I appreciate your comments as my original comment was not particularly good.

I suspect, at this point, that Hasan is already making a living running No Tech For Apartheid, and protesting for Palestine. It is even possible that it is a better living than they made working for Google, but probably not. I am not saying that sacrifices have not been made. However, when I say that this person is a professional protester I understood what that meant. My wife is a professional organizer. You can pay her, by the hour, to organize your closet, or your warehouse. Ibraheem is a professional protestor.

It is funny how you think that it is the red states that will kill this. Noncompetes are already not enforceable in many right-to-work states. It's the blue states where noncompete clauses had weight.

I actually believe that. Probably because that's what Hasan Ibraheem is quoted as saying in this article. He was already part of an organization No Tech For Apartheid. Here's the requisite quote from the article in case you don't feel like clicking on a link.

I don't see why this should be a surprising take. There are quite a few people that have become professional protestors. Nine people sat for a while in an office building with some very nice banners and somehow this has been in the national news for a week. These people came prepared, they were well-funded, and they clearly were plugged into the media well beforehand. He's done it once. I am sure that he has a long career ahead of him in this profession.

I want to make this very clear. I actually applaud this guy for his work. I am quite sure that he is genuine in his regard for Palestine, and it is hard to argue that it isn't an important topic. I just don't believe, even for a second, that any of this was a surprise to him. Hasan used his job at Google to catapult himself into this role.

Apple's only advantage is that they are seen as a status symbol by certain people. Apple has gone out of its way to make sure that you can tell if someone you are talking to is using an iPhone. If they aren't using an iPhone then the experience is degraded significantly. There are a million video chat programs, and they all work great, but the cool kids all want to Facetime. In group chats they care what colors bubbles they have.

That works great in places where there are a lot of Apple users, but it works against Apple in places where there is not. In China there are replacements for all of Apple's software that everyone uses, even if you have a fancy phone you aren't really in Apple's ecosystem. In essence you are buying an iPhone to become a second class citizen in all of the software you actually want to use. Everyone else is running Android.

Throw in major financial issues in China and all of a sudden Apple's phones look like a very poor choice, even without throwing politics in the mix.

I read an interview with one of the main protestors that got fired in the first wave. Their plan is to become a professional protestor. I suspect that pays better than being an average Googler.

Exactly. I drive a 1996 Honda Civic. If I were to buy a new car, that is the sort of car that I would be interested in. The sort of car that is inexpensive and capable of driving at freeway speeds. If the government would let me buy a Toyota Hilux for $12K I would do that tomorrow. Instead I get enormous pickups and SUVs that get through the loopholes in our current EPA standards and that cost more than my first house.

I just spent a week in Peru where Chinese cars are quite popular, and the taxi drivers that I talked to were pretty happy with theirs. The mentioned, time and again, that, for the price they were great cars. They were definitely popular. I would buy one of those. They tend to have manual transmissions, which I know how to drive, and which I trust not to leave me stranded.

If I could buy an electric vehicle for $10K I would do that. It wouldn't be my only vehicle, but it probably would be my primary vehicle. I love the idea of electric vehicles, but it doesn't make sense to replace my ridiculously inexpensive (paid for and hyper reliable) Civic with an expensive electric vehicle, or my far more useful Honda Odyssey mini-van. It sort of makes sense to replace the Civic with an electric vehicle, however, if the price is right.

That was 12 years ago. A 12 year out of date critique of a web technology that has had ongoing language updates and two entire rewrites in that interval should be viewed with some suspicion. Also, are you really just citing the title of the article and none of the content?

I'm not even defending PHP here, just questioning lazy kneejerk, "but it sucked once, so now I hate it forever" thinking.

Apple's market dominance in the U.S. means that people with Android phones face significant headwinds. Being the only Android user in a group chat is its own special Hell. That lack of interoperability works against Apple in places where Android phones are more established. It is hard to convince people that your phone is so much better than theirs when every time you put a picture in a group chat it looks like you took the picture on a flip phone from 1995. Everyone else's pictures look fine. In these cases Apple is clearly the problem, and it is a bad look for Apple.

That doesn't stop iPhones from being a status symbol, and there are certain parts of the population, where all of the rich and powerful people have iPhones, where being part of the crowd is worth the price of entry. However, in a country where 90+% of the population is using Android you have to be pretty darn snooty to justify buying an iPhone. I suspect that is a very hard market to sell into.

The article actually does a good job of talking about this. It even mentions recent problems that they had in Alaska with a cable that got cut because the ice got thicker than they thought possible. I actually think that this is a pretty cool idea (pun totally intended), and I am glad to see these guys making 23 million euros to look into it. Good on them for getting paid to study a very interesting problem.

However, I would be surprised if the cable actual got laid, assuming that the current forecasts are remotely accurate. This fiber optic cable is already forecast to cost 4 times as much as a cable that took the conventional route. It is also going to be considerably more expensive to maintain. The main selling point appears to be that it is less likely to sabotaged (unless your adversary has access to nuclear submarines, I guess), and it is also less likely to be cut by an errant anchor.

There's a reason that so many of the undersea cables follow essentially the same routes. That reason is cost. No one wants to sink hundreds of millions of dollars into a cable that is going to have a serious price disadvantage.

