addicted

Corruption within private companies is irrelevant, as the main ones to suffer from it are usually shareholders.

And a few millions of people suffering because they're being misled into buying "wellness" solutions.

And a few hundreds of millions of people around the world suffering the effects of local pollution and clean water laws being skirted.

And a few billion folks who are gonna suffer the effects of climate change.

etc...

Other than the 6-7 billion humans who suffer due to private company corruption, it's basically only the shareholders.

"customer" is a much better term IMO. It indicates this is ultimately a transactional relationship where both sides have certain responsibilities. The customer the responsibility to provide the money, and the provider receiving the money has a responsibility to provide the customer with something, products or services, of value that makes their lives better.

"user" is a worse term. It suggests that the "user" is simply utilizing the provider's products/services, and therefore they can't really complain about whatever the provider chooses to do in return, because the "user" can simply stop using.

It's also not a coincidence, IMO, that drug addicts are also called "users" since "user" implies a one way dependent relationship and that's what all the tech companies have been trying to create.

I'm curious what you think VCs, etc. who are investing in all these private companies want to do?

The only difference with public companies is we actually have data about their finances.

The private companies are doing it all under wraps.

This is correct.

This isn't a financial transaction. This is a "relationship" transaction.

Are there other examples of well capitalized technology startups that have significant revenues that have also opted for significant debt financing?

Yeah, your local friendly police officer isn't gonna do that.

They're gonna pay Anduril, Palantir, and a whole host of other business or consulting firms a ton of your money to do that.

The criticism that "it's technically too challenging for the police department therefore its sci-fi" is extremely silly given that the current article literally is about private companies that are building surveillance networks that they will then sell to the police.

Which makes the entire situation a lot worse.

Or a Roomba... One of the first things they want to do is make a plan of the house.

But also, don't builders have to submit plans of homes to the local government when building them for approval?

This wasn't a non issue. You touched the phone in the wrong places and you would drop off an existing call.

Most people solved this by indeed not "holding it wrong" or getting cases (I don't know if the cases worked, but there was a whole industry built around advertising cases that solved this problem).

There are 2 problems to this.

1. I seriously doubt Apple was accidentally displaying more bars on the phone. If it was a "bars" issue then it was almost certainly done deliberately to make the iPhone reception look better than what it was.

2. It wasn't just bars. I had this phone and you would literally drop off calls by holding the phone differently when you hadn't done anything else. There was a genuine problem with the phone that I don't think was ever resolved other than people getting used to holding the phone differently like Steve Jobs told us to.

I lost my iPhone and switched to a hand me down from my parents which was a generation older and the service was significantly better.

Yup, that's what they will do now.

Which is indeed a benefit for their countries.

And is a loss for the US.

The brain drain was real and the US was the beneficiary and that may be ending soon.

Not sure what your point is? Are you happy that the US will be worse off than it was before?

Student enrollment in the US is declining and the big problem for colleges the past few years has been a worry about not having enough students. So it's not clear why US students were struggling to get a college spot.

And if you mean them getting spots in the more prestigious institutions, well, it's not clear whether that will even happen (the few thousand international students admitted to the top universities are not the ones that are likely to decline their acceptance letters), but even if it did, well, those universities are simply not as prestigious anymore.

Attracting the best talent from anywhere in the world is a huge part of what created their prestige, and that's even before we get to how they're losing funding, and professors and researchers to other countries.

Yes, they should.

Which is a completely unrelated effort from the free money you're getting from abroad.

Unless governments institute policies that require them to "tighten their belts" they won't tighten their belts by cutting their own pay. They'll tighten belts by cutting out the least paying students, and scholarships, instead.

If this does push governments to get universities to tighten their belts, then why not have governments make them do that anyways without losing a massive chunk of export earnings, and a form of export earnings which has demonstrated positive effects many times greater than the dollars they bring in.

Any anecdote will suffer from survivorship bias (and also negative anecdotes). The data on the other hand are very clear that people are not doing as well as their parents. Unless you have a theory as to why Americans simply became more lazy, etc. a starting point should sensibly be a systemic explanation.

Also, just speaking about your anecdote, let me add my own. I am also doing fine. Not particularly rich but middle class, good income, and savings for retirement. But I just got hit with compounding dental issues, which despite having the most expensive health insurance from my company that's well known for providing excellent employee benefits, it will end up costing me at least 20k out of pocket, potentially going up to 30-40k due to the need for multiple surgical procedures.

