tjohns

You have it backwards. Housing is astronomically expensive in San Francisco precisely because there are so many people with high incomes bidding against each other.

When you have a highly inelastic supply (constrained by zoning laws, density limits, and geographical boundaries), prices rise to the maximum margin of what the highest-income buyers are capable of paying.

Regarding taxes: Since taxes apply to all local high-earners equally, it doesn't change their relative purchasing power against one another in the local housing market. If taxes were suddenly halved, that extra liquidity would be priced into the next bidding war, driving home prices even higher.

Yes, you need to register with a phone number, but publicly you'll show up as your @username and that's how most people will interact with you.

And I agree, I think yours is an accurate assessment. Telegram is indeed much more community centric.

- Messages send quickly and reliably, even under poor and sometimes hostile network conditions. Telegram just seems to work even when other chat apps struggle.

- Telegram uses usernames instead of phone numbers by default, which is good if you're using it as an IRC replacement instead of an SMS replacement.

- You can have the client open on essentially unlimited devices simultaneously, including a web app if you need it.

- Messages can be edited at any point after sending with no expiry.

- You can schedule messages to send later, or send a message silently so it doesn't wake people up.

- Different group types - announcement channels, Discord-style groups with sub-channels, flexible moderator roles, etc. (I believe WhatsApp has some of this.)

- Support for bots, which is also very helpful for managing large communities.

- Community-created, sharable stickers. Seriously, people underestimate how nice these are.

The downside is that a lot of this requires state to be stored on the Telegram servers, so most chat's aren't E2E encrypted. (They do have an option for E2E encrypted private 1:1 chats, but you lose most of the polish by using that.)

Also, the official apps are open source, so you can modify them if needed.

While I suspect this is actually profitable for them, you can't attribute 100% of their profit to anti-repair activities.

At a minimum, you'd have to break out profit from equipment sales vs service contracts.

The tech specs say it uses HP 63 cartridges (or HP 302/803 outside the US), and that the cartridges can be refilled using a refill kit.

The photos clearly show HP cartridges installed.

On the technology side, I'm somewhat hopeful because it looks like they're using off-the-shelf HP ink cartridges for this. HP cartridges embed the printhead into the cartridge itself, and that printhead is arguably the most complicated part of the entire device. Outsource the printhead, and you're just designing a plotter with a PCL interface.

I agree that the bigger challenge is going to be patents.

It also wouldn't surprise me to see HP add DRM to cartridges to authenticate the printer itself if this catches on. (Possibly requiring a printer driver/firmware update.)

It's worth clarifying that the adenovirus-based (viral vector) vaccines that article is discussing were a completely different technology from the mRNA vaccines.

Then what, ban stepper motors?

Don't give them ideas.

But seriously, given that the 3D printer movement started out with people building their own printers from scratch and there continues to be a healthy open-source hardware ecosystem within the community, I can't see this stopping anyone.

Unless you also make it illegal for 3D printers to print 3D printer parts...

Dismantling monitoring programs which show evidence of climate change is one of the Project 2025 priorities.

Specifically, their plan calls for downsizing the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (Mandate for Leadership, Project 2025, p. 676), and breaking up NOAA (p. 674), because they view these agencies as a source of "climate alarmism" and that "the preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded."

An oil change is quick, like 30 minutes. If I grab a granola bar instead of sitting down for breakfast and then instead use that time to do the oil change, the time expenditure is basically a wash.

Oil changes cost like $35/year if you do it yourself. Decent tires last 4-5 years, so that's like $100/year (to be generous). Air filters are so cheap and need replacement so infrequently as to not even be worth counting.

"Incurred violations" should be effectively $0. How often are you getting a traffic ticket? I think the last time I got a ticket was a decade ago...

I don't think any of those fall under the umbrella of consumerism. So no, that's not a continuation of my list at all.

Looking after your health or taking proper care of your kids is really not in the same category as spending less on veblen goods.

(I'm noticing that people are getting very different messages from this game.)

I just grabbed random things I've seen from behavior in other people. If you don't fall victim to those consumerist traps, then that's legitimately great.

Yes, I absolutely know folks who buy new phones every year, and who lease new cars and upgrade every 3 years. Most of whom really can't really afford to do these things but do it anyway and end up in increasing debt.

And sure, buy clothes from Walmart if you have a Walmart location near you. I just picked the nearest big-box store to me, for some reason Walmart doesn't have much of a presence out where I am.

(The takeaway I got from the game is "don't try to buy the hat, it's a trap". I'm curious what your takeaway was?)

I'm absolutely not saying this alone is sufficient - particularly if you're unemployed or your job truly doesn't pay a living wage. There are absolutely people who don't make enough to survive - and that's a bigger problem of course.

