Nifty3929

Much like home prices. Everybody says they want homes to be more affordable, but all actions are designed to keep them high and if they did actually fall it would be treated as an emergency.

This is why it's so important to have guardrails that limit what the government can do. The US tried to do that, and has probably been the most successful at it - though there's still been a lot of scope creep outside their constitution already. And that's probably a one-way street.

Not really the point of the article, but I'll use it as a soapbox anyway: Privacy (of the sort supported by Tor) is never a technology problem - it's a government / legislative problem.

Whatever you try, whether Tor or VPNs or whatever - doesn't matter when the cops come knocking. VPNs are coming under legal attack now, and more and more sites refuse to work with them. You can say you're just running a relay, but if it came from your server they will put you in jail. Or consider the cyrpto anonymizer services - the folks running them might claim ignorance of where the crypto is coming from or going to - but they still go to jail.

If you want privacy, you have to get it at the ballot box.

Revenue tells you scant little about the health and profitability of that business. Care to share profit and gross margin numbers? Grocery stores are notoriously low-margin.

Exactly, and "Early reports indicate losses are already approaching 300,000 euros, but could run into several million euros nationwide." - IOW, the attack has cost far less money than it would have cost to prevent it with better security.

Here's a fix that I think could work:

1. Transition water rights from basically unlimited (subject to priority) to a specific, generous amount (i.e. double your yearly average over last 5 years or something). This would still be subject to priority order, and the sum of amounts would still be far more than the available water. So in this step, practically nothing changes. But it moves the problem from unlimited rights to a shared resource, to limited rights.

2. Have the state do a reverse auction to start buying back the water rights, starting with very low bids. Remember that those at the back of the priority line still aren't getting any water anyway, so buying those rights should be very cheap. The state keeps buying back the rights until whatever our goal is has been achieved.

In some sense, everybody would win. The people of the state get back control of the water. The lowest value use gets sold back or shifted to higher-value use. And the farmers don't have their water taken from them - in fact they get to sell it back if and only if they want to.

Water in California IS plentiful! But 85% of the water that is used is used by agriculture, leaving people and businesses to fight over the rest. Also, water "saved" in homes actually does not save any water, because it then gets used on a farm. Each gallon Californians reduce in homes produces one additional almond, but it gets used either way.

What's worse is that California is effectively exporting 40% of the water in the form of agricultural products. That is, half the food produced is exported. California sells their water, much like oil, to the rest of the world. And half of the exports are foreign exports (rather than to another state).

Did you know California exports a very large amount of rice to Asia? There are rice paddies surrounding Sacramento.

I bet that lumber mill wasn't union, but your examples are.

"Bring back forums" - I'm with you. I prefer forums as well, but when I think about it a little bit I can't say exactly why. Threaded conversations on specific topics, with moderation? That's basically Reddit (and forums). So what do you think it is that makes Reddit feel icky, versus the forums we've had in days of yore? Is it something fundamental about the system/experience, or is it just a "nobody goes there anymore... it's too crowded" problem?

Maybe the difference is the post/comments framing? Rather than an opening post with sequential follow-up replies? Maybe something about voting? Maybe it's all the bolt-on features?

Profit is the best way to measure that economic outputs exceed economic inputs, which is the whole point. But profit doesn't work so well as a measure when the outputs are hard to measure per individual beneficiary. Inputs are generally always pretty clearly measurable, but outputs aren't always, as in the case of roads and bridges - although even there often you can.

Electricity is super-duper easy to measure the individual benefits of, so profit is a really simple and easy way to measure the overall effective economic benefit. It's not perfect though - there are external costs to consider which aren't paid for directly, but we have lots of experience with that across all sorts of industries and usually solve for that via taxes and regulation, which become part of the profit equation.

Remember that when private equity buys out a business, there is at least one major winner in that moment: the current owners who have been building up that business over years.

One foreseeable consequence of this bill is that it reduces the ultimate value of starting and building your own practice, leading to more consolidation among existing large operators. As this is foreseeable, I also imagine that it's an unstated goal.

Not really. Monopolies are an invitation to competition: Your margin is my opportunity, as it were. They are therefore hard to maintain absent some kind of external force to support it: Regulations (regulatory capture), licensing, explicit grant from the government, intellectual property laws, or some kind of collusion or market manipulation (more leading to oligopolies rather than monopolies).

This is how industrial barons of the early-mid 20th century operated, as an example, with collusion and price fixing type things. Or hospitals and medical facilities today with certificate-of-need laws enforced by the government.

Americans are too busy working for all that. Their GDP per capita is almost double leading EU countries, except for a couple of outliers like Ireland and Switzerland.

