chawco

As a Canadian with kids who recently bought Monopoly, I can you tell you that American money objectively feels much more like Monopoly money...

Yeah, it's not a historical quirk, really. In talking to many Americans it seems like they don't really cover loyalists at all, or what happened after the Revolutionary War. Much of what became Canada was settled by former colonists from the what became the United States who remained loyal to the crown. My hometown was founded by loyalists from New York -- including the mayor of New York City -- after the Revolutionary War.

Essentially we are even closer than many people think in terms of history, but Canadian identity was seeded from the beginning with the idea of rejecting being "American". We are indeed your closest brothers and sisters because of history, but it's no quirk at all that we're separate -- it's the entire reason we stayed separate at all.

You can also see the reverse play out -- what would become Alberta was settled by large numbers of American colonists moving to Canada, and to this day you can see the cultural impact of that in the politics and world view from the region.

While I agree as a whole, there are parts that are easily captured even with some small false positive rate, like credit card numbers. I do think it's acceptable to do PII detection probabilistically for some classes of identifiers/quasi-identifiers, because you can't really do any better without crazy false positive rates, things like credit card numbers have enough structure that it's more work to do it entirely via an ML model with a higher chance of failure, versus just building a simple heuristic for it.

Add to that the fact that missing a credit card number is way higher stakes than missing something like a zip code, you can understand why something like this is just not acceptable in a product like this, with the resources Microsoft has at their disposal.

I’ve only been sailing a few years, but I racked up about 500nm of racing this summer. I’ve only been in these situations a few times, but had a ton of confidence in the boat and the skipper. It’s honestly a ton of fun, and feels more dangerous than it is, since the boats are (supposed to be) designed to handle this. That said, I keep the family away from this sort of thing, and take them out on our family friendly coastal cruiser for more leisurely sails.

From what I understand, leaving the keel up would be reasonable enough if a boat was rigged as designed. Typically the boat would be ballasted differently if you have a retractable keel/centreboard. Sounds like converting the rig from a ketch to a sloop is probably the root of the design issues, combined with some troubling risks of down flooding from the various vents mounted close to the water line.

It's pretty shocking that a boat with no sail area could get knocked over bad enough to sink that quickly. Something had to be seriously wrong with the design. I'm not particularly salty, but I've sailed in 25-30kts with the rail buried and not even had a second thought about the boat sinking. I've been knocked down with full sails up in 25kts, and had a broach while racing -- sailboats can be expected to spend at least brief amounts of time on their side, even if you're not out doing anything particularly dumb. I just can't fathom how a boat wouldn't be able to survive 2 minutes on its side and still be signed off by a builder.

I’m going to assume I wasn’t part of their target audience, given what I’m about to say, but the whole thing looks like a bunch of amateurs with a ton of money.

First off you’re spot on with the name — what a terrible decision. Secondly because the name doesn’t tell you anything about who they are or what they do they needed to have advertising spots that got that across quickly. Except for some completely inexplicable reason they ran ads from a show about a mobile app, requiring you to watch for over a minute (!) before realizing the spot was for a show, not for some new app named Quibi. I literally saw their ads dozens and dozens of times before accidentally letting it run long enough to figure out what the hell it was. Did they recruit marketers from Microsoft or something? They’re the only other people I’ve seen capable of causing that degree of product confusion in marketing decisions.

Next, where the hell did the focus on short form content come from? If anything the trend has been for longer and longer form content as seen by the success of HBO, where a shorter medium (cinema) has moved into a longer form medium (television) in order to tell the stories they wanted to tell. Given the focus on celebrities I’m sure I wasn’t their target audience, but what mobile-first audience WAS the target anyway? Why wasn’t YouTube serving their needs? Why weren’t there production companies making and promoting this form on YouTube and other platforms already? The mind boggles. The whole thing reads like a bunch of amateurs with too much money.

Everyone is focusing on the aircraft, but the pilots are also super important here. They need to maintain a certain number of hours every 90 days, IIRC, in order to be flight ready. If not, they need to do a refresher in a simulator. As I’m sure everyone is familiar after the 737 max debacle, there is a shortage of simulators. This would mean it would take months or perhaps even a year to get all pilots recertified for commercial flight. That’s not a great situation to be in, and easily solved by keeping them flying.

The design predates broad availability of jetways at airports. The concept, in the 1960s, was that by being able to use stairs they'd be able to service many smaller airports. By the 1970s this was clearly the wrong choice -- smaller airports just installed jetways too. This was a design decision that didn't even last the decade, but was brought forward for the next 50 years because changes would mean a recertification. That is why the landing gear is short. There are essentially no operators who make use of the low height of the aircraft, and there hasn't been for longer than most of us have been alive.

I think one additional factor here is that storage isn't the only option. Once a larger amount of waste needs to be managed the attractiveness of fast breeder reactors starts to increase. These reactors can then extract more energy from this high level "waste" (really fuel for fast breeder reactors). These reactors would then reduce the volume of this waste by a factor of about 100. So in the end, those 400 car-sized containers of waste per 50 years becomes 4. One hundred years worth of energy for an entire country producing about a house's volume of waste, total.

But doesn't it seem like that, as total ownership of the market shifts towards passives, higher returns would be driven by funds running active strategies such as these, thus making them more attractive investments? It seems like this sort of thing chases an equilibrium.

This article seems to get Numidia screwed up twice — once calling it Mumidia, and once referring to it as Nubia! It was a really important region politically, especially in the lead up to the fall of the republic. Come on, Nat Geo...

Even a replacement is unnecessary — silphium was a commercially important plant traded in antiquity. It had well known uses in antiquity, was sought after (considered worth its weight in silver), was mentioned in literature of all sorts and appeared on coins. It’s also potentially where we get the heart symbol and its connotations in modern times (it is theorized to have been a contraceptive of some sort).

And it went extinct, and a we’re not quite sure why. Plants can be very useful and not survive attempts at cultivation before going extinct in the wild. It doesn’t need to get more complicated than that.

On the one hand, sure, this is true. On a deeper level this is just a criticism that the methods may not apply across the whole population -- that they may not be able to reduce the rate to 0. Fair enough. But given that more than 80% of Canada's population lives in urban centers, and indeed, that about half the country lives in the corridor you mentioned (Windsor-Quebec City corridor), it's a really good start, and may yield many more dividends yet.