thadjo

I'm seeing a lot of people here assuming that the purpose of green hydrogen is for fuel cells / automotive transport, but I don't see many people in this space talking about that anymore (except Toyota).

Instead there is a lot more interest in using green hydrogen for industrial purposes or as a key building block for cleaner fuels like methanol. Currently green hydrogen is expensive to make and sucks to transport. But it will likely get a lot cheaper to produce in the next 10 years and you can convert it into fuels that are easier to transport.

There is recent episode of Volts that interviews a startup trying to do this: https://www.volts.wtf/p/making-shipping-fuel-with-off-grid#d...

aaaaand it's down again

I'm seeing a message to download the page on safari and a 403 on Chrome. Anyone else?

Came here to say the same. I cancelled two months back and I really don't miss it. On the other hand if HBOMax hiked their prices to $30/mo I wouldn't blink.

For me I associate the big red "N" with bad content. So when I open Netflix and see the red "N" plastered on every thumbnail the algo serves up, I immediately wanted to close the app. I eventually felt tired of batting away their originals to find good content so I unsubscribed.

I don't know how many other people actually feel the same way, but it seems pretty clear to me that their subscriber base doesn't like Netflix's original content as much as Netflix does.

pretty wild how these outages are basically just tolerated now. folks just get some coffee refresh HN a dozen times and then resume work when it comes back online. no huge uproar, no exodus from GH

yep I'm seeing that too - wow.

obligatory comment about status page showing seas of green: https://status.aws.amazon.com

Love this! This is going to help so many people. Thank you!

wow I've never noticed this. it's pretty subtle.

A lot hinges on what would actually happen to WeWork during a recession. I think there's some possibility that when a recession hits, many companies may find WeWork (and coworking generally) more attractive as they downsize. I'm also curious about whether WeWork has leverage to renegotiate leases, since commercial real estate (which is already not doing well) will weaken in a recession.

Honest question: do you want to see Google broken up or heavily regulated? If I were lucky enough to work at Google, I think I'd be cheering for regulation so I could enjoy all the sweet comp and meaningful work without feeling conflicted about the truly dark parts of the company. Isn't that Google a much better Google to work for?

This difficulty lowers the likelihood of government fiscal responsibility and increases the likelihood of devestating inflation.

I share this worry too, but it's not like there's currently any political appetite for fiscal responsibility. I wonder if the threat of inflation and currency volatility would actually serve as better stick, than what we currently have which is continuing to run up a massive debt which will be terrible for our children?

Probably dumb question: if debt and deficits don’t matter and a country can just print money - how does that explain cases where countries have defaulted and other countries and their own citizens lose confidence in the currency?

I think the idea is that deficits don't matter if you print money and offset any inflation (1) some sort of jobs program, (2) taxes which can take money back out of the economy and cool inflation, and maybe (3) more traditional ways of tweaking interest rates.

I'm not sure if you need all of the parts in place to see if / how it works. The fed could start offsetting deficits to the tune of $100B to the treasury and see how the USD, bond markets react. If inflation goes up, it could in theory, be offset with a tax scheme inline with MMT. I'm not saying this would be terribly smooth, but I do think it is possible to test parts MMT in relative isolation.

I'd argue that in today's international economy, there is actually a huge excess of supply capacity that is under utilized.

By "supply capacity" here do you mean idle capital? I'm interested in this, but I'm not really sure what metrics show it.

Printing more money does not change the real wealth in the economy. You can’t create additional purchasing power with an increase in the money supply because prices will adjust to the new level.

I think the point is more thatn printing money and transferring it to treasury coffers effectively is a tax on anyone holding USD. More government spending -> bigger deficits -> more money printed -> higher inflation (taxes). That's my understanding anyway.

Hey Simon. re: friction, I built a little service about a month ago that creates events via email — www.thad.cc

You just need to cc the address in an email and it sends invites to all of the people in the email list. I used it for an event of about ~30 and most people added their RSVP. It has chat too, but that wasn't as successful. Email is obviously not the 'coolest', but this approach at least reduces friction. I spent about a month thinking about / building this and would be happy to chat.

Edit: kinda funny we both chose pink :)

Thank you - it’s very refreshing to see these points here. So many comments here miss the main points of the article or default to tired lines from Econ 101. Yes more affordable housing is good an important but it takes a long time. And there are a lot of folks suffering in the meantime. To me the core problem is your point 6 - despite our power and wealth, not enough of us give a shit about long term community goals.

Not paying these bonuses would have certainly resulted in a court case and publicity that Google perhaps thought, at the time, would be negative. So they probably rationalized that resolving the situation by a) paying a settlement to the victim, b) ending Rubin's employment and c) not having to go to court and face that bad PR was the prudent approach.

And we all agree that this 'prudent approach' was objectively terrible, right? Not just in the hindsight of post-#MeToo PR. At the time it was actually wrong and a bad thing to do.

Explaining the reasoning behind unethical behavior does not make it more ethical.

Sundar's letter unsatisfactory here. Isn't the real scandal that the company weighed the risk of terminating Rubin without compensation and decided not to.

If I were a Google employee I'd be wondering when it will be expedient for Google to do the right thing in cases of gross misconduct, and when they'll take a calculated risk like they did here. I'm guessing the 13 execs sacked probably didn't have ~$100m compensation packages at stake.

https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/1055539381958668288

The title of the piece is extremely misleading... this didn't happen today; it's since 2016. Were that not the case, I'd completely agree with you here.

The actual framing of issues like this as a cost-benefit is much closer to the root problem.

Make these decisions more expensive? Sure. But the deeper problem is doing this kind of financial calculus in the face of monstrous moral behavior.

This is really a partial accounting of the risk. Don't forget to include the risk of reporters finding out about this whole arrangement and doing further damage to an already tarnished company and industry.

But risk assessment is really besides the point anyway. It's not difficult to see the correct course of action here and that Google as a company failed to take it.

Amazon famously did this to their warehouse workers: https://www.theverge.com/2015/3/26/8280309/amazon-warehouse-...

Some of the workers most affected by this sort of tactic are those that have the least understanding of the contracts' enforceability. Feels like there should be some kind of recourse for this kind of thing.

I noticed that too. Maybe as the models evolve they'll start looking like Rondo.

I'd be pretty OK with this if they have me, as the viewer, 30% of the revenue they generate from ads served. Seems fair.

The "last mile" is a utility, and by its very nature will always result in monopolistic control.

This is THE central point. Everyone saying that they would be OK with the latest FCC regs if there were only more competition need to consider this. In what bizarro world would anyone actually want ISPs competing for the last mile?

Not to sound like a free market idealist here, but don't market forces keep this in check?

In general, miners won't mine unless there is a financial incentive to do so. as Bitcoin matures, that financial incentive maps closely to an overall demand for a store of value (plus the nifty features of crypto).

I would see your point more clearly if miners really were wasting energy–using energy to calculate hashes that weren't financially valuable–but I don't see that happening right now.

true, but i think these purchases have a much greater impact on TV that film. Amazon, Netflix, Hulu all have a long list of really successful TV shows but it's hard to think of a 120-minute movie that has risen to the ranks of Handmaiden's Tale, House of Cards, etc..

yes, and the ROI on some of these flicks is just jaw-dropping. horror is definitely having its moment.