bb2018

I agree its risky. Perhaps I'm being pedantic but seems weird to do an entire article on Musk's vision for space and not once mention starlink or the satelite side of the business.

The not-up-to-date person reading this would truly think that the billions of dollars funding this by Musk are like a side project done simply because of his dreams of terraforming Mars. Maybe Musk is serious about that - but if described with starlink you realize its much less of a "billionaire hobby obsession" and more of a "potentially profitable business (with bragging rights too)"

Bezos, Musk and Richard Branson seem animated by a lofty goal: securing the future of humanity by going into space.

This seems like a very under-researched statement. Bezos and Musk clearly see huge profits to be made flying satellites for use on earth. Space is sexy - and that's why its used as the marketing gimmick by these companies. For an article so critical of them its odd they took the promotional material of these companies at face value.

I obviously realize that influenza does not attack the body in the same way with the same receptors - but it obviously attacks the body in its own unique way.

It rarely causes serious health consequences but for the people it does (I've known younger people sent hospital with it) are there long term consequences on the same order of magnitude? It doesn't seem like the data really exists for this.

I do wonder if this is proportional to your symptoms/proportional to other ailments.

For instance, is someone with Covid (who was on the verge of needing oxygen) more likely to have long term symptoms than someone the same age who got the flu/pneumonia (and was also on the verge of needing oxygen).

In other words - is there something unique about Covid? Or is that any disease that sets you back has serious long-term consequences, and Covid is just statistically much more likely to do that than the flu, for example.

NASA's version of doing things quietly is pretty loud

https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2021/06/28/nasa-administrator-...

I honestly am cool with NASA getting lots more money but also seems clear that the beurocrats have realized the best way to secure more funding now is no longer to make a national security argument - but one involving overhyping the evidence of aliens.

Would be more interesting/honest if they differentiated between companies that have declined versus just mergers.

The AEI is making the point there is more creative destruction than people think - which is fair.

But Mobil is counted as if it isn't in the top 500 companies now because it merged. But it wasn't just gobbled up - if it was independent it would clearly be top 500 still. If you were a shareholder in 1955 you'd be pleased.

I've used website blockers before on Twitter. I would still go incognito to find people for updates on things but the extra two clicks def nudged me from doing it as often.

I don't see how it is less relevant.

Warren says he understands how much Microsoft is getting off of royalties for Windows but is unsure about his confidence in a 20 year bet compared to a company like Coke which sells Cola.

Warren turned out to be very wrong in investing in Coke over MSFT. However, his reasoning wasn't awful. The entire e-mail pleading the case to him is about how great of a business selling the OS is. However, if Microsoft had stuck to that the stock would not be doing so well now. Perhaps he and the person pleading MSFT's case were wrong to view Microsoft's business as operating system related instead of tech and computing more generally. I'd say both were about the same levels of wrong but one had a better outcome.

Not on a random blog.

I disagree. I feel like that's up for the patient to decide. If I am going to tell my deepest secrets to someone I'd rather there not even be the faintest idea that details would be written about, even in very general ways.

According to Snopes, the song "Sweet Home Alabama" was actually inspired by a radio commercial for "Sweet Homes" that had aired decades earlier. Full circle.

I am in favor of looser zoning laws and generally consider myself a YIMBY. However, I wouldn't say it is good politically to only support local low-income housing conditional on the fact that there is no negatives. I think that is the best policy but also acknowledge that there will be some tradeoffs.

As others have said I don't think looking at home values in major cities like Boston or Seattle is that interesting. Cities are used to having very rich areas next to poor ones. I grew up in a town of about 20,000 that had close to no housing that wasn't zoned as single family. As a result, the median income was very high, property taxes stayed extremely low as a percentage (since everyone was contributing a lot), and the schools were considered great despite people not having to pay a lot in taxes. The neighboring town had higher taxes (because the median property value was significantly lower) and the schools were known to be bad. I wish there was more state level funding at the time - but there wasn't and don't think there is now.

I'm a bit confused. That article doesn't mention viruses at all in its abstract, only bacterial studies.

My understanding is that the virus came from horseshoe bats. These largely live in Southern China. Wuhan is not Southern China. All studies of Corona viruses I can find deal with going to southern China (because that's where horseshoe bats live) to collect samples from horsehoe bats: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6563315/

Do you have a non-paywalled version to the link you provided? It says they looked at bacteria in bats in the abstract but didn't mention anything about which species of bats.

I've had some trouble understanding this claim though. From my understanding the bats that the virus most likely came from are thousands of miles away from Wuhan. This also is the area that the Wuhan researches went every year to collect samples.

My understanding of Chinese geography is a bit weak - but it is a bit like if a cow disease broke out in Boston near a BS4 lab. There are certainly some cows in Boston a few blocks from the BS4 lab there. Sure - there are cows in Massachusetts - but statistically it would be a bit surprising that a disease in cows would first show up there.

Though I was the one who suggested this would be easily catchable - Tesla is probably the one company where you could get away with this. There is no shortage of random Robin Hood users making pretty big plays on it constantly.

If they wanted to get as much money as possible without being caught what else could they have done?

If that was the case they could only deal with bitcoin. Blackmailing with bitcoin may be smarter but maybe they figured that would be investigated more or treated more harshly? They could have released fake financial tweets and shorted the market - but that still would be investigated much faster.

I'm sure the 100k or whatever they got isn't as much as it could be - but for a random dude who paid 10k to a disgruntled employee it is pretty good.

Occam's razor says this is almost certainly the case. It isn't like the hacker knew that it would generate such little bitcoin being sent their way until after it failed.

