Look what he responded to.

People toss out a throwaway allegation and then expect you write a dissertation to rebut it.

Another way to go would be to keep burning jet fuel but purchase bricks of carbon from a sequestration company that captures it from the air.

I know there are more efficient types of carbon credits, like investing in cleaner energy in the first place, or increased efficient at the point of usage such as insulation, or preserving rainforest that would otherwise be developed.

The problem is all that gets complicated and thus subjective. Maybe carbon credits could work if it is based on a new type of 'coin' that is 1 kg of pure carbon that is chucked into an old mine.

That truly is the question for Apple. I don't know how they've held off smartphone commoditization as long as they have.

I agree with GP, it's a big kickback scheme for employees that have discretion over business expenses. Most types of card rewards are not reportable as income, which sweetens the deal even further. Score one for the upper-middle-class little guy, I guess...

Yep, the fire code is how you know the story is wrong.

Tesla stock is only up a cumulative 6% from the peak it achieved exactly 4 years ago. That is not even close to keeping up with inflation - 18% over the same time period. So if just getting attention from a market flop is a strategy for driving up the share price, I guess it isn't working very well.

Yeah, nobody would consider this a story without the "billionaire" buzzword.

When my kids were small many of the wives from her church organized a summer school for all the kids. It was great.

I notice this whole thing is a zoning dispute and nothing else. Probably because the level of education being delivered is exceptional, since why wouldn't it be?

You can make a simple statement like "nobody starves to death in America" and it offends people every time. They'll call you deaf dumb and blind yet they can never say who it is that's starving to death.

There are homeless people wandering around all over the place, they produce nothing, ever, yet somehow food just keeps materializing for them. In fact they hardly resemble truly destitute people actually starving around the world. I'm glad that's how it is here and wouldn't want it any other way but it's strangely difficult for people to "admit."

I think the single biggest reason is because demand for healthcare is basically bottomless and we have a lot of money to throw at it so we do.

I haven't seen any emphasis on this factor but look at the correlation between per capita GDP and per capita healthcare costs:

https://ourworldindata.org/gra...

That is a strong correlation!

Interesting, did you try any others, such as ChatGPT?

That's not why. Waymo is testing in Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn. NYC by the way has also recently legalized jaywalking.

The idea that machines don't / won't beat humans at continuous vigilance and precise movement doesn't make much sense to me, since machines are great at that. The safety issue already favors automation and the gap will only grow. (More specifically, safety already favors certain self-driving implementations, like Waymo... obviously in general, "automation" can also be total crap if done poorly).

I know we are only relatively early in the development and adoption of the technology, but I sure can't see any reason to doubt the outcome.

Made me curious. Here's a graph of their headcount over time.

If Palintir don't think a pricey college education is worth paying for, then I guess they don't want to pay for it. College grads pull higher salaries for those extra years of education, whereas highschool grads can be hired more cheaply.

There's a sizable online sentiment that 'blue-collar' (highschool + on-the-job training) has been unfairly devalued, and in other contexts many people seem to agree that college is largely a waste of time. Yet in the context of Palintir, since it is 'evil,' everybody will adopt the opposite opinion immediately and presume that offering workers a job directly out of highschool is abusive.

Right, "fundamentally" nothing is exactly knowable

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Check this out - to transport a pair of shoes from Hong Kong to Rotterdam (18,600 km) via container ship generates 100 g of CO2. Whereas a 20 km trip in a car to get the shoes from the store is 1,800 g of CO2.

https://safety4sea.com/maersk-...

So on a mass-per-distance basis, the container ship is 16,740 times as efficient as a car.

I am not sure exactly how that translates to, e.g., a step van making a couple hundred stops vs. a container ship from China to LA and a train or semi from LA to Phoenix.

But transoceanic shipping is very efficient. True it's still a significant source of pollution, because it transports vast tonnage across vast distances.