gknapp

Socrates was put death in ancient Athens in no small part to how much he was sinply a pedantic ass to everyone he interacted with, and yet it was this incessant questioning which laid the foundation for over two millenia of philosophy.

I read Crime and Punishment, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I then thought I'd move right over to War and Peace and could not get through the first 5% of the book. I'm sure with diligent effort, you can get over the very lengthy and plotless character interactions to the point where it's engaging, but I just felt like there were other books to read.

Now I'm back reading The Brothers Karamazov and it's instantly captivating! The author of this article describes the same thing... could it be that Tolstoy is just much more of a slog than Dostoyevsky?

I had to take down two absolutely enormous Douglas Fir trees on my property (> 36" base), and asked them to leave the wood rounds for me. I knew it was going to be a lot of wood, but even then, I was not prepared. I spent about a fair bit of my free time over the next 1-2 months just out there slowly working my way through the pile, and you're absolutely right - you get substantially better at it. For me, it looked something like this:

Stage 1: At first, I could chop essentially nothing, probably 60+ minutes per round as I mostly puzzled about how to make progress and got lucky from time to time with a round that split easily (fortunately, I had a nice splitting axe)

Stage 2: Then I bought some splitting wedges, and I used a handheld sledgehammer to drive them in to what I thought were the weak spots, and then ultimately pried open the log, to pieces that I could split more readily.

Stage 3: I bought a massive demolition sledge hammer (essentially a two-handed battle hammer) and used that to drive the wedges in after getting them started, and made a bit more progress on actually splitting the rounds.

Stage 4: After doing this countless times, you just a knack for reading the wood, and where it will / won't split. I reverted back to using just the splitting axe, since if you hit the wood in the right spots, it really just splits on its own.

Here's where I ended up, if it helps any of you:

- Start by establishing the fracture line that will be used to split the round in half. I would eyeball any existing line on the round towards the center, and use the axe head to mark a line, away from any knots , from the center to the edge. These two center-to-edge didn't necessarily need to be inline. They could be slightly offset, like hands on a clock.

- With moderate force, just repeatedly strike that line, working from the center outwards. You'd be shocked out how quickly repeated strikes widen the line, and eventually the wood's own weight almost causes it to fall apart.

- Recursively do this with the two halves: Draw the line from (what was the center), radially out to the edge. Repeatedly strike until these pieces have been halved.

- Continue this process until you have proper pizza wedges. At this point, it's pretty trivial to just chop the pizza wedge, from the wedge to the base, into 4 or 5 smaller firewood-sized logs.

I know y'all probably didn't care to read this, but this was quite honestly weeks of my life in learning this, and I couldn't find a great guide on YouTube or anything, especially for rounds this big.

What does this do that Obsidian doesn't already do? I've found that's my typical go to for pairing with Agentic work, and supports Markdown well, alongside tons of other functionality.

Well, it's easy! Just get the majority of voters to hate each other enough that it's a moral boundary to vote together on any law, effectively limiting any meaningful change.

And no, please spare us all your justifications for how caffeine is fine or micro-dosing has been amazing, because they are simply varying levels of rationalization, I do it too, I’m just not in it as deeply. And no, just because you were able to become rich with and on the back of drugs does not mean you did it without harm, you likely just scandalized a lot of harm to, e.g., get rich selling some service to some coke head investor who will only fuel the abuse of data mining and social media addiction.

I think you make some interesting points, and it's a very well thought-out post, but this is the definition of "poisoning the well". You're attempting to preemptively discredit the most obvious flaw in your argument.

There is a massive amount of evidence for the impact on both society, economy and neurology for each of the drugs listed in your last paragraph – and it's these impacts that often change personal and societal perception of risk and reward. Caffeine, at average doses, induces an effect that is comparable to a small cortisol spike – it is mildly addictive, but nowhere near that of an opioid, for example.

Drugs like meth and heroine (and one wonders why you left off fentanyl) are highly addictive and destructive, cause enormous loss of life an an inconceivable scale, and can permanently damage neurological pathways. From what I've read, the impact of hallucinogenics is less well understood... but probably not great.

If your argument is "we like to say caffeine and alcohol are fine, when they're really no different than opioids and meth", well there _is_ a staggeringly enormous difference in the potency and impact of caffeine vs the other drugs you've listed. I do agree with you that alcohol is far more harmful than society cares to admit, however, and that's both well-studied and often ignored.

I just played a full round of Geoguessr world with Gemini 2.5 and got a score of 22k / 25k (so a silver medal). This puts in the realm of a "pretty good" player.

It was shockingly accurate with its guesses of Essen, Germany and Sheffield, UK, but faltered a bit in Italy (it thought Genoa was Siena) and Russia (it guessed Samara but it was actually a small town about 400 miles to the west). It also guessed Orlando when it was Tampa.

Still this was only giving it a single image to work off of, where any player would be able to move around for a few minutes.

Right, but this is the same company, so the cost of marketing, auditing, R&D, etc. shouldn't be different for these products. That's a fixed cost for the company.

