One human pyromaniac with a bic lighter can probably do more damage.

I'm picturing a robot powered dog sled.

It's hard to write something that will blow peoples' minds when you're writing in a genre that's had decades of writers mining the same material. But we ought to beware of survivor bias; the stories we remember from the Golden Age are just the ones worth remembering. Most of the stories that got published back then were derivative and extremely crude. Today, in contrast, most stories that get published are derivative but very competently crafted. I guess that's progress of a kind but in a way it's almost depressing.

I think the most recently written mind-blowing sci-fi (or perhaps weird fiction) novel I've read was China Mieville's *The City & the City*, which tied with *The Windup Girl* in 2010 for Best Novel Hugo. I was impressed both by the originality of the story and the technical quality of the writing.

I recently read Ken Liu's translation of Liu Cixin's *The Three Body Problem*, which I enjoyed. In some ways it reminds me of an old Hal Clement story in which the author works out the consequences of some scientific idea in great detail, but the story also deals with the fallout of China's Cultural Revolution and the modern rise of public anti-science sentiment. So this is a foreign novel which doesn't fit neatly into our ideas about genres of science fiction. It's got a foot in the old-school hard science fiction camp and foot in the new wave tradition of literary experimentation and social science speculation camp.

On my Firefox Nightly I have an extension to set Yandex as an allowed default search engine. Makes it easier to pop up another browser for a session.

Somebody fix that extension to work on mobile, eh?

> Just throwing solar panels up on a roof without batteries seems to be a rare thing these days.

That is probably for the best, honestly. Energy storage capacity on the grid is something it's pretty hard to have too much of.

They don't - something like this needs an Act or Congress.

SCOTUS made up some BS "Chevron Deference" in the 80's which has been abused like this since.

The current /Maine Fisheries/ case should dissolve Chevron deference.

We may like the FTC proposal on this one but with that kind of power and no representation it's only counting the days until they do something we absolutely detest. And then there's no effective recourse.

> No, they really are producing too much.

Yes, but with qualifications. It's not too much in any absolute sense. It's too much for the current grid infrastructure, and in particular, the amount of energy storage capacity that is available on the grid.

In other words, as usual, they got the cart before the horse and did things in the wrong order.

It's important to understand that statistics are statistics. Individual cases vary, widely.

My high school English teacher eventually (end of senior year) confided to me that he had been in the habit of grading my papers last, so he could have at least one good paper to look forward to and finish on a positive note. (He liked my writing style; not everyone does, but he did. My papers always got good grades from him.) My surname starts with E, FWIW.

My point is, your grade isn't mostly determined by your position in the alphabet. It's mostly determined by other factors. Position in the alphabet has a statistically significant effect (and yes, the nature and extent of that effect almost certainly varies from teacher to teacher), but it's a secondary effect; other factors have a bigger impact. I expect it's not especially relevant at either the top or bottom end of the grading curve, but in the middle of the curve, where there are a ton of average students who produce just about equally mediocre work, it could be a bigger deal. Sometimes. Up to a point. The first paper the teacher graded that was a comparison/contrast between Barbie and Ken, two weeks after that movie hit theatres, probably got a better grade than the thirtieth such paper, especially if all thirty of them made basically the same points. But the student who didn't see the movie and turned in a comparison/contrast between the Illiad and Beowulf probably got an A, and the student who spent five minutes right before class hastily scrawling a short incoherent paragraph about smoking weed, got the low grade it deserved. Probably.

If there's a take-home point, it's probably this: software that collects student assignments and then presents them to the teacher (or TA or whatever) for grading, should probably present them in a randomized order each time. Well, pseudorandomized. No point making it cryptographically sound; if you're going to go to that much trouble, skip the randomness and rig it so that each student's position in the order is as close as possible to an even distribution over time.

It depends.

If the workers were fired for having opinions outside of work on their own time (e.g., on social media that they were using from home while not on the clock), then they have a valid grievance. That's, at least arguably, a form of discrimination.

On the other hand, if they were busy protesting all shift instead of working, while being paid to work, that's entirely a different thing altogether and falls under "refusal to perform job duties", which is a valid firing offense in any jurisdiction.

Pharmaceutical research (i.e., the search for new medications) is also (and has been for decades) disproportionately funded by America. Europe and a few other countries (e.g., Japna, South Korea) do also contribute, but their contributions are consistently a much, much smaller portion of their GDP.

They already have that. The Youth Unemployment Rate is so high they've stopped even publishing fake numbers, because any number low enough to publish, would not be believable.

Yeah. The Chinese economy is facing some "challenges" at the moment.

I don't know if that's going to work, given that the youth unemployment rate has gotten so high they've stopped publishing numbers for it, because either they'd be too high to publish under Chinese law, or else no one would believe them. Granted, that's not tech-sector-specific, but a *lot* of those unemployed young people are college educated, and STEM fields are quite popular over there. Employers may in fact be in a stronger negotiating position than the prospective employees.

Traditionally the poor and homeless gets sent to a new colony. So send them to Mars.

Well, it's like in Econ 101 when you studied equillibrium prices. At $3500 the number of units demanded is small, but if you dropped that to $1000 there should be more units demanded, assuming consumers are economically rational.

There is a tech adoption curve in which different groups of people play important roles in each stage of a new product's life cycle. At the stage Vision Pro is at now, you'd be focused on only about 1% of the potential market. The linked article calls these people "innovators", but that's unduly complementary; these are the people who want something because it's *new* whether or not it actually does anything useful. This is not irrational per se; they're *interested* in new shit, but it's not pragmatic, and the pragmatists are where you make real money.

Still, these scare-quotes "innovators" are important because set the stage for more practical consumers to follow. Perhaps most importantly, when you are talking about a *platform* like this people hungry for applications to run on the doorstop they just bought attract developers. And when the right app comes along the product becomes very attractive to pragmatists. This happened with the original IBM PC in 1981, which if you count the monitor cost the equivalent of around $8000 in today's money. I remember this well; they were status symbols that sat on influential managers' desks doing nothing, until people started discovering VisiCalc -- the first spreadsheet. When Lotus 1-2-3 arrives two years after the PC's debut, suddenly those doorstops became must-haves for everyone.

So it's really important for Apple to get a lot of these things into peoples' hands early on if this product is ever to become successful, because it's a *platform* for app developers, and app developers need users ready to buy to justify the cost and risk. So it's likely Apple miscalculated by pricing the device so high. And lack of units sold is going to scare of developers.

But to be fair this pricing is much harder than it sounds;. Consumers are extremely perverse when it comes to their response to price changes. I once raised the price of a product from $500 to $1500 and was astonished to find sales went dramatically up. In part you could say this is because people aren't economically rational; but I think in that case it was that human judgment is much more complex and nuanced than economic models. I think customers looked at the price tag and figured nobody could sell somethign as good as we claimed our product to be for $500. And they were right, which is why I raised the price.

Weren't the founders and top management of Google citizens of Israel?

It dozen't seem all surprising from that perspective.

These protesters should have gone back to writing code to surveil Americans, I guess?