In 2021 Reddit raised a lot of money at a >$10B valuation:

Reddit, the virtual town square of the consumer internet, has raised a fresh $410 million in funding, valuing it at more than $10 billion, the company said on Thursday.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/0...

If the shareholders have bought in at this valuation they will accept risk of tanking the platform if there is also a chance of it providing the expected ROI that the investors have paid for.

I see this as a problem with today's stock market and business investment ecosystem. To an extent there is less value placed in companies providing a good product or service with a small and steady profit. Especially for a Silicon Valley company like Reddit the goal is high-risk and high-reward: investors expect most companies to fail, but based on a hope that the few successes will achieve domination of current or new markets and massive ROI like Google or Facebook. The current owners of Reddit probably have no interest in a measly few hundreds of millions of revenue per year. They probably want more like 10's of billions in revenue, and 1's of billions of profit per year. To achieve that will in all likelihood fundamentally change certain aspects of Reddit. The owners don't care if Reddit changes, they only care about ROI.

The main problem is growing animal feed such as alfalfa and corn with irrigation in low-rainfall areas like in California and Arizona.

For human feeding crops some are more water intensive like rice and almonds but they still end up being relatively efficient because the food is directly consumed by humans. It's a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of water needed to grow animal feed for meat and dairy. Cows (beef and dairy) are unfortunately the most water inefficient at turning irrigation water into calories for humans. CA's top water consuming crop is alfalfa, primarily used for cattle feed. Almond milk takes less water to produce per gallon than cow's milk. I'm not a fan of almond milk personally, but to go after almonds before going after cattle feed is missing the big picture.

Wet bulb temperature is an important concept, and its rising values are very concerning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Basically, if we ignore evaporative cooling from sweat or from dunking your head in a bucket of water, then the 120 degree air temperature will kill you eventually, since our body is designed for a core temperature of about 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, and is under significant stress when exceeding 100 degrees. A fan would only make things worse, since it increases the rate at which your body reaches equilibrium with the 120F ambient by speeding up natural convection.

But we are mammals - we perspire, and the evaporating sweat cools us. If the humidity is low enough, we can effectively cool ourselves to well below the ambient air temperature. And we can get a bucket of water to augment our natural sweating.

But when the temperature AND humidity rise, evaporative cooling becomes less effective. This is where wet-bulb temperature comes in. In a wet bulb temperature of 95 degrees or higher the body can no longer cool itself evaporatively, so an average human will overheat and is only expected to survive for a few hours under these conditions. A bucket of water won't help unless the water is chilled, since the evaporation is too limited to help you. The planets rising wet bulb temperatures are very worrying, we may reach a point where we require artificial cooling to survive.

So the emergency items that might help you:
* Alcohol evaporation actually increases when the air becomes more humid. It will also irritate your skin over time, but pouring some high-percentage alcohol over your body will cool you evaporatively. This is probably the best emergency approach that doesn't require you to invest in infrastructure ahead of time.
* A reserve store of chilled water, ice, or ice packs to cool you by contact in the event of a power outage and loss of air conditioning when wet bulb temperatures are high.
* A backup generator or other power source to run your home A/C or a portable A/C.
* A deep basement, if you're in an area where underground temperatures are lower than surface temperature.

Because it's all common knowledge: The election's losing candidate tried to overthrow the election to maintain his power. If you need a link to know what happened then you need to start occasionally reading the news.

There have been some cases reported of some Republicans committing small scale electoral misconduct, like voting multiple times. I'm sure a few Democrats did that too. This is important, and I don't want to minimize such issues, but the big issue in the 2020 election was what Trump and allies did essentially out in the open, and which has been common knowledge for over a year.

I agree completely. There seems to be some good benefits to having grazing animals in certain locations. But our current cattle industry has very little to do with cattle grazing in natural and beneficial ways and numbers. At any given point of time the total weight of live cattle in the US, supplying both dairy and meat markets, is approximately equal to the weight of humans in the US (circa 50-60 billion pounds). At the end of the day, having cattle graze in a beneficial and sustainable way is going to provider a lower beef output than our current system. And most consumers are very resistant to the idea of buying less beef, or paying slightly more per pound for beef.