This is a guess, but the argument is probably that it took way more R&D effort for them to figure out how to produce it efficiently in the US, and they've chosen to increase the cost of the US phone variant to offset this particular R&D expenditure that the Chinese variant didn't have.

I don't have a great sense as to how this works across the world, but where I'm at (Seattle) your property tax is a factor of both the improved and unimproved aspects of your parcel. The improved ones being the value of the buildings and the unimproved being the value of the land itself.

If you had a massive plot in an urban area, undeveloped, presumably the unimproved portion of your property tax would be quite high! But, the issue is that restrictive zoning means that typically the unimproved value of your tax assessment are pretty low.

For example, if you live on 2 acres, but zoning says that you can only put 1 dwelling unit per 5 acres, then you can't really do much with the remaining acres. As a result, the remaining land has little value, and the tax on it is low. This is especially true in areas of little industry, where the same zoning regulations might also prohibit industrial or agriculture uses on that same plot of land!

This is all to say that the structure you're looking for may already exist, but the issue is still in zoning.

People value family differently. For some, their dream life is to have sick cars and a sweet loft, for others, it's to raise other humans to be good. You should probably understand that there are some that read your perspective on life as equally puzzling.

I agree that childcare and college is mad expensive. It's why people complain about these things as much as they do!

What I've always thought, as a parent: those without kids don't know what they're missing, and those with them know what they have.

I'm not saying this to try to brag about how I have some special thing in my life that you'll never understand. I'm saying it because it feels like a perfect system in a way - you simply don't miss what you don't have.

And lastly, those some sort of information bias at play. Non-parents hear all the time about how parents don't have time for this or that, or they hear them talk about how annoying their child is being. But most people have the self-awareness to not just sit and gush over how great their kid is to their non-parents friends, and even when they do, it's just obnoxious.

These are some interesting points around its value, but it can absolutely be inflated, no? Given that most of our standards of value are tied to fiats, and that Bitcoin's exchange with said fiats is highly variable, the value of your crypto wealth can totally be out of your control.

Fortunately for most bitcoiners who got in early, it's been variable in a positive direction... But not for everyone.

I can tell you honestly that I am personally hoping for a crash, and that's in part because I work on real estate. Home prices are unsustainably high by such a margin that it's absolutely killed transaction volume. Sure, earnings per transaction will go down, but we desperately need an increase in volume.

Plus, I want housing to be affordable despite my economic incentives.

When I say that I don't see it happening, I just don't quite see all of the indicators just yet. If we start seeing a sharper increase in new listings coming on market, or new construction prices significantly dropping, then I'd certainly change my outlook.

It's a very interesting time indeed for the housing market! These next 6-12 months are going to tell us something very big about the economy, crash or no crash. If anything, however, the Fed has built up an ability to drop rates if things go awry, so there's padding in the cushion if a fall does happen.

An interesting stat: We're almost back to our 2022 quantity of _new_ listings in October [1]. That's substantial because we've hovered around 20% below last year's number for just about every other month this year. One of the big stories of real estate is that sellers don't want to sell because they all locked in killer rates on their current homes, and buyers can't afford to buy with home prices AND mortgage rates what they are.

So, seeing even a slight increase in new listings (or the lack of a seasonal dropoff) is maybe an early indication of an easing of that stalemate. At the same time, time on market is still really low, which means that sellers are tapping into the high levels of demand that still exist. As a result, overall inventory isn't increasing.

All told though, even with those slight indicators, it's still a really tough time to be a buyer, and for the real estate market overall. The best hope that most have is that the dam leaks more, or even breaks on listings, and of course, if prices start to fall meaningfully, folks will want to cash out high, and you might get a proper "crash".

I personally don't really see it, but anything can happen, and we'll know soon enough!

[1] https://www.redfin.com/news/data-center/

(Disclaimer, I work at Redfin)

The dictionary doesn't agree with both options. Cambridge has a single definition:

In a way that continues or has continued for a long time.

Merriam-Webster offers the following two:

continuing or occurring again and again for a long time

always present or encountered

For"chronically" to mean "extremely" wouldn't make sense as to the root of the word, either.

That is the requirement. The law applies standards to ensure that domestic workers aren't adversely impacted by the hiring of foreign workers. This includes putting essentially bogus ads in newspaper classifieds, and requires that they're paying the same to H1-B workers in the same role as a domestic worker, among other comical things.

The program has defacto evolved to one in which the US can tap into a skilled global labor market to increase competition for roles, without paying too much attention to the actual legal requirements.

Sources:

(Like many here, I've written a few H1-B role requisition documents - which are often designed to be so ludicrously specific that it would be almost impossible to find anyone to fill that role, save for the one person applying for the visa)

[0] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/immigration/h1b

[1] https://www.boundless.com/immigration-resources/the-h-1b-vis...

I'm not quite sure where you got that figure from, but some quick research cites numbers vary between 0.1 and 1.2 acres per person.

In any event, 17 acres could theoretically supply food for an enormous range from 15 to 170 people, depending on how intensively it's farmed.

[1] 4000 sq ft bio-intensive farming (http://www.growbiointensive.org/) [2] 0.44 acres permaculturism (https://permaculturism.com/how-much-land-does-it-take-to-fee...) [3] 1.2 from a 1994 study (and further discussion in this reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1aozn1/how_much...)

