Assuming she didn't start it: "Oh no. There is a fire which is still small but could grow to become dangerous."

• Should I call emergency services so they can control it before it spreads, and potentially harms/kills people and wildlife.
• Or should I shoot a TikTok video of myself in front of it.

I suspect a lot of this hinges on whether or not she called emergency services to report the fire. That would be the first reaction of someone who randomly encounters a fire. While someone who starts a fire may be reluctant to report it for fear of incriminating themselves. TFA says she replaced the clip with video she shot at the same time (she claims) of another person saying they started the fire "to clear snakes". So I'm actually inclined to believe she didn't start it. But if she didn't notify authorities, she may still be culpable.

but the summary shows exactly zero connection other than being in the area..

She also says the fire in her video was about an hour away from the fire she's being accused of starting.

It gets worse. Most of that borrowed money is at variable interest rates. So as interest rates go up, a larger percentage of income goes to repaying debt. Honestly, I suspect that's the reason the Fed kept interest rates so low. The Federal government has amassed $30 trillion in debt, most of it in the last 15 years. Low interest rates helped keep the cost of that debt low. Interest on debt in FY2021 was $392 billion, or 5.7% of the budget. If interest rates increase by:

• 0.5% (which has already happened), interest on debt rises to 7.1% of the budget.
• 1.0%, interest on debt rises to 8.5% of the budget.
• 2.0%, interest on debt rises to 11.2% of the budget.

Note that before the housing bubble (2008), the Federal funds rate was 5%. A 2% increase will only take us up to 2.5%. We could see a quarter of the budget going to pay interest on the national debt.

This is one of those badly written stories where the author couldn't find a real problem to rile up the public. So he manufactured one by comparing different numbers to try to trick readers into thinking there is a problem. It's comparing available rental units (i.e. currently don't have a tenant) vs all Airbnb units. Because Airbnb is short-term rentals, they're always listed as available. Whereas the listing for rental units is dropped once they're occupied.

If you want to compare like-for-like numbers, I couldn't find number of rental units in Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn. But 63% of units in NYC are rentals. There are 884828 homes in Manhattan, 864790 in Queens, and 1.056 million in Brooklyn. For a total of 2.806 million units. If you assume 63% of them are rentals, that's 1.77 million rental units.

Versus 10,572 Airbnb units. Or 167 rental units for every Airbnb unit. So that would seem to indicate renting your unit to a long-term tenant is much more profitable than renting it via Airbnb. At the very least, much more popular than renting via Airbnb. The opposite of what TFA states.

The only conclusions I'd draw from these stats is that NYC needs more housing units. Based on these numbers, vacancy rate for those three boroughs is only 0.43% (7669 / 1.77 million). Average vacancy rate for the U.S. overall is 5.8%. So NYC is extremely supply-constrained.

I suppose you could argue the Airbnb units should be rental units. But even if you did that, the vacancy rate would only increase to 1.03%. Still far below the national average, so hardly likely to cause any significant drop in rents. Even if you go by the higher figure of 20397 Airbnb units, and assumed they all became apartment rentals, that would only increase the vacancy rate to 1.57%.

Or put another way, of the 5.4% delta between NYC vacancy rates vs national vacancy rates, Airbnb only accounts for 0.6% - 1.1% of it. The remaining 4.3% - 4.8% is due to other factors.

Bringing tuition and housing prices under control requires reducing if not eliminating loans. Loans are a mechanism for transferring future income into the present to pay for something. Which unfortunately means your future income will be depressed while you're repaying what you borrowed from your future self. The same thing happened (absent the loans) when families moved from single-income to two-income in the 1970s and 1980s. Household incomes rose, but housing prices rose to match. And the net result was houses cost the same % of income as before, just that you needed two people working to afford a home instead of just one. If more money becomes available to a large part of the population, prices will rise to soak up that extra money. So it's extremely dangerous to subsidize loans for things whose market price can fluctuate (like housing and tuition). Unfortunately the party most likely to complain about high tuition and housing prices, is also the party most resistant to turning off those loans.

And "forgiveness" is a poor word to describe what's being proposed with student loans. The debt you incurred is forgiven only from your viewpoint. From a systemic viewpoint, the money was already received and used to pay for something (tuition), so the money has already been added to the system. What's really being proposed is debt transference. Student debt will be transferred away from the student, either to the loan underwriter (so the banks, mutual funds, etc. end up paying for it), or to the general population. Your loan is not being forgiven; you're asking someone else to repay it for you.

