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jmcmaster

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So make income tax a deduction on a wealth tax, and avoid penalizing people who do indeed pay top marginal rate income tax on a large salary/bonus.

Given that the ultrarich pay very little to no income tax then Paul’s argument is “don’t increase my income tax from unnoticeable to 20%”

I am a layperson for astrochemistry but IIRC comets have much higher hydrocarbon content by an order of magnitude or more (and obviously more water, fewer metals to contend with for extraction energy requirements).

Anyone have more insights? Did I miss mention of comets in my skim of the paper?

Ps usually HN not a punfest, but kudos for the Starmite(tm) @andai

I have a nonfiction draft built on conversations between 4 friends. Started as a regular nonfiction book but quickly realized the desired mainstreet audience would never read it. I created personas (as in UX style goal-directed design personas) to describe each character’s background, POV, goals, expertise, values, concerns and questions. Different than anything else I’ve ever written. Still very rough but rewarding.

Noto doesn't ship with OS, and users need multiple fonts for different use cases.

Grandparent comment is saying that Microsoft, Google, Apple could settle on a common set of open licence fonts and bundle them with the OS (and Linux distros / other OSS OSes could also do the same). Then web design & dev could rely on those fonts without having to locally serve them, or embed with Google fonts, etc. Noto could indeed be one of the bundled fonts in this alternate reality.

But no real incentive for any of those big players to do so, and disincentive for Google who gain surveillance data from font embeds as noted elsewhere in thread.

Horses evolved in North America, and disappear from the fossil record along with other megafauna about 10,000 years ago.

Clovis people almost certainly interacted with horses, but likely as food.

One of the ways you become authentic is by practicing something you want to become. It’s doing the thing consistently that leads to character development. Also, if you and your partner value different love languages (my partner is meh on flowers, I spent time in high school doing floral arrangements) then having a guide to help you translate could be super helpful. Disappointed this is EU and USA only for now but will see if it shows up in my country soon.

Which is why if you're job searching you should spend a decent chunk of your time making connections. Go to meetups, work on open source, volunteer, join a hackathon if such a thing still exists near you as well as "job board" job searching.

I read the evergreen "What Color is Your Parachute" when I was 18 or so (before the web), and it profoundly affected my take on job search (and sales). It gets updated pretty regularly though the original author has passed not that long ago.

The best LD50 story I've heard was an Agriculture Canada scientist working on biocontrols for pests (think natural pathogenic organisms like fungi or bacteria to control weeds instead of chemical pesticide). Policy and commercialization required an LD50 for a bacterium they were working with. It is nontoxic; the lab calculated the volume of bacterial solution at commercial application strength that it would take for a rat to drown (but obviously did not harm any animals). Sometimes regulatory compliance needs creativity.

Unfortunate that not all labs are able to work similarly, especially as you say for doses where we already know harmful levels and LD50 is a bureaucratic requirement or an easy paper.

The complaint is that by reducing taxes for highest incomes there are fewer resources for the state to address the wellbeing of its citizens. It is not that the poorest pay less tax, it is whether social services and other government programs like education, environment, etc. are cut as a consequence of lower taxes on the rich (note the difference from raising taxes - where the wealthiest have greater capital mobility and access to professional services to shield incomes from taxation, so increasing taxes can fail to raise anticipated revenues when things go the other way.)

I suspect if you threw away all preconceived notions of local mobility and started with maximizing {effectiveness/efficiency/carbon/infrastructure costs/real estate/ healthcare/economic benefit/commute times/ opportunity costs} rather than an individual car you would end up with rapid on demand transit (think publicly funded ride-share minivans, light rail, bus rapid transit, autonomous golf carts, e-bikes and biking infrastructure) for moving people by default. Beyond that, you'd also see 15 minute neighborhoods where essentials are all walkable, and remote work for many commuters. Networked local mobility, denser mixed use planning, and hybrid work all do better at some of the same jobs that cars do today.

Electric cars seem more about saving the car industry ecosystem, under the guise of saving the planet.

I recognize a valid counterpoint is that because we already have car infrastructure* BEVs are a drop-in replacement culturally and physically where transit, urban planning, and remote work all require more systemic change and have long timelines and NIMBYism. Electric vehicles also make sense in most fleet situations (delivery, school buses, trucking). The backwards-compatability argument makes sense in the short term, but misses the sort of step change needed to recalibrate western lifestyles to become both resilient and sustainable.

In the end, while BEVs are better than gasoline cars, and they may provide a stepping stone, the real investments must go well beyond the default individual car ownership model--to considering designing the best local mobility experience as a network and services rather than a thing parked in your drive.

This is where user experience and service design can make a profound climate impact, in creating better, more desirable mobility experiences as alternatives to car ownership.

Acronyms: BEV = Battery Electric Vehicle = electric car NIMBYism - Not In My Backyard-ism. The tendency of property owners to push against urban densification, rapid transit, and similar efforts in their neighborhoods.

Happy birthday! No great answers to meaning of life, but work focused on societal contributions helped me. In 2009 I was burned out on consulting for banks and telcos, switched to focusing on public sector challenges. Lots of needs for purpose-driven design, dev, product. Also coaching and mentoring, especially for social innovation. Have yet to hit lottery, and make less than I could with industry clients, but better for my sense of making a difference.

Former NASA engineer turned YouTube science fun guy Mark Rober explained this attack in 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Vc-69M-UWk

and references this 2011 UCSD paper Heat of the moment: characterizing the efficacy of thermal camera-based attacks

https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2028058

So not sure what the Thermanator folks are adding here...

EDIT: Thermanator paper cites the UCSD research, focuses on qwerty keyboards, updated technology for thermal cameras, comparisons to other attack vectors for public password entry (when you are at coffee shop, airport, ATM etc.).