RhysU

I want someone to start a monthly subscription service that mails HEB tortillas within the continental US using UT Austin students as the smurfs. The ad copy writes itself.

Loved that Ranger my father owned. Rolled it onto the driver's side, totalling it. Still have road rash on my left forearm from when the window broke mid-accident and my left arm dragged a touch.

Suppose we did exactly what you suggest, preventing amassing incredible wealth.

The only substitute for wealth is power and for power is wealth (with a hefty conversion fee). Amassing power would be the alternative action taken by the driven billionaire types if you take away the possibility of amassing wealth.

A bunch of stymied billionaires amassing power leads us back to pre-nationalized Europe.

At least when people amass wealth, they generally do something valuable for others.

What does "democratizing the expenditure" mean?

You might enjoy reading the concept of the demiurge [1]: A lesser creating-but-not-creator deity than the ultimate benevolent god, usually portrayed as something of a deceptive character. Great rabbit hole to go down.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demiurge

...except now you've incentivized everyone driving on bald tires and, unintentionally, killed a bunch of people when it rains.

Teachers usually outsource negotiations to their unions and therefore largely cannot negotiate on their own behalf, even if they wanted to.

Now, add in the pre-tax earnings that would be necessary to emulate a teacher's risk-free pension. One would need post-tax investments which must be turned into an annuity on retirement. It's not a small sum.

You can. A bunch of companies offer SMAs like this. It's a retail product, usually labeled as some smart tax loss harvesting atop the indices where you can denylist particular stocks.

Fidelity offers one: https://www.fidelity.com/managed-accounts/separately-managed...

It'd probably take you an afternoon worth of time to research then enact it.

But doing so would be a fair amount (by index standards) of overhead and hassle.

Any product provider, like Blackrock, would jump at the opportunity to sell them an S&P499 given the scale of those pension funds.

Plus they'd put themselves in the crosshairs of a whole range of activists...

Not to mention putting their own jobs on the line if SpaceX outperformed the rest of the index.

The first point, that an S&P499 is easy for them but they won't do it, means they have no conviction. The second point (where I agree with you), that it's obvious we-tried CYA lacking any real teeth that'll go nowhere, means they have no courage.

They're an asset manager: put your money where your mouth is. If their hypothesis is that SpaceX governance will be bad then short the bloody thing and use the proceeds to buy the S&P499. It's not a complicated trade given their industry position and ability to call third-party providers.

Absent any restrictions on targeting adults, what would cigarette ads look like today?

The New York and California pension systems would become holders of SpaceX shares through their passive allocations if the company is admitted to major U.S. stock indexes.

If they have discretion, these pensions can replicate the S&P500 minus SpaceX if they don't like SpaceX's governance.

If they're forced to passively hold precisely the S&P500 then shaddup and stop active managing.

Next.

Doesn't check out. Not all recipients of US federal tax proceeds are classical liberal. It's a split.

It's beyond belief how much California imports...

[California] imports about 60% of its crude from overseas--up from 5% in the mid-1980s- about a third of which comes from the Middle East. About 15% of the state's refined fuels are also imported, much of which depends on Middle East crude.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/gavin-newsom-california-offshore...

A friend once relayed his mental scale that people usually fall somewhere on...

1) Must plan to buy a meal out.

2) Must plan to take a vacation.

3) Must plan to buy a house.

4) Must plan to pass it on.

...and that these are useful subgroupings for large-scale discussion.

Cool.

How sensitive is the Strouhal number to viscosity at Re = 100 indirectly via the shedding frequency? My hunch is not very and so the implicit diffusion from coarsening is not having a first order effect. See Implicit Large Eddy Simulation (ILES) as the reason I ask.

How bad is the Strouhal error under coarsening of a less fancy method?

Beware, my computational fluids is meh these days.

Fun. Needs sound effects, in particular someone muttering "Hoyt–Schermerhorn next" over a crackling intercom.

