My hypothesis is that the disenfranchised young men complaining that they don’t have enough money because of inflation have really just been blowing their money on online sports gambling and refuse to admit it.
It is much simpler than that. My dad watches Fox News all day nonstop. When I say all day I mean he is watching it from the time he wakes up at 6am until going to sleep and doesn’t watch anything else. It does not matter who the democrats field, Fox News will just demonize that person and their viewers will vote accordingly. He does not even agree with any traditionally conservative ideology; he is pro-choice, pro-LGBT rights, pro-union, doesn’t like tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy doesn’t agree illegal immigration is a huge problem, but he votes for Trump because he watches Fox News nonstop. The one common thread among every Trump supporter I know is Fox News.
>The one common thread among every Trump supporter I know is Fox News.
Nobody I know watches Fox News. My social circle is almost entirely current/former US military expats, so it's not easy to even access cable television outside of work, if you even work on a US military base (and not everyone does). Most people are tied into YouTube, podcasts, etc.
Mostly economically liberal, socially conservative, with graduate STEM educations or MBAs. Mostly prime working-age males or kinda close to retirement. Significant over-representation of minorities. Religiously either atheist, Catholic, or Muslim. Almost all vocally Trump-leaning or at the very least VERY anti-woke.
The anti-Trump contingent in my personal life is all older people:
(2) retired boomers, one a white Progressive guy from the Pacific Northwest, the other a black guy from Virginia, both with TDS from consumption of legacy media (NYT in the white guy's case, mainstream cable news in the black guy's case)
(2) almost-retired black women, both unmarried, one with no kids and the other a now-empty-nester with adult adopted children. Both watch a lot of US TV as well.
I only know Cramer from the fun and others meme is been the originator. But that statistics should be taken with caution. Being long equity since 2008 was not really a proof of creating a alpha ( aka adding superior return than the market).
That's the long term low interest rates environment that incentivize W Buffet to make his famous 10 years long sp500 won't be beaten by any HF.
There’s a misconception that bonds are safe investments. They are not. You’re just trading one kind of risk for another. You can do the math, compare 4% and 1.5% compounding for 10 years and that’s why no one wants the bonds yielding 1.5%. Dumping 90%+ of your liquid funds into a single thing other than cash is completely insane especially when it’s not yours.
Treasury bonds are "safe" in the sense that you will (because the US Government will not default on her debt) get your money back. The caveat is you will get your money back at maturity; if you need it before then, well, market value adjusts based on current yields.
If you're investing in bonds without building a ladder you're honestly doing it wrong. With the past 15 years of easy money and low yields it might have seemed pointless given rates barely moved, but completely giving up on any ability to capitalize on higher yields if rates move up is just poor investing :/
Bonds are perfectly safe investments when the normal consideration of safety is that you cannot lose money and you know your exact return through maturity. Can you miss out on better investments, ofcourse. The only issue is investing someone else's money into bonds - because they are the ones to decide when the cash is needed, not you. But I'd be shocked if at any given time at least 90% of cash is not invested in someway. You only want to keep what you need immediately out of investments.
Safe investment means you're not risking losing the money, not that there will never be a better opportunity (that may be just as safe). Alternative cost is not really coming into play here IMO.
I am uneducated in this particular field but my understanding is that salt water is extremely corrosive. Having reliable energy is not just about installation, but also about maintenance and continued operation. The latter is a challenge in a corrosive salt water environment.
Serious answer? Yes. Brooms and mounting panels a foot off the ground works fine. Heat reduces efficiently but by a very, very small amount. Not long ago there was a company posted to HN which puts panels basically flat on the ground, and has a little robot run up and down sweeping them off in Texas.
Much simpler and cheaper and less error prone than a floating array of panels exposed to salt water and waves.
Heat reduces power of PV Panels by up to 10%. Looking at a random spec sheet it's -0.35%/C so from 45C to 75C the difference is roughly 10%. I would not call it "very very small". Also increase in temperature reduces the lifetime of the panels.
That said I too think that taking that hit will never be offset by all the faff of dealing with ocean water, waves etc.
Moreover the big installations in Morocco have not been PV but concentrated mirrors in which case any increase in heat is improvement and brooms are more important.
Brooms cause abrasions, especially when they are moving sand along glass or composite plastics. Non lubricated wipers are fine (but not ideal) for dirt / dust, but not at all comparable for sand.
Yeah, and as far as I am aware, they are all kept clean with water. I'm not aware of a single installation that isn't hooked up to water facilities, let alone plonked down in the middle of a desert.
I'm really not sure why you think washing them with water is vital to make a solar installation worthwhile. Panels have been getting / are dirt cheap, efficiencies have been going up, and that trend will continue for a long time. If $ cost to wash is more than $ increase from cleaner panels, we won't wash them.
Would panels be even efficient for such a project though? I think concentrated solar is better in this case, as it generates power at night, more stable during weather changes, and not subject to heating issues.
There was an article a while back about placing solar panels on California aqueducts. This wasn’t really worth the cost in the analysis, until you considered preventing water loss from evaporation and saving on canal cleaning. I expect solar power from the ocean would lose money, if floating it on land is barely profitable.
