CA is #6 in homeless per capita among states. #1 is NY. I can't find any good nationwide numbers on homeless spending; it doesn't seem like anyone collects that data. However, I did find numbers from CA and NY, and NY spends nearly three times as much per capita as CA, so CA is definitely not #1.

Per the official poverty measure, CA is #22. That's arguably not a great measure, though, since it assumes the value of a dollar is the same everywhere. Using the supplemental poverty measure, CA is #2, behind Louisiana (#3 if you include DC, which falls between LA and CA). LA is high because people are actually very poor. CA's poverty rate is high even because though incomes are relatively high, housing is very expensive. Anyway, not #1.

CA is #11 in percentage of income collected, though it does have the highest marginal rate. It's important to keep in mind that CA's tax burden is more progressively allocated than most other states. If you're middle-class, your tax burden in CA is about the same as someone in TX or FL. If you're poor, CA is cheaper. If you're rich, CA is more.

#6, not #1. LA, NM, MI, TX and NV are numbers 1-5. Well, that's "average literacy score". If you want to look at percent with literacy skills at or below PIAAC level 1, then CA is in a three-way tie for #2. #1 is NM, #2-4 are CA, TX and MI. Either way not, #1.

Personally, I wouldn't want to live in CA, mostly because of their ridiculous gun laws, but it's a pretty decent place to live by most measures. It's best if you're highly-educated and highly-skilled, because while it costs a lot to live there, you can also make a lot of money.

$424 USD.

You're thinking of Nexus. Even by the end of the Nexus era, Google had shifted towards the flagship device market. Pixels have always been aimed at the flagship market.

If you want a cheaper option, look at the Pixel "A" series devices. They launch in the spring and generally have the prior year's CPU, less RAM, cheaper cameras and more plasticky build quality, but the prices are quite a bit lower. They still offer the same seven years of OS updates, though.

Yes. Always have. If you buy on a payment plan from someone other than Google they may keep it locked until you pay it off.

I live in a "high desert" region, in the mountains in northern Utah. Years ago I built a really nifty semi-passive cooling system for my house, which relies on the fact that even though the days get quite hot in the summer (~100F), as soon as the sun goes down the temperature drops, generally down to the low 60s, sometimes the low 50s or even 40s. Or at least it used to.

When I had to replace my HVAC system 10 years ago, I had the installers add an extra 8-inch vent pipe to the roof that comes down into the HVAC room and connects into the air return. Into this pipe I inserted an inline electrically-controlled baffle. I also installed a high-volume fan, the type used in greenhouses for plant ventilation, in the ceiling of my laundry room. It pushes air from the house into the attic, creating negative pressure in the house. When I open the baffle on the roof vent and turn on the HVAC fan and the attic fan, the effect is to draw air from the roof (from outside) and to push it through the HVAC system to my entire house, and to draw hot air near the ceiling and push it up into the attic (which is well-ventilated to the outdoors).

I then designed and built a set of ESP32-based microcontrollers, one each to control the vent baffle, the attic fan and a thermocouple that is installed in the roof vent, near the top, and I wrote some software that runs on an RPi and talks to the microcontrollers (via Wifi) and my smart thermostat (via its API). During summer nights, whenever the exterior temperature falls below the interior temperature and the weather forecast says the next day will be over 70F, the RPi turns on the fans and opens the baffle, drawing cool air into the house all night long.

In past years, most mornings I woke up to a house temperature in the mid-60s, and not just the air temperature; most of the house's thermal mass, especially that large amount of ceramic tile on the floors, had cooled to that level. Outside temperatures typically reach 80F by 10 AM, 90F by noon and 100F by midafternoon, but when the house starts at 65F in the morning, it typically takes until 4PM to reach 75F, at which point the AC has to begin working to maintain that temperature. The AC has to work a bit (not much) until maybe 9 PM when the exterior temperature falls. So vast majority of my summer cooling is done by running a couple of fans at night. If we were willing to accept 80F in the house, the AC might often not be needed at all.

Not this year.

This year, nighttime temperatures rarely fall below 70F. My system rarely kicks the fans on until about 4 AM, and even then there isn't much cooling going on because the temperature differential isn't large enough... and even when the house does cool a bit, it only cools the air. It's not cold enough long enough to significantly cool the tile and other thermal mass components. My AC sometimes runs during the night, consistently starts running by 10 AM and runs off and on all day, every day. I've adjusted the thermostat to 78F and I'm considering going to 80F, though I probably won't because my wife would complain.

Also, half of my state is on fire. Last night I disabled the system because there's a 15,000-acre wildfire 10 miles from my house, and if the system ran it would have pumped smoke into the house.

