Where does it say that I lived in the US my whole life? You're getting ahead of yourself.
From another blog post:
> I grew up in Europe (mostly Germany, Denmark, Switzerland). I had never even set foot outside the continent until I was 18, when I moved to the United States. I have lived here for 12 years now, with most of that in San Francisco.
Class suite actions as only moral option to protect consumers (which is not common in Germany), Citing Kissinger as a god like authority in intra - countries relationships, lack of knowledge in pro - market / competition regulation (very strong in Germany, EU [for different reasons]),
I regularly read German and Swiss newspapers. The arguments are very different (and in many cases more nuanced)
I never cited Kissinger as a "god like authority", and to insinuate that I did is offensive.
Furthermore, you made an earlier false statement about bias -- claiming I had lived in the US all my life -- and backing it up claiming that you had read my LinkedIn. My LinkedIn features my European high school. You're either lying or lazy; you can tell me which.
Making bombastic and trivially false statements doesn't help your arguments. Good luck with your "nuance".
I'm amazed that this is still an ongoing discussion. All of these "studies" have been distracting with muddied data from a very simple, unambiguous scientific fact: alcohol is a poison. By its immediate biological effects, it literally is a poison. And you shouldn't drink poison.
Decades of studies rationalizing that "actually, people who drink two glasses of wine a day live longer" and their ilk, have only ever distracted from this simple truth, obviously so hard to contradict by first principles.
It's not quite so black and white, since poisons are generally defined in conjunction with their dose. Eg "The dose makes the poison".
With alcohol, we don't really have a dose, like we do with eg vitamin A, which is toxic beyond a certain level. And as the article states, there are social benefits with drinking alcohol which could, if the dose of alcohol is low enough, offset the cost-benefit analysis of drinking.
> But he points out that it doesn’t consider the social aspects of moderate drinking. “It is healthier to socialise without the need for alcohol, but the benefits of spending time with others is still likely to be greater than the risk from the consumption of one to two units of alcohol,” he says. “The challenge being perhaps limiting alcohol intake in this way.”
While the conclusion looks like a good general guideline, the logic is flawed. There are things that are beneficial (or even necessary) in appropriate amount that are bad in larger dosage: resistance training, cardio, sauna, sulforaphane, food in general, fasting, even water..
I figured this was a religious thing. I have spoke to a lot of Christians who were big on health and abstained from all kinds of things, but insisted that alcohol was healthy in small amounts, specifically a bit of red wine every other day or something. Took me longer than it should have to realise this was due to not wanting to acknowledge thst something cultural or promoted by Jesus/the church could be objectively bad.
FWIW, prosciutto and other cured meats are also carcinogenic. So is barbecue. Lots of things that we ingest are poison. I’m not sure why alcohol should be singled out here.
I've had the same thought for a long time. I think this is spot-on. Ballmer is underrated in that he put Microsoft into a profoundly well-resourced position that a better product leader was then able to make productive use of.
Consumer Windows doesn't generate enough revenue per customer and the consumer OS space is commodified, so I'd say it's getting the treatment it deserves.
Vista was good, just slow on the older contemporary computers. I bought a new properly specced machine when it was released and it was a significant improvement over XP.
Vista was utter garbage. It is historical revisionism to only blame it's failing on minimum requirements. Not only was it slow, it was a horrible clickfest eg with almost 20 clicks and almost as many windows to change wifi settings. At that time (and probably still today) do you know how many did you need to get to wifi settings on OSX? 3 or 4. That was insulting to a windows user and I've never used windows again as my primary choice of OS. Windows 11 is on a good path to become Vista as it's enshittified to hell and back.
I've been very happy with Dynadot. I don't like that domain hosting is just one of many products for Cloudflare and others (as we've seen come up for Google!) and have had bad experiences with Namecheap et al.
