gwbrooks

<<and if you are calling yourself a philosopher CEO you are a blowhard.>>

Yep. Wholly apart from the value or lack of it in his points, I'm not taking that personal brand seriously.

Rubbish. Artists/creators/tortured souls with berets and clove cigarettes don't get to define what art is or isn't.

Art is that which moves us, and "us" isn't a committee of gatekeepers; it's fractal down to the individual (or even the individual-circumstance) level.

Lived in California for 30 years -- it's an amazing place. But it's hubris to assume your definition of quality of life is objective or universal.

California has seen negative net domestic migration for over 20 years. So multiple things can be true:

* It's a desirable place to live and work, for some. * For others, the net quality of life is higher elsewhere.

Triumphalism ("They know they could never make it here...") isn't a good look whether you live in Silicon Valley or Dallas.

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I can't think of a single time in history that humanity responded to a threat in a fully coordinated manner. Maybe this is the first time, but the incentive stack from the individual voter all the way up to geopolitical grand strategy argues against it.

Trying to tell poor nations to remain poor -- or telling rich nations to consume less -- is a losing game. There's evidence that as societies get richer, their populations demand cleaner air, water, etc. And, as another commenter mentioned, a realistic hope is that the whole green-tech stack matures to the point where it can compete on price.

We'll either make lower-carbon/lower-warming solutions work at near-market rates, in a way that allows personal and national economies to grow, or it'll just be talk for the next 50 years as well.

The biggest impact of something like this -- thoughtful, nuanced and multidisciplinary -- is that it makes you remember just how bad the ocean of hot AI takes really is.

It's voluntary. There are jobs with less flexibility and lower pay. There are competitors in the market if you really have your heart set on a career in ridesharing.

None of that sounds exploitive.

It was more than interesting 100+ years ago -- it was the subject of wildly inconsistent, often fear-based (or incumbent-industry-based) regulation.

A vetoed 1896 Pennsylvania law would have required drivers who encountered livestock to "disassemble the automobile" and "conceal the various components out of sight, behind nearby bushes until [the] equestrian or livestock is sufficiently pacified". The Locomotive on Highways Act of 1865 required early motorized vehicles to be preceded by a person on foot waving a red flag or carrying a red lantern and blowing a horn.

It might not quite look like that today, but wild-eyed, fear-based regulation as AI use grows is a real possibility. And at least some of it will likely seem just as silly in hindsight.

There's no standard definition of what constitutes the press.

Now, if the question is some flavor of: Do Hacker News posts and comments enjoy First Amendment protections generally described as "freedom of the press?" Absolutely.

The press isn't a special class under 1a; "or of the press;" in the First Amendment simply means you're free to write and publish -- not just speak -- without interference from the government.

In most markets with state lotteries, it's easier to pass a lottery than a tax increase; they're typically sold as a way to fund schools or some other public good. It's an inefficient revenue capture in the sense that there are higher costs (marketing, printing lottery tix, profit for the lottery operator, etc.) but you can get it across the finish line and not have to worry about your opponent calling you out for raising taxes.

California's lottery, converted to a tax and using topline revenue numbers, would be ~$235 annually per resident.

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Using Google's GDELT to analyze velocity and sentiment around public-policy/political news. Objectives: develop a taxonomy of news-event types and their behavior; use that taxonomy to test faster/better time to market with responses; ultimately determine which scenarios, if any, can be predicted.

1. Foreign entities are also investing in land that is strategically or tactically important -- agricultural land is a good example of the former; land near military bases an example of the latter. China has demonstrated a willingness to do both.

2. I think this represents a misunderstanding of the U.S. Constitution and U.S. law. The Constitution provides no power for the federal government to acquire land without just compensation, which courts have regularly held to mean fair market value. Put another way: The feds can likely devise a path for buying your land, but can't outright nationalize it. Changing that is not a matter of presidential decree or even a law by Congress; it would require an amendment to the Constitution itself, which is an extraordinarily heavy political and policy lift.

I've run my own consulting agency for 20+ years and this tracks. It's more organized and incremental-product-improvement oriented than what I do, but there's a lot of wisdom here. Well done!

People seem to handle it very differently, according to my doc. I never had issues while taking Mounjaro or Synjardy (a prescription pill for diabetes management with similar side effects) alone, but the two together meant I could count on a couple of bad days a week.

Sidebar: Mounjaro changed my life. I'd been very diabetic (300 units of insulin a day) for years on end. Taking that much insulin, my normally large frame got very large indeed. A couple of months into the Mounjaro and I was off insulin; a year into it and I was down 75 lbs and healthier than I'd been in 20 years.

If you view the products as prayer, worship and reflection... yeah, probably ridiculously productive.

Nature is healing.

With the exception of things that can be done within the Executive Branch by EO (which isn't much and isn't lasting), the president-elect's rhetoric is communicative and not prescriptive. He's trying to set an agenda but lacks (like all presidents) a lot of power to make it happen beyond the bully pulpit.

Nothing relatively large and permanent happens until Congress makes a law or SCOTUS makes a ruling.