What makes you say that? There's so much research that flies in the face of this sentiment. Solar on rooftops alone has the potential to supply a fourth of the current US energy consumption [1]. Other studies estimate that solar could grow to supply between 30-50% of our energy consumption in the future [2]. Solar represents a near limitless supply of energy, and can be harvested in a decentralized fashion (allowing homes to directly power themselves).

Furthermore, EVs have shown that advancements in tech can mitigate concerns around material availability and sustainability (while also increasing efficiency).

[1]: Rooftop Photovoltaic Technical Potential in the United States, https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1575064

[2]: The underestimated potential of solar energy to mitigate climate change, https://www.nature.com/articles/nenergy2017140

I know this is anecdotal, but whenever I hear these stories, I'm curious about the details. A quick search leads me to believe that head chef pay in Seattle typically ranges from about 90k-110k per year. Finding apartments off Broadway in Cap Hill, I can see that studios, though relatively expensive, range around $1.5-2k a month.

An income tax calculator estimates about a 22% total tax bracket and a monthly adjusted income of just over 6k. To me, that means that this person is falling right around 33% of their income devoted towards housing, which seems typical. What am I missing?

For me at least, reading speed inversely correlates with reading retention. There are plenty of non-fiction books that are about 20% useful information, and 80% anecdotes in support of that information.

If I find that I’m already convinced of the point that a particular subchapter / section is trying to make, I’ll speed through it. As a result, I speed read through about 80% of most non-fiction books.

My experience with speed reading is that it’s more akin to speed “skimming”. I see all the words, I understand the point each paragraph is making, but I’m not resting and respecting every word, or really paying too much attention to sentence structure. You can miss details, but this is predicated on the assumption that those details don’t matter.

If I’m reading something where every detail does matter, or fiction that’s heavy on prose, I slow down significantly, since my objective is often to enjoy the book for the maximum amount of time possible, and not to learn as many things in as short a time as possible.

It's easy to pick on the weirdness of french numbers, but honestly "quatre-vingt" ends up just being a word like "eighty" in its own right. No French speaker is multiplying 20s in their head.

Probably the only true weirdness is the 70s and 90s because they use the teen words like douze and treize, but that's honestly where the weirdness ends, and larger numbers follow very consistent rules.

I don't have an answer in particular, but I was surprised to discover that Panama is doing just as well, if not better, in most macro-measures (HDI, median income, per capita GDP PPP, etc.) than Costa Rica. Took me by surprise!

Pumped-storage hydroelectricity is an excellent and renewable answer to this problem in tons of areas, has high efficiency (above 70%) and is already in use in a number of areas.

Vietnam does not have the capacity to accurately test any reasonable swathe of the country, nor are they known for being transparent with any government data. I would take any data published from them with a lot of skepticism.

This might not be applicable to you, but I will say that meditating is like reading speed. Everyone says they can do it better than they can. I've done multiple meditation retreats and have meditated for years. For me, a "focused" meditation when I'm a bit out of practice means I'm actually focused maybe 3% of the time, and I consider myself a relatively focused individual.

For example, try this: Sit down in a mildly uncomfortable position and close your eyes. Take slow deep breaths, focusing entirely on your breath. Count each breath. If your focus wanes at all from that task, stop counting and see how high you got. When I first start this exercise, it's pretty common for me to not even be able to hit 5. But after 6-7 days of this I can usually get up to the 45-60 range.

In this case, it's likely that Nazis would be labeled a terrorist organization, or a wartime enemy, and would be subject to federally-enforced economic sanctions. It actually would be illegal for Google to do business with Nazis.

The article mentions what they plan on doing with it:

"What Gebald and Wurzbacher really want to do is to pull vast amounts of CO₂ out of the atmosphere and bury it, forever, deep underground, and sell that service as an offset. Climeworks’s captured CO₂ has already been injected deep into rock formations beneath Iceland..."

I gave Allo an honest shot when it first came out – I was excited by its feature set, and I was hoping for a far improved messenger app.

My first message went to my wife, who's on an iPhone. It was really difficult to suss out exactly how Allo wanted to handle this conversation... It seemed to both want to fallback to a default SMS while also trying to do some of the Google Assistant things, failing at both.

There are certainly some countries where the vast majority of users are Android, but it seemed pretty unfathomable to me that they'd push a product that didn't function appropriately cross-platform.

but string together 80 or 90 years worth and you will be close to death

I think 80 or 90 years of "life" will bring you close to death!

Disc brakes are catching on, but for good reason: they increase the stopping power in rain substantially.

Though, it doesn't matter if you don't ride in the rain, and many people don't.

I would argue that this particular character was actually very receptive to the idea of still being part of society - he certainly doesn't come off as a individualistic idealogue.

He set a goal of being totally self-sustained, and achieved some amount of it, while eventually recognizing that the cost of such an experiment was higher than he had initially thought. The whole article ends with him coming to terms with the fact that society is necessary in so many ways, and that we can perhaps achieve sustainability easier as a collective, than as an individual.