URSpider94

Tile never gained enough market traction for it to be an issue. No use using a system to track your stolen goods that can't provide you with a location because there's no phone running the Tile app within hailing distance.

I can see how, if you get to critical mass, the network effect will drive adoption. For example, building a Blocks-based project management system becomes much, much easier if it can tie into one of many (hypothetical) Blocks-based HR information systems, so that you can pre-populate a list of employees at the company. As much as big companies love lock-in, there's tremendous potential value in enabling small companies to build open value-add tools that focus on solving a narrow problem extremely well.

The thing that people are missing here is that these aren’t natural gas wells, they are oil wells. Natural gas is a byproduct of oil production (crude oil can have a lot of natural gas dissolved in it, which bubbles out when it’s pumped out of the ground). It’s usually not economical to capture this gas and make use of it, so it’s usually just flared, or worse - vented. To the degree that this makes use of this waste gas, it’s better than nothing. However, if it encourages continuing to tap gas off of shut-in oil wells, then it’s potentially less good.

Specifically, it needs to absorb/emit in a frequency range called the “sky window”, where the atmosphere is transparent. In this range, the object is basically seeing the cold of space at a few Kelvin, so that almost no energy is absorbed and a lot is emitted.

The trick is to design a system where the total power absorbed across the solar irradiance spectrum is less than the power that is emitted in the sky window, so that the system is a net power sink (in this case to the tune of 100W per sq. meter or so).

They don’t have to do this in most states. Only a few states have laws against selling cars factory-direct.

Car manufacturers contracted with car dealers back when the car business was uncertain - they needed a local dealer network to sell and service their cars. Once dealers were established, they lobbied to get laws in place to prevent them from being disintermediated by the manufacturers, who could have easily just put them out of business and replaced them with manufacturer-owned stores.

Not a great reason …

Not entirely true. Certain classes of jobs, like working in health care, have always mandated vaccination. Additionally, when most vaccines are given in childhood, making sure everyone is vaccinated in grade school has the effect of ensuring that most adults are vaccinated. No need to keep re-checking throughout life.

This. What’s your long-term business plan? If you plan to keep this business as a privately held enterprise in the long term, equity is basically useless and worthless. Are you planning to hand out equity to investors or employees? If not, this person would be one of a handful of shareholders. Unless you have a plan to sell the company or go public, then I would advise that you explain the situation to the salesperson and explain to them why they wouldn’t want equity.

The issue is, most of the things you mention never happened. Not even close.

In most places in CA, the touchscreens spit out a marked paper ballot that is then counted and stored with the rest.

Can you please explain how criminalizing homelessness, for example by enforcing sit/lie ordinances, would help homeless people find homes? Likewise, getting people into mental health services is not likely to get them a place to live. You seem to think that somehow “getting tough” on homeless people is going to make them straighten up and find a place to live, when in reality it will just cause them to move out of your view, so you don’t have to see them any longer.

There have actually been studies done on this. The estimate I’ve seen is that for every year of life that would be prolonged by mandating helmet use in NL, 25 years of life would be lost from the loss of exercise by people who don’t take bike trips because they are put off by helmet wearing. This is a real thing that has to be taken into account.

The other interesting stat is that an hour of bike riding in NL carries approximately the same risk of head injury as an hour in a car in the USA. So, should we make all car passengers wear helmets? It would make them safer…

I probably would have agreed with you until I spent a lot of time in the Netherlands. Imagine saying the same thing about pedestrians: “I think we should normalize walking among cars. Sidewalks just create the mindset that pedestrians should be separate traffic.” Yes, to do this right, you need more than just bike lanes down each street that end in normal intersections. You need intersections with separate signals for bikes and cars, with no right on red, with grade-separated crossings at major roads. The Netherlands has done this for nearly every road in the country, and no it wasn’t always thus - it was done starting in the 1960’s as the result of a massive grass-roots people’s movement.