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BayAreaEscapee

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I escaped Silicon Valley and I'm never going back.

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medium.com 3y ago

Things I Learned in 2022

BayAreaEscapee
5pts0
www.americanbanker.com 3y ago

Hackers sniff opportunity as banks permit more data sharing

BayAreaEscapee
2pts0
dynomight.substack.com 3y ago

Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

BayAreaEscapee
1pts0
www.dailymail.co.uk 3y ago

Leeds schoolboy, 11, achieves highest possible score in Mensa IQ test

BayAreaEscapee
1pts1
www.nytimes.com 3y ago

What Your Dog's Behavior Means

BayAreaEscapee
2pts2
www.thefirstnews.com 3y ago

‘Priceless’ Stradivarius violin looted from Poland during WWII found in Paris

BayAreaEscapee
3pts0
www.scientificamerican.com 3y ago

Some People Are Mosquito Magnets, and They’re Stuck That Way

BayAreaEscapee
1pts0
www.bloomberg.com 3y ago

Putin Tried for Years to Stop Military Using Western Parts and Mostly Failed

BayAreaEscapee
3pts0
www.cell.com 3y ago

Do blind people hear better?

BayAreaEscapee
1pts1
medium.com 3y ago

Lookism in TikTok

BayAreaEscapee
4pts0
www.cnn.com 3y ago

Denmark and Germany now building the longest immersed tunnel

BayAreaEscapee
1pts0
www.washingtonpost.com 3y ago

New estimate for the total number of ants on Earth is 20 quadrillion

BayAreaEscapee
1pts0
arstechnica.com 3y ago

Fire ant rafts form because of the Cheerios effect, study concludes

BayAreaEscapee
2pts0
www.nj.com 3y ago

Customers are stealing shopping baskets instead of buying bags in New Jersey

BayAreaEscapee
8pts9
www.bloomberg.com 3y ago

China's Surveillance State Will Be the West's Future, Too

BayAreaEscapee
13pts1
ar.al 3y ago

Dear Linux, Privileged Ports Must Die

BayAreaEscapee
5pts1
humanevents.com 3y ago

Lessons from the Bitter End: What General Wrangel Means for Americans Today

BayAreaEscapee
1pts0
marginalrevolution.com 3y ago

The United States Is Still Under-Policed and Over-Imprisoned

BayAreaEscapee
51pts56
evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com 3y ago

Suboptimal Optics: Vision Problems as Scars of Evolutionary History (2008)

BayAreaEscapee
2pts0
www.washingtonian.com 3y ago

The Restaurant Amenity for Washington VIPs? The Secret Back Door

BayAreaEscapee
2pts0
neddonovan.substack.com 3y ago

Why do Fire Departments still exist?

BayAreaEscapee
2pts2
www.sixthtone.com 4y ago

Bridesmaids go professional

BayAreaEscapee
48pts46
www.si.com 4y ago

Hurl, Interrupted: What Ever Happened to the Playground Spinner?

BayAreaEscapee
1pts0
www.economist.com 4y ago

Some ex-FARC guerrillas have become tourist guides in Colombia

BayAreaEscapee
1pts0
boingboing.net 4y ago

Service retrieves your dead loved ones' tattoos and frames them

BayAreaEscapee
2pts0
www.theringer.com 4y ago

The golden age of the aging actor

BayAreaEscapee
112pts245
www.nytimes.com 4y ago

‘An Invisible Cage’: How China Is Policing the Future

BayAreaEscapee
4pts1
www.nytimes.com 4y ago

Who Stops a ‘Bad Guy with a Gun’?

BayAreaEscapee
2pts0
www.youtube.com 4y ago

First 3D Printed Rocket Launcher

BayAreaEscapee
1pts0
www.theguardian.com 4y ago

Car tyres produce vastly more particle pollution than exhausts, tests show

BayAreaEscapee
9pts4

That's actually a reasonable amount, comparable to what your body normally produces.

I can't understand why all the OTC pills seem to come in doses of 3-5 mg. It's really unnatural and probably messes with your system.

Did you find pills with your 500 ug dose? Or do you cut them or use volumetric dosing?

When I was a new manager, I had a problem employee. He was very bright, but very lazy. He wasn't self-motivated and was always doing everything in a mediocre way.

I ignored the problem for a long time, which caused friction within my team.

I eventually had to fire him when the situation got very severe.

The mistake I made was not addressing it right away.

I think that now, how to fire (or better stated, "manage up or out") your first employee as a new manager is one of the most important things you have to figure out how to do right.

The next time I had a problem employee, I got on it right as soon as the problem was clear. Saved me and everyone around me lots of grief.

I'm on my third foreign language. I believe you have to have a "multi-pronged" approach.

I think the most common mistake people make is to study a lot of grammar at the beginning. Mostly at the beginning you need pronunciation and vocabulary. Grammar should come a bit later.

