The only people for who gambling is profitable are the book keepers. They don't care who wins or loses because they get their cut either way.

This isn't really true. It's true that bookmakers do their best to set the odds so that they get about the same amount of money betting either way. In that case, they get their vig and do well no matter what the outcome. They don't always succeed, though, so there are cases where there's a lot more money on one outcome than the other and the bookmakers wind up having to cover the other side themselves. Being able to get the bets to balance is a skill, and bookmakers who don't have it can and do go out of business.

It's also possible- though harder these days- to make money by being a contrarian. The betting lines are set based on the bookmakers' predictions of how the public will bet, not on their best guess of the true odds of the contest. If you are good at recognizing cases where the public at large bets their biases rather than the objective odds, you can make money. For example, there are some fans who will bet for their team out of affection rather than good judgment. When one team is much more popular than the other, that can meaningfully shift the odds. It's possible to make money by finding those cases and betting for the less popular team.

It's like the bridge to nowhere in the sense that it actually makes sense as a project but is easy for people who don't understand the situation to ridicule. Yes, Rancho Cucamonga is a drive from downtown LA. It would be great if they could extend the tracks to Union Station, and they probably can, since there's already a rail connection between the two on LA's commuter rail system, Metrolink. Rancho Cucamonga is also right next to the most common driving route between LA and Las Vegas, so people who might otherwise drive the whole way can instead think about taking the train for a big part of the distance. CityNerd did an interesting video on how HSR would compete with driving and flying between LA and Las Vegas and concluded it will beat the pants off driving for most people in LA, despite the less-than-ideal station location.

What we need to understand is why we can't build stuff.

People have looked long and hard at why the USA has so much trouble building infrastructure. The two big reasons:

1. We give property owners a lot of power to fight against proposed projects. If you propose a new piece of infrastructure, you'll be inundated with lawsuits from people who might possibly be affected in some way, and you'll need to fight them all before you can do anything. In a lot of cases, the only way to avoid the lawsuits is by altering the project in ways that make it more expensive. As an example, this is why US subway projects tend to use expensive tunnel boring machines instead of cheaper but more disruptive cut-and-cover. Part of the reason the new HSR line is in a good position to move so quickly is they were able to secure right of way in the median of I-15, preventing a lot of those kinds of suits.
2. Projects that get past the lawsuit stage tend to be treated as employment programs for construction workers at least as much as infrastructure projects. This also tends to blow up the costs and make the projects less popular with the taxpayers who fund them. Again the HSR in this case can avoid a lot of that because it will be privately owned and thus doesn't have to worry about what taxpayers think nearly as much.

The project was designed for control, not efficiency. They want to force people to use government controlled transportation to get anywhere more than a short distance from their home. That way they can use their control over the transportation system to isolate anyone acting in a way they don't like. If there are protests in one part of the city, they can shut down transit and elevators in that area to keep them from spreading. It's exactly what you'd expect from a bunch of authoritarian thugs.

"Land" isn't that unusual of a name. According to the U.S. Census, it was the 1704th most common last name in the USA in 2010 (the most recent census for which they have tabulated the data), with about 21,000 people having that name. It was about as common as Zhu, Irvin, Gagnon, Spivey, Patino, Marrero, Hager, or Lanier.

It doesn't sound that common, but last names have a very long tailed distribution in the US. The Census-provided list includes every name with at least 100 people, and it has more than 162,000 names. Even that list only covers about 90% of the population; nearly 10% of people in the US share their last name with fewer than 100 others.

FWIW, how cool is it that this kind of information is available to anyone who chooses to visit the Census web site? Honestly, this is probably only the second coolest name website maintained by the U.S. Government. The Social Security baby name website provides far more granular information and with better presentation.

The problem with binding arbitration isn't the process; it's the disparity in power. If Roku wants to agree with its network provider that they'll settle contract disputes through binding arbitration, that's fine. What's not fine is Roku telling their customers that they're unilaterally changing to binding arbitration and the customer has no say in the matter. "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further." is a sign that the deal is not agreed to through fair negotiation.

You don't necessarily need to. Plenty of cars are networked, so you just need to hack them, and they often have miserable computer security. There was even a famous hack that allowed someone to take over a car's computer systems through their wireless tire pressure sensors.

Many people think they're capable of outsmarting the law. I think computer programmers can be especially prone to it, since they're used to coming up with creative solutions to rules-based problems. They don't realize two things:

1) They aren't the first people to try this stuff. The legal system has encountered lots of clever scofflaws, and it has been tweaked to account for their tricks.

2) The law is more flexible than computers are, because it's run by humans. There are plenty of legal rules that include flexibility because they know they'll be interpreted by judges, not machines. The whole concept of Common Law is allowing judges to make up new laws by analogy to old ones if existing law doesn't cover their case.

That's the general concept of device testing, but it's more complicated in practice. The FDA has been doing this kind of thing for a long time, and they've seen all kinds of mistakes in the testing process that they'll want to avoid. To do that, they'll ask some more questions, such as:

• How did you decide on the number of people in your study?
• How long will the study last, and why did you decide on that study length?
• How do you make sure the people in your study are representative of diabetes patients as a group and aren't a self-selected sub-population that behaves differently?
• How are you making sure the diary is complete and accurate? What do you do if it isn't?
• What happens if some people drop out of the study?
• How will you use the data you have to determine the accuracy of your device?