We can debate whether or not that sort of debt transference is warranted. But don't fool yourself into thinking it's as simple as zeroing out a cell in a spreadsheet and the debt simply vanishes. Once the funds from a loan have been disbursed, the money has to be repaid by productivity to balance things out. e.g. The education you received increases your productivity enough to repay the loan. If we decide to wipe out that loan debt without repayment in productivity, that's equivalent to saying the additional productivity generated by your education was less than the amount loaned to you. Meaning the money added to the system exceeds the additional productivity that was generated. And any time that happens, the currency devalues - you get inflation. The "forgiven" student loan debt then ends up being paid for by all Americans (actually by anyone holding dollars) by slightly decreasing the value of their savings and money in their wallets (and creditors of debt instruments repayable in fixed dollars). Increasing productivity is key, otherwise we could just sit around repeatedly loaning money to each other and forgiving it until we had everything we ever wanted.

When I graduated in '91, the average starting salary with an engineering degree was $36k. Put that into an inflation calculator to account for changes in the price of the things you cite (food, energy, housing, etc.) and that's equivalent to $76k today. And when you read TFA it says the average 2022 starting salary for an engineering degree will be $74k. How about that. Inflation-adjusted starting salary of today's engineering grads is within 3% of what it was 30 years ago.

Also consider that $50k/yr puts you in the top 1% globally. Everyone complains about the 1%, right up until they learn that they're part of the 1%. In the U.S. $50k/yr puts you into the top 20%. Congratulations, that 4-year degree you're bemoaning put you ahead of 80% of your fellow Americans.

The PR was deliberately crafted to generate a deceptive outcome. They knew the mass media would overlook details like this being only for one minute, and giving a glimpse of the future. And the headlines would say California ran almost entirely on renewables. And it worked - just look at the slashdot headline, which makes it seem like the time period was an entire month, not just a single minute. Calling the PR "clear and truthful" is disingenuous.

The Lilo radiological accident is probably a more apt comparison (PDF of accident report if you don't want to watch a video). When the Soviet Union dissolved and Russian troops withdrew from an army base in Lilo, Georgia, Georgian soldiers took over the base and began using it as, well, a base. And over the years about a dozen of them were eventually diagnosed with radiation exposure. The IAEA was called in and helped clean the site up. It turned out the Soviet army had been using the site not as a base, but as a training site for how soldiers should respond to a nuclear accident or nuclear war. Except they didn't tell anyone this when the left, abandoning all the unlabeled radioactive materials.

I suspect the problem here isn't that Russian soldiers were dumb enough to want souvenirs from Chernobyl. It's that large portions of the population (any country's population) don't really understand what radiation is, and based on popular movies think it just glows and gives you superpowers. No glow? Must be safe.

• If you make $80k/yr and are working 40 hr/wk (2000 hr/yr), your effective pay rate is ($80,000/yr) / (2000 hr/yr) = $40/hr. If you decrease the work week to 32 hrs while keeping the salary at $80k/yr, your effective pay rate goes up to ($80000/yr) / (1600 hr/yr) = $50/hr.
• If you make $10/hr and are working 40 hr/wk (2000 hr/yr), you're making ($10/hr) * (2000 hr/yr) = $20000/yr. If you then limit the work week to 32 hours, this becomes ($10/h4) * (1600 hr/yr) = $16000/yr.

In the salary case, the natural response of companies will be to pay salaried employees less, since they're getting fewer hours of work from them. Putting them back down at $40/hr, reduces their salary to $64k/yr. Likewise, in the case of hourly workers, the natural response of companies will be to hire 1.25x as many employees so they still get as many hours of work in a week, but by using more employees. Both of these would seem to hurt workers, not help them.

The bet here is that worker productivity will increase with the shorter work week. So the company finds that they only need to hire (say) 1.1x as many workers instead of the 1.25x to get the same productivity as they had before. In that case, the salaried worker would stabilize at $72.7k/yr @ 32 hrs/wk, or $45.45 per hr. Their drop in work hours is greater than their drop in salary, meaning their effective hourly pay is higher than before. Likewise, the 1.1x number of hourly workers needed to match previous productivity means companies can pay workers 1.136x more per hour. This of course assumes the bet is correct, and worker productivity really does increase from the shorter work week.