One good output of the current fried chicken sandwich war in the fast food industry may be to steer people to a meat that has a lower environmental impact.

That's an interesting note. Did you listen to the podcast and have any details to share? Unfortunately it's hard to dig up details quickly in podcast format.

His blog notes that a special blog post will come out on Tuesday addressing this topic which will be more accessible than the podcast format.

Isn't cost-of-living adjustment standard? High-cost areas like the SF Bay Area, or New York have higher salaries for the same job than low cost-of-living areas.

The penalties for covering up (as opposed to disclosing) a failure to contain classified information is much more severe, because it prevents the government from investigating a breach in a timely fashion to understand the leaked information and possibly mitigate it. Honeywell self-reported the disclosure of classified info, which by itself mitigates the punishment required.

Your logic is the "tough on crime" argument that every transgression needs to be punished severely. In reality the response should be proportional to the individual transgression, including fines, corrective actions, restrictions on future government contracts, and criminal charges if these are merited by negligence or deliberate misconduct. Not that we should always trust the government, but there is not enough information available for us to judge the proportionality of these fines to the transgression in question.

Not every piece of leaked classified info merits a 10 year prison sentence for everybody involved and a $100M fine, or whatever you are proposing for this specific instance. Sometimes what is classified is quite stupid, contractors can even be penalized for disclosing information which is publicly available but which is still officially classified.

This "at work" qualifier I don't think is a meaningful distinction when considering if something is cancel culture.

You're saying that employers can fire employees for speech made during employment. You're correct, in many cases can. But whether something is cancel culture I think needs to account for the impartiality and fairness of a response, which is always difficult to define. For example, if the team that Kaepernick was employed by had a policy that was against all forms of political and social speech while at games, and this was fairly enforced for all players regardless of their speech, then it is not cancel culture. If they made a judgement call that Kaepernick's political/social speech was specifically unpopular and for that reason terminated his employement and blacklist him (as some say effectively happened) then that would seem to be cancel culture, regardless of whether the entities involved had the right to do so. Also you say that you doubt Kaepernick would have been penalized if his speech had been totally off the field - I tend to doubt this because as a NFL player he has some celebrity status and his team would likely consider him a representative of the team both on and off the field. Even a minimum wage job I had long ago during training they told us that they always considered us to be representing the company on and off the clock. Of course he kneeled on the field "at work" as you said, so we will not know for sure how his team and the NFL would have reacted if he did not kneel on the field. Suppose a person of political Party A talked politely about their political views in the breakroom, while everybody else at a company talked politely about their Party B political views. And the Party A person got fired for talking about politics at work, but all of the Part B people kept their job. That would be cancel culture, no matter the value of "A" and "B".

Take social media de-platforming. Just like an "at work" distinction (employers have broad latitude to make employment decisions) social media networks essentially have an "on their network" power to ban people violating policies. It could be cancel culture if they were specifically banning people because of their political views. But if their policies concern things like e.g. encouraging hate, violence, medically unsafe behavior etc. and are written and enforced impartially then enforcng these policies fairly is not cancel culture. But if they specifically ban people who e.g. are fiscally conservative then that is cancel culture.

Basically I'm saying that in my opinion for something to be cancel culture it has to be based around trying to go after people for their specific views in a biased fashion. And it is cancel culture no matter whether it is done by pundits on commentary TV shows, private individuals on Twitter, by employers to their employees, by social networks, by Presidents of the US, etc.

But it is does seem to me like it is fair game (not cancel culture) to go after people who espouse hate (too much of that on all sides in politics today), who support violent acts, who oppose a fair democracy, who appear to have committed crimes, etc. There is a similar phenomenon to cancel culture which is outrage culture - amplified by social networks people can get very outraged about something before a lot of information is out there, and before an accused party can even give their side of the story. I think this is a kind of separate issue, even if it has some commonality with cancel culture.