Seems legit for Google vs Kagi: https://sitemogging.com/mogged/google.com-vs-kagi.com

Go read a few months worth of the National Review.

Many prominent conservative thinkers are not particularly big fans of Trump. They like portions of his initiatives and policies but not him as a standard bearer, because he does dumb, ill-principled stuff at odds with conservatism.

Peggy Noonan of the WSJ can't write two sentences without letting you know how much she disdains Trump, e.g.

Wilholt's essay is a nice one. But it amounts to defining the opposition in a way that's easy to tear apart followed by tearing it apart. It's a cute trick but isn't much of a basis for serious discussion.

Watch: Wilholt's essay consists of exactly and only one indefensible, rhetorical sleight of hand. Consequently, no one can honestly defend it. Attempts to do so are undeserving of serious scrutiny.

After tearing down a strawman, he claims high ground:

The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

But you'll get a fair bit of support for Wilholt's so-called anti-conservative principle from a fair number of prominent conservative thinkers.

It really ought to be possible to structure the utility contracts such that a new data center lowers every one else’s rates instead of raising them.

That would imply that increased demand strictly decreases prices, no?

Given fixed supply, no dice.

To expand supply, one would use incrementally more expensive mechanisms to generate the incremental supply. (Because, why wouldn't you already be generating via the cheapest supply?) Either all existing customers would pay the same and the new customer would pay the higher rate OR smear the incremental costs across everyone. Prices might hold steady under the former choice but they would not decrease.

Is the idea that the new customer would unlock some better generation capabilities through capital investment? Something not already incentivized by the distributed grid?

Or is the idea that one should soak the new customer to subsidize the existing ones? Maybe rejigger some pricing tiers to push more of the existing customers into lower tiers while charging the new customer more. My guess is you're proposing this last option. I otherwise can't see how to square your suggestion with supply vs demand.

Thank you for pointing out the sidebar. I missed this because I did not understand that footnotes/sidebars were presented as links.

The author's framing "we have failed" suggests otherwise.

This section, https://chapel-lang.org/blog/posts/30years/#ok-then-why, does not mention libraries at all.

we have failed to broadly adopt any new compiled programming languages for HPC

The article neglects that all of C, C++, and Fortran have evolved over the last 30 years.

Also, you'll find significant advances in the HPC library ecosystem over the trailing years. Consider, for example, Trilinos (https://trilinos.github.io/index.html) or Dakota (https://dakota.sandia.gov/about-dakota/) both of which push a ton of domain-agnostic capabilities into a C++ library instead of bolting them into a bespoke language. Communities of users tend to coalesce around shared libraries not creating new languages.

Many people do get more back than they put in. High earners do not:

Most American workers receive significantly more from Social Security over their lifetimes than they contribute through payroll taxes.

https://legalclarity.org/is-social-security-worth-it-contrib...

Social Security is almost completely disbursement charges but those disbursements aren't means tested so even quite wealthy individuals receive them.

Only to those who paid into the system and far less than they personally could have earned on investing the same dollars.

A little over a third of production evidently goes to ethanol: https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10339

No idea if subsidies disproportionately subsidize fuel ethanol over non-fuel usage.

Beef prices are high right now.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000703112

If the intent of the government is to pour subsidies into domestic beef production to stabilize prices they're doing a crap job.

Compare corn: https://www.macrotrends.net/2532/corn-prices-historical-char...

In the US agricultural subsidies for 2024 were overwhelmingly for corn ($3.2B), soybeans ($1.9B), cotton ($998M), and wheat ($960M). Pasture comes in 5th ($741M).

https://usafacts.org/articles/federal-farm-subsidies-what-da...

Tofu and ethanol may be more price-distorted by the US government than is beef, but I dunno how to quickly support that idea with hard data beyond what I cited above.

Most roles let you settle into one way of thinking. Engineers think in systems and constraints. Designers think in experiences and affordances. Salespeople think in objections and value props...

I don't think often, but when I do, it's in stereotypes. Stay dismissive my friends.