Newlaptop

I've been surprised that the news that Strategy (formerly Microstrategy) bought 3x the total amount of mined bitcoin in the past year didn't cause bigger waves.

A single corporation is issuing debt at 11% interest to buy all the bitcoin being produced and a huge chunk of the additional sales. That's such an obviously precarious situation that I figured the news would cause a crash as people tried to get out of bitcoin before Strategy has to start liquidating, but it looks like there's still some runway left.

I just checked, and the SAT math section covers algebra, trigonometry and statistics.

Look at this list:

  Quadratic equations and functions (vertex form, roots, discriminant)
  Polynomial operations and factoring
  Exponential functions and growth/decay
  Radical and rational expressions
  Function notation, composite and inverse functions
  Nonlinear graphs and their transformations

Standardized tests can be a great resource for assessing students, but they're not just testing for intelligence. Test-prep courses average increasing SAT scores by about 200 points. That's not because they're increasing the intelligence of the people taking them.

Voters rejected a proposal, and your response is that the result will be more parties that support the type of thing that the majority of voters just rejected?

In a sense, you may be correct, but who cares? The majority of people voted against xenophobia, some people are still super xenophobic and will continue to try to implement xenophobic policies, and the majority of people will keep voting against them.

And the safety-focused AI lab ends up being the most dystopian one. Is that irony?

Scary future, where we'll all end up increasingly dependent on AI models, but those models will hide knowledge and refuse to help with any manner of things that the people in power don't want the rest of humanity to access.

California has 10% income tax vs 0 in Texas. Austin property tax is 2% vs Palo Alto at 1.4%.

Salary of $150k in Austin requires $282k in San Francisco to be equivalent. Source: https://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/austin-tx/san-fran...

To make sure that wasn't an anomaly or misrepresentative, I also checked https://www.nerdwallet.com/cost-of-living-calculator for Austin vs San Jose and got similar numbers: $150k in Austin requires $288k in San Jose.

You can argue that the Bay Area wins on weather, politics, startup ecosystem or whatever, but comparing taxes or cost of living is not where California wins.

This comment seems like 15 years outdated to me. I'm curious what you think "normal" pay and "startup" pay are. Or maybe how early you're drawing the line for defining "startup".

Being in the first handful of non-founder startup employees at some seed stage company is probably not the most lucrative thing, but once companies are post Series A, as far as I can tell they tend to be comp competitive with bigger companies.

Obviously not many companies can compete with Meta or Jane Street for salaries, but that's true whether you're talking about a startup or the majority of the S&P 500 companies.

"Environmentalists" is a large, diverse group and nuclear energy has been a controversial topic splitting the group for decades.

Many environmentalists are pro-nuclear, and viewed exclusively through an environmental lens, nuclear is likely the best energy source.

Other people share the "environmentalist" label because they care about clean air, unpolluted rivers, biodiversity, climate change, etc but they oppose nuclear on unrelated grounds (eg, as part of an anti nuclear weapon proliferation agenda) or out of fear of adverse events from damage to an energy facility.

The "pro-environment but anti-nuclear" subgroup held power within the Democrat party in the US through most of the cold war era. The "pro-environment, pro-nuclear" subgroup is now the largest group within the Democrat voting base, but some of the people and all of the regulations from the 1960s-1990s are still in power.

I guess I just don't get it

Imagine you liked something, then realized that thing was bad and you didn't want to do it anymore. Then somebody offered you an alternative without the ethical problems.

I ate meat for like 30 years, then as I learned more about the realities of the meat industry in the US (suffering of animals, development of antibiotic resistant bacteria, pollution of air and water, exploitation and harm to workers, etc) I decided I couldn't buy meat anymore. I like having burgers and sausages and such, and Beyond meat gives me something that tastes good, is easy to cook, fits into a healthy diet.

Reservations have no federal restrictions against development. In fact, they are exempt from regulations that restrict nearby land, which is why casinos are such a common usage.

People born on reservations are US citizens, with full rights and privileges to live and work anywhere in the US they choose, as well as access to capital to start businesses within the reservation (subject to regulations from within the tribal government).

The dependency on federal funds is true in many cases, but some tribes operate such profitable casinos or other businesses that being born a descendant of the tribe is akin to being born a descendant of a Rockefeller or Kennedy.

US instantly becomes a pariah state

Aren't we already?

