arbor_day

It's not that EVs are a commodity. Competition and speculative production capacity buildouts combined with lower than expected consumer demand made the market less profitable.

They said "net worth" which is assets not cash that's being spent. M0 would shoot up which causes inflation.

If they said "income" it'd still shoot up the velocity of money, since poor people have higher spending rates.

I've been a FAANG engineer for the last 15 years, tech pays pretty well. The things you see on the news about "farming subsidies" often show up as government subsidized loans (lower rates and higher leverage) which has helped.

It's somewhere between an extra job and a hobby. It's just touch for planting / harvest season -- lots of nights / weekends / day job PTO along with getting help from relatives.

I find Illinois taxes to be scarier for land than other investments.

Illinois state is in a bad financial position, they can't inflate their way out of it. Financial assets are easier to move than land if things get bad.

Yeah, it's sorta both big and small.

It's small in that you can't support a family farming 500 acres of corn/beans. It's big in that buying 500 acres would cost $5M - $10M, that's real money!

There’s something righteous in farming where it’s really hard to feel like you’re doing wrong even if you’re getting rich — you are just feeding people. It’s like being a doctor.

1M was a nice round number for equipment. I see people without much land buy new equipment all the time, it’s wild! They tend to not stick around long though.

You must have better land than we do. Land by me goes for around 14K/ acre. The bigger plots or better land goes higher.

Have you seen how expensive a tractor or combine is? The economies of scale are real in farming.

You need ~$1M worth of equipment to farm 80 acres (~$1M worth of land), but that same equipment can basically farm 800 acres (~10M worth of land). An equipment issue can destroy a years worth of work with 800 acres (e.g. frost damage from delays), but with 8000 acres you can have spares / avoid the loss with some overtime.

Fertilizer and pesticides aren't neatly contained. If you farm different crops than your neighbors, overspray can kill your yield (e.g. weeds spray for corn kills soybeans). Laws around who can grow/spray what and being big helps make that better

I own the farm and farm it in Illinois. I owe the land through an LLC, because farming is dangerous and I don't want to go bankrupt if somebody sues me. Farms are expensive and hard to subdivide, so people will put them into a legal entity and pass down to the next generation via a trust. All of my neighbors are doing the same, so we're all counted as "not farmers" here

Farming is a terrible business. My few hundred acres (maybe worth $5M) will only churn out a few hundred grand in profit -- not even better than holding t-bills. The margins get better as you get bigger but still not great.

Many of the buyers keep growing their farms because it's a status symbol. Everybody in your area will instantly know you're a big wig if you're one of the X family who has 2,000 acres all without the ick that comes with running other businesses. You can't buy that kind of status in my community with anything other than land.

Yup, sort of the whole point. There's a lot of cost plus contracts floating around here, which is a terrible incentive.

facebook.com started out as a php app. It was easier to make php efficient (enough) than to rewrite the application.

I was suspicious before I joined, but it works way better than you'd think!

That seems wrong. More than half the US population uses Facebook. https://www.statista.com/statistics/408971/number-of-us-face...

EVs are ~1% of cars and ~5% of new car sales. It seems like we have another 5 years until those scale effects start to really kick in.

Of the negative effects of IG, knowing which photos have been digitally altered doesn't seem high on the list. I'm not sure who you'd be significantly helping with this feature.

Even if this does solve a user problem, it'd be difficult to make this label accurate for photos altered outside the app. An inaccurate label might be much worse than not having a label.

I think my use of "quiet" and "crowd" was not very clear. For me quiet is the absence of hustle and bustle.

When I down my street, I'll see at most 1-2 people out and about. To me, that's a more relaxing environment than even the best urban environments where I'll see dozens of people.

Unless I live next to a major road/highway, the occasional car noise is less bothersome to me personally than noise from people. To me car noise feels like white background noise, but voices trigger some active part of my brain.

I'm not arguing that's a completely rational way to feel / belief, but it totally how I feel.

FWIW, I am happy to pay a premium for the living situation I want. I do that today across high housing costs / taxes / cost of local goods/services. I'd happily support paying for other externalities (e.g. carbon taxes).

Cities don't vote, people do.

I own a single family home in the Palo Alto. If I wanted to living in a city like Paris, I would. I like it here.

I don't care about the price of my house, since I do not plan to sell it this decade. I care a TON about my neighborhood. I love that my neighborhood is quiet, not crowded, and has easy parking. I will vote against any proposals or elected officials who represent me that would make that worse.

I get I represent NIMBY-ism, but these tradeoffs are real. I often see people strawman them like there are easy/obvious solutions to shared problems. There aren't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Me_163_Komet

O.o

"""

[M]any pilots were killed during testing and training, at least in part due to the highly volatile and corrosive nature of the rocket propellant used in later models of the aircraft. This includes one pilot, Oberleutnant Josef Pöhs, who was *dissolved* by the rocket fuel following an incident that resulted in a ruptured fuel line.

"""