And fortunately we can manage it, but if the same issue had happened to me 5 years ago, I would basically be at the edge of my savings where even a minor unexpected cost would have put me in terrible shape, and 10 years ago I may have had to declare bankruptcy, or more likely, do without either suffering in pain, or pushing off the problem to be handled by even more expensive work a few years down the line, taking on expensive debt, or setting myself up for periodontal disease which leads to a whole host of issues including significantly increased risk of dementia.

Even if one is earning and saving decently, the precariousness of life in the US of A today is incredible.

I think eliminating online sports betting, and requiring it be done within the physical confines of a casino may help mitigate most of the concerns around this.

After all, sports betting was legal in several states such as NJ, Nevada, as long as they were taking place in the casinos in Atlantic City/Las Vegas, and we didn't see any major negative impacts like we do now.

For context, SNAP is valued at $14Bn.

This is a straight up giveaway to friends.

Even dictators in other countries don't make it so obvious because they're worried their populations would revolt, which says a lot about the American voter today.

If you think anyone has "forgotten" the issues you're deeply mistaken.

Apple essentially has a monopoly on iOS so just because people have adapted to their decisions doesn't make their decisions correct, or at the very least, painless.

If a headphone jack existed people would still be using it.

The USB-C example is particularly ironic given that it was Apple that was fighting switching over to USB-C on the iPhone until forced to do so by the EU. For years you could carry an Android and Macbook with a single charger, but needed 2 chargers for a Macbook and an iPhone. When Apple dropped USB-A completely it was painful for years, and people still have trouble with it. Most competitors still include at least 1 USB-A port.

Which wasn't the case for the CDRom or the floppy drive examples, showing that those decisions were correct in a way the USB-A removal one wasnt.

Further, even when Apple dropped the CD-Rom, it was a phased removal starting with teh Macbook Air, which made complete sense. People who bought the MacBook Pro still had CD Roms (except for 1 of the cheapest models). That was the correct way to approach this. Remove it from a device where it made sense to remove it, while keeping it for the Pros who needed it, but also signaling that it was going away giving people time to transition their workflows.

The USB-A port was signaled for 1 year at best (and even then it really wasn't signaled...it was simply removed from the cheapest model, which could have been seen as cost cutting more than anything else), and then a year later all the PRO laptops lost their USB-A ports completely. This was the opposite of the kind of transition they did earlier (such as keeping Firewire on the Pro laptops for years after they were removed from their no Pro versions).

Would similar research in other countries also return similar results?

The US is going through a lot of upheaval, which whether you think is positive or negative, is unique, and a confounding factor for any such research.

Install Google For Windows...

until Lucy pulls the football again.

How does Google expect anyone to trust them.

I absolutely loved the Google Windows search app, and even went as far as fighting for our org to install the google appliance, only for Google to pull the rug out from under us.

They have Exchange solutions working for over 2 decades but the Google Appliance barely lasted 5 years.

Wow, this explains an alarm I missed literally yesterday which ended up being set to today AM instead of yesterday PM like I thought I set it.

I thought the US approach to biofuels was always understood as a Republican head fake towards climate change action during Bush without doing anything that would threaten oil interests while simultaneously enriching their donor and voting base with all our tax dollars.

The Democrats have a structural problem.

The party is defined as being composed of the people who are already elected. So the priority of the Democratic Party ends up reflecting the priorities of those who are already in office, which is to make sure the incumbents get reelected.

This means there's very little incentive to expand the electorate (which would mean younger voters, who are likely to vote younger candidates, so that threatens the aging incumbents), or spend resources in expanding the map (because by definition there are no incumbents there whose interests are represented in the party).

For as advanced as the US political system is, it's incredibly backwards when it comes to professionalization of the political parties. A good comparison is the BJP in India. Setting aside policy, ideological issues for a moment, what they're really good at is being professional. The head of the party is not elected, and constantly rotates the party representative in each election, keeping their bench deep. They also have a soft age limit.

In a way, Donald Trump's greatest contribution to the Republican Party was destroying the incumbency advantage for Republicans. As a result the Republican slate was completely refreshed with younger (although generally worse) candidates, but while it may have made the party significantly worse from a policy/ideology perspective, it has made it politically stronger.

To be fair, a lot of people were fooled by the first term.

In the first term Trump hired a lot of retired or retiring generals. They may not have been subject matter experts, but that's fine, since they had subject matter experts within their departments, and they had the ability to organize, lead and execute.