Not to be a wet blanket, but no investment decisions have been made. If you read the article carefully you will realize that they aren't even to the survey stage yet. What they have done is that they have hit the EU up for 23 million euro in funding.

So far the estimated costs of the project are 1 billion euro, and that's projected to be considerably more costly than non-Arctic routes. So they have a lot of fund raising to do if they want to actually make this happen. And, let's face it, the easy money has already been raised. The EU is more than happy to pay 23 million euro, much of which will end up in Nokia's hands, to study this. Actual business people, spending their own money, are likely to be more skeptical. Especially considering the fact that comparable cable that doesn't take this route would only cost 250 million euros.

This article is really just a fancy advertisement for something that is probably not a good idea. The article actually does a good job of covering that part of the story. You have to read down a ways, but it is worth it. True to form the EU has already invested heavily in this project. I personally think that says more about EU spending than on the viability of the Northwest Passage for fiber optic cables.

If, on the other hand, you felt strongly enough about the direction that the climate was headed on this planet that you wanted to make a big bet on the Northwest Passage becoming a viable route for fiber optic cables, I suspect that their is an opportunity here to put your money where your mouth is. These people are going to need a lot more money than they currently have if this is to get off the drawing board.

General Motors announced today that it is now selling this data directly to insurers. After all why should LexisNexis and Verisk get a cut?

For a truck that is spectacular gas mileage. The manual transmission helps, but the big difference is that it just isn't that big. Our current regulations make small trucks like the S10 infeasible. That's the sort of unintended consequence that is likely to make this 30 year-old vehicle even more desirable in the future.

And before you mock his gas mileage remember that he has been getting that gas mileage since 1995 when 23 MPG was even more amazing. That vehicle cost around $10k new, is far less expensive to insure than basically anything else. While the S10 is small, it is still a pickup truck. If you take the time to compare his driving costs over the last 25 years compared to yours you will probably be far less inclined to mock his decision. Especially when you consider the fact that his vehicle doesn't phone his insurance company every time he brakes aggressively.

I drive an old 1996 Honda Civic for similar reasons. It gets better gas mileage (and seats more people, at least in a pinch), but it isn't as generally useful as an S10. I'm jealous.

What I want is a new Toyota Hilux. It is like the S10 in many ways (in that both are small pickups). Unfortunately, Toyota can't sell them in the U.S. due to the unintended consequences of some of our stupid EPA regulations. Instead we are stuck with bigger trucks because apparently those vehicles get loopholes.

That is a good point. And it really drives the point home that what we want is reduce and reuse, but what we are sold is recycle. Thanks.

Smoking is the number one cause of preventable death in the United States with approximately 500K deaths per year. That is more than twice more than alcohol (200K) with less smokers in the U.S. than drinkers. The mortality data for smoking marijuana is less clear (mostly because it is illegal in most places), but it carries many of the inherent risks as smoking. Any of the papers that talk about the actual risks of smoking marijuana cover this in detail.

It turns out that lighting stuff on fire and then breathing that smoke directly into your lungs is not a good idea. It's 2024, this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone anymore.

Edibles are probably considerably safer than smoking. The probably is because we really don't know. Heck, it is even possible that edibles are good for you, or that they are worse for you than smoking. Feel free to be a guinea pig.

That data is very hard to come by, as we don't really have good numbers on how much marijuana gets used. Canada has very good data on how marijuana impaired accidents nearly quintupled when they legalized marijuana. The doctor that wrote that paper had this to say about comparative deadliness of the two substances:

On it's face this would seem to agree with your assessment that marijuana is less deadly than alcohol. From a driving perspective it probably is. Although the paper went on to talk about how very few of the people who tested positive for marijuana only tested positive for marijuana. Most also tested positive for alcohol and that combination was significantly more deadly than alcohol alone.

It turns out that people that get stoned and drive tend to also be drunk, and the combination makes them even more dangerous than simply being drunk.

It also doesn't take into consideration increased risk factors long term for cardiovascular and other health related issues arising from marijuana use. Right now, admittedly the science behind that is murky. Numbers are hard to get for criminalized substances, and it is very difficult to separate the effects of marijuana from the effects of other drugs that often get used in combination with marijuana (alcohol being a prime example). That being the case smoking marijuana probably has most of the same health problems that smoking tobacco has. From the limited studies that have been done marijuana smokers can probably expect similar if not worse mortality rates. Not to mention the fact that while most marijuana users don't go on to use other "harder" drugs. There is a statistical link between marijuana use and later use of other drugs. Some of that makes sense. I have several friends that have told me that they have been given marijuana spiked with some other substance at one time or another.

It turns out that drug dealers are not nice people. Hanging out with them is a very serious health risk.

Just for the record, I am personally in favor of the decriminalization of marijuana, and I have even helped my niece get a medical marijuana card. I recognize that the science on some of this is still out. I just don't think that when the research is done, that marijuana is going to turn out to be as benign a substance as many marijuana advocates currently insist that it is. I think that it is at least safe to say that it is probably as harmful to your health as cigarette smoke, and long term cigarettes are invariably an early death sentence.