcing people to pay flat rate for services (electricity) that we should all be cutting back on, not using even more.

i can relate to this. sometimes coming across new philosophies can change your life's priorties and values quite a bit: for instancing learning about taoism.

it's important to remember that a lot of the "progress" that compounds is just digital progress which is quite different from material/atom based progress. atom based progress comes much more slowly and is often accompanied by mitigators of progress: you take a step forward and then another step backward.

the author states that progress is "exponential". that maybe true for digital but certainly not for real world problems, especially not in the long run.

Things maybe changing quite rapidly but that doesn't mean it's progress. for example, a Toyota corrolla had 35 mpg back in the 70s. after decades of innovation, it's still about 35 mpg. why so? although engines have become more efficient, cars also vastly increased in weight as well.

Or for example, in construction we can build houses a little more efficiently than 50 years ago but the cost of land mitigates all this progress and then some.

Today, we can travel 30 miles in 30 minutes with a much smaller cost than 200 years ago. and yet the average commute distance is x10 or more than it was 200 years ago, once again, mitigating all our progress. if the average commute today is 40 min and 200 years ago most of the population only needed a 2 minute walk (because they were all farmers who lived on the plot of land), it means our commute times have actually gone up significantly not down.

well, it's not like they're not trying to branch out. the list of failed project at google is incredibly long.

i sometimes wonder if they would have more success with atoms based innovation rather than bits (reference to avc article on the matter). but that would necessitate hiring something other than software engineers.

the problem is there's not enough high value projects to do. to much labor, too many employees and too much funding relative to the number of projects that actually bring value.

Because all the high value stuff(high ROI stuff) is already done or already being worked on. all that's left is low ROI projects which take up huge amounts of time but bring little value. employees and managers know they generate little value, so they end up doing more of them to compensate which makes the problem even worse as there's less and less high value stuff to do.

there's just too few opportunities, hence the need to expand into new industries.

you don't necessarily need to urbanize. just make things more walkable. Instead of having 1 large library or grocery store the size of a theme park, have 10 smaller ones in walking distance instead.

I think he really hit the nail on head here:

"Part of this is a result of poor planning and ordinance-making that long ago overcompensated for the wide use of automobiles. Henry Grabar, a staff writer at Slate, mentions this in a book published last year, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. ”On a national level, certainly, there’s far more parking than we need,” Grabar said in an interview. “There are at least four parking spaces for every car, meaning that the parking stock is no more than 25 percent full at any given time. And some of those cars are moving at any given time, so parking may be a good deal emptier than that.”

I guess a significant number of employees are just working really hard on things that don't matter. When every single thing that needs working on is already being worked on, a lot of people are going to be doing busy work. There was a post by Stevie Yeggie where he talked about working at google. he looked really hard to find a new project to lead but absolutely everything was already being worked on, he found. eventually he just couldn't see himself leading or doing meaningful work there and quit.

the lesson here, i think is that there are limits to how much can be done, without moving into new industries and spreading horizontally.

I've been using them for a couple of years for now and I think they're awesome!

my solution to this is to not have any subscriptions except for property taxes, garbage, utilities, insurance and phone plan. and I absolutely avoid 30 day free trials (if they ask for credit card info) like the plague. the moment I see a credit card number entry field, I close the browser tab immediately.

but, I'd like to know, which companies have onerous cancellation policies?

travesty of justice doesn't begin to describe it. there must be something else wrong besides just the software? how could the justice department just blindly trust the software accounting without any other evidence.

can't you just forget you ever saw the hardcoded credentials? that seems like the safest course of action to me.

all the real problems of the world are atom problems, not bit problems. and so, software companies without real problems to solve, continue to flounder.

96% of the web already is not indexed. Clearly there is something wrong with the algorithm they use to determine what should be indexed and what shouldn't. All that AI doesn't seem to help them much

azurestandard or other wholesale companies sell large bags of orangic beans for just 50$ for 25 lbs (even in CA!). That's nearly 25 days worth of food for just 50$, much much cheaper than going to McFatBurger everyday.

A single fruit tree can yield 100-200 lbs of fruit (apples, pears, oranges, etc), conservatively. All you need is 40$ for a fruit tree and some water, and some space, and 5-10 years. Plant 5 of those and now you've got 500 to 1000 lbs of fruit per year.

If the free market refuses to provide what people want, then we can create our own food and let the execs wonder why they keep loosing market share every year.