I have to agree with the rest of your defense of California, but what parts of SF are you going that you're not seeing human feces, or is it just the act itself you haven't seen?

I have seen human feces every time I have been to the city in the last few years, especially in BART, SoMa, and within a mile of the Tenderloin.

The rest of your post is spot-on. And it's worth asking how many of the homeless folks in California have been bused over from other states vs. how many are CA native.

FWIW, I'm reading this article on Arc. I've been using it for... six months? It's a real product and I love a lot of things about it. Easels and notes built into the browser are great. Split view is clutch. "Spaces" instead of new windows + tab groups is a much better organizational system. Allowing use of different (or any combination of) profiles in every space is really awesome. Their UI also makes bookmarks usable for me again.

From the UI and product side, it's great. A really big improvement over Chrome for me. It's still just Chromium rendering, plugins, etc. under the hood. But the overall UI is such a big improvement.

On the tech choices side, I have serious questions. I'd love to talk to their CTO about why they chose to write it in Swift (that's why it's Mac only right now).

Instead of porting it and maintaining it in two languages, or re-writing in Rust, they're taking on the much harder job of trying to get Swift running on Windows. No idea what they want to do about Linux.

My best guess is that they started with Mac because that's what they use, it's what many early adopters use, and their team knew Swift.

From my experience with the browser this year, I think they have a great product. I was an early adopter of Netscape, Firefox, and Chrome. I remember my feeling with each jump, that "this is so much better, this is what I want to use going forward" feeling. I feel the same way about Arc. I don't know if we'll all be using Arc in three years, but Chrome and Firefox should be eyeing Arc's user experience if they want to remain relevant.

No surprise changes until the next iOS or Android update, anyways :)

Congratulations on your successes!

I've been very happy using MacroFactor (jumped ship from MFP earlier this year), but I was just thinking about trying to write a rep counter for lifting. I always forget how many reps I've done halfway through a longer set, and I can't work to failure without losing count either.

Well, that escalated quickly and for no apparent reason.

There are a lot of us who still care about weight and/or tracking calories beyond functional fitness or purely having sufficient lean muscle mass to prevent osteopenia. Some have struggled with body fat in the past, struggled with eating disorders, have hormonal issues interfere with hunger and satiety signals, take medications that do the same, etc. Or even actors who need to rapidly change body composition for a role.

Personally, I have a hell of a sweet tooth and would snack an extra 500 kcal/day if I didn't track my intake. That wouldn't affect my deadlift, but I'd need a larger lifting belt and I don't want my body to go there. Tracking my macros also helps me make sure I get enough protein, esp. after heavy lifting days. And for me, tracking calories is the difference between sorta fitting in a commercial airplane seat and wishing they'd let me buy a second seat.

I respect Mark Rippetoe (and do recommend his book), but sometimes it helps to focus on nutrition as well as fitness and strength training. Rippetoe himself addresses this (briefly) in Starting Strength where he encourages lifters to eat more protein, novices to drink lots of milk, and heavier people to eat fewer carbs.

Congratulations on being able to lift so much you never have to think about what you eat, though. You're very fortunate.

Sounds like user error if you're trying to use Windows as a communication system.

Yes, just like the ridiculously low (briefly negative) oil prices in 2020 had nothing to do with "drill baby, drill" Republican policies. Oil prices were low because global demand was incredibly low due to a global pandemic and widespread lockdowns.

The economy has been rapidly recovering from the pandemic, leading to increased demand for oil. There have also been some supply disruptions, some of which have also been caused by the pandemic.

You can see the macro trends really clearly in global Brent crude prices here https://www.statista.com/stati... . The EIA also has prices back to 1986 here if you're interested.

But if you'd like to ignore global events and cherry-pick some dates, crude oil prices increased 198% under Trump from April 2020 to January 2021. They only increased 35% under Biden's presidency until Russia began its invasion of Ukraine.

It's been a while since I read the original study, but I'm pretty sure that was addressed. Yes, shading canals with a flat roof is cheaper than solar panels, but it is still quite expensive and has fewer benefits to offset those costs. A lot of those costs are labor and transportation, and incremental infrastructure upgrades like this are hard to get funded.

If you're going to build solar power generation anyways, there are some huge benefits to doing it over canals:
- You get all the benefits to the canals from covering them
- Solar panels generate more electricity because they run cooler
- Minimal land use costs compared to purchasing agricultural land to convert to solar power production
- More in the actual study

In other words, there are actually synergistic benefits from covering canals with solar panels vs. just covering canals or just installing solar panels. Doing both should be more profitable and more economically beneficial to the state.

The low sperm count won't be a concern, since they won't be able to get it up.

On the nuclear engineering and design levels, sure.

But when you start talking about people problems like a poorly functioning bureaucracy leading to bad decision making, using inferior materials to save costs in construction, poor training of operators, etc.? Those are repeatable failures that transcend designs. They also clearly apply to any other large engineering project. It's not unreasonable for people to believe similar human failures can lead to other catastrophic incidents.

Personally, I'll be more supportive of nuclear when nuclear operators no longer need the Price-Anderson Act and waste is actively being dealt with better.

us-east-2 isn't so bad. us-east-1 had better latency from most of South America than sa-east-1 last I checked, so there's also that.

But yeah, it's good advice to not put too many eggs in the us-east-1 basket.

I mean, I agree with you, but worth pointing out that Tumblr sold for $1.1B. So the lesson here should be "sell your company to suckers before you ban adult content".

100%. I can't believe they communicated this way. Unfortunately, even doctors have fallen for this and are discouraging patients from getting tested.

I know of three different vaccinated people who complained to doctors about COVID symptoms and were explicitly told not to bother getting tested after requesting a test. One person even had extensive contact with a known positive case!

Trump also called COVID a hoax and didn't have any real evidence to backup his self-contradictory claim that China created the virus to hurt him/America. Add in his racism and ability to corrupt just about every agency in the executive branch, and you can understand why some people might dismiss everything he says as bullshit designed to rile his base. Unfortunately, reduced trust in the US Government is the cost of installing a serial liar as POTUS to try to pwn the libs.

I just don't understand how conservatives can simultaneous believe this is an insidious Chinese weapon against the West *and* a harmless hoax virus. If we ultimately prove this was an accidental lab leak, can we agree that:
1) the virus is real
2) the virus is deadly
3) the virus was not intentionally released

It seems relevant, given "boasting" about recently being "at the Capitol" on the side of an attempted insurrection (and quite possibly actively part of it) is relevant. News reports about police killing unarmed men frequently cite previous and unrelated criminal conduct. News reports about significant crimes also frequently cite suspects' previous crimes. Why should this be different?

It's not an accident that Amazon was the target. Trump and his mob have been targeting Jeff Bezos over the Washington Post's coverage of Trump for years. I doubt the dumb attempted terrorist was a deranged GCP or Azure fanboi.

If Trump wants his name to stop being connected to vicious acts, he should stop encouraging them.

Without some independent audits of his finances, including tax returns, I'm not sure we should agree with that. From leaks about his tax returns, it looks like he's probably lost money just about every year of his life.

Do huge loans from Russian oligarchs make him financially independent or more financially dependent than most?