Putting gasoline in an automobile is work. Ringing up groceries is work. If you are employed in this job, and you are paid for it, it is in no way fake.

Isn't not letting the user get off easily the exact point?

Houston proper is 669 sq miles.
San Francisco is < 47 sq miles.


If your stats are for the data within city boundaries, you're comparing avocados and watermelons. Downtown areas have much higher housing costs (and smaller homes) than more suburban areas. San Francisco is urban proper; Houston as a whole is incredibly suburban.

Again, if you're comparing city proper. If, on the other hand, you compared equal land areas around the cities, all the area with a 75 mile commute to downtown, or some other apples-to-apples metric, good on ya.

Five years ago, I swore I wouldn't use AMD GPUs any more because their Linux drivers were utter crap compared to the Nvidia blob, and the radeon driver was a performance joke. Now I say the exact opposite: no more buggy Nvidia proprietary garbage, only AMD GPU with the open source drivers. Works so much better, 2D and 3D performance is awesome, no painful hoops to jump through when upgrading kernels. What a turn around for them on both the CPU and GPU front. Happily running an inexpensive AMD+AMD Linux-only rig now, it'll become a media PC next year when I build a Ryzen 5000 + Big Navi machine for my main PC.

Is it blocking ads only for elections that are held on November 3? I couldn't find an answer to that.

1. Some states have runoff elections. The November 3rd election determines the top-two finishers, who then compete in a second election. For example, Louisiana's runoff is December 5, 2020. Georgia's is December 7, 2020. For candidates who are in those elections, can they run ads?

2. What about special elections for vacancies that occur after November 3? Districts (states, cities, counties, etc.) could have elections in January or February 2021, often as a result of a current officeholder winning an election on November 3, 2020 for a different position. For candidates who are in those elections, can they run ads?

3. Some communities have elections in months other than November, including in some cases in the Spring. For candidates who are in those elections, can they run ads?

4. What about future elections, say primaries and the general election in 2022? For candidates who are in those elections, can they run ads?

I get that lots of folks on slashdot simply don't like political ads. I suggest that the alternative may be worse -- allowing Alphabet and Facebook and Apple and a few others the ability to influence politics in the US without allowing those with other points of political view from creating advertisements that persuade viewers in favor of policies that are antithetical to Silicon Valley's profit margins.

Want to keep pavement cooler? Put it in the shade. Street trees that give shade (not palm trees) provide all kinds of benefits to human health, as well as the health of other flora and fauna.

Thank you, it's well past time that /. promoted the pro-ana movement.

We'll see how this plays out, but this may have been a very good ruling, in that it does not redefine the concept of sex. The idea here is that an employer cannot discriminate against a male who identifies as/presents using cultural gender stereotypes of a woman. But this is because the employer would be treating that person differently than a female who identifies/presents using cultural gender stereotypes of a woman; i.e., discrimination based on sex. The ruling is not saying that transgender person is the sex that they identify with; in fact, it has to be read as the opposite, otherwise the argument that it is an example of sex discrimination falls apart.

Now, that is for a general employer. There are already exceptions in place where discrimination based on sex are allowed, such as women's sports. Those exceptions remain, and as sex has not been redefined to be based on personal identity, women's sport can continue to exclude males regardless of how those males personally identify. The trick being that while leagues are allowed to, that doesn't mean they have to, and as you mentioned, some organizations are going with the flawed identity metric based on extremely poor reasoning with the obvious injustice following.

I have a family of four, live near good mass transit, and don't own a car (nor does my spouse). We own two parking spots at our home and live comfortably.

Lyft -- along with walking, mass transit, ZipCar, car rental, bike share, and my own bike -- allow my family to continue not owning a car. Lyft is a pretty important part of that, because it covers trips to the doctor, trips with a big package, last minute efforts, etc.

If I owned a car, I'd drive it a whole lot more than my current ZipCar, car rental, and 2x Lyft rides. This is intuitive. The marginal cost of driving your own car is something like $0.50/mile, and that's if you internalize all costs and not just gas. The marginal cost of an uber is a few bucks a mile in a dense area, due to congestion. Higher price, reduced use. Econ 101.

