actionablefiber

It's increasingly a pet theory of mine that the uncontrolled concentration of wealth into the hands of the richest, their subsequent existential ennui, and their disconnect from reality owing to media consolidation and algorithmic content feeds have basically created a world where the superrich are in a "post-game" mentality. There are no further material comforts to obtain. They just want to feel anything at all and the only way to do that is by bringing about the end of the world.

We had a perfectly functioning economy prior to car domination and all the alternatives have progressed by incredible leaps and bounds in the time since as well.

I've been to two funerals in as many years for personal friends who died when drivers killed them with their cars. I'll make sure to throw in a good word for "emergent freedoms" and "the progress of civilization" at the next funeral I end up at.

I think it's important to think of Excel as a tool for modelling reality and not a tool for changing it. IMO Excel should not be producing data feeds that other tools expect real time access to, nor should it make API calls that mutate state on other platforms.

A lot of sitcom tropes involve behaviors that are repulsive in real life.

My family (parents, siblings) are asking me "How did our T-mobile phone bill balloon so much in the past decade?" and I can point to the slow creep and the plan changes they made that (without them knowing or anyone telling them) un-grandfathered them out of a favorable promotional plan. For instance my sister needed to increase her data cap about a few months before they moved our data to unlimited. It pushed her out of the promo and now the family plan costs $35/mo extra even though her line is getting the exact same things as mine, which is still on the promo pricing.

Then I tell them they'd be better served by switching to an MVNO offering significantly better rates and they come back and tell me they're locked in for a while because they just financed new devices.

I'm souring on the ways we create systems where you have to be super savvy and walk on eggshells with how you use the service and utter the right incantations or else you get hosed.

SBF didn't have anyone bigger to flip on.

Tons of people who get degrees in technical fields work outside that field. There are many people who have have spent at least part of their studies or career in hard science, SWE, IT, management consulting, law or finance before switching to something else in that list to improve their work/life balance, to make more money, to find employment more easily, or simply because learning the field and cracking its puzzles is engaging work for them no matter the exact technical field it's in.

It tries to make you 'competitive' so hard.

I've found that it's really what you make of it. My city has a bunch of cycling subcultures - social slow rolls, fast road riding, sightseeing and exploration, commuting and errand-running - and different people like to see and talk about different types of rides and sometimes dabble in different subcultures, but generally people care way more about seeing the rides, and whatever fun banter or background context you add when you post it, than analyzing your speed and elevation.

I really love the social aspect of Strava because I'm friends with all the other people I follow on it. In some way I think it is more intimate than traditional social media. You could get a better picture of my life and how I spend my time from seeing my physical displacements during the day than by seeing the super filtered Instagram stuff that I only choose to share when I'm having a good time and doing something interesting.

Overall, I eat out less, but "drink out" more and never get more than one drink at the establishment. I can't claim to be able to uniquely isolate any of my behavior to fees because a lot has changed in my life. Before covid I was a student and now an FTE, I was shy and lonely and now I have an active social life, I lived in a very big city and now live in a big city, but I can tell you I get an ick about going out, and when I'm proposing to go out I am mindful of costs and fees and propose places that I consider to be cheaper and more forthright about pricing.

I'd like to believe this is true but in my metropolitan area, it's quite common to see e.g. a covid recovery fee, inflation recovery fee, iniative 82 service fee, and autograt when you are checking out. It's extremely bad for price transparency but the practice seems very popular among merchants who are betting that customers will still show up as long as the menu prices appear low.

Why not go even further? Itemize the marginal cost of maintaining your property's parking lot for those customers who visit your business by car?

Aka... charge for parking? I mean? This is pretty common? I've always found it annoying that stores will validate parking for motorists but if I choose to take public transit or bikeshare, I don't get any corresponding debate.

It is sort of like claiming Netflix is a membership-selling company that happens to run a streaming service.

Though you could make this argument for gyms, which are notorious for selling a lot of memberships to people who lack/lose the motivation to use them.

Uber Pool is back after a pandemic-induced hiatus. The main draw isn't the potential for an interesting conversation but the fact that it's cheaper.

For the sake of your local dogs I wish you many more boring calls where you have nothing to contribute.

Bike lane hardening is surely good, but this is a press release from almost two years ago that promised to harden half of the city's bike lanes, which still hasn't happened or even come close to happening. One thing you get used to, cycling in NYC, is that it doesn't mean much when the administration tells you about its ambitions: the thing you measure it by is how much it gets done.

The Transportation Alternatives tracker[1] tells you how much they are falling short of their promises.

And of course without bollards, cars can still enter the bike lanes at intersections[2]. I'm happy for progress where we get it, but it's hard to lean into my optimism when you know that every time the city announces it will do something, it will take 3x as long to do 1/3 of what they promised.

[1]https://projects.transalt.org/bikelanes

[2]https://www.reddit.com/r/MicromobilityNYC/comments/yaqfwd/pr...

