dumbotron

[cheating] was a cultural difference that had to be respected

What he meant to say was "they pay sticker price"

I'm not being smug about CA's grid. It has rolling blackout on hot days. Its problem is it doesn't let anyone build power plants.

Cities can compete against each other to attract businesses - no?

We've seen this with Walmarts. They get cities to compete for their stores. Amazon did it for HQ2. The problem is the winner's curse. The winning city will often bid so low they take a net loss.

Having everyone lock themselves inside and exclusively interact via video chat is not a good thing, IMO.

Sounds like a Black Mirror episode.

There's an argument that you want consistency across the state. Having snowflake jurisdictions is a headache for businesses.

SF is being gutted because the only equipment a programmer needs is a computer

I think that's only half of it. The other half is a lot of people were only in SF for the money. When given the opportunity to leave and make the same money, they did.

I'm sympathetic to concerns that some kids (mostly girls) are doing it because it's a trendy thing to do. I'm worried things like The Genderbread Person send the wrong message by gendering clothes and activities. It tells a boy wearing pink and playing with barbies he's a girl.

If my kid's LGB, I'm glad they found what they're looking for, and if they change their mind, that works too. The trans bit worries me because it's permanent.

I think both sides have gone too far on this issue, and find California and Florida equally scary.

You're confusing misdirection for divide and conquer. Divide and conquer would mean the US splits up so China can be the superpower.

I'm surprised mass shooters all love ARs. A cheap plastic 9mm pistol with hollowpoint rounds is plenty deadly.

Some of their stats resemble third world countries.

Have you walked through the TL?

Comparing California and Texas can be interesting because the states are both dominated by a single party, so you see how both ideologies can go wrong. With Texas being like a developing country, I'm reminded of the winter power outage. They love free markets. It's not worth it to harden the electric grid for an event that rare that only lasts a few days. Picking on California, its K-12 education is in the bottom quartile.

my hobbies tend to be populated mainly by the conservative demographic

What are conservative (and liberal) hobbies?

No area is thriving right now thanks to the recession

We're not really in a recession. Tech was probably in a recession in 2022, but Google and Meta both had good earnings reports, so maybe we're through that. Finance is having its own issues. Everyone else is a little nervous, but doing ok, except for inflation.

I saw this today. It looks at mass transit funding in big metros. Mass transit is interesting because it's a proxy for downtown health.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-09/us-public...

The outlook isn't good, and the shortfalls mean there will likely be service cuts, driving people away from city centers even more. SF will probably be worse off because of how poorly it's handled homelessness, theft, and drug use.

This joke's getting tired. Jersey Shore did just fine, and that was a decade after The Real World showed MTV they should downplay the music. They just didn't have the next big thing, and now kids are into TikTok dances.

Next you're going to tell me "why's it called Coca Cola when there's no cocaine in it."

People like to criticize subscription models, but this is why you actually want them. It's easier to keep everything mostly up-to-date than do a big migration every decade, and if the pricing is set right (it usually isn't), it works out to the same amount in the end.

This isn't just a tech thing. People redo their kitchens and bathrooms every so often because they start looking dated.

We also set up concentration camps for Japanese-Americans.

The best part about over-treating as a dentist is there's no evidence, and the patient might never know.

Once I sunk a day into a take-home test. It went well, and I got to chat with a manager for half an hour. They said they weren't interested with no added context. Setting aside that take-home tests favor people who have time on their hands, the time investment can be very asymmetric, and it doesn't scale for the candidate.

The yellow flag to me is less the job hopping and more that you were only obviously successful at one company.

is there anything that isn’t meaningless, then?

Invert a binary tree.

The exploited host workers then do everything for them, from taking care of their brood to protecting and feeding them. Such a relationship between species is called obligate parasitism, because the parasites cannot survive on their own.

There's a lesson about wealth in here somewhere.

I suspect what's going on here is that in music, it doesn't matter if you understand it right the first time.

So there's this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdz5kCaCRFM

and more interestingly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8

Realizing no one's going to change a language with 900 million speakers, do you think it's because there's a lot of ambiguity, or is it because it's a cognitive load people aren't used to? Mandarin is a newer language than Cantonese, and it has fewer tones. Languages tend towards laziness, so I wonder if it settled on the right number, of if it's an ongoing trend.

Edit: About languages losing features, English used to be declined like German or Latin. Only pronouns are declined in modern English, and we don't usually teach it as "pronouns are declined."

But it's the wrong straw. The reason people played with their Oculus for a day, then left it on the shelf wasn't insufficient model training.

He misses the forest for the trees. It's not this one case, but it's a pattern with him. He's not wrong about these things, but when he calls them out rather than calling out more meaningful, high-level issues.

Marijuana literally means "big numb" in Chinese? Or "big horse" if I mispronounce it?

As an English native speaker who learned Mandarin, I really didn't find the lack of spaces harmful to learning the language.

Definitely. The logograms and being in a completely different language family are the real hurdles.

Hence expertsexchange.com

I got curious about something with tonal languages: how are song melodies written for them. For some, the melody matched the tones of the word. Then there's Mandarin. Mandarin just follows the melody, and you can figure out the word by context. As an English speaker, this makes ~cents~ sense. Homophones aren't a big deal. If Mandarin doesn't need tones in lyrics, why does it need them normally?