zanderz

And yet, Thorsten Veblen was American. Have we mellowed out since his observations about "veblen goods"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

An analogy I saw once: can 9 women make a baby in 1 month?

It was decent, we shipped one but switched to .net because of high dpi scaling issues IIRC

Part of the reason was that WinRT was aimed at tablets and other low power devices, where unrestricted Win32 API use could drain the battery too quickly. They were trying to put the genie back in the bottle to have more control in this new ecosystem, like Apple enjoyed on iPad, etc. Much of the weird signing and app store evaluation was to make sure your app used only the blessed APIs and wouldn't, for example, stay awake in the background listening on an arbitrary port and drain the little tablet battery.

Painful and nonsensical from a desktop standpoint but also kind of impressive in a way.

Yes, this was needed for civil engineering and city permits to replace a retaining wall that holds my driveway up and (hopefully!) keeps it from sliding onto my neighbors fancy expensive house. All licensed and by the book. Quotes from other surveyors were 2x and more.

That's cool to discover entire roads you didn't know about. I would be hoping to discover an ancient city, like they did in central and South America with lidar. Are you sure there aren't any? Look again!

Maybe they need to put a traffic circle at this intersection.

Not only that, if 2 people talk at once they can cancel each other out and neither can be heard by anyone else.

Much of aviation is still based on pre WWII tech and practices like this and people underestimate how slow and difficult it is to change. Many piston aircraft still run on leaded gas, for example, the last existing market for it in the US.

I got a survey of my residential property, 1/2 acre on a rugged hillside, from a guy who used a drone equipped with lidar. It was $4,000, less than traditional methods, but it would be cool if a drone could just be dispatched from a nearby power pole instead.

For anything more complex than a shower head, a made in USA label often implies some trickery with final assembly of imported components, like the crossfire example above. Researching the supply chain for every single purchase is too tedious and exhausting for many of us otherwise willing to vote with our wallets.

I learned on here that this has been happening to a degree with maps. Several big companies have been cooperating to improve open street map data, a rare example of a beneficial commons. This is probably some unique accident of incentives and timing and history but maybe it could happen in other domains.

It was a major reason Grey Davis was recalled and we got the Governator

The person who wrote this Spotify p2p software also wrote uTorrent, which was bought by the company bittorrent after they struggled to make a C++ client on their own. The original bittorrent implimentation was in python, but they re-skinned uTorrent as bittorrent and shipped both for a few years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludvig_Strigeus

Ha, yes, agree. How many trips to the office should it take to prove you are real meat?

The name "grapefruit" always seemed a little puzzling when compared with grapes, and it seems nobody is quite sure how the name got started, only that it is from Barbados. One interesting theory is that it is named after the "sea grape", the only kind that grew in that time and place, which has a bitter taste.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/grapefruit-history-and...

Prescriptivist in the streets, descriptivist in the sheets!

Agree. Hindsight is 20/20. A conservative CEO who pulls back and doesn't lean into a growth cycle will be criticized even more for leaving money on the table.

Whether the entire economy should be structured to incenivize all this instability is a separate question. Don't hate the player, hate the game!

Some consider the emphasis on hard work and striving for its own sake to be less a default or inevitable value as an arbitrary confluence of history and Protestant/Calvinist doctrine.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic

One of Max Weber's theories is that working ever harder for more material gain once basic needs are met is not a universal part of human nature but more a cultural artifact of a certain time and place.

Not a message usually impressed upon us these days.

"In other words, the record business became the only entertainment industry in the world with no plan for technological innovation."

Hasn't this been true since people started listening to the radio instead of buying sheet music? Who can be surprised at the cluelessness and intransigence of the music industry after 100+ years of the same? They were so busy fighting digital music, seemingly with the ridiculous pretense they could stop it altogether, they let spotify come in and take a big piece of the pie they could have kept for themselves.

slogging across that giant parking lot doesn't help...

A shoulder mounted anti-tank rocket was once turned over at a gun buyback in San Francisco: https://abc7news.com/san-francisco-gun-buyback-bazooka-guns/... I think it is probably worth a lot of taxpayer money to get that off the streets. More broadly, without wading into 2nd amendment arguments and just viewed as a public health issue, it seems possible that fewer guns in the general population equals fewer gun deaths. Whether these buybacks make any dent at all is a different question - one that would likely be easier to answer if political pressure hadn't halted government studies of gun safety https://www.npr.org/2018/04/05/599773911/how-the-nra-worked-...

Some have argued in the past that a large part of the economy is money laundering for Russian oligarchs - hence the pejorative "Londongrad" nickname. Might a slowdown of this activity be affecting the economy as well?

"...those reductions are about what could be expected with conventional aerobic exercise..."

"It could be beneficial for people who are unable to do traditional aerobic exercise ..."

Title seems a little misleading

San Francisco has had all the problems being blamed on the DA for decades. Things got worse during the pandemic in most cities, regardless of what DA they had. People act like Boudin personally emptied out the jails and stopped prosecuting anyone for anything but this is a ridiculous charicature - as you point out, the actual data says otherwise. He was enacting some reforms promised to us voters, and attempting to hold police more accountable turned out to be an outrageous notion to some. It hardly rose to the emergency people pretend it did, and for which the recall mechanism is intended. Far worse to me is that the police can do as they please and simply stop doing their job and get away with blaming someone else for the result. The recall process is being twisted into a do-over for wealthy interests who don't like an election result.

All the comments about how it will be too expensive and difficult to source unusually sized parts make me wonder how they make something like the Hammerhead Karoo for $400 - an android device with a 3.2" sunlight readable reflective screen (supposedly even more expensive), custom software. etc. Is the market for a bike computer so much larger than that for a smaller phone? I don't think they're burning VC, it was crowdfunded IIRC.

Surprised the article didn't mention that you are generally welcome to use the restroom in a Japanese convenience store, which will usually have a spotless toilet with fancy robotic bidet features. At least in Tokyo a few years back, it seemed true of every place you went and it makes American cities seem savage and inhospitable in comparison.

Many don't realize that Prop 13 also protected commercial real estate - the Transamerica Pyramid in SF was the poster child for this until it sold recently

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-jun-30-me-prope...

Speaking of NYC, we've enjoyed some amazingly effective soundproof windows in many spaces, it seems like a thing there, but when we ask window salesmen in the Bay Area about soundproof windows like that, they kind of shrug and say " double pane is pretty much all you can do". Why can NYC do this but not SF? Or have we just not called the right store?

There have been microphone arrays in many neighborhoods for years: "ShotSpotter has been in operation for 25 years, serves more than 120 cities..." https://www.shotspotter.com/

This is one of the reasons for motorcycle helmet laws and maybe seat belts

So far I find it even worse that 1. You're forced to login with a live account, and 2. IE is banned, no more legacy activeX allowed. I may have to take it off my new laptop and go back to 10