Personally, I think it has more to do with attitude, like Germans who work fewer hours but work extremely diligently. Without instilling the proper work ethic, mandating fewer hours will just result in the first case outlined, where everyone's annual pay ends up being lowered.

You're halfway there. Price increases are caused by a change in the amount of money in the system, relative to the amount of stuff that's produced. When you do the math for standard of living, it's (how much stuff is produced) / (how many people get to use the stuff). Prices and wages cancel out of the equation. Productivity is what matters (and to a lesser extent, distribution). Not prices nor wages.

• If you announced that everyone's bank account accounts and salaries would be doubled overnight, everyone wouldn't suddenly be able to buy twice as much stuff. Because there's been no change to productivity, all that would happen is prices would double to exactly cancel out the increase in money everyone receives. That's essentially what happened during the pandemic. We shut down global production, then gave away money to try to keep consumption going. That can work for the short-term, when you still have inventory to absorb the money being given away. Unfortunately, you can't buy what's not being produced. So once the inventory was gone, the extra money instead went into increasing prices - i.e. inflation.
• OTOH if everyone works twice as hard to not waste as much time goofing off at work, and produce twice as much, then everyone is able to buy twice as much stuff. Because twice as much stuff is being made per capita, that means there's twice as much stuff available to consume per capita. This is how Germany gets away with extremely generous vacation time. They don't work as many hours in a year, but the hours they do work are much more productive.

Disproportionate CEO pay is bad for a different reason. The economy functions most efficiently when everyone is paid close to how much they produce. If CEOs are siphoning off pay which should really be going to employees,

• It decreases the economy's efficiency. Henry Ford stumbled upon this in reverse when he paid his workers double the prevailing wage. Because it was still less than how much his workers were producing, he still made a profit. But because it was closer to the productivity his workers were producing, it had a snowball effect. Suddenly these workers could afford to buy the cars they were producing, which increased sales, which created more work producing more cars, which created a need for more workers to make the cars, which allowed more people to buy the cars they were producing, and so on. i.e. Economic efficiency was improved. All of which made Ford more money, until he became one of the richest men on the planet. But if you do the reverse and underpay employees, it hurts efficiency and decreases productivity. Not because the workers aren't working hard enough, but because there's less work for the workers to do.
• It increases the tendency for CEOs to waste money on stupid unproductive crap like gold toilet seats. Which also decreases economic efficiency.

This ends (in the near immediate future) with all our computing running on our phone. With a "tablet" just being a wireless display and touch interface for your phone, and a "laptop" just being a wireless keyboard and display for your phone. Samsung's DeX may seem clunky and of questionable usefulness right now. But it's moving in the right direction. Processors keep getting faster, and low-end processors long ago passed the point where they're "good enough" for the vast majority of users. We already had the transition from desktops to laptops. And I'm increasingly starting to see people who get by without even a laptop/PC, relying entirely on their phones.

Even further into the future, the computing power will shift away from something which you can drop or lose (a phone) to something harder to lose. Probably first the wristwatch form factor. Then eventually something like a belt buckle or ring (worn on your finger or ear or nose). And the "phone" will join the tablet and laptop, becoming just a display and touch interface which connects wirelessly with your watch or ring. I wouldn't be surprised if the glasses display or even on-retina projection gains traction that time around.

The economy is like a wheel. A massive wheel spinning with a ginormous amount of inertia. When the pandemic hit and everything went into lockdown, this wheel ground almost to a halt. Now that we're trying to get the economy moving again, this wheel needs to be spun up. Which means pumping a whole bunch of inertia back into it, and suffering shortages while it's in the process of spinning up. Nobody couldn't prevented this, short of preventing the entire pandemic.

And no, printing more money to stimulate the economy couldn't have prevented this. Unlike money, goods are a conserved quantity. You can always print more money and hand it out. But in order for 1000 more TVs to be sold, 1000 more TVs first have to be produced. Handing out more money doesn't magically cause more TVs to appear; only increasing TV production can do that. Once the lockdown reduced production (fewer people going to work to make stuff), it was inevitable that the economic wheel would lose inertia. The stimulus money helped early on while there was inventory to absorb the extra money. But nobody keeps two years worth of inventory around. And once inventory was exhausted, the only thing printing more money did was drive up inflation. If only 1000 TVs are produced and you give every person a million dollars in economic relief, and more than 1000 people want a new TV, the price of TVs goes up past a million dollars. The fundamental currency is production, not money. The value of money simply changes to reflect the amount of money vs the amount of production.

