Another month. More things. Much roundup. Bad News Jesse Smith writes in Asterisk that our HVAC workforce is both deeply incompetent and deeply corrupt. This certainly matches my own experience. Calculations are almost always flubbed when they are done at all, outright fraudulent paperwork is standard, no one has the necessary skills.
"Claim here is that they cancelled a Starlink contract without justification." Kind of seems self-justifying. Is the idea that they should purchase the technology without any regard to the actions, statements, motivations, or history of the company that provides it? I am extremely aware of the dangers here, but this is not a simple case and Elon Musk is possibly the worst possible stand-in for "victim" here.
It seems obvious that support for different methods of advocating for a cause would vary with the cause, unless the question has a whole lot of limiting conditions to avoid it. To clarify, I probably wouldn't ever support criminalizing political advocacy, but there is certainly advocacy that I would shame and which I would find "unacceptable."
To take an extreme example:
(1) Sincerely* handing out fliers advocating that we should segregate young children by race, then incinerate all the children of disfavored races alive would always be unacceptable.
(2) Handing out fliers opposing this policy would always** be acceptable.
I don't see how that's hypocrisy. It just means that my commitment to free speech isn't so absolute that it outweighs all other concerns in all situations, even though I think I consider myself unusually committed to free speech.
* The purpose of "sincerely" is to carve out cases like "the person is an actor in a play" or something.***
** For reasonable assumptions, in order to exclude cases like "there is no risk of this policy and you are causing panic unnecessarily."***
*** Or I guess I could just vote "usually acceptable/unacceptable" as long as I can think of at least one exception.
It's not right to say that moving away from disposable bags is bad for the environment. Sure, carbon costs increase but those are minuscule. The reduction in litter is much more important at the relevant margins. Are they worth the consumer welfare cost? I think potentially not but that's a different issue.
Re: HVAC, quoting from the linked Asterisk article
> Our national HVAC crisis runs much deeper than a few bad contractors in Princeton, New Jersey. All the construction trades suffer from a shortage of skilled labor, but the situation in HVAC may be uniquely bad: Not only are there not enough workers, the workers we have often — I will suggest — aren’t capable of fulfilling basic work requirements. I regularly watch technicians struggle with routine maintenance that demands far less technical savvy than the proper installation of ultraviolet germicidal irradiation.
I've become pretty blackpilled lately on intelligence, due in part to recently picking up a copy of Murray's Real Education, which showed that approximately half of eighth graders can't answer what I consider fairly trivial reading and math questions.
I do wonder if it's a simply not realistic to expect to install these systems across houses in the nation with the labor force that's available.
This is an obvious call on the manufacturers to design these systems to be much more idiot proof as well, but it's still a grim prospect.
More FTA
> And for upgraded filters to be effective, HVAC systems need to be fully operative in the first place. My anecdotal experience suggests they’re not. Well into the pandemic, a friend who coaches at a Princeton boarding school approached me with a diagnostic and repair problem. During high-occupancy sports events, water pooled on the floors of the school’s gymnasiums. He was forced to pay assistant coaches to hurriedly wipe the floors with towels during breaks in the games. From a ventilation standpoint this usually indicates catastrophic failure. It means that occupant breathing and sweating is causing massive humidity spikes, and this humidity isn’t being ventilated from the building.
So... one wonders what they did from here going forward? Just hope they pass down knowledge that "water pooling on floors" means you should call the HVAC technician? Pretty counter-intuitive and not likely to survive a few rounds of staff turnover.
Obviously it needs a monitoring panel, but that's an additional cost and also requires training because nobody is going to spring for the panel that's got a high resolution touchscreen that tells you in plain English what's wrong and what to do (if one even exists).
Instead you get a piece of plexiglass with a few LEDs on it and terse messages about HVAC etched into it. The people that were there when it was installed will remember, but everyone in the future will be just as likely to disconnect it out of frustration to make the alarms stop as they are to know this means to check the fans. Probably you could call a random future HVAC tech and they wouldn't even know what this means.
There was a WSJ article about growth rate of EVs slowing in China. It was previously 180%. But now it's much lower. Not mentioned was that EV market share is now 40% in China, so it can't grow more than 125%. I am dumbfounded that even WSJ is this innumerate. I subscribed to the paper version so my young kids could read the paper the way I did as a kid, and my 9 year-old actually enjoys it. I picked WSJ over the times, because the times is just mostly woke non-sense, but the journal is just newsertainment for right-leaning people, and electric cars are left coded. I guess I should just give up on the media.
