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BrendanD

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My bedphone experience was not good. Spouse complained about noise leakage, and they stopped working within a month. Otherwise, they _could_ be more comfortable than ear buds depending how well they fit. Most wired earbuds survive <6 months in bed. Generally they short out from being slept on, crushed, rolled over etc.

Wearing silicon tipped in-earbuds all night is likely courting ear infection. I have settled on JBL T205 Earbud Headphones. They are in-ear but without silicon tips (i.e. ear canal is not sealed shut all night), are comfortable enough, last 6-12 months and are cheap.

Wish someone would make a pair that would last at least a couple years. Hate the waste.

On Being Bipolar 6 years ago

One of the "doctors" who recently published research on "psychobiotics" was later selling a brand of "clinically tested" probiotics tailored for mood disorders. Gut microbiome studies, at this point in time, need to be taken with a pinch of allum.

I think it is (although my comment about populism was not directly solely at the U.S.). As an outsider, I would attribute the poor pandemic response to lack of coherent leadership. The U.S. federal government is obviously incapable of pulling itself together across partisan lines for the greater good of the people it is supposed to serve. Even if you disagree about politics, the numbers do not lie. Just north of the border, Canada is doing literally ten times better (for the moment).

Not everyone lives in a temperate climate with little precipitation, nor in modern cities with wide streets laid out on a regular grid. I seriously doubt self-driving cars are ready for some of the weather conditions where I live. Freezing rain. Snow storms. Roads increasingly narrowing in winter from huge snowbanks. They might be ready for your use case, but they ain't ready for mine.

IIRC CMIP5 models(used for IPCC AR5 2014) did not account for permafrost melt or changes in soil chemistry. Shortly after AR5 was released I remember reading an article or two describing how these exclusions resulted in under-predicting climate change. There were three emissions scenarios under CMIP5, and we are surpassing the worst. Put that in your pipe...

I have only lurked here for a few years, but from the beginning it seemed to me that the HN zeitgeist is slightly sociopathic. It does not stop me from lurking, however, perhaps because it is one of the last bastions of text only web.

This story started me wondering whether hardware, in this case Amazon order packing automatons, or wetware has a smaller net lifetime carbon footprint, assuming both are as green as possible. (Ignoring, of course global over-population and/or mass over-consumption of essentially disposable goods.). These days I am having a hard time imagining that technology could ever have the negative carbon footprint required to mitigate climate change.