SquirrelOnFire

It's not really a question of living, it's a question of prosperity (through a strictly capitalist lens).

Currently reading

Katabasis by RF Kuang - magicians from Oxford go to hell on purpose

And, meatier

The language of the night, essays by Ursula Le Guin

Just hire a dang artist or (gasp) take a few hours to learn to make something.

There's no ethical way to use AI art, it's all based on theft.

KEXP is a local (and beloved) station for me. WIll have to give some of these others a listen if they're doing similar things.

You've got to find the rare radio stations with public support and human djs. kexp.org is a great one based out of Seattle with a wild variety of shows and decades of history. Are all the shows to my taste? No. Have I ever heard something being played that was total crap? Honestly, maybe? Because there's genres I don't know enough to gaugue quality, but I haven't twigged to it.

"Hey, the whole team is getting together for an all hands next week and I'd like you to join..."

Giant miscanthus can grow on land that's not viable for farming food (other than grazing grasses), has a lot of properties that ready it for becoming charcoal (high tonnage per acre, self drying, minimal inputs needed). Without a price for carbon, it's hard to make it work, though.

Why's that, given that files are encrypted?

Speed of development of something important isn't necessarily good. Humans are bad at absorbing a lot of change at once and it takes time to recognize and mitigate second-order effects. There's plenty of benefit to the systems that disruptors operate within (society) to not moving as fast as possible... of course since our economic systems don't factor in externalities, we've instead turned all of society into a commons.

30 million people in the US are affected by "rare" genetic conditions.

"Locked doors only stop honest people" -Abe Lincoln

Up to 1/2 inch thickness... Great. Just need to 4x that to replace 2x4s, the construction material that the entire US home building process is built around.

But looks like it's ready to go for some applications (plywood). Hopefully they can get it thicker and replace more dimensional lumber. Or maybe I'm reading their site wrong?

That seems unlikely, given that beekeepers have kept hives in similar thin-walled boxes for centuries and colony collapse is a recent phenomenon. Plus CC occurs in wild populations[1] as well, suggesting either a widespread environmental factor or communicable agent.

[1]https://www.nrdc.org/stories/colony-collapse-disorder-why-ar...

While it felt awkward at first, I've been intentionally trying to befriend my neighbors. I've managed it with one couple and am working on a second. Tech helps reduce the barriers between distant friends, but we're wired to value eye contact and physical contact.

As a long time PM (of all sorts of P)...

If you don't want to have to talk to customers, which only one developer who I've ever worked with has actually wanted to do, you need a way to equip someone else to do so.

Same thing if you want to keep your investors happy, your counterparts in other departments informed of when they need to have the hardware to pair up with your software ready, etc.

There's definitely such a thing as too much overhead, but developers who just do the things they are interested in without considering that they are part of a larger business are the other side of the coin that you're describing.

Yeah, they kind of blow past light sheet microscopy, but I'm optimistic that this can still be quite useful. There are brain banks with already donated brains that we could use to learn about diseases, and I imagine many organ donors would be happy to have their brains sliced up for science.

Mozilla's biggest source of revenue? Google. By about a factor of 5.

People usually overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years.

Perception is reality. This is true of how you see the world and how people see you.

Convenience is like sugar - it is sweet and addictive and adds less to your life than you think. Finding ways of doing things that build connection to your community rather than cut you off (Prefer farmers markets to grocery stores and grocery stores to meal-delivery kits) will give you opportunities for meaningful connections every day.

Oh, and try mushrooms, but take them seriously and have a guide you trust and respect sit with you.

They hadn't written the ending of Die Hard when they started filming - the Movies that Made us episode about it is pretty wild & illuminating.

Like Signal?

From Bacteria to Back and Back follows a similar path and was a worthwhile read for a layman like myself. It emphasizes the evolutionary fitness of ideas as well as biological evolution. https://www.nature.com/articles/542030a

Agreed, but on a transaction level having higher profit MARGINS is what enables the company to have money to plow back into the business.

More rich people in and of itself is not a bad thing, and as you say, having a baseline level of wealth in a nation leads to huge quality of life improvements.

However, the increasing divergence between the rich and poor in wealthy nations causes all sorts of indirect harms - https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson?language=en

I'll have to keep an eye out, thanks!

Sure. You want businesses you deal with to make profit, otherwise they won't be around to do business with in the future.

In industrial supply chain, if you have two suppliers who are each charging the same price and you know that one is making higher profit margins, go with the one with higher margins - they're more likely to be stable.

BS. in a comment about pricing "more" does not include complex concepts like autonomy - it clearly only referred to money.

Humans have sapience. Cows don't.

Cows should still be treated humanely and only have one bad day (when they're slaughtered) since they're clearly capable of suffering, but ignoring the difference is a little dishonest, intellectually.

I think there's also value in recognizing that animals can suffer. It is (in my opinion) a moral question whether or not to support systems that create animal suffering.

I'm mostly vegetarian - I'll eat meat when it is offered in a social situation or buy it myself to cook for a special occasion when I know the source is a place where the animal was likely to have "only one bad day" - the day it was slaughtered.

Back to the article - I think lancing a fish' brain to kill it immediately follows that spirit. As you say - understanding what it means to give it a good life and good death.

Uh, you know you can make multiple accounts and don't need to even associate an email, right? You can browse just as anonymously logged in as out.

That's not how it works. Educated, creative workers look for more than just salary. Increases in autonomy, purpose, and opportunity for mastery are often viewed as more valuable than money (once threshold levels of income have been crossed)[1]

[1] Drive by Daniel Pink