But most importantly, most of them had a pretty strong sense of ethics and loyalty to the country and constitution.

The generals, and the people they hired, and even the Trump lackeys who were nonetheless being watched by the generals, helped keep Trump's worst impulses in check.

In Term 2, on the other hand, Trump has explicitly picked people who are completely unqualified (this is a mafia tactic to ensure the individual's loyalty is entirely to you since they know they would never have got the job they did on merit) and their primary skills lie in right wing TV and Podcasts. So these people prioritize effect and show for their followers, and are loyal to no one but Trump. And they've been selected primarily because they're incapable of doing the jobs they've been hired for well, so it's a stark 180 from the first term.

I can't speak to whether the 6 applications is the correct number, but it seems like a reasonable first pass to apply some limit as long as the NIH is closely monitoring this and modifying the restrictions as needed.

Who is advising Apple on these actions? Is it a team out of California? Because their approach to working with the EU seems pretty obviously unproductive and will (as it has in the past) hurt Apple, leading them to give up even more than they may have wanted, where if they worked collaboratively in good faith, they'd probably be able to negotiate the EU into a position more favorable to their preferences.

I'm confused. An insurance company cannot reject a prescription. They can only reject paying for it.

So if you're paying for it with Hims why wouldn't you be willing to pay for the medication the doctor prescribes to you if the insurance company is refusing to pay for it?

Another nice thing about markdown is that you can pick up the formatting even if reading the markdown in plaintext.

So lists look exactly how you would expect lists to look like if you were writing it on a piece of paper.

Italic/Bolds are surrounded by /* which convey emphasis even in plaintext.

Headings prefixed by # is a reasonable way to depict headings in plaintext and convey the intention immediately even if you don't know Markdown.

No, the question is are bicyclists killing and injuring pedestrians disproportionately than cars.

And the answer is no.

Every time a bike lane is installed on a street/avenue the safety rate for pedestrians increases dramatically.

It's largely enforced fine with e-bikes.

However, you do have car lane legal scooters that also ride in the bike lanes when convenient which are a real problem.

These aren't e-bikes, however, and are not supposed to be in the bike lane in the first place.

Anecdotally (London not NYC) I feel like I am "endangered" by e-bikes much more often than cars

Speaking of NYC, not London, there are several reasons I see for this. 1. NYC has used bike lanes as pedestrian safety infrastructure, siting the bike lanes right against sidewalks, providing a buffer from cars. NYC DOT has done a lot of research every time a new bike lane has been added, and every time they did that pedestrian deaths and severe injuries dropped. However, the flip side is that you're gonna have e-bikes much closer to you than cars.

2. Street infrastructure, including red light timing, etc. is entirely based on cars and not bikes. The bike lights, for example, switch directly from green to red, providing no "yellow" period to stop. This actually makes sense because bikes are significantly safer, but it leads to different behavior than cars, which some pedestrians feel is "unfair". What would actually be fair would be to design the infrastructure suitable for bikers as well.

3. Pedestrians simply have different expectations of cars/ebikes. You will reliably see tourists not even look for bikes while crossing the bike path and stand in the middle of the bike path or walk in the bike path in a way they never would with a car lane.

4. Bikes are just given much poorer infrastructure. In NYC, you have narrow bike lanes, several of which are interrupted with slick and dangerous sewer gratings, and with no space to pass, with car parking right next to them leading to people constantly hopping through the bike lane from their cars to the sidewalk without looking, constantly creating a danger of opening their doors without looking causing bikes to be "doored", etc.

There's way too much "feels" in this discussion. It's about time someone provided some actual data that bikes, and even e-bikes, have even slightly increased risks to pedestrians, when all the actual data suggests otherwise, and it's about time we recognize that at least in places like NYC, the "danger" caused by bikes/e-bikes, is literally because the city has made bikers a buffer to protect pedestrians from the actual dangers on the road, the 1-2 ton cars traveling at incredible speeds through dense urban areas.

So it’s not that it won’t be published today.

It just won’t be as popular today. And would, ironically, be crapped on by other people, which is what the author is unhappy about.

Thats what the author means, and represents the entirety of the “Oh I am so oppressed because I can’t say shitty unfunny jokes because other people will make shitty unfunny jokes about me in response” genre of argument.

The difference between then and now is that the people in the “crap towns” have the opportunity to call the author out.