"Dox" a bunch of anonymous anti-Putin online personas, but substitute the personal info of various Putin supporters and Russian oligarchs. (1) It might get some of them in trouble, at the very least damage their credibility as Putin no longer knows if they can be trusted. (2) It casts doubt on the accuracy of future doxing efforts which are in fact accurate.

I've noticed that with aggressive ad-blocking and script-blocking extensions, embedded videos sometimes don't show up on a page (usually if the page is scripted to not show content until after an ad has loaded or played). That's what may have happened to OP.

Kudos to Wulff Den though. He displays the crown jewels (shows the slight burn-in on the screen) in the first 45 seconds. Most videos I've seen lately will force viewers to watch them drone on and on about other things, and only reveal the now-clickbait subject at the very end of the video.

All this started in the 1930s, after the Dust Bowl. For the first time, the U.S. wasn't producing enough food to feed everyone. To prevent that from ever happening again, a bunch of agricultural subsidies were implemented. This is why we pay farmers not to grow food - to guarantee that their land is available as a reserve if some disaster or blight should put other agricultural land out of commission. The government also pays farmers more than market value for their crop, then sells it to food wholesalers and supermarkets at market value.

When you subsidize crops like this (pay higher than market price), more of it gets produced than there is demand. So every year, the U.S. ends up with a surplus of crops. The trick is to figure out what to do with all this excess food. A lot of it is turned into feed for cattle, because Americans love beef. Some of it gets turned into high fructose corn syrup, to reduce American's dependence on cane sugar imports. Some of it is turned into foreign aid and shipped overseas to countries in need of food. Then in the 1970s after the Arab oil embargo, someone came up with the idea of converting some of this excess corn into ethanol as a substitute for gasoline.

The important thing to understand is that this is excess corn. The food has already been produced. The water, fertilizer, and labor have already been used - they are sunk costs. Not using the corn doesn't get you these consumed resources back - all it does is give rats more free food in the silos where you're storing it. So in this case, burning food does in fact make sense. (Same goes for much of the beef we eat - lowering beef consumption won't translate into a direct reduction in water, land, and fertilizer used to feed the cattle).

However, the current corn ethanol program is totally different. It's corn which is specifically grown for the purpose of converting into ethanol. There are no sunk costs here. So it is in fact a waste of resources that the agricultural industry has foisted upon us with heavy lobbying.

LED headlights do not have a "ridiculously high" color temperature. They're about 6000K. That's pretty much the same as daylight. Our Sun is a G2-type star, so has a color temp around 5750-5800K. It just looks blue at night because up to now everyone is used to having the night lit by candles (about 1800K), wood fires (about 2000K), and incandescent lights (about 2500K).

In reality, 6000K is pretty close to "white" (in that it lights up all the colors we see in daytime), while those older lights are orange-red (cannot properly render the color of blue and some green objects). Your brain just constantly does an automatic color balance, deciding the predominant light it sees is "white." If most of the lights you see are incandescent, then you'll perceive those as white and the LED will look blue. If most of the lights you see are LED, then those will look white and the incandescent will look yellow-orange. Camera sensors can't do this, which is why you need an auto white balance to fiddle with the colors and get photos to look the "right" color. (This is also the cause of the dress color illusion. If you take the photo of the dress at face value, your brain says the dress is white/gold. But if your brain happens to notice the blown background on the upper right and the yellow background near the bottom, it decides the photo is overexposed and the light color is yellow, making the dress appear blue/black.)

The standard for daylight used for film in the U.S. is about 5500K (probably an average of real daylight and the 5000K from a flash bulb). The standard used in the EU is 6500K (a combination of daylight and blue sky - sunlight at oblique angles the atmosphere has its blue "stolen" to make the sky blue, which also makes sunsets/sunrises red). LED is much better at hitting this range than incandescent (2500K), fluorescent (3000-3500K), halogen (4000K), and HID bulbs (4300K).