jjslocum3's comments

The rise of robust middle classes in Asia have also put a squeeze on the world's chocolate supply in the last decade or two. These days in the US, it's hard to even discern the cocoa in most "chocolate" bars.

America has a water crisis?

> And an example of it getting something complex terrifically wrong

This is the part I'm stuck on. The process still needs a real analyst to verify whether GPT got it right or not. There goes the ROI, right?

Aardwolf mud: https://www.aardwolf.com/

I've witnessed the reverse happen very successfully: Fortune-500 company signs a multi-million-$$, multi-year contract with a vendor while at the same time investing in them.

Actually, the way I learned it in probably the '80s was that during the colonial era in the Northeast US, the indigenous peoples (Indians) would resume attacks against frontier colonists during late-autumn thaws (cold weather typically preempted organized war parties).

Looks like the inmates are running the asylum at Stanford. <ducks and runs for cover>

Which begs the question, why not just use Dollars?

This entire comment seems to reprise the FTX/Larry David Super Bowl commercial. I'm sure there's a term-of-art for the tactic in debating circles (like "straw-man argument," or "appeal to authority"). I think of it as the "disingenuous comparison."

I can't begin to list all the ways in which comparing the auto industry of the 20th century to crypto of today breaks down. For starters, automobiles promised a massive demonstrable value-add to society from the get-go. Crypto, as others here have pointed out, is a solution looking for a problem.

So far, every application of crypto has actually destroyed value for the process it seeks to replace[1], by adding layers of busy-work on top of an already-working process. If it were of value as a self-contained, isolated ecosystem, then things might be different; but where it interfaces with the existing economic infrastructure within which it needs to operate (and which it seeks to replace), any economic efficiencies bleed out rapidly.

[1] Edit: And I'm not even considering the scams

This was a common practice in the early 20th century, as many of the wealthiest in the US owned and traveled by private rail car.

By way of thanking you for this informative little summary of issues involved in creating YouTube content, I went ahead and subscribed. I'd be interested to hear from you in a few days what impact this HN post had on your subscriber numbers.

Also what I think is being asked:

...if the photon comes to rest on earth, and we compare clocks...

IIRC, the deceleration of the photon relative to me (as it comes to rest on earth as would a returning space traveler) would "reverse" the time dilation relative to me, so both our clocks would read 12:08.

Please, correct me if I'm wrong. I read this many years ago but never dove all the way into the math.

I suppose jet engines don't need to be restricted to airplanes, although I'm reminded of a long-ago Darwin Death Award involving such an attempt:

https://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1995-04.html

From one of the authors: "It should also remove SO₂ and chlorides from the atmosphere, and may reduce residence time of CFCs HFCs and PFCs. As far as I know, this is the only proposed alternative net-zero GHG fuel with aircraft range similar to or longer than plain hydrocarbons. (NH₃, H₂, even synthetic liquid CH₄ all have 55-90% lower energy density and require pressurization or cryogenic cooling.) The combustion product magnesia (~100 nm MgO particles) is a bodily nutrient which dissolves in lung fluids, we drink it for upset stomach and add it to drinking water to reduce acidity."

I spent the entire decade of the 2010's WFH, 1500 miles away from my company's HQ. I rose through the ranks (albeit more slowly than some of my peers), and left the company on good terms.

Thusly anecdotally armed, I can tell you that for cases towards the center of the bell curve, employees working in the office is better for the company and arguably better for the employee long-term. More shared vision, more opportunities for cross-pollination, more quick problem solving. All the usual arguments. It worked in my case, but productivity plummeted for the next guy who tried it, and we had to let him go.

It worked in my case because this was before the time when every kid expected to be able to work from home, and so I was terrified on a daily basis that out of sight would become out of mind. In the early days I made a point of traveling to HQ one week of every four, to meet the new folks and maintain relationships. I strove to overachieve so I didn't become redundant. Even so, by the end of the decade, with the growth of the company I was noticeably detached from the centers of power and the office culture, serving a role not much different from a contractor.

Not this specific post, which is reasonable and well-thought-out, but many rants I've heard by WFH proponents come across as myopic and naive. Yes, it can succeed sometimes, for some combinations of office culture and individual. Just based on my own experience, more often it doesn't.

> Generally, the stance of the WFH crowd is that each individual should get a choice of what makes that individual happy.

Salaried employment in this business (at least in the US) is a contract between you and somebody who wants to give you a lot of money, with some expectations in return. The person offering the money has the right to set the terms of that contract, and you have the right to reject that contract and work somewhere else. I view this as the actual "choice of what makes that individual happy."

Finally, let's not forget that people working in group settings is what got us here. It gave us the airplane, modern medical care, and the internet. New is sometimes better, but sometimes it's not.

When Java came out, before it stabilized, it was often jokingly called C--.

It definitely discriminates against the Salvation Army, Buskers, and Panhandlers.

> there are numerous other search engines available to any user with web access — Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex being the most popular, outside of more country-specific platforms like China’s Baidu.

Yandex is a country-specific platform. For ten years it's been referred to as "the Russian google."

> ...studied the disconnect between the excitement with which kindergartners and first graders greet learning and the boredom and disaffection that seems to overtake many by high school

It seems myopic to search for the answer to this discrepancy purely within teaching styles. In high school, coincident with the onset of puberty, many students simply become more interested in achieving social goals than academic learning.

This does verge on political - nevertheless it's an interesting look at how a powerful Pfizer board member was able to get a Pfizer critic banned from the platform.