The labor participation rate has been trending down since the middle of 2000 when it peaked at 67.3. It dropped to 65.8 at the beginning of 2005, worked it's way back up to 66.4 after 2 years then started trending down until dropping to 66.1 by August of 2008. After which it fell off a cliff and continued dropping to 62.4 by 2015. It worked it's way back up from there to 63.6 until February 2020. Then Covid tanked the economy and we hit an all time low of 60.1 in April of 2020. It rebounded to 62.8 by November of 2023 and has continued the downward trend since.

The same labor participation nonsense was used after the 2008 crash as well. December 2023 it was at 62.5. It was at a post Covid high of 62.8 in November 2023. So I don't know why TFA chose December 2023. The last time it was this low was March of 2021. Outside of Trump's first term the participation rate hasn't been above 63 since 2014 and was on a 14 year downward trend by that point. The fact that it hasn't changed by more than 1.5% in the last 14 years isn't as concerning as the trend for the last 26 years.I don't recall anyone going crazy when the labor participation rate went from 65.7 in January 2009 to 62.5 by October 2015.

The reality is is that there hasn't been a roaring economy since before the dotcom bubble burst.

LEO is used for most satellites because it's by far the cheapest orbit, which you can easily reach with a two stage rocket. Everything above LEO needs much bigger rockets and is thus much more expensive to reach.

Kilowatt-hours are also used in countries which use the Metric System. And the S.I. units don't use camel case. It's kilowatt and Megajoules, albeit the abbreviations are kW and MJ.

Additionally, diesel generators need regular diesel transport, while a solar+battery installation, once in place, does not require outside resources. You could even transport solar panels and batteries with a motorcycle along a foot path, which is much more complicated with a diesel generator. And a solar+battery installation is easily scalable, while a diesel generator is not.

I can get a 2 kWh battery here around for 300 EUR (after taxes), and Hawaii will subsidize the same capacity with $400? I should buy a container full of them and ship them to Hawaii immediately.

My grandmother lived near an airbase, and every day, there were at least two supersonic aircraft in the skies. When they were flying above us, you could not understand the other guy talking. And we have to consider the distance in the line of sight. A starting aircraft on an airbase on the other side of the valley might be 10 miles away from you. A starting airplane right above you is quite different.

I wonder why most other nations also had a ban of non-military supersonic flight in place, nations with supersonic passenger jets, a.k.a. France and the United Kingdom, and those without, like Brasil or Germany.

Supersonic flight is incredibly noisy, and you don't want it above you.

I am not even sure it is really about trump or the party, and I doubt the energy companies actually care about things like this. DeSantis is deep into the 'cruelty as a status symbol' thing, and evangelicals eat that up. They don't seem to really care what he (and others) do, as long as it hurts and upsets people they see as inferior...

That they made peptides part of their marketing pitch says a lot. This is not a tool for doctors or researchers, but hussle culture biohackers and dropshippers. Now they can be even less creative and hands off with their snakeoil.

I suspect when they picture 'any clinician around the world', they are picturing biohackers running unregulated supplement websites, like that guy who claimed he built a billion dollar company with nothing but AI.

I used to think that. Then I looked at the math. The amount of money possessed by the billionares and a trillionare pale in the face of the size (and needs) of the actual economy. Just having no rich people doesnâ(TM)t mean society suddenly has a bunch of wealth. Like you can generate wealth once, for like a year, and then there is nobody to take money from any more, and everyone is back where they were: same expenses, same income as today. But mysteriously, nobody wants to make businesses actually workâ¦. So the income starts to decay, the prices rise, and with nobody to blame, people start going really weird. And everyone feels that they have a veto power over anything that bothers them, so: bye-bye innovation of every kind. Look at how neighbors police their neighborhoods, and then scale that to every business civilization-wide. Nothing new will ever be created. âoeSafety.â âoeEnvironment.â âoeThreatening jobs.â Everything just⦠stops.

What a weird ... hey, wait, I think I figured it out!

You're looking at it from the point of view of the bank robber, aren't you? (Instead of from the point of view of all the people who didn't rob the bank but still somehow had their locations leaked to the government.)

Did I guess right?

The fact is that the catastrophe happens, no matter what. But there are people wanting to hide it for as long as possible, while others think that getting prepared because of solid information available beforehand makes some sense.

Climate change happens, and it is hanging fast, faster than ever in recorded geological times.

All's left to do is to answer three questions:

1. Do we want Climate change?
2. If no, do we want to do something about it?
3. Whatever the answers to the two questions above, who will foot the bill?

There are people wanting to dodge the questions, especially the third one by hand waving and mumbling something about economy, technological advance and the market forces. And there are people who want answers.

I'm imagining devices going by a conveyor belt, and a worker with a wirecutter is making a brief snip on each of the devices as it travels by.

The boss walks up, and the snipper guy asks "Is it true? Is the customer canceling?"

The boss briefly nods but then shakes his head. "Yeah, they're canc--no, I mean they still want the devices. They just don't want the snipping anymore. They say go ahead and leave the warrant-detection-and-lookup circuit live."

"Good. I never really understood what I was doing here. They're still weren't required to check the sensor anyway, so why disable it?"

The boss explained, "so we could charge them for the snipping."

There's no way to interpret these costs, that nobody is ever going to be willing to pay, as a reminder that soon these companies are going to be bankrupt.

Every time I see an AI story like this, it makes me realize I really have no idea what the AI bubble hardware is actually like, and how it might be used after auction.

A few months from now you might find yourself at an auction where 4TB of faster-than-anything-you-have RAM might be for sale for $80, but of course it won't be in the usual DIMMs that any of your existing mobos can use, will it? What will it be, and how do we best exploit it?