Of course, all of this is ultimately only an inconvenience to me. I can afford to run the AC all day every day if I have to. Not cooling down at night is a real problem for those who don't have the resources I do.

Your original comment, at the top of the thread was:

Are you claiming that this original belief is correct? Or have you admitted it's not, and are now discussing the other claim that it was "only app users"? If the latter, you're correct. If you're still maintaining that it must include people who submitted followup question so the AI result (or just "told the AI it was shit"), then you're incorrect.

So... I dug some more.

Yes, his vessels (both of them, the yacht and its tender) fall into the large vessel category but Frederick Sound has no VTS, so both were legally obligated to be listening on channel 13 and channel 16. And large vessels aren't allowed to use one dual-channel radio like small vessels do (mine does!); they have to have two separate radios monitored by two separate people. This isn't because dual-channel radios are unreliable, but because they don't want the crewman who's using one radio to communicate to miss messages on the other channel due to task loading. It's about keeping the two crewmen unencumbered enough to effectively monitor both.

I've never learned much about radio requirements of large vessels, so this was interesting :-)

Large vessels aren't required to monitor 16, at least when in an area with an active Vessel Traffic Service (VTS) operation.. They are required to monitor 13 (the bridge-to-bridge channel) and the VTS channel (the frequency varies; it's never channel 16). But if the Coast Guard was calling them they'd be calling on the VTS channel, which Zuck's crew should have been monitoring.

So, you're right in substance, just not about the particular channel.

Whether it's legally required depends on the type of vessel. "Voluntary" vessels, such as small recreational vessels, are not required to have a VHF radio at all. Those that have one are required to maintain a watch on channel 16 when they're not using the radio to communicate. In practice, most radios today have dual or triple-channel monitoring, so you can keep monitoring even if you've switched to a different channel to talk.

I had to look up the rules for larger "mandatory" vessels... and the result surprised me. Large vessels are required to have VHF radios and maintain a watch, but not on channel 16! They're required to maintain a watch on two channels, the bridge-to-bridge channel, 13, and the Vessel Traffic Service (VTS) channel, which varies from location to location. I guess the theory is that if there are distress signals that the vessel needs to respond to, they'll be routed to the VTS channel by the Coast Guard.

Either way, it sounds like Zuck's crew wasn't maintaining the required radio watch.

I found it at a different URL: https://www.allrecipes.com/rec...

With conveniently-streamed video evidence identifying the vandal / assailant!

FWIW, many of us outside the US don't think of the US as a country manufacturing high quality goods. For those, you'd go to Germany, Switzerland, Japan, or Taiwan. Or even China. The US is the country where anything goes. Cars being one example - clunky, low quality, low tech/gas guzzling, poor to drive vehicles of enormous sizes. A US company optimizes for low production quality vs. warranty costs, it doesn't optimize for high quality and see warranties as a failure.

Now, having lived and worked in the US I know that this is only a part (the largest) of the story - you can get anything of any quality. But "Made in the US" is certainly not a positive stamp, even before your orange demi-god alienated the civilized part of the world.

You can argue that there is equilibrium right now - companies are selling and buying, it's just not at a price point consumers like. Thus we lower our demand.

You are considering the current AI tech as "... junk". Many others aren't, that's why there is a gold rush - many see the value, and that it keeps on improving. Fast. Others again just go for the gold rush. Personally, I see it as a very valuable tool in my arsenal. It's not the only one, but it's a good, multi-purpose one. And it definitely needs to be checked, but the good ones give you references you can and should check when providing information - and for coding, it gives you what you ask for. Which has finally led to improvements in one of my pet peeves - people are starting to provide better and testable requirements.

Is there a bubble? I think so. Will it pop? Yes, I think so - it will be reminiscent of the dot-com bubble. Many will go bust, and the world is changed by the remaining companies over time.

This is not like the crypto bubble, where the end value is 0.

The 4 GWh per year makes sense. The factory will produce 4 GWh of batteries every year. So if each battery is (pulling a number out of my butt) 10 KWh, the factory will build four million of them per year, or about 11,000 per day (assuming 365 days per year operation).

As for the translation to households... I can't make anything sensible out of that number. I'll note that you (inadvertently, I'm sure) multiplied the number of claimed households by a million, but if we drop that down to the claimed 4M households, that means each household gets 1 kWh of the capacity, which is enough to run the average house for about 45 minutes of average consumption... so that's not "overnight" storage for solar generation, but it's more than you need for grid stabilization. Dunno. My best guess is that they were going for how many houses you could run for a month on that much storage and just screwed up the arithmetic by three orders of magnitude (one SI scaling factor).