Of course, what you could do would be to put in a more powerful engine and then add a speed limiter but that adds cost and really does very little in terms of safety since the limit would have to be set to the highest limit anywhere that the car can drive and if that includes places like Germany then there is no legal speed limit, just a "gentleman's agreement" to 250 km/h (155 mph) which is faster than the speed in this accident. Then there are the people who race consumer vehicles on tracks, not really professionally but for fun at the weekend.

Why do you think that a car maker would consider the entire planet's traffic laws when setting speed limiter values? A car sold in Wisconsin is not going to be driven on the Autobahn. And for the rare few cases where an American exports their car to Germany, e.g. if they are moving there, surely they can contact the dealer to have the speed limiter adjusted to the value used for the German market.

Similarly, if somebody is going to be safely conducting track racing in their vehicle, it seems reasonable that a dealer should be able to deactivate a speed limiter, given acknowledgement that liability falls on the owner of the car, and that it may void the warranty. Not all carmakers would be willing to do this, if for example Toyota is not confident that a Camry can be safely driven routinely at 125mph on a track - they're not going to want to shoulder any liability even if the owner acknowledges that this action would void the warranty.

And 0.05% is very much on the low side of what experts find the true IFR to be based on actual studies. The IFR is quite variable with age, exceeding 10% above ages ~70 to ~80 years old, depending on the study. So the average IFR it is currently thought to be a bit over 1% in high income countries which have more older people, and lower in low-income countries with a lower proportion of older people.

This is a good meta-analysis showing age-specific IFR: https://link.springer.com/arti...
This report has a meta analysis considering overall IFR for different age distributions in high and low income countries: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc...

The data in the above two studies is from last year, but closer to the end of the year when there had been a lot more studies done on larger populations.

These numbers are also pretty consistent with the cruise ship data from early on in the pandemic's US debut, which being a captive and closely studied population should give accurate IFR data: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

This statement seems to be based on an assumption that certain ground truths are unknowable, which is just not true.

I'm not saying that we should trust Facebook, but some steps have to be taken to counter misinformation which can spread like wildfire in this digital era. What is their alternative? To let misinformation (intentional and unintentional) spread unchecked on their platform, misinforming millions? I hear all kinds of crazy things that well-meaning people believe because they read it on Facebook. Just today I heard of some religious people in my workplace who are not getting the vaccine because they think that it contains aborted fetuses (which it does not).

The idea is to spread the heat over a larger portion of the case. The more surface area of the case that the CPU's heat can be spread to the more convection and conduction can work to carry the heat away from the case. This reduces the case's peak temperature and CPU temperature.

The Capitol Police's lack of preparedness is one issue. Another issue is the fact that the National Guard were not present, and were not deployed until the Capitol had already been overrun for some time. The DC National Guard was hamstrung in advance and is under the authority of the President. The Maryland and Virginia National Guard requires permission from the DoD to deploy to DC which the DoD initially refused while lawmakers and the DC mayor pleaded with the neightboring state governors for help.

So there was a failure both in the Capitol Police, and from the President, to prepare for this. And investigations are underway to determine why this happened, and to what extent it was deliberate.

You think that wireless systems don't work in the rain above 3 GHz? You sure don't know much about real wireless systems. Yes "rain fading" (this is the technical term for what you describe) is a real issue but it simply has to be accounted for in the design margin when selecting antenna gains, transmit powers, and modulation depths. People have been doing satcom in the rain at Ka-band frequencies (roughly 10x the 3 GHz "limit" that you mention) for years and years.

Now the total data throughput per satellite is a real issue. Current Starlink satellites can apparently push around 20Gbps. Obviously that becomes more of a challenge in dense areas, since you can only populate so many satellites in the sky, not that I've done the math (Starlink has done the math I assume). This is why Starlink is more strongly targeting rural users who are underserved by conventional wired/fiber internet. Wired obviously gets better the denser populated an area is, so satcom and wired will probably intersect somewhere between dense urban and sparse rural.