It's okay if the Switch isn't a platform you like; not everything needs to compete with PC or Xbox or PS. "Success" in this case, I think, means "selling enough systems, and making enough money, that it remains a viable platform."

Third-party titles on Switch struggle a lot. I'm genuinely amazed, though, at what first-party titles can do. TOTK is very big and runs very well, considering it's running on hardware that was "slow" six years ago.

The whole "vehicle was operating under inadequate control for 40 seconds because its FTS was undersized" thing seemed a bit slapdash to me. It's good that no one got hurt, but that's definitely enough time for the rocket to enter populated areas in a worst-case scenario.

Having rocket failures is fine (good, even!) and should be way more normalized than it is now. Having rockets endanger the uninvolved public is very bad, both from a "it's fundamentally bad to hurt people" a "killing some random person in Port Isabel would bring the regulatory hammer down SO HARD on the entire industry" angle.

I get the feeling you're arguing from bad faith, but to be clear: Farming these days is generally a very high-tech operation, from planning and seed selection through planting and harvesting and selling. In some cases, broader 4G cell coverage maybe makes more sense than pulling fiber to residences? (This is, of course, all assuming that the farming operation in question is actually trying to make money in production, rather than looking for favorable tax incentives.)

I would guess that for most things, rock-solid reliability is more important than high bandwidth, but once physical infrastructure is in place, yeah you're likely to have enough bandwidth available to stream 4K video.

An enormous one. Milwaukee is the most segregated major metro area in the US and Madison would probably take that slot except that it's too small to be considered a major metro area.

The Universities try to do better but at least UW-Madison is really shit at it. The thing about hiring DEI staff is that institutions need to listen to them and changing culture is hard and people don't like doing it. I'm not saying we shouldn't employ DEI experts but I don't know that 180 is too few or too many; all I do know is that hiring the staff isn't a magic bullet.

Long-time Wisconsin resident here. Not long ago Scott Walker was a Republican governor and used this same trick. As has basically every governor before him; the line-item veto is not exactly a secret among Wisconsin politicians.

As to what the government would do if unchecked, we don't need to imagine. The Republicans had control of the governorship and both houses of the legislature, as well as a (very) friendly supreme court, back in 2019. They left this power right where it is. (Honestly, I think this was a dumb move; the way the districts are in WI it's much more likely you'll see a Republican legislature and Democratic governor than vice-versa.)

Everyone moans when the line-item veto gets used on their budget, but they keep it as a cudgel for stupid tricks when their governor is in power. At this point, my take is: Politics has rules. Play by the rules or get played. Change the rules if you don't like them and have the power to do so. But don't whine when someone else plays by by the rules in a way you don't like.

Even then, tritium is very low hazard. Water cycles through your body all the time, so you'll flush it out. It's got a pretty long half-life and its decay modes aren't very high-energy. Yes, all things considered, you want to minimize exposure to any ionizing radiation. But tritium is a pretty benign isotope, and in this case they're diluting it into the sea, which is enormous and already contains a bunch of tritium through natural decay processes.

All of this presupposes they're really, truly just releasing tritium-contaminated water, but if they're doing anything else, IAEA will notice immediately. You can't hide fission daughter products.

Do you have any idea how many rows are in that table? I have a database with just a few tens of millions of rows in it and ALTER TABLE takes _hours_ to run. I can't imagine how many posts are on reddit.

I think "make a schema change to slightly mitigate the consequences of our users cutting off access to 95% of our site" would be a monumentally bad management decision. Which, I guess, is why I'm kind of surprised they haven't done it yet.

Because they use neutrons generated in fusion to run a sustainable fission reaction with "non-fissile" isotopes of uranium and/or thorium, so you don't need to do an expensive uranium enrichment step. Or to breed fissile isotopes for traditional designs. Currently, it's non-economical; centrifuges are... well, not cheap, but cheaper than fusion.

The other thing it can do is provide a different way to reprocess spent fission fuel; it has the advantage of "burning off" some of the nastier transuranic isotopes. Again, not currently economically viable; reprocessing and leaving waste in storage until it cools off are also well-understood.