Marina vN Whitman had the book in her possession so I suppose they visited her and got access to it that way. I emailed her back in 2022 about it and she said she was planning on sending it to Josh Levy at the Library of Congress to go with the von Neumann/Klara papers there but I don't know how that ended up going, perhaps the book might be there now.
In a similar fashion Vincent Ford, who was the Air Force colonel responsible for von Neumann when he was in hospital dying of cancer, published a manuscript, Twenty-Four Minutes To Checkmate, on the US crash program for ICBMs focusing on the 1953-1957 period, which obviously overlaps a lot with when von Neumann was involved in those topics. It's held in the Dwight Eisenhower Library in Kansas however it's also only available if you visit in person.
It would be a great boost to the history of science if both texts were either published or scanned and uploaded online to make them significantly more accessible to both scholars and interested laypersons.
Hi, author here. This is a good point that's worth addressing.
Technology is not the reason it's a winner-take-most market. It's helpful, but in the long term, many players will have comparable technology.
Utilization is the reason why it's a winner-take-most market. If you have the most popular app with the best drive liquidity, that's a self-reinforcing feedback loop. In turn, it means that your economics are better because your cars are going to be utilized at a higher % of the time. This in turn means that you can charge lower prices, and so forth. (A similar dynamic has been the case for Uber, for example.)
Right. I guess I see that argument as an "economies of scale" argument, rather than as a "natural monopoly" argument.
In many industries large players will benefit from economics of scale. This is definitely true for Uber. But it's not a natural monopoly position -- if someone could offer the same service for half the price, people would switch, as we all expect they will when Waymo does this.
This is different from, e.g., AirBnB, where there's not that much a competitor could offer, necessarily, and they'd have to build a huge set of inventory from scratch, a true two-sided marketplace. A competitor that manages to cut the service fee in half would still face an uphill battle building up that marketplace.
The natural monopoly emerges from the economy of scale: eventually you are offering a product at a price that nobody else can profitably undercut, because they do not have the same infrastructure that you do. And obtaining that infrastructure is too expensive for anyone to fund.
"In places with working public transit" is a huge caveat here. The vast majority of the US does not have what I would consider "working public transit". And those places aren't going to get it any time soon.
Unfortunately, sitting in a Waymo is experientially not at all the same as riding the BART or NYC subway.
1) With superior scale, the utilization of each Waymo approaches 100%. "Empty rides" going to a new pickup spot become more and more rare because they immediately get a ride close-by.
2) I think you underestimate the case for shared rides. Any Waymo with >= 2 passengers is reducing congestion, not adding. When you consider small bus-shuttles, e.g. 6 or 12 or 18 seats, it gets even more impactful.
3) The point with suburbs is that they become more accessible when the price point comes down. If you have a 45-minute commute to drive yourself, an Uber might cost you $60, which would be prohibitive. If a seat in a carpooled Waymo costs only $5 or $10, the incentives and customer behavior change significantly.
That’s is unsubstantiated utopia (from you POV). People do not have uniformly distributed locations for starting and ending routes. There are concentrations of where people work, live, go to restaurants, schools, etc. More so if you are assuming suburban homes. The direction of routes also have very strong biases.
You very strongly and, again, unsubstantially overestimate shared rides. Shared rides could already be happening at scale with a human driver and are not. There is nothing about self-driving tech that solves any urbanistic, social or economic barrier to shared rides. Also, a shared ride negates most of the benefits of self driving cabs. You are not alone in the confined space, you are sharing with others, others that will likely be more intrusive than a professional driver. The vehicle will not be as clean, as comfortable, as silent, etc.
About commute getting cheaper seems a pipe dream. There is nothing in the self driving tech remotely indicating that a currently $60 ride will cost $5 with self driving cars.
From another blog post:
> I grew up in Europe (mostly Germany, Denmark, Switzerland). I had never even set foot outside the continent until I was 18, when I moved to the United States. I have lived here for 12 years now, with most of that in San Francisco.