Floating windmills sounds like a fun concept. I never heard of it but in theory, with cables securing it to the bottom and weights to keep it upright, I could see it work.
Scotland was big, at one point, on using sea-power. Their idea was more about using the rising/falling/tidal energy to generate electricity via motion:
It is feasible, but it's not something i would recommend doing because it won't solve the underlying issues that causes your unhappiness. Also most people severely underestimate the stress in this job. I've met quite a few doctors who would be equally happy having a cushy job in tech instead of night shifts.
A doctor’s job is definitely much more stressful than a tech job. You are dealing with people’s lives every day and a misdiagnosis could possibly lead to someone’s death. Seldom do you have that level of responsibility in a tech job.
All we can really say is some doctors jobs are more stressful than some tech jobs. A podiatrist, for instance. It's critical work if you have a foot problem and a lot of pain, but it's not the same life and death situation as a ER doctor. On the other hand, if you're responsible for, say, Google or 911 being up, I dare say there's a very high level of responsibility.
It is feasible actually. Graduated med school with two people in their late 30s, early 40s. You didn't ask for it but be forewarned: it'll take 10 years before you have a realistic taste of what the job actually is like. I don't usually speak in absolutes, but I will confidently claim that no amount of shadowing, training, volunteering in clinics/hospitals, or family will provide you with a shortcut to that experience. Could talk for days about this, but I have a cloud to go yell at.
> it'll take 10 years before you have a realistic taste of what the job actually is like.
And if you're taking out loans to go to school, you may have no choice but to continue even if you find out it's not for you. I know someone who's halfway through med school and clearly hates everything about it, but is past the point of no return financially. If she doesn't finish and become a working doctor, she'll never have the income to pay back her debt of several hundred thousand dollars at 7% interest.
Same. Specifically I would want to be a pharmacologist. There are two major barriers that prevented me from considering this route:
I'm a fairly terrible student and 8 years of school wasn't gonna happen.
I can't stand blood/body parts. Even if I got through school I don't think I could stomach a clinical position.
I'm considering the same. Approaching 30 and I've been at FAANGs for half a decade, but I'd love to grab a Doctorate in Physical Therapy and transition away from computing. Not sure how feasible it is in terms of time though... seems like 2 years for pre-reqs and then 3 more years for the DPT program?
If anyone has attempted this I would love to talk.
MD in your 30s, early 30s especially, is possible. Some schools happily accept nontrad applicants, and most will take you if you have a strong background and clear interest.
Now, starting down the MD in your late 40s? Early 50s? Yeah, probably not.
i almost went to med school until i found out about the grueling 24 hour residency shifts. absolutely pointless torture that hurts patients and doctors alike. makes being on call for prod look easy
You fell for the boondoggle. Waymo has a very narrow set of routes you can take. They collect ultra HD maps for those routes in SF which has a completely unsustainable human labor cost. It doesn’t scale to “drive me on any road”. Waymo is localized-only driving funded at a major loss by a search ads monopoly.
Cruise does the same, just with VC money (and weird low-traffic hours of operation).
They have not solved driving in the generic sense and they are fooling you (and investors)
Lucid is a money pit for the Saudis so they have something to point to and show that they’re trying to move away from fossil fuels. You’d have to be completely insane to buy one of those things though. Especially when there are better and cheaper options without warranty risk.
The more I looked at it, the more it seemed obvious that Lucid/etc super small, non-scaled EV startups were to be treated as rich boy toys.
It can't be your primary car. It might need to travel 500 miles to get service and be gone for weeks. It might never get the ADAS software they claim they have in R&D. It might go bankrupt before your warranty is up. It may go to $0 before you can resale it. Etc.
The real problem for Apple ever getting into EVs is that they have not managed US production at scale in decades. This is the challenge of domestic auto sales and what most EV startups are failing at.
So buying a neat-o car that can't scale production & service network isn't going to help Apple much.
My tinfoil hat belief is that the design was solely to please their investors, an electric Mercedes S Class. Sad because it really is the best designed EV in the market IMO.
My success rate over chat is 0%. I just get told over and over that 'Prime guarantees shipping, not delivery. So your package will be shipped within 2 days [or 1 day for 1-day] to the nearest Amazon distribution center. Usually this matches with the delivery date, but not always. The updated delivery date for your order is when you will get it, so we are following our end.'
Give them a link to the terms of service and say "please direct me to the language in your terms of service to that effect." Follow up with "as a paying prime member, I insist on compensation for Amazons failure to meet their guarantee". This has always worked for me. Some reps have pressed back when I insisted on two instances of compensation for one order with two late packages. I replied "I have no sympathy for a multi-million dollar company that fails to meet its obligations." Have gotten several months of prime and gift cards through chat in this way.
They tried that on me today (I've had a bad run this month - I usually have about an order a day)...
Item bought on Monday, with expected -delivery- Wednesday. Late Monday status said "Package has left seller facility and is in transit to carrier".
It's Friday morning now, no package, and status is still "in transit to carrier".
I argued that "Shipped" means the carrier has it. Not that it may or may not be sitting in a corner of a truck for the last week forgotten or unnoticed.