The current administration has torched relationships with essentially every allied country except Israel. From Toronto to Taipei, and across NATO and BRICS, people see the US as a chaotic bully to be dealt with, not a friend or role model.

I don't think that "other countries won't like it" carries any significance at all to the people in power.

Payroll taxes on $160k salary are $12,240. Employer contribution to health insurance is maybe $6k - $20k. Retirement maybe $5k. Still under $200k.

Heck of a lot of "support cost" to get to $670k

Surveillance capitalism is going to swing around to full communism.

Airfare, hotel rooms, now even groceries will have their price adjusted based on ability to pay. Getting a raise will have no impact on one's life, as all prices will automatically increase to absorb the additional income.

There are ~700k h1bs out of ~157 million American jobs. So about 99.6% of jobs in America are held by Americans and 0.4% by h1bs.

I'd imagine that most couples would still want to be able to close a door when they're on the toilet.

I'd rather sleep in a shared room at a hostel and use a toilet in a stall in a communal bathroom than in a hotel room without a proper door on the bathroom.

You've got your cause and effect flipped.

They don't sound like AI. AI sounds like them, because this is exactly the type of content that the LLMs were trained on and tuned to replicate.

Journalists really need to stop using "millionaires" when they mean billionaires, centi-millionaires and deca-millionaires.

About 1 in 5 American households are millionaires.

"Millionaire" as a label is mostly describing mundane middle-aged, middle-class people who have spent a few decades paying down a mortgage and saving 5-10% of their salary into their 401k. As a group, they pay both the highest percent of their income in taxes and their taxes are the largest share of the federal budget. It shouldn't be used to mean "rich" the way it would have in the 1960s.

8h on zoom is far more desirable than 8 hours in person shuffling from meeting room to meeting room for me.

I can have the call in the background while looking at something else without it being impolite. I can eat, drink, or use the restroom at will. I can wear comfortable pants. I can throw laundry into the wash in the couple minute gap between meetings. And when the last meeting ends, I close the laptop and I'm already home, no miserable drive in rush-hour traffic.

Of course, there is something worse than in-person meetings. Which is meetings that are hybrid, with a groups calling into zoom from two different conference rooms in different locations. Those manage to be far worse than just everyone individually joining the zoom. And ironically, that's the type of meeting that becomes common when you force your distributed workforce back to offices split across a dozen locations.

The weapons will be used by the people in power.

Do you want your country's current political leaders to have more weapons to suppress information they dislike or facts they disagree with? If yes, will you also be happy if your country's opposition leaders gain that power in a few years?

housing that is income or means tested

Hasn't means tested social welfare basically been proven to be bad in every way, regardless of political or economic belief system used to analyze it?

There are lots of positive things that can be done to improve affordable housing - removing impediments to housing density like allowing multiple units on a lot, increasing building height limits, removing parking spot requirements, removing requirements for extra staircases, lowering property taxes, and removing bureaucratic approvals that are full of secret bribery and favortism.

But just stealing money from one set of people to give someone else below-market rent doesn't fix the systemic issues at all, and creates perverse incentives where people are locked into semi-poverty to keep their means tested housing.

Society is not made better by someone refusing a higher-paying job because it would mean they no longer qualified for their apartment.

the audience understands that it's a caricature with a lot of truth and a bit of simplification

I suspect a whole lot of TV fails both parts of this test. The audience doesn't understand and there is only a little bit of truth and a lot of simplification.

No one is risking multi-year commitments of millions or billions of dollars to build a factory in America when the tariffs change week to week.

If you want to incentive domestic reindustrialization, you do it with things like the Inflation Reduction Act, CHIPS act or the "Green New Deal" where congress lays out clear sets of rules in law with a mixture of tax incentives, loan programs and spending to give investors and corporations confidence to make decade-long commitments of capital to major projects.

"Founders" are a tiny percentage of the rich, they're just the ones in the news.

The richest 1% own half the wealth in the world and the gap is getting wider. Since 2020, for every dollar of new global wealth gained by someone in the bottom 90%, one of the world’s billionaires has gained $1.7 million. (Source: https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/wealth-inequality-o...)

So yes, some of the wealth is going to your retirement account. But for every penny going to a middle-class professional workers retirement, there's about a thousand dollars going to some hedge fund manager or the trust fund of the grandson of some robber baron who got rich a hundred years ago.

Where does the money go though?