I'd argue it's not about selling everything. Instead, avoid buying things by default and trying to keep up with the Joneses. You don't need to move to the wilderness, you just need to choose to escape consumerism.

For example:

- Do you really need a new car, when a lightly used one will do just fine and will be more economical?

- Do you really need to upgrade to a new phone every year when your current one is still working fine?

- Do you really need to buy premium clothes from the mall when the ones from Target are much cheaper?

Many community libraries offer free NYTimes access to their patrons.

It's always been a good idea to have a UPS in front of any digital electronics anyway.

Brown-outs are arguably more dangerous to your electronics, and those are more common now with more frequent heat waves during the summer, stressing the electric grid and triggering public safety shutoffs on the US west coast.

I also think the concerns in the article are overblown. I grew up in the mountains where the electric grid was notoriously poor quality, especially when buildings would fail over to (often poor-quality) generators. It would make computer monitors misbehave, but rarely did it actually damage anything.

This is basically what the glass repair kits sold at auto parts stores are. (They also include a suction cup with syringe, to vacuum any air bubbles out.)

If you are preparing for your own defense and don't have an attorney (you're acting pro se), your own LLM use would likely be protected under work product doctrine. The court would extend you some of the same protections an attorney would have, for the limited purposes of preparing your case.

This is a very narrow exemption, however.

(You would also want to make sure you're using a paid AI plan with contractually guaranteed privacy protections, otherwise it could be construed as third-party communications, which implicitly waives privilege.)

See: Warner v. Gilbarco, Inc.

#1 is a little complicated. Communications with an AI are possibly sometimes protected by work-product doctrine... but only if you're representing yourself as a pro se litigant, and strictly limited to mental impressions and opinion work product of counsel (in this case, extended to the pro se litigant). See: Warner v. Gilbarco, Inc.

There's a good summary of the current state of things here: https://www.akerman.com/en/perspectives/ai-privilege-and-wor...

Also worth noting that none of this is binding precedent, so expect this field to evolve over time.

Once you've lost more than ~2 processors, you're probably into the realm of common mode failures and voting won't save you. At that point, it's entirely possible you're just working with random data coming out of all your processors.

I wonder what happens if you disable the e-SIM (in the US) and then a safety recall appears via software update - do dealers have any way to update control modules besides OTA?

I would assume so. Even on older cars, service techs can typically manually push firmware updates over the OBD-II / J2534 port. Rivian's OBD-II port actually hides an Ethernet signal inside of it - so the interface is certainly there.

Fun fact: You can buy an Ethernet adapter directly from Rivian here to connect to the car's internal network: https://rivianservicetools.com/Catalog/Product/TSN00535-300-...

Even in the US, I don't know many friends with enough living space to have an entire spare guest room. When friends visit, they sleep on the living room couch or an air mattress. Is this not typical?

Often they don't pay high taxes nor do they employ large numbers of people... They are building and selling a non tangible good i.e where do you tax it?

You could easily charge a property tax (could even have a higher rate for data centers, specifically), or an excise tax on number of servers, or a tax on excess energy/water consumption. There's lots of options here, if that's what you're worried about.

Their is also noise pollution concerns which can destroy communities near by and water usage concerns. These plants drain aquaifers.

Factories also do both of these things. They're noisy, often have emissions much worse than anything coming from a datacenter, and most factories use large quantities of water as well.

Does anybody else find these AI-authored blog posts difficult to read? Something about the writing style and structure just feels unnatural, it's hard put my finger on it.

At the very least, the writing takes way too long to get to a point.

That could still get prohibitively expensive. Take the example from this article, where there's only one person still using the paper ticket option...

I could see someone arguing you need a specially trained staff member or supervisor to verify your ID for anti-scalping, which they don't need to do for other e-tickets. Say only one person uses this option all season, they could be asked to pay for an entire employee's salary/benefits.

It's a bit hyperbolic, but supporting non-standard workflows is organizationally expensive with many non-quantifable costs.

It looks like you can buy them in the Purrrr app.

The metadata at the bottom says the feeder is out of kibble. :( A small amount (8%) of snack left, though!

It depends on whether the ticket is considered a criminal or civil matter in the US.

For a criminal case, yes, they need to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" - which would require that you are positively identified as the driver.

For a civil case, they only need to prove by a "preponderance of the evidence" - which is a much lower standard.

This is why tickets from red-light cameras in many states are zero-point citations. You're still charged a fine, but there's no finding of guilt attached to the offense, which keeps it away from being considered a criminal matter. (This is the same way parking tickets work.)