I bet if I worked three days a week and got paid for five, I'd be happier and healthier yet.

As with any social proposal, you have to measure the costs in addition to the visible benefits.

11 weeks of storage? That's an enormous amount. Some quick searching shows California currently has something like 11 hours of battery backup.

Whether that's enough, well, I don't recall ever having 11 weeks of still air and clouds when I lived there. I'll let others with more real knowledge explain the actual math.

This is a great example of why open markets and competition are great. Legally protected monopolies (telecom, power, water, education) universally have high prices, low quality, and poor customer service. Companies competing for customer dollars are much more invested in selling great products at low prices.

I am curious though, what are they using for their uplink to the Interwebs? It sounds like they're building out the last mile infrastructure. How do they connect to the rest of the world?

I'm not disputing that exchange rates are changing. I'm saying that exchange rates of one level or another are not per se good or bad. It just is. A "weaker" dollar means there's less demand for dollars relative to other currencies and imports are more expensive relative to domestically produce products and services. Is that good or bad? I don't know, I'm not sure it really matters.

Now what might matter is why there's less demand for dollars than there used to be. If it's because the federal government has borrowed so much people doubt our ability to repay and thus aren't willing to lend more, well, that's an important issue. If it's because some other country improved their markets and became more attractive, that's not a bad thing at all. That's the real story, not the exchange rate.

Think of of the exchange rate as a thermometer reading. If the reading is going up in your house, the real story is (a) are you comfortable and (b) if it's too warm, why is the temperature going up?

I'm curious. I've heard this before. How exactly do they do this? What's the mechanism?

Thing is, there must be a cost to this. If they subsidize exports, that must mean they're penalizing imports and that's reducing the standard of living of Chinese citizens.

I have no idea whether having dollars trade for more or fewer Euros is a good or bad thing. It's really just a thing, representing the product of a number of other economic factors. It bugs me that we frequently use loaded terms to talk about derived metrics. "Strong", "weak", 'best', "worst" all imply we should value a dollar which trades for a larger number of units of other currencies. Most everyone wants to be strong, few want to be weak.

We would be better served to focus on what we really want: access to goods and capital. Having a "strong" dollar tells us foreign products are relatively more available than foreign capital. A "weak" dollar means the reverse. Neither one is inherently better than the other, it's just where the equilibrium lands.

I'll take the 25% pay increase, please.

If Bernie thinks I'm 25% more productive, that will eventually be reflected in wages. Wages are a price for labor and eventually supply and demand will set the price at the market clearing level.

That said, there's nothing stopping my employer offering me either deal today. What makes Bernie think he knows better than my employer and me what work arrangement makes more sense for us?

No doubt. If someone earns a bachelor's degree with a half million dollar debt, many things went horribly wrong. That person is in a world of financial hurt.

OTOH, people graduating with $500k in student debt are almost entirely from medical and law schools. No one enters those at age 19 with no track record of academic success. And even then, I'm not at all sure many people graduate from Harvard Medical with that sort of debt. I believe the median is about half that.

Very few undergraduates graduate with hundreds of thousands in debt. IIRC, something like half have no debt at all and the median owed by those who borrowed at all is in the $30-40k range.

Keep those figures in mind when you imagine the typical person with college debt.

I drive a BMW and I love my iDrive system. It still has lots of physical controls for volume, temperature, fans, and the like. Those things I still to find the physical button (taking my eyes off the road) but it's pretty quick.

For most everything else can use the iDrive controller. It's a scroll wheel/joystick combo on the console. I think other brands have something similar. I keep my hand on the controller, glance at the screen, scroll, glance again, click. It's not as fast as other interfaces but it lets me control maps, entertainment, and the like with minimal distraction.

As UIs go, it's a pretty good implementation and makes good tradeoffs between functions and safety.

It may have been a cash grab. Regardless, if you make something more expensive, you'll get less of it. If your goal is to reduce congestion in NYC, adding a fee is a quite reasonable way to accomplish it. As you say, there are lots of other ways to make driving more expensive (if you consider a lottery a cost, which it is in economic terms). Pricing could also be dynamic: the more crowded the streets, the higher the entry price.

(I didn't read TFA. Did they address the aggregate affect on commute times? I'd be curious whether it takes people more time to drive in traffic versus take the subway. It sounds like the people who still drive are better off. How about the people who switched to mass transit?)

My issue is the story doesn't address the question "is it worth it?". Sure, the visible benefit is lower congestion. But at what cost? What happened to all the people who now can't afford to drive in Manhattan? What jobs were destroyed or will never be created?

Don't get me wrong: I have no idea whether this is worth it. But beware of looking at the visible metrics and ignoring the unseen effects.

That's a quite absolute statement. I can believe there are some situations where review may not be necessary. Of course, readers ought to know that and treat the content appropriately.

I'm sure that happens from time to time. The question is how often? I suspect rarely. Nonetheless, I think that's the point of this change, so readers can see reviewers had strong opinions which the author and editor did not address.

I'll have to ask my kids (both in in the physical sciences) about how this works today. It's certainly the scuttlebutt I hear, that you can frequently guess who your reviewers are and that you won't make it past review if you don't cite the reviewers papers and you definitely won't pass if you contradict them. Yes, that sounds unprofessional and yet I can easily believe that's how the world works. People aren't as upstanding and unbiased as we want to believe.

(As you write, I'd like to believe this is more common in humanities than sciences. I have no idea whether that's the case.)

I can believe it because many fields are vey narrow. There may only be a dozen other people working in the same narrow specialty you're working in, which means there are only a dozen plausible reviewers. And given those other dozen researchers are competing for the same grants and publication slots, well, I can believe there's sausage being made.

If I'm reading TFA correctly, Nature isn't changing which papers are peer reviewed or the review process. What they're doing is offering to publish all the communication between the author and reviewers. That might let others see whether they think the review was fair and unbiased. We might be able to see whether an author significantly changed the paper solely to appease a reviewer.

Of course, what this doesn't address is a paper getting quashed because reviewers refused to approve it, possibly because the paper contradicted the reviewers' findings.

More transparency is probably good unless this makes qualified people even less willing to review papers.

It reminds me of "military grade" guns in scare quotes. Military grade means built by the low-cost (or most politically connected) vendor using inconsistent and ambiguous specs carved in stone 20 years ago. It does not necessarily mean the deadliest weapon available.

Yup. Sure, AI could cause trouble. Monkeys could also fly out of my a$$.

It's not enough to say something could happen so we need to regulate. We need to assess how likely the bad consequences are. Given how much coaching Cursor needs to re-write some code for me, I don't think it's staging a worldwide robot revolution any time soon. TBH, I think it's much more likely some code monkey will use Claude or Copilot to create some faulty document which another drone reads and follows and causes problems.

I agree. It was amazing when they first started coming out. Now I'm tired of it. I'm tired of time travel stories too.

Here's the thing though: the beauty of free markets is Disney is free to try one approach, DC is free to try another. We'll see in the end which one works out better. I don't really care which approach they use as long as great content eventually shows up on my screen. I personally can't keep up with all the Star Wars and Marvel content Disney is cranking out so I'd be pretty happy if they slowed down.

I'm also pretty tired of claymation animation and live-action remakes of animated films. Go back to hand-drawn ones. Or invent some interesting artistic styles like Into The Spiderverse (although the sequel so over did it I couldn't finish it).