Small typo on food - it's fresh and hot, not fresh and not.
I don't think the conversation should even go in the direction of trying to quantify and regulate the labor or cost of home cooking and equating it to communal or industrial cooking. Let people sell their small-batch cooking on the sly via social media for cash. It's like the conversation about quantifying unpaid domestic labor of spouses. The moment it gets quantified and starts being officially imputed as income, the clock will start ticking towards the taxation and regulation thereof. So leave it alone even if it's imperfect.
Cooking for yourself is definitely better than processed foods, especially with the current Shrinking Container. In highly collectivized groups, the food is either highly processed or not the best -- so for the specific level of quality and healthfulness, it can be the most economical for sure.
I’m also behind on my Neal Stephenson and I’m not sure why. Missed Reamde, own Termination Shock but never got into it. Seven Eves was very good though, recommend that
1) For WFH harming talent development in software engineers, my first tech job (tech support, very early stages of knowing how to code) was fully remote, and I felt constantly frustrated by the fact that I could learn nothing during my time there, despite weekly code walk-throughs over IRC, despite high-quality documentation, despite friendly, open, software engineers who wanted so badly to knowledge share. The only software patches I submitted during my time there were written during the semi-annual all-hands in-person meet-ups. I never gained confidence in those skills until working at in-office companies.
2) I definitely find myself now in the 1% percent that consistently gets more work done in a day than I expect (I set expectations pretty low and surprise myself).
The Starlink decision's public justification was that Starlink can't prove today that they will have enough satellites to meet speed benchmarks in three years, and that their dish has a $600 upfront cost. I would tend to think that if the goal is to get high speed internet to rural communities, we should at least be trying out wireless - some of these communities may end up waiting a while if the FCC rules that the only way they can get subsidized internet is for someone to run fiber out to their house.
>> If you’re talking about loops of over a week in a normal situation, the whole thing is madness. Now you can go anywhere, do almost anything, learn almost anything to help you do it. I’d want to come out of the loop with the code for an aligned AGI.
> The system still fails to offer taxpayers the information the IRS already knows. Why shouldn’t it pre-fill the information, saving everyone time and effort and minimizing error? Seems to be more rent seeking from the tax preparers
> It is widely believed in the tech industry that the reason the United States requires taxpayers to calculate their own tax returns, which is not required in many peer nations, is because Intuit (who make Turbotax, the most popular software for doing one’s taxes) spends money lobbying policymakers to oppose the IRS creating a competing product. People who believe this have a poorly calibrated understanding about the political economy of taxation in the American context. [...] And, relevant to the question of whether Intuit controls U.S. tax policy: it can’t, because that would imply they have wrested control from Norquist. Norquist considers a public filing option a tax increase by stealth and opposes it automatically. (I offer in substantiation ATR’s take on a specific policy, which was bolded for emphasis in the original: “Americans for Tax Reform rejects the use of unauthorized taxpayer dollars being used to expand the IRS into the tax preparation business and urges states to reject participation in the program.” You can find much more in the same vein.)
---
> Once again, I am left to wonder how the store is still there at all? How does our civilization not collapse, if there is zero risk of enforcement of laws against theft?
Regarding taxes and retirement accounts, absolutely the tax preference should be removed. But it should be removed by removing all capital gains taxes. Why on earth would we want to extend capital gains taxes even more?
I am probably not a standard person here, but my financial goals are focused around moving as much money into tax-advantaged accounts as possible, to the extent that I juggle a HELOC loan, credit card balance transfers, etc., to have as little cash in my checking account as possible. (My income is essentially quarterly and varies quite a bit, so I can't just count on the same amount of cash available each month.) Ideally I could just invest money in an index fund and withdraw it as needed instead of playing these personal cashflow games, but capital gains make that a non-starter.
This is the first of these round ups that came out since Nitter finally truly died. And whoof, that completely explodes almost all value I get out of the write-up, due to not being able to follow nearly any of the links.
When I try to click through without being logged in, it links to a single tweet with no context (since most of your links are to multi-tweet threads, this is essentially useless). I figured, well, this is high enough value to be worth logging in, so I tried logging in but that failed and caused some kind of error where I couldn't even see the context-less tweets anymore (just a "something went wrong, try to refresh" message, and of course refreshing did nothing.
I am sure that this is mostly a me problem (the login-issue certainly can't be very widespread). But man I did not expect to miss Nitter this much, this fast.
link to "thread of excellent classic papers" seems broken?