I use:

1. Duolingo. I also pay for it and practice my mistakes the following day to build in some time spacing for memory retention.

2. Anki (spaced repetition). I use both a frequency dictionary of flashcards from the Internet and also make a second deck with a small number my own cards

3. On-line lessons from Verbalplanet. Surprisingly affordable!

4. Occasional consumption of media in that language. (Trying to read news in that language or watching TV shows in that language.)

This article was interesting because it described how Sabre and Amadeus came about in the first place, but (from my perspective as a consumer), they've done nothing incredible since the seventies. They did nothing but sit on their duopoly.

Even when the internet became popular, the first search engines (like Travelocity and Kayak) really sucked.

It wasn't until ITA Software came about that there was an honestly good and useful travel search engine. ITA is really the "technology that changed air travel" in the internet age.

Where I lived in California, you had to take one year of a foreign language to graduate from high school.

If you were university-bound you usually had to take two or three, depending on where you were headed. It's nowhere near enough to speak fluently.

He said, "We're going to jawbone a lot about inflation and make some token steps, but not actually do what will solve the issue. Who do you think I am, Paul Volsker? We're in debt trap and more worried about springing the trap than about persistent and high inflation. Don't worry, young whippersnapper, in the future you'll own nothing and you'll be happy!"

Wasn't it the great economist Milton Friedman who said, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"? Or was that someone else who said that?

In all seriousness, the way the west (and California in particular) price water defies logic. All this talk about senior and junior water rights doesn't make any sense: it only benefits the entrenched incumbents. A properly setup market would simply price out water uses whose utility was materially less than demand of the produced product.

I also own a couple of Brother black and white laser printers. They are quite durable and cheap to operate. Way way way better than any inkjet.

The only complaint I have is that after a large number of pages the printer will insist that the toner cartridge needs to be replaced and will just stop printing, even if the printer output darkness is still acceptable. Quite annoying if you need to print urgently! Fortunately I found a youtube video with a work-around you can enter into the UI on the printer.

[dead] 4 years ago

I'm much more afraid of George Soros. Way more dangerous than Peter Thiel.

True, but it's much easier to roll the middle class and small business. They don't hire expensive tax attorneys. Big corporations and billionaires hire tax attorneys to bury the IRS enforcement effort in legal processes.

It makes me think of all those reports that claim that having a single glass of wine per day makes you healthier.

It's probably the case that people who have just one glass of wine are drinking socially, and therefore have friends, and having friends is an indicator of having status and health. The alcohol itself is poison but one glass is more than offset by otherwise living a good life.

I think that modern cars have electronics that keep you from starting the car without the clutch pressed. Cars I owned in the 80s and 90s would engage the starter when you turned the keys. Cars since then won't engage the starter unless the clutch is in.

I agree with this. I use it on both Mac and Windows. The Windows version works pretty well: no major problems. But the Mac version has all kinds of quirks. The most annoying is that somehow it gets into a bad state where it won't even launch, and the only way to fix it is to find its hidden configuration file and delete it.

I have some sympathy for the stores: they've obviously put in a lot of these features to keep people from scamming the self-checkout system.

But I also share the author's frustrations. I've had a number of times where it decides the weight of something is wrong or for some other reason stops functioning until a store employee intervenes. But sometimes there is no store employee there at all, and I'm standing there at the self-checkout with no way to resolve the situation.

In some of those cases, I've just left my groceries there at the machine and walked out the store. I tell myself "That'll show 'em, they'll have to put all that stuff back on the shelf!" But it obviously doesn't show them anything: they never fix the broken parts of the self-checkout and I end up having to return to that supermarket (or another) for the reason that brought me into the store in the first place.

USB Cheat Sheet 4 years ago

I don't know where you get "1 byte per pixel" from. At minimum, raw 4:2:0 video would be two bytes per pixel, and RGB would be three bytes per pixel with 8-bit color depth.

Right, but outlawing the ability of the laborer to sell his services at a market-clearing price doesn't fix that problem.

If the minimum wage becomes $25, for some workers, the result will be them making $25 per hour. For some other workers, the result will be structural unemployment.

If you suspend market reasoning and just virtual signal, you can just assign blame to the business owner. But virtue signaling itself and assigning blame doesn't actually fix the problem that in the alternate $25-an-hour-universe some subset of workers become structurally unemployed by the invisible hand of the market.

The counter-argument is this: you're outlawing willing market participants who wish to sell their labor for less than $25 per hour.

What if someone doesn't have a skill set or live in a prosperous enough market that supports that wage? Quite a bit of business will simply disappear if the labor is too expensive. That hole-in-the-wall diner in the Ozarks will simply close if they have to pay $25 an hour, and the waitress working there will simply be unemployed without another alternative.