It's sad and infuriating that in the United States, you can point out blatantly dangerous infrastructure and fight for safety improvements, and it won't make any difference until someone actually goes out and exploits the bad infrastructure to murder cyclists and pedestrians. Then suddenly you can get the bollards, but only in the place where the murderer killed people: NYC still has tons and tons and tons of unprotected bike lanes, but at least no one will ever again be able to murder people with their car in that specific part of the Hudson River Greenway.

Nit: Most food delivery workers in NYC are on e-bikes or mopeds. There are surely some drivers but it is prohibitively difficult to use a car for food deliveries in nearly all of Manhattan and decent portions of Brooklyn/Queens/the Bronx.

As it is there is public outcry about dangerous and aggressive riding behavior from food delivery workers. It is not strictly a bad idea to tilt the incentive structure so that while you can earn a little extra on tips for completing more deliveries, it's not such a huge part of your earnings that you need to cut corners, ride the wrong way on one-way streets, ride on sidewalks etc. to hyperoptimize your delivery rate.

Riding a bike is not fun if you're doing it to commute - having to do it in all weathers, in traffic that feels unsafe, even if you don't feel like it and got poor sleep etc. It's really fundamentally not the same.

With good infrastructure, like PBLs, cycletracks and dedicated trails, it really is that fun. DC is an extremely good place to bike commute and I do it in all weather.

Anywho if you got poor sleep and decided to drive, everyone else is living at the mercy of your alertness. I'd rather you rode a bike.

Presumably if the technology is good, there is some competitive advantage in retaining sole control over it, or licensing it out.

So they're basically switching employees from an investment plan where the employees profit from falling interest rates to an investment plan where IBM profits from falling interest rates.

Except IBM also takes plenty of upside if interest rates stay high too, by paying way below-market yield for the first few years.

I make my own decks. Nearly all of it is word + pronunciation (for Chinese/Japanese) + definition + example sentences, with additional fields for words that have several pronunciations/definitions.

I don't have any particular resources to share on this subject (but there is much discussion on /r/anki and /r/medicalschoolanki about it). Broadly I'd say that the most efficient way to use it is to use it consistently, but not to make it your one-and-only practice. It's passive practice, and it's useful for making sure you see idioms and words that might otherwise be uncommon, and it's extremely useful as a searchable database once you've built up your deck, but it can get tedious, and drilling works better as a complement to, rather than a substitution for, practical experience. The move is to limit yourself to ~30 min a day, and use the rest of the time you want to spend on languages for active engagement, like speaking/writing with other speakers of the language, or reading things you're interested in in the target language.

Yes but doing reviews on a phone can get tedious under some circumstances. Since a lot of people, particularly med students but really any dedicated learner who uses Anki, puts tens or hundreds or thousands of hours into Anki during their journey with it, making the experience enjoyable and comfortable really matters. (And for med students, getting the learning right is one of the most foundational important things they'll ever do in their lives, since everything they do as a doctor is a result of learning well and passing exams.) With a controller you have tactile feedback and better ergonomics. Plus it's easier to stay focused if you're using the controller, since you won't just unconsciously swipe away into another app/window; all your buttons are bound to Anki actions, so unless you set the controller down, you're in Anki.

The optimal setup is generally with a fixed, large-ish screen (tablet, laptop, desktop monitor etc) where you can see all the text and media in your cards and don't have to scroll all the time. Med school Anki decks have a lot of diagrams, long fill-in-the-blank sentences and so on; I learn languages so my cards have a lot of example sentences and sometimes lengthy explanations for idioms, cultural/historical terminology and so on.

It also helps that when you use a controller, your view of the screen and your grip on the controller become separate concerns. You can do stuff like lie in bed with the phone mounted above your face, and do reviews using the controller instead of having to raise your arms up to touch the buttons.

One of the most popular applications for these controllers, at least in the circles I run in, is doing flashcard reviews in Anki. It's super convenient if you have a controller since you can do the reviews while on the go, while huddled under the covers, while relaxing on the couch and so on. You can search `"8bitdo" site:reddit.com/r/medicalschoolanki` or `"8bitdo" site:reddit.com/r/anki` and you'll get a bunch of results from people configuring these for flashcard reviews.

From what I see in the comments here it looks like some people also use them to play video games!

He is probably going against the advice of his lawyers because he thinks he is smarter than them.

I think it's a hail Mary. All his buddies were offered deals to flip on him because he was the big fish. There's no bigger fish for him to flip on, so prosecutors will throw the book at him, no reason to go easy. A conviction is pretty certain and would be pretty bad, so any strategy that could make things better but can't make things worse is ideal.

What’s the “Very Bad” scenario? Limited liability stops being limited?

Long-term Bed Bath shareholders lost everything. Evidently their returns were not boosted by the buybacks.

Borrowing money to buy back stock is the opposite of funding: it's de-funding. It's the acquisition of liabilities with no offsetting acquisition of assets or future cash flows.

One can, but I think it is better to dream.

The rebuttals to his design are basically just "every room needs a window", without any real justification. Do you think he didn't think of that? That he just forgot to put windows in?

I think Munger should build a dorm room for himself that doesn't have windows and live in it for a few years before deciding that other people don't need them.