"Twitter thread of classic excellent papers." This link seems broken
"Claim here is that they cancelled a Starlink contract without justification." Kind of seems self-justifying. Is the idea that they should purchase the technology without any regard to the actions, statements, motivations, or history of the company that provides it? I am extremely aware of the dangers here, but this is not a simple case and Elon Musk is possibly the worst possible stand-in for "victim" here.
It seems obvious that support for different methods of advocating for a cause would vary with the cause, unless the question has a whole lot of limiting conditions to avoid it. To clarify, I probably wouldn't ever support criminalizing political advocacy, but there is certainly advocacy that I would shame and which I would find "unacceptable."
To take an extreme example:
(1) Sincerely* handing out fliers advocating that we should segregate young children by race, then incinerate all the children of disfavored races alive would always be unacceptable.
(2) Handing out fliers opposing this policy would always** be acceptable.
I don't see how that's hypocrisy. It just means that my commitment to free speech isn't so absolute that it outweighs all other concerns in all situations, even though I think I consider myself unusually committed to free speech.
* The purpose of "sincerely" is to carve out cases like "the person is an actor in a play" or something.***
** For reasonable assumptions, in order to exclude cases like "there is no risk of this policy and you are causing panic unnecessarily."***
*** Or I guess I could just vote "usually acceptable/unacceptable" as long as I can think of at least one exception.
It's not right to say that moving away from disposable bags is bad for the environment. Sure, carbon costs increase but those are minuscule. The reduction in litter is much more important at the relevant margins. Are they worth the consumer welfare cost? I think potentially not but that's a different issue.
Re: HVAC, quoting from the linked Asterisk article
> Our national HVAC crisis runs much deeper than a few bad contractors in Princeton, New Jersey. All the construction trades suffer from a shortage of skilled labor, but the situation in HVAC may be uniquely bad: Not only are there not enough workers, the workers we have often — I will suggest — aren’t capable of fulfilling basic work requirements. I regularly watch technicians struggle with routine maintenance that demands far less technical savvy than the proper installation of ultraviolet germicidal irradiation.
I've become pretty blackpilled lately on intelligence, due in part to recently picking up a copy of Murray's Real Education, which showed that approximately half of eighth graders can't answer what I consider fairly trivial reading and math questions.
I do wonder if it's a simply not realistic to expect to install these systems across houses in the nation with the labor force that's available.
This is an obvious call on the manufacturers to design these systems to be much more idiot proof as well, but it's still a grim prospect.
More FTA
> And for upgraded filters to be effective, HVAC systems need to be fully operative in the first place. My anecdotal experience suggests they’re not. Well into the pandemic, a friend who coaches at a Princeton boarding school approached me with a diagnostic and repair problem. During high-occupancy sports events, water pooled on the floors of the school’s gymnasiums. He was forced to pay assistant coaches to hurriedly wipe the floors with towels during breaks in the games. From a ventilation standpoint this usually indicates catastrophic failure. It means that occupant breathing and sweating is causing massive humidity spikes, and this humidity isn’t being ventilated from the building.
So... one wonders what they did from here going forward? Just hope they pass down knowledge that "water pooling on floors" means you should call the HVAC technician? Pretty counter-intuitive and not likely to survive a few rounds of staff turnover.
Obviously it needs a monitoring panel, but that's an additional cost and also requires training because nobody is going to spring for the panel that's got a high resolution touchscreen that tells you in plain English what's wrong and what to do (if one even exists).
Instead you get a piece of plexiglass with a few LEDs on it and terse messages about HVAC etched into it. The people that were there when it was installed will remember, but everyone in the future will be just as likely to disconnect it out of frustration to make the alarms stop as they are to know this means to check the fans. Probably you could call a random future HVAC tech and they wouldn't even know what this means.
There was a WSJ article about growth rate of EVs slowing in China. It was previously 180%. But now it's much lower. Not mentioned was that EV market share is now 40% in China, so it can't grow more than 125%. I am dumbfounded that even WSJ is this innumerate. I subscribed to the paper version so my young kids could read the paper the way I did as a kid, and my 9 year-old actually enjoys it. I picked WSJ over the times, because the times is just mostly woke non-sense, but the journal is just newsertainment for right-leaning people, and electric cars are left coded. I guess I should just give up on the media.
"Good news is the replacement scale I bought lacks this ‘feature.’"
Don't leave us hanging! I hate this feature. Which scale doesn't have it?
Excellent!
Small typo on food - it's fresh and hot, not fresh and not.
