peterkshultz

"...in the United States, the commerce departments of state governments generally prohibit or restrict the use of certain words in the names of corporations unless those corporations are legitimate chartered banks. For example, words prohibited by the state of Louisiana include bank, banker, banking, savings, safe deposit, trust, trustee, and credit union" [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banq_(term)

Balds are some of America's hidden treasures.

Jane Bald through Hump Mountain was my favorite section on the Appalachian Trail, except maybe for a few sections in Maine.

South of downtown was the first one, yes. See "The History of Costco" at: https://www.costco.com/about.html

Highly recommend "Hard Landing" by Thomas Petzinger Jr. if you're interested in this sort of subject.

Unit economics for commercial aviation have changed substantially since the industry's inception.

You should check out the book "On Bullshit" by philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt. He develops a similar theory.

That accountability doesn't work for everybody, of course.

I learned in school that gyms sell more memberships than their facilities have space to support. People think that by buying a membership, they're locking themselves into going and working out because they're paying for it.

Sometimes, however, people conflate paying for the gym membership as actually going to the gym, and then don't go at all.

But yes, as you said: it boils down to accountability.

I disagree with the idea that the market has room for a finite number of millionaires.

See Paul Graham's essay on wealth, specifically the subject about the pie fallacy. "...although there may be, in certain specific moments (like your family, this month) a fixed amount of money available to trade with other people for things you want, there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. You can make more wealth. Wealth has been getting created and destroyed (but on balance, created) for all of human history." [1]

[1]: http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

Appalachian Trail? I did it too!

Fritos and Nutty Buddies were my go-to. I added a few notes about my trip here: https://pkshultz.com/at/

I would call what you're experiencing the sunk cost fallacy [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Loss_aversion_and_th...

Anybody interested in this might want to check out EME (Earth-Moon-Earth) communication: point an antenna at the moon, bounce a signal off of it, and coordinate with someone back on Earth to receive it.

More details here: http://www.moonbouncers.org/

Had I not set up a keyboard shortcut for this a week ago, I would've been using your site at least a dozen times a day.

Clean and functional. Well done!

When Amazon Go was first announced, my guess was that they were using RFID tags on every item in the store.

I now understand why that was misguided: the cost of RFID tags would scale linearly with the amount of goods sold. With Amazon's camera/ML technology, they can reproduce this store wherever they want for just the cost of the hardware and maintenance.

I really appreciated the article for explaining that.

I'm willing to wager that this number has dropped in the six years since the article has been written.