Lyft helps me reduce traffic in my region by reducing my total miles on the road because it's a key component of me being voluntarily car-free. Is my status unique? Nope. Does it dominate the stories across all urban areas? Probably not. But if we characterize vehicles on a roadway as (a) commercial, (b) personal owned-and-operated, and (c) taxi/TNC, what category do you think is biggest? I think it's rarely (c), particularly during times of peak congestion.

Single occupancy owned and operated autos dominates congestion. Focusing on Uber and Lyft as the cause of congestion is focusing on the sawdust in another driver's eye and ignoring the plank in one's own.

Cooking with electricity: you could use an old, electric cooktop. Or you could use induction. Induction uses about half the Btus to boil water, because the energy is directed to the pot itself, not the air around it. So in addition to being faster, not emitting pollutants in your home, and not being a fire or explosion risk, induction cooktops use less energy for cooking.

Heating water with electricity: air source heat pump tanked water heaters are more efficient than gas, particularly in places that don't get especially cold (like, say, Berkeley).

Drying with electricity: Gas dryers use more energy (kWh-equivalent) than electric models. Newer electric (condensing, or condensing with heat pump) use even less electricity than traditional electric dryers. See Table 6, third column of
https://www.energystar.gov/sit... (pdf).

If you prefer gas cooking because you like to see the fire, because you like to light your smokes off the flame, because you don't have magnetic pots, that's cool. If you prefer gas dryers because they dry faster, that's cool too. But don't make energy efficiency claims that are flat wrong.

It's not a shift. SV has always been driven by strong ties to academia and, as with any well-educated and successful area, understands that strong public sector institutions are critical. Look at the original Jargon File/Hacker's Dictionary: the wide-spread left-leaning politics is obvious. It wasn't until the hostile takeover by gibbering reactionary nutcase ESR that he imposed his personal ideology for a bit of historical revisionism that the dictionary started representing a ton of libertarian nonsense. And yeah, you have a few shitheel billionaires running a constant advertising campaign inflating their supposed importance, but no astroturf campaign will ever disguise the fact that the Thiels and Elisons and so on are assholes and universally reviled. SV has never been about them, SV is about the innovation and brilliance of the technology working class: the researchers and engineers in academia and at companies driving public/private partnerships.

Has Windows Media Center, with CableCard support, been added back to Win10? No? Then eff off.

A) your luggage This trick doesn't work with checked bags, since airlines tend to check bags through to the final destination. Hidden-city travel is a strictly carry-on-only tactic.

B) where did we lose this person They know where they lost you, since they scanned your boarding pass when you boarded the first flight, and they didn't scan your boarding pass at the gate for the connecting flight.

C) we now have to delay the flight to make sure our count is correct This is the only potentially obnoxious consequence--some airlines may delay a flight by a few minutes to allow a "lost" passenger to get to the gate. But if an airline has a takeoff slot they're not going to give it up to recover one wayward traveller. And they do a headcount of passengers on board before every flight anyway--if it matches the count they get from the scanned boarding passes, they're good to go.

D) is there a security risk to the plane Nope. They know that you and your carry-on were on the first plane, but that makes you no more dangerous to that aircraft than any other passenger. They know that you're not on the second plane, since you and your carry-on never boarded. They know you don't have a checked bag in the hold.

You're right that the variable operating and maintenance cost is low. VOM is fuel and all costs that scale linearly with the amount of generation. Simple wear and tear, some labor, that sort of thing. However, nuclear power plants have significant capital investment requirements. CapEx are expenses on infrastructure that depreciate over 5, 10, even 20+ years. CapEx investments are necessary to maintain a safe, efficient plant, and are often executed during a refueling stage. As plants get older, CapEx gets even more challenging because more investments are necessary. Because you might be replacing parts on something designed 40 or 50 years ago, replacements aren't always easy to obtain "off the shelf," driving up prices even more. In the United States, we've had several nuclear power plants retire in the past few years because, despite "already built and running," their VOM + CapEx requirements penciled out at more than the ~$30MWh that we're seeing for wholesale electricity prices (plus very low capacity payments in many markets). Dozens more have been placed on the dole, receiving (or claiming need) for subsidies to remain open. A strong case can be (and is being) made to pay the subsidies to keep the plants open, because the sheer quantity of very-nearly-carbon-free electricity is enormous. But the claim that nuclear power plants are "dirt cheap to operate" isn't true on a multi-year basis, because of the CapEx requirements.