I don't think the conversation should even go in the direction of trying to quantify and regulate the labor or cost of home cooking and equating it to communal or industrial cooking. Let people sell their small-batch cooking on the sly via social media for cash. It's like the conversation about quantifying unpaid domestic labor of spouses. The moment it gets quantified and starts being officially imputed as income, the clock will start ticking towards the taxation and regulation thereof. So leave it alone even if it's imperfect.
Cooking for yourself is definitely better than processed foods, especially with the current Shrinking Container. In highly collectivized groups, the food is either highly processed or not the best -- so for the specific level of quality and healthfulness, it can be the most economical for sure.
I’m also behind on my Neal Stephenson and I’m not sure why. Missed Reamde, own Termination Shock but never got into it. Seven Eves was very good though, recommend that
1) For WFH harming talent development in software engineers, my first tech job (tech support, very early stages of knowing how to code) was fully remote, and I felt constantly frustrated by the fact that I could learn nothing during my time there, despite weekly code walk-throughs over IRC, despite high-quality documentation, despite friendly, open, software engineers who wanted so badly to knowledge share. The only software patches I submitted during my time there were written during the semi-annual all-hands in-person meet-ups. I never gained confidence in those skills until working at in-office companies.
2) I definitely find myself now in the 1% percent that consistently gets more work done in a day than I expect (I set expectations pretty low and surprise myself).
The Starlink decision's public justification was that Starlink can't prove today that they will have enough satellites to meet speed benchmarks in three years, and that their dish has a $600 upfront cost. I would tend to think that if the goal is to get high speed internet to rural communities, we should at least be trying out wireless - some of these communities may end up waiting a while if the FCC rules that the only way they can get subsidized internet is for someone to run fiber out to their house.
https://www.satellitetoday.com/government-military/2022/08/10/fcc-cancels-starlink-funding-for-rural-broadband-program/
>> If you’re talking about loops of over a week in a normal situation, the whole thing is madness. Now you can go anywhere, do almost anything, learn almost anything to help you do it. I’d want to come out of the loop with the code for an aligned AGI.
Do you see the failure mode?
> The system still fails to offer taxpayers the information the IRS already knows. Why shouldn’t it pre-fill the information, saving everyone time and effort and minimizing error? Seems to be more rent seeking from the tax preparers
Worth noting patio11's commentary on this, from https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/payroll-providers-power-respect/:
> It is widely believed in the tech industry that the reason the United States requires taxpayers to calculate their own tax returns, which is not required in many peer nations, is because Intuit (who make Turbotax, the most popular software for doing one’s taxes) spends money lobbying policymakers to oppose the IRS creating a competing product. People who believe this have a poorly calibrated understanding about the political economy of taxation in the American context. [...] And, relevant to the question of whether Intuit controls U.S. tax policy: it can’t, because that would imply they have wrested control from Norquist. Norquist considers a public filing option a tax increase by stealth and opposes it automatically. (I offer in substantiation ATR’s take on a specific policy, which was bolded for emphasis in the original: “Americans for Tax Reform rejects the use of unauthorized taxpayer dollars being used to expand the IRS into the tax preparation business and urges states to reject participation in the program.” You can find much more in the same vein.)
---
> Once again, I am left to wonder how the store is still there at all? How does our civilization not collapse, if there is zero risk of enforcement of laws against theft?
That particular thief was arrested after a second theft: https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/thief-in-viral-emeryville-apple-store-video-arrested-police/
Regarding taxes and retirement accounts, absolutely the tax preference should be removed. But it should be removed by removing all capital gains taxes. Why on earth would we want to extend capital gains taxes even more?
I am probably not a standard person here, but my financial goals are focused around moving as much money into tax-advantaged accounts as possible, to the extent that I juggle a HELOC loan, credit card balance transfers, etc., to have as little cash in my checking account as possible. (My income is essentially quarterly and varies quite a bit, so I can't just count on the same amount of cash available each month.) Ideally I could just invest money in an index fund and withdraw it as needed instead of playing these personal cashflow games, but capital gains make that a non-starter.
This is the first of these round ups that came out since Nitter finally truly died. And whoof, that completely explodes almost all value I get out of the write-up, due to not being able to follow nearly any of the links.
When I try to click through without being logged in, it links to a single tweet with no context (since most of your links are to multi-tweet threads, this is essentially useless). I figured, well, this is high enough value to be worth logging in, so I tried logging in but that failed and caused some kind of error where I couldn't even see the context-less tweets anymore (just a "something went wrong, try to refresh" message, and of course refreshing did nothing.
I am sure that this is mostly a me problem (the login-issue certainly can't be very widespread). But man I did not expect to miss Nitter this much, this fast.