Europe has its own problems, and US instability will magnify them. The last 20 years have shown that China is essentially uninvestible for foreigners. Japan maybe offers relative stability but without growth. Commodities might seem like a safe haven, but will decline in value in a recession.

For the pension funds, insurance companies, and sovereign wealth funds who hold the hundreds of billions of dollars of US debt instruments, what are the realistic option? Buy billions in gold? Invest in Japan, South Korea and India? Bet on a European turnaround? Yolo it on fartcoin?

I'm not sure what the safe haven is when America goes bankrupt.

HFCS is a sugar. The difference between HFCS and standard cane sugar is relatively minor - a 5% difference in the ratio of fructose to glucose.

There's some evidence HFCS is worse than sucrose (standard refined cane sugar) and some metabolic mechanisms to make that plausible, but it's a relatively minor difference compared to just the overall amount of consumption.

10 grams of "sugar" (sucrose) is 5 grams of fructose. 10 grams of high fructose corn syrup is 5.5 grams of fructose.

A diet going from 10 grams of any sugar per day to 50 or 100 grams of any sugar per day is going to have a drastically larger impact on health than if the 10 grams were sucrose vs HFCS.

This is the most horrifyingly dystopian thing I've ever read. Why are you advocating for a police state where sick patients in hospital beds are harassed by police and charged with crimes for existing?

I'd rather die a "John Doe" than live in an authoritarian police state where it's a crime to not give ID to police.

Frustratingly problematic headline, I'd expect better from Popular Mechanics.

The title "Oops, Scientists May Have Severely Miscalculated How Many Humans Are on Earth" is entirely misleading- it's not "scientists" who have miscalculated this, it's government bureaucrats in various countries who are responsible for collecting and reporting census information in their region.

This matters, because we live in a world where many people get much of their information only from headlines, and a recurring narrative of "Scientists make mistakes" or "Scientists can't be trusted" has real impact to policy on climate change, vaccine hesitancy, and other areas where distrust of scientific knowledge or expertise causes uninformed people to make decisions harmful to their own well-being or harmful to those around them on everything from nutrition to pollution to evacuations before hurricanes.

Early Reddit had a philosophically libertarian majority (or at least, a significant percentage) and a demographic of mostly STEM-oriented, bookish, nerdy dudes from 18-40. Ron Paul was a popular political candidate. "Socially liberal, fiscally conservative" was a common refrain, although in 2008 that usually meant supporting gay marriage and wanting legal marijuana. People were skeptical of big corporations and big government alike, but had genuine belief that technology was changing the status quo in positive ways (remember when Google was a startup and "Don't be evil" felt earnest). The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were unpopular, but a big chunk of the criticism focused on ways the PATRIOT act invaded individual privacy and the wastefulness of DHS spending. Open source software and filesharing were discussed as philosophical stances and acts of resistance against entrenched powers. Race and gender were rarely discussed as being particularly important.

Writing this made me realize not just how different Reddit was, but also the issues of the time and the ways they were thought of and talked about. It's almost hard to map onto contemporary parties, policies or issues.

Insurance fees are not high because the insurance companies are making huge profits.

United Healthcare alone made $23,000,000,000 in profit in 2023. Health insurance companies have collectively made $371 billion in profits since the passage of the Affordable Care Act.

Property & Liability insurance (home, car, etc) have relatively modest profit margins, but health insurance companies absolutely are making huge profits.

For whatever reason we don’t as a society let “tech” markets mature. We demand growth long after everyone is satisfied.

The reason is tax law and it applies to all companies not just tech. Removing the double-taxation of dividends would fix so much of our economy.

If you run a stable, no-growth but profitable company, and each year return the profits to the owners (shareholders) in the form of a dividend, that's bad because the income is first taxed when the corporation declares it as income and then again when the shareholders receive the dividend.

If instead you don't issue the dividend, but re-invest to grow the company, then the value of the shares can increase without creating a taxable event for the shareholders.

We could avoid a lot of the boom-bust cycles, enshittification of products and other economic problems if we just structured tax law to encourage stable, profitable companies issuing boring predictable dividends instead of our current system that requires infinite growth.

Heh, this thread reminded me that I own Sonos speakers that I haven't used in several years because at some point they updated and I needed to install an app or make an account or something to use them and never did.

So while it's maybe neat that they solved fringe use cases, it's unfortunate that they failed at the basic use case of "just easily play audio from my phone"