But just because these things aren't currently economical doesn't mean "never research them." They may prove to be economical in the long term, or help to make other technologies feasible in the future.

The best time to plant a tree was thirty years ago

Second best time is today

For example: Apple's repair program sells a torque wrench, adjustable between 2.5 and 25 Nm. Looks like it has a 1/4" drive. It's $157.52.

Looking on McMaster-Carr, similar wrenches (they don't have any that have that exact range) list in the $160-$180 range.

Apple's just selling a quality torque wrench at regular price for a quality torque wrench.

I very much doubt that Apple makes much money on repairs. (Don't get me wrong: I'm sure they don't lose money on them, either.) A good benchmark is that they make, overall, a 30% profit margin, every quarter, like clockwork. Yes, some things are higher (cough app store) and some are lower (cough mac pro), but it's a good bet that repairs are right in that 30% margin area.

Apple devices are, for better or worse, optimized to be high-performance, light, and reliable, with repairability an afterthought compared to those attributes. Replacing an iPhone battery —properly, with a low risk of damaging the phone —requires expensive tools and training, and then the parts are expensive too. There's no evidence to my eye that Apple is charging unreasonable rates for replacement parts or tooling; I look at this program and say "well it doesn't make sense for me, the parts aren't cheaper enough than having Apple do the repair" but the parts are clearly cheaper than having Apple do the repair.

So! If you're doing repairs on Apple devices, you probably can't simply do the same thing they do, except cheaper. That was a silly idea from the start.

Where you _can_ compete is in location -- maybe the closest Apple store is three hours away. Or you could beat them on turnaround time (you're doing this in-house, Apple is usually sending the machine out to a repair center), and customer service. You can offer things like emergency service and house calls. You can charge for these things. Some people will pay a large premium to have a friendly repair tech come to their house and fix their laptop or phone!

The right-to-repair folk have won this fight. Apple has committed to publishing repair guides (they're just there, on the web, today) and selling replacement parts and tooling. They even rent tooling if you need that. But saying that Apple needs to sell parts at cost, or at a loss(!), is silly.

I mean, this is true. The real rich person trick is to not make income, let your assets appreciate, and take out loans for things you want to buy. Someday you die, basis is recalculated on your assets, and and your heirs get them without anyone ever needing to pay capital gains.

So yes: changing the top marginal income tax rate would have a limited effect on revenue because rich people have a wide array of legal ways to avoid interacting with the income tax system.

The biggest change I would make to the US tax system would be: Everything is income. Capital gains? Income. Inherit a bunch of stock or real estate? Congratulations! You had income equal to the market value of that inheritance, and need to pay tax on it.

Flat taxes are appalling. Telling someone making $20,000 a year that they need to pay $2,000 is cruel —and so much different than telling someone making $200,000 that they need to pay $20,000.

I think that having extremely poor and extremely rich people is bad for society, and it's good to use macroeconomic policy to help flatten the ends of the income curve.

Not just could; you can buy a portable low-field MRI with no superconductors today:

https://hyperfine.io/

Image quality and scan times aren't as good as you get from a traditional superconducting magnet at 3T, but you can wheel this thing around and plug it into a 120V outlet.

In this case, the bacteria are already in the bloodstream and the patient's immune system is suppressed.

Anyhow, phages will not replace antibiotics, but having a targeted way to treat bacteremia in chemo patients seems like a nice tool for the toolbox.

Here's hoping the trials work out!

I grew up in Minnesota; there's nowhere in the state where it gets to -40 on a regular basis. Even if you live in Moorhead, -40 is exceptionally cold.

Not to say Moorhead is a good candidate for a heat pump install! Even if the heat pump won't cut it for one day a year, you absolutely need to have an alternative solution in place. "It is exceptionally cold" and "my heat doesn't work" is a recipe for a bad day. Some systems come with resistive heating backup -- it's very expensive to run, but dead simple and if you only need it a couple days a year, maybe okay. But some parts of MN are in a climate where a regular gas or oil furnace and AC may make the most sense.

Even in the Twin Cities, though, an air source heat pump is probably a good option. Talk to an installer.