opinion-is-bad

Just for some context, a million gallons of water is about three feet covering one acre. Almonds use four per year. There are individual farms in the California delta using three orders of magnitude more per year.

I made no such claim. I simply asked someone who said that we can all agree taxes must go up to what level they were referring to and how they chose the number. If there is no fixed ratio such as you say, then their claim is clearly false.

The ratio of the economy that gets collected as taxes has only gone up over time. Do you have an idea for how much should be collected as some ideal ratio? At what point do the effects of taxation become counterproductive?

Inequality isn’t as simple as pulling one tax lever, and not all levers are equally effective at all points of the pull. Dead-weight loss is an important concept when designing tax policies, otherwise why not simply eliminate ALL taxes in place of an expanded VAT or income tax or corporate tax or whatever.

I find the ethics of these kind of predator reintroduction programs to be extremely dubious. I feel this story could be reframed easily as ‘American activists unleash genetically modified hunters upon the world’s poorest.’ Does anyone know of any material benefit that is expected to be gained by those who live with the dogs?

Only the Nasdaq, which is an intentionally aggressive index. The S&P rejected all proposals.

It’ll be at least a year before they are eligible to join the S&P500. They also need to become profitable.

Many people avoid washing cars just before rain to avoid spots, etc. Phoenix as an extreme example rarely rains and leaves everything filthy afterwards.

No, this is the term they use to refer to their package of sensors, compute, and software.

In statistics, the p-value is shorthand for “how unlikely was this result.” Smaller p-values indicate less likely results, which in turn creates evidence of a relationship between variables. Many naive approaches to statically analysis place an almost magical value on the 5% threshold, but that’s not actually a rare event if you run dozens of tests. P-hacking generally refers to running tests and discarding the values that do not support what you want to be true. It’s a big problem in academia.

At some point Waymo is going to want a lot of cars if things go well. Those cars need to be electric, due to the power draw of the computer and sensors. A partnership doesn’t necessarily make sense between these companies, but I can see possible synergies.

The Chicago grid is actually based on fractions of a mile (1/8 and 1/16 iirc), and when I lived there I would absolutely convert blocks to miles automatically when talking to people.

How would that be different than property tax, which SF has?

Illegal immigrants are counted by the census and total population is used to allocate congressional districts. High rates of illegal immigrants in a district therefore increases the voting power of the citizens living there. This allows illegal immigration to distort election results without anyone casting a ballot.