bariumbitmap

The New York Post links to the Economic Times:

> The Comprehensive Study on Single-Use Straws, commissioned by South Korea’s Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment, was revealed on Wednesday by Kim Wi-sang, an opposition People Power Party lawmaker, according to The Korea Herald.

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/new-updates/paper-...

which cites the Korea Herald:

> The report, commissioned by the Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment and disclosed Wednesday by Rep. Kim Wi-sang of the People Power Party, assessed the environmental impacts of four types of straws — conventional plastic straws, paper, biodegradable plastic and bio-based polyethylene (bio-PE).

https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10911494

I wasn't able to find the original report, it's not in the ministry's press releases:

https://www.mcee.go.kr/eng/web/index.do?menuId=461

LED light bulbs really seem to be a market for lemons.

> I still use Backblaze drive stats and lifetime annual failure rates to help me decide which make and models of drive I might want to buy for my NAS upgrades. > > Why did you stop using them?

I guess the short answer is I don't have a NAS, I have a laptop with M.2 SSDs.

> Outside of drives, I rely on Consumer Reports for reliability reports.

I also use Consumer Reports but they have some limitations, for example they stopped reviewing LED light bulbs in 2017.

Backblaze drive stats used to be very useful when purchasing consumer drive stats for my laptops, e.g. in 2015:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10387962

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q3-201...

For various reasons I don't consult Backblaze stats much nowadays, but I wish this kind of reliability and failure rate information were more available for other products, especially LED light bulbs.

I don't know much about sociology, so I found it interesting to read a sociologist critique his own field. This part stood out to me:

> To make a loose statistical analogy, it is a little like continuing to add variables to a regression on the grounds that the explained variance keeps increasing.

Like a statistical model having parameters, a theory should have some nuance, but too much nuance is analogous to overfitting. It reminds me of the maxim that a theory should be as simple as possible but no simpler

> This sort of breathless outrage rhetoric would be a lot easier to take seriously if it spent even a minute acknowledging the very real risk to users that this is meant to mitigate: tech support scams where people are walked through installing an app that takes over their phone and steals their money, private data, and identity.

1. Is requiring developers to submit government ID actually an effective way to prevent tech support scams? Will scammers actually be deterred by a government ID requirement in addition to the existing developer registration process?

2. Is requiring developers to submit government ID the best option to prevent tech support scams? Are there other options that Google could use to make Android user less susceptible to tech support scams?

> You can disagree with the tradeoff, but if you don't acknowledge it you're just doing propaganda.

The tradeoff, such as it is, is acknowledged on keepandroidopen.org under the "But wait, isn't this...just about security?" section:

> The security rationale is a smokescreen. Google Play Protect already scans for malware independent of developer identity. Requiring a government ID doesn't make code safer.

Finally:

> Personally, I think the 24h cooldown is an excellent compromise to allow user freedom while slowing down attackers sufficiently to mitigate the harm.

I don't think this is an excellent compromise. Scammers are persistent. I'm not convinced a 24 hour cooldown is enough to deter them in any meaningful way. I, on the other hand, am not persistent enough to wait 24 hours to install an Android app from F-Droid just to try it out.

See also: https://www.wikimediastatus.net/

Edit: and these too

https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incidents/2026-10-21_PHP...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50172041

Stargate is military scifi. For starters, all the protagonists work for the US Air Force.

1989 was 37 years ago, i.e. almost 40 years ago. Time flies.

> Blue-collar workers, in general, have successfully ridden the waves of technological change. If you can manage a crew of manual carpenters, you can also manage a warehouse full of woodworking robots.

Uh, what? This hypothetical is literally an example of an entire crew of manual carpenters being fired and replaced by robots, leaving only the manager. That sure doesn't sound like successfully riding the waves of technological change.

> It’s usually the white-collar workers who bear the most economic disruption from major technological innovations.

Citation needed. This is not the prevailing wisdom I have heard, and certainly not the experience of e.g. longshoremen replaced by shipping container technology in the 1960s and 1970s.

I don't like the clickbait title, but the reporting is otherwise solid. Related reporting:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/fcc-abolishes-gi...

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/digital-future-daily/20...

https://www.telecompetitor.com/policy-experts-weigh-what-com...

This blog post is odd because it keeps on hinting about a difference between `-r' and `-R' and links to the source code but never actually says what it is. I'll quote the OpenBSD manual that the post mentions but does not link to for some reason:

> Historic versions of the cp utility had an -r option. This implementation supports that option; however, its use is strongly discouraged, as it does not correctly copy special files, symbolic links or FIFOs.

https://man.openbsd.org/cp

See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TxEQnkoI9U

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49588077

There's a lot here to absorb, but one thing I've always wondered about Georgism and Land Value Tax is whether land supply is actually inelastic:

> Land, however, is not built. Land is inelastic in supply, and landowners don’t “provide” land the way laborers provide labor and investors provide capital; they un-provide land by excluding others from using it. Building supply can change in response to a tax change, but land supply cannot.

But many cities actually can increase their land supply via land reclamation. This can be done by filling in waterways or otherwise altering the landscape to make it suitable to build on. Chicago, for example, built the land under the Adler Planetarium by filling in rubble along the shore of Lake Michigan. Boston is an even more impressive example; Back Bay used to be a bay of the Atlantic Ocean, not an entire neighborhood of a city with very high cost of living.

Cities can also lose land. Sometimes this is due to natural causes like erosion, sea level rise, or disasters like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Other times a lack of regulation might permit pollution to make land unlivable or infeasible to build on. Land owners can't create natural disasters, but they can advocate for policies that strongly influence effective land supply, such as whether building codes allow building on certain kinds or soil or require resistance to earthquakes.

Does this change the calculus from a Georgist economic perspective? If not, why?

The context of Jensen Huang's comments and Tante's commentary is in teaching children the multiplication table, long division, and square roots. As adults we might use a calculator to multiply or divide large numbers to high precision but we understand what we're doing because of practicing easier arithmetic by hand.

> How are these bad things ? We have tools for a reason

The bad thing is not bothering to learn basic arithmetic. If kids don't learn that they won't understand what the tools are doing.