mech7654

Gigantic engineering mathematics calculation tools.

The best way I know how to express it-

We live short lives, and only have enough time to make a few real investments of our time. We can't throw these investments off too casually, or we end with nothing.

Until today I still did not know where a (scantron-required, supposedly) #2 pencil falls on this chart! The other chart in the article shows that #2=HB, which is about as confusing as the could've made it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PencilGradingChart.png

Regardless of whether the wealthy people in your country are taxed a small bit or taxed a lot, you should want them to be efficient allocators of capital. Would you rather it be the case that every investor in your economy sank all their money into umpteen duplicates of pets.com?

To add onto what others said, insurance companies love loyalty. Loyal customers get charged more. I've found that shopping around about every 3 years is a good idea without too much trouble.

Dilution is the solution.

The only possible motivation for these dirty corporate pigs to make these foods UNNATURALLY TASTY is, at the least, morally fraught, and, more likely, such an act of villainy as to clearly implicate them as disgusting subhuman monsters. /s

If you don't know already, go look up ABLE accounts. If your child became disabled before the age of 26, they can create an ABLE account and keep much, much more money in their ABLE account than they would otherwise be allowed to keep. ABLE account funds can be used for living expenses that cover the majority of expenses for most people- housing, healthcare, transportation, etc.

A fish that fell from a bird’s grip landed on a transponder in Sayreville, located just southwest of New York’s Staten Island, according to Jersey Central Power and Light Company spokesperson Chris Hoenig.

I suspect that the "transponder" was a transformer.

The college bubble is popping. Enrollment is down 15% from its 2010 peak. My intuition is that the bigger state schools will be well insulated financially, but smaller independent colleges will have a bloodbath.

So for NPK fertilizer, I now know that nitrogen is manufactured cheaply with the haber-bosch process, and we've got a lot of phosphate available. Do we also have plenty of potassium around? i.e. enough to realistically never worry about "peak potassium".

A pillars are getting wider, and the bottoms of windows are getting higher. These changes are being made for crashworthiness, the effects of visibility on accidents are understudied.

I am often frustrated at the poor visibility out of modern cars and I wonder how many crashes are caused by the poor visibility. It is the other side of the tradeoff that crash survivability data will not show- how many crashes would have been avoided altogether with better visibility.

I remember when the egg shortage was going on a few months ago NPR said that we shouldn't expect the retail price of eggs to drop more than about 15% from their then-current highs. Then 2 months later eggs were 50% cheaper at my grocery store.

If you look at social science as an entire discipline (separate from "hard science"- which sounds dismissive- "Hard science" is able to achieve better precision because its experimental subjects are easier to control! in those ways it is easier!), it is so fraught with confounding factors and difficulties applying controls that eventually you have to choose a lower standard of evidence than "perfectly rigorous". One standard of evidence, or maybe better stated as epistemological standard, is the precautionary principle. If cell phones are an unknown threat, but a "creepy" one, where there certainly seems to be enough evidence that one should treat them with caution- treat them with caution. Especially when you can tell that the benefits of certain behavior patterns don't outweigh the risks.

There are lots of areas of our lives where we lean on the precautionary principle WITHOUT needing bulletproof justification.

To be fair the french have had some massive problems with their fleet recently. There were issues discovered where (IIRC) a supplier that made pressure vessels used steel that was not of sufficient quality and covered it up for decades, only to be discovered recently- this required major downtime and expense. Other issues have resulted in lots of nuclear plant downtime in france as well recently.

It sure is boring. We probably should eliminate all boring things from the world.

Is a collection of balls falling down a galton board into bins to form a normal distribution a form of processing? How is it materially different than a ball rolling down a hill?

One of the reasons I appreciate for business long-term planning success is that businesses are allowed to die. When a (typical) business fails badly enough for long enough, it dies, its pieces are sold for scrap, and other businesses come in to take its place. Successful long-term planning happens organically, as successful businesses grow and prosper while weak businesses fail and shrink.

bureaucracies that are not allowed to die do not face this evolutionary mechanism of creative destruction- this includes governments but also a lot of business edge cases like PG&E for example.