These are all kinds of questions you need to answer before you start your study in order to make sure the results are meaningful. There are some additional things you'll want to do, too, like look for sub-groups within the study where the device is especially inaccurate. If you find a sub-group like that, you'll either need to figure out how to fix your device or make sure that sub-group doesn't get it.

The FDA will also want you to take a bunch of extra steps beyond the initial testing. For example, software updates will have to be tested to make sure they don't screw things up and make the results unreliable. You'll probably have to test the device's longevity to make sure it doesn't start producing erroneous results as it gets old, or at least provide some way to figure out when it's stopped working right so it can be replaced. You'll also need strict QC and tracking procedures so if you ever produce a batch of defective devices they can be identified and pulled from the market.

There's an old saying in the field that safety regulations are written in blood, and it's completely true in this case. These regulations aren't there because the FDA likes to be difficult. They're there because inadequately tested devices had undetected problems that made people get sick and die. A bad medical device can actually be worse than nothing at all if it fools people into thinking everything is fine when it isn't.

There absolutely is a supply shortage. You can estimate the housing demand by dividing the population by the average family size and compare that to the actual housing supply. Here in California, the supply is short of demand by 2-3 million homes. We need a massive amount of home building to get back in balance. It simply isn't possible to meet demand within our existing metropolitan areas without completely revamping our zoning system.

New cities aren't a real solution because they would be so far away from the jobs that the commutes would be impractical. We are already fitting those people into our existing cities; we're just doing a really bad job of it. People are cramming multiple families into homes that aren't built for it, or they're winding up homeless and living on the street because they can't afford rent. We should just acknowledge we need to build more houses and get rid of the legal obstacles to doing it.

That's not to say that zoning is the only problem, but it's the main problem. Most of the other problems people focus on, like short-term rentals and private equity buying up houses, are problems because housing supply is so short. If we had enough houses, short term rentals would be a local quality of life issue rather than something competing with people who need homes. Similarly, private equity is capitalizing on the housing shortage because it drives up rent. If we had enough housing, rent would come down and private equity would look elsewhere. Deal with that big problem, and the little problems mostly go away.

This technology will only improve, and ultimately, it is the only way to actually have reasonable commutes in cities, where vehicles can speed up or slow down at intersections without having one side stop.

No, not at all. A city where the cars never stop at intersections but only slow down is one that is inimical to actual human beings. Engineering our cities to be better and better for cars makes them worse and worse for every other means of transportation: pedestrians, bicyclists, public transit, delivery vehicles, etc. That's what gets people so angry about robotaxis: they focus on moving cars to the exclusion of everything else that needs to move around a city.

We- or we in the USA, at least- need to completely rethink the way we design our transportation system. We've spent the past century trying to build and rebuild cities for the benefit of cars, and the results are awful. We devote as much space in our cities to moving and storing cars as we do to housing people and businesses, and cars are still an inefficient way of moving people around. Meanwhile, our cities are absolute garbage for anyone who tries to move around without a car.

We need to reorient our transportation infrastructure to moving people and goods rather than cars. In some places- small towns and rural areas- cars will still be extremely important, but in larger cities we need to work harder at making transportation that's compatible with high density: more walking, bicycling, and public transit, and more attempts to reduce the need for long-distance travel by putting everyday necessities, like stores and other businesses, close enough to where people live that they don't need to drive to handle the daily necessities of life.

More importantly, tritium has problems as a fuel for a commercial reactor because it's not a naturally occurring isotope. It has to be generated, usually by bombarding lithium with neutrons. The only economic source of those neutrons is a nuclear reactor. Currently we do this with fission reactors, where tritium production is a minor byproduct. You can produce some tritium from a fusion reactor, but I can't see how you can get even close to one tritium per fusion reaction in any real-world design.

The net result is that it just isn't practical to use D-T fusion as the main energy source because we can't have enough tritium for that to work. We need excess energy from a reactor that uses primarily deuterium (of which there is plenty to fuel everything for millions of years) for fusion to be a practical power source for the whole world.

The same thing is true of any film print. The only time you see exactly what's on the film is projected slides from slide film. Any printed photograph involves a complex process to convert the original film image into what winds up on paper. Not to mention that a lot of changes can happen by careful choice of development process. Again you have an image that's based on the light that came in through the lens, but there's a complicated process for converting that light into the final image.

You should read Ansel Adams's Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs to learn about the complicated process involved in developing a printing a film photo. He spends a lot of time talking about developing and printing, which he saw as at least as much of the process of producing a photography as composition and exposure. He never distinguished what happened before he pressed the shutter as a distinct activity from what happened after. All those steps were essential to producing a photograph.

More generally, Amazon is destroying its value as a seller by acting as a marketplace. They've deliberately made it as difficult as possible to tell the difference between goods sold by Amazon and ones being sold by third parties using their system. That makes it easy for scammers to take advantage of the system. They could try to weed out the scammers, but they won't. They're worried that eliminating scammers could give some company that's less discriminating a chance to break into the market. I get the impression that Temu is already doing this. At the same time, I'm sure the scammers are good for Amazon's short term profits. Not their long term health, though; they're getting so worthless for so many things, people are going to go back to buying from individual sellers who don't have the same quality problems.

I think there are two possible failure modes. You're right about the danger of people accepting photos uncritically, but there's also a danger of people rejecting accurate information out of hand because they don't want to believe it. If there's a real worry about fake pictures, it just makes it easier for people to ignore any picture they don't want to accept. We need to do something to try to make news photos harder to fake to counteract that danger.