You can complain about what you don't have, or you can work to produce it.

Then again, Americans are sometimes called workaholics, working far more hours. So in some ways this is just a lifestyle choice.

As an amateur (but competent) player of both, when I play go it almost feels like I'm playing multiple smaller games at the same time on the same board. Even if I might be struggling in one area, I can make it up in another. So it's very hard for a lesser opponent to beat me, even if they do gain an advantage in one area. Likewise in reverse when I'm playing a superior opponent. I might get in a nice kill, but next thing I know we're playing a different battle on the other side of the board and I get crushed.

So I think there's truth to what you're saying.

One can navigate by stars as well, at least at night.

Really, all modern conveniences like grocery stores and plumbing are "unnecessary" in the sense that we survived for 100k years without them.

Remember that function calling doesn’t mean that the model is actually calling a function for you: what it does it interpret the intent, then return back to the application the function and arguments, then the application runs the function with those arguments.

Think voice control for your device. You speak, and it returns back instructions ( a function and arguments) for your device to be execute.

They weren't saying there is anything wrong with the syringe disposal per se, but instead that it's indicative of the people who use those facilities and the priorities of the authorities that manage them.

It is observed that you have junkies shooting up in bathrooms, evidenced by needles strewn on the ground. So the solution from the authorities is to install syringe disposal containers.

Thanks. I wasn't aware of this interesting report.

https://data.worldhappiness.report/table

It wasn't easy for me to interpret these rankings though, or how they came up with the life evaluation score. More explanation around that would have been helpful. The column headers have hover-descriptions, but they don't really say how the values were calculated.

Anyway - it does seem that Scandinavian countries are well represented at the top. That's not too surprising. Costa Rica at #4 is very unintuitive to me. Viet Nam at #1 for freedom is REALLY surprising to me, having visited there a number of times and having many Vietnamese friends. Likewise, The United States at 104 on freedom seems very weird.

How would I connect to my own network? Wifi and cellular solve different problems.

It's a real problem when we allow violence or destructive activity to be perpetrated by sympathetic people or in the name of sympathetic causes.

I don't like government surveillance either - but even if you think the destruction is justified in this case, it's starting to become a trend that leads nowhere good. We lose the rule of law, and begin to enter the rule of the sympathetic.

What are those best places in the world?

I really hate hiding scrollbars, and I think the warning on that "feature" misses an important point: The scrollbar is not just for scrolling - it also tells you where you are in the document, and roughly how much of it you can see.

Tiny little slider toward the top - oh man, this is going to take a while. Huge slider - great, quick read. Slider toward the bottom - almost done!

Please stop hiding scrollbars!

Pay 2-5% to who? That's the problem for me - usually this means just another way to expand government. If you would just distribute it equally to all relevant citizens, with none of it going to the government, then I might get on board.

Dynamite has been incredibly beneficial for humanity.

"... two old white men were having a pissing contest ..."

This is the big mistake that so many people make: assuming that these folks are behaving irrationally, or somehow focused on something other than what is best for humanity or their own country.

The unfortunate truth is that these people are actually behaving rationally, and doing what they believe is in the best interest of their own country or even society at large. They are doing their best.

And, if you were thinking coolly and clearly, you would likely do the same things in their shoes.

This doesn't at all mean we're doomed - in fact quite the opposite. These are hard things to navigate (nukes, AI, etc) but we're up to the task and will come out the other side much better off.

How about we hope for Chinese labs to continue pushing forward - and for America and the rest of the world to do so as well.

It needn't be competitive - everybody can succeed more tomorrow than they are today. You win. I win. We win.

It's not all roses out there, to be sure. But there are some roses, I think. A lot of roses actually. Can we talk about the roses once in a while?

The problem is that everything is negative, all the time. Nothing good is allowed to be acknowledged. Everything someone or some company does must not be acknowledged to have any redeeming value- it’s all just negative

Which is sad, because so much amazing stuff is happening on the world right now, and seems to be only accelerating. For everybody.

"Aluminum (Al) is a widespread environmental contaminant " - they lost me right there in the very first sentence.

Already using charged, non-neutral language ("contaminant"), giving away their pre-existing bias and forcing me to disregard the rest of their opinion on the matter. Aluminum is no more "environmental contaminant" than any other extremely common basic element in the Earth's crust, like silicon or iron. Are they also against chlorine?

Clearly they decided to conduct a study to show just how scary aluminum is, and I have no doubt the succeeded.

That's one of the important reasons - I thought - that we have the FDA in the first place. But these days I'm really not so sure. So many promising treatments rejected (or just stalled forever) while pointless placebos and worse get or remain approved.

So - why again does the FDA exist?