Policy guy here. Big, broad brushstrokes:

* You can go bottom-up or top-down. Some theories of change and some movements focus on developing a critical mass of grassroots/voter/public support to make change happen; others focus on getting the technical/specific policy right and then finding (or creating) the political window for adoption. Sometimes, that takes months; other times, it takes decades. A good read on this concept would be anything walking you through the Overton Window.

* It's hard to overestimate the value of in-person, informed conversations, particularly if you're talking to local or state officials. Show up at the right time (i.e., not the morning something's being voted on) with factual considerations/arguments that aren't outside the law or what's possible. A local example of how not to do it: Showing up at the planning commission to bitch about a new project affecting your view (for example) when the city doesn't have anything on the books about protecting views.

* No politician anywhere ran on doing nothing -- if your proposed solution to something is to do nothing, you're pushing a big rock up a big hill. Better to recommend things that allow politicians to feel like they're taking action.

I'm not in your space, but this advice was damn solid. Well done!

COBOL

Single-line (that is, five dealt cards) video poker can be played with 1-5 coins. However, there is a disproportionate payout for a royal flush (A-K-Q-J-10, all suited) with five coins played. There are no video poker games you can play with less than five coins that are anything near breakeven payout.

Every video poker game in Nevada is required to be truly random. And every game has the payout for every possible poker hand shown on the game. A bit of math allows you to calculate both the correct strategy for any five cards dealt (which you memorize, just like proper blackjack strategy), but it also tells you the theoretical return of the game with perfect play.

As an example, 9/6 Jacks or Better (a game that pays nine coins for each coin played for a full house and six coins for each coin played for a flush) has a theoretical payout of 99.54% with perfect play. This puts it in the range of blackjack. And, like blackjack, you will eventually go broke because it's still not over 100%.

Unlike blackjack, you can't count cards. But what you can do is seek out returns in other ways. In the 1990s and 2000s, some casinos would compete on cashback comps. Add 0.33% or 0.5% cashback to the game I just described, and you're close to (or barely over) 100% payback. Find a game with a baseline payout of over 100% (full-pay Deuces Wild is 100.76, as a [rare] example), and you're deeper into the profitability zone.

Small returns unless you're playing higher denomination returns with a giant bankroll. Most people who do this make it a bit of a lifestyle -- pushing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars through the machine gets you noticed by the casino, leading to free rooms, free meals, invitations to parties, etc.

Others look (or looked -- it's rarer now) for poorly planned promotions where a scarce hand pays off grandly and changes the math. Most of the life-changing wins in this space came from those sorts of situations.

A million years ago, when you could still find video poker games with 100%+ theoretical return or poorly thought-out promotions offering enough cash-back to get you over 100%, we'd calculate the Kelly number for a given opportunity -- the bankroll necessary to ride out hills and valleys in favorable situations.

Spoiler: It's almost always 3-4x the value of a royal flush. So you needed $12-16k if you were playing a $1-per-coin game with a 1% edge at a pretty good clip.

And what do you earn with perfect play in that situation? The princely sum of around $30 an hour.

Location: Northern Nevada, but willing to travel up to 100%.Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No, but can long-distance commute up to 100%.

Technologies: persuasion, policy and reputational capital -- more than 20 years of it. I'm the guy you hire when your org needs support and understanding with local, state or federal government audiences, when you need to build (or defend against) grassroots armies or when you just need to sell into the .gov space. Full-stack comms background that includes PR, marketing, public affairs, consultative selling and more. Tech-savvy enough to work in that environment, but not limited to it.

Résumé/CV: https://linkedin.com/in/gregbrooks

Email: gregb@west-third.net

There's a huge need for a product like this in the small and mid-sized PR/marketing agency space. Announce to those folks -- PR and marketing subreddits might be a good place to start, subject to their product-announcement posting policies.

The future is getting better, broadly and on net, judged by human-centric measures. Because the data is choppy and fractal as you look from x billion people to one individual, it's easy to say things suck and are getting suckier. But overall measures of human flourishing have been improving for hundreds of years. Maybe the trendline eventually reverses, but it hasn't yet.

Is it getting better deterministically or nondeterministically? Both.

We still don't understand all manner of deterministic forces in the universe. However, most improvements in humanity's existence have been and will continue to be driven by human will.

Self-hosting the mail-composing, mail-merging and tracking functions while using third-party SMTP is well-trod territory. The former can be done on a pretty basic box and the latter, at scale, is a heavy lift.

My guess is Plunk is for people who need a Mailchimp-like offering at a lower-than-Mailchimp price point.

In the U.S., it happens regularly.

In the U.S., only about 30% of homeowners are subject to housing associations.

I get how that seems odd if you live in a big city, a multifamily building, etc. -- associations and their problems are ubiquitous there. But it's not the experience of most American homeowners.

>The unifying theme (from my perspective anyway) is to try, earnestly, to take steps towards a kind of real-world everyday utopia. Reached pragmatically, by any means necessary.<<

I had no idea Utopian was a synonym for Authoritarian.