Especially if the hacker is not from the US it seems much easier to do the bitcoin hack than try to contact a company thousands of miles away that you know one at.

One rule of thumb I think about is that the cost of oil needed to manufacture/ship an item cannot exceed the cost of that item.

So, if a plastic straw costs two cents, then at most about 1/200th a gallon of oil/gas was used to both make the plastic and ship it to wherever you are.

It is very easy to look at the visual volume of straws or bags and feel like it is a lot of plastic - but in reality it is the equivalent amount of oil usage as driving a few more blocks.

Is there a reason for this to be on HN? I'm only seeing jokes in the thread and not even positive how a meaningful political discussion would make sense here. Every other forum has plenty of room for political discussion.

Right now - a lot of hacked organizations may just say "it's not worth the payout" but if they are already paying insurance then of course they are going to tell the insurance company its important and ask for the ransom to be paid.

I think the bright spot of the ban would be that if it was legally enforced then all hackers would see this and quickly realize it wasn't worth the risk.

(Not sure if I'm for this 100% - but I think it is worth considering)

No one would say that if you just taxed everyone 10,000 dollars a year that prices would fall in a way such that everything would carry on the same.

The US already has a fairly solid way to transfer money for those in need of food. I'm sure it inflates food prices some but clearly without food stamps more people would be hungry.

This article compares growing food like wheat locally and rightfully points out how insane that would be in terms of land required. Growing some specialized foods locally is what others have suggested but I still find this extremely misguided.

First, as a citizen of a large city, if we are going to give valuable land to a large building is it really beneficial to make it a farm? Making space for housing (whether affordable or regular apartments) seems more appropriate for most cities.

Second, as a consumer, would I really prefer the building crop to a the crop of a farm about an hour or two away from the city? Probably not (and especially not if tower fruit is more expensive).

B and C list celebs have been doing autograph signings and meet and greet for decades. Performers travel to cities in the middle of nowhere and stay there for hours before shuttling off to another location. I think it is a bit silly to single out quick video messages, that they sign up for and can set their own price for, as debasement.

I'm not quite sure that level of concern is warranted. It is illegal to ask for a medical examination before getting hired and I imagine this would extend to that. Testing poop, even with a smart toilet, would be pretty cumbersome and a huge PR nightmare. It would be just as easy now to remove hair for covert DNA tests - but I don't think that has ever been an issue.

I'm sure there is great data on police calls but from my experience with calling 911 social workers wouldn't really help. Earlier this year there was a homeless man waving a knife at pedestrians a few blocks from my house. I know this is a mental health issue and we need do do more for our homelesss - but I couldn't ask officers to deal with stuff like that on the regular with little or no protection.

I've also called 911 in the past when my house was burglarized, two men on a highway got into a fist fight after one's car hit the other, and once when a man was wandering into the middle of the highway trying to get himself run over. You could limit the number of guns but there are real issues that I think you'd want a well-equpied force for.

Again - I think this is misleading and I should have specified. In California, most of the money for schools comes from the state.

So, when I say school budget from LA is 4x the police budget, that is just covering the 21% and 12% part of this graph. Doubling the LA school budget would only increase the total school budget about ~33%

Again - if I was in charge I probably would lower police budgets and raise school budgets - but I think those sharing the slices without being informed are doing a disservice.

Source: https://ed100.org/lessons/whopays

I would love to be corrected on some of these issues, but in general looking at just discretionary funds from a city and ignoring all other funds will lead you to some wild conclusions.

I'm really not suggesting education should be cut! I just think the chart is silly because it pretty much finds the smallest subdivision of the budget that includes all of the police budget but doesn't include things like education. The desired effect of the chart is clearly for people to think "Damn - half my tax dollars are going to the police and nothing to health services" when that isn't close to being true.

Additionally, while Los Angeles in particular could increase its budget for homeless shelters and a few particular resources, I don't see it as the city's job in particular to cover all social problems that can be better handled at a state or national level. Police everywhere are largely funded locally so again it is a bit comparing apples to oranges.

I think the chart is misleading for those just seeing it in isolated form on social media. It doesn't include education budget because that is not discretionary. The school budget is 4x the police budget. I'm not exactly sure the right way to show what to include and not to include - but think it is a bit misleading to represent it this way.

If I was running a company and didn't show the cost spent on salaries or office space it might look like we were spending a ton of money on coffee.

(I am in favor of reducing militarization of police - just offended as a statistician!)

Trump, Mnuchin, Pelosi, McConnell, Sanders, and Biden have all referred to this as a stimulus. Sure, anything with money could stimulate some, but the express purpose of this was to stabilize and stimulate the economy. Most bills have that a secondary goal. A bill which directs money to institutions that do cancer research stimulates economic movement but that is not comparable to giving money directly to people for not working or losing their job.

There is no mention of the bill, either in the law itself or in discussions, that this would somehow reduce transmission by encouraging people to stay home.

Trump: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/22/coronavirus-stimulus-trump-w...

Mnuchin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoEsSwxKGtk

Pelosi: https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/05/12/nancy-pelosi-...

McConnell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHGSQCMZSt4

Sanders: https://www.masslive.com/coronavirus/2020/05/bernie-sanders-...

Biden: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-26/biden-ass...

I really disagree. The payment amount was not linked to whether or not individual people stayed at home or whether or not they lived in an area that had strict stay-at-home orders.

The economy may not seem "stimulated" compared to where it was a year ago - but it is certainly "stimulated" compared to what it would have been if the additional checks didn't go out and a much larger swath of the population missed rent, car payments, or credit card bills.