Locking up is a great way to get some piece of mind. Another way is insurance! It’s not too expensive compared to an expensive bike. You can also setup your own “insurance” by opening a savings account/index funds/rotating CoDs with some money and deposit a monthly value of your choice (gas money saved per month, what private insurance would be, or as a general savings goal).

IMHO, scooters are so inexpensive that it’s not a huge deal to buy a new one when it’s stolen. This is true for ebikes too, though it can be a little more painful. Try comparing such a loss to how much you’re paying for transportation and you’ll find that a bike isn’t the biggest slice of that pie. Use that knowledge to relish the thought with your coffee after not paying for gas or a parking meter.

There are good parking garages and bad parking garages. What makes a good parking garage? I’d say good garages must be:

• Located away from attractions and venues. The garage should not operate as a way to funnel cars into a popular area but rather as a way to store cars for those unfortunate enough to be unable to arrive by alternative means.
• Located close to public transit. The garage should operate as a gateway into a local community, hence should have access to bike paths, trains and trams, buses, etc to carry their passengers into a community.
• Be priced to cover the garage cost. Garages are expensive and the hourly/daily fees with average occupancy should pay for the garage in 10 to 15 years.
• A tool to remove on-street parking and minimum parking requirements.

Bad garages are ones that break the good rules. They are:

• Are free or too cheap to pay off their construction cost and land value in a reasonable time period.
• Located inside downtown areas.
• A method to increase the capacity of car storage in downtowns.

It’s also possible for a good garage to become a bad one. Say a small town installs a parking lot on the edge of town, but then the town grows. That lot should be removed due to the increased land value it occupies. The new medium sized town can consider adding a parking lot or garage again, but certainly not in their popular, profitable, and active downtown.

Absolutely. My comment is about why a regulation would be 2 hours when today we can get more capable, air rated parts. US regulation is lagging behind, but it was based on what was within reach 20+ years ago. Heck, I bet most craft would eventually become 25 hours voice recording as older standard recorders become no longer available.

Flight recorders have a very long history with modern ones being engineered in the 1960s. They used film and magnetic tape loops, having very limited capacity. That’s where we get 2 hours from. Early ones only ran for 30 minutes, so 2 hours is pretty good in comparison.

It’s time to upgrade the regulations to match our current technology instead of 1990s limitations.

Uber has posted profits for the last two quarters. Lyft hasn’t yet been profitable, but they have been reducing their losses quite a bit.

I don’t think either of them will fail this year. Some AI gold rushing unicorns out there certainly will. It’s hard to know which though; they’re still private companies.

Nortel wasn’t killed by Huawei stealing their IP, which certainly did happen. They tanked themselves with some terrible accounting that hid the terrible situation they put themselves in. Nortel and Enron are the reason GAAP is the gold standard and legally required to be reported these days.

There are sailed powered logistics ships! Here’s a grain ship that just launched. There are also companies that produce inflatable or deployable sails to reduce fuel consumption in favorable winds.

Ultimately there will be a need for chemical energy or similarly dense energy to move a ship. The wind doesn’t always blow, and when it does it won’t always be in the direction you want. Nuclear is certainly an interesting option.

A friend of mine explained why it’s important to his kids: they can’t chat with a group of their friends.

Why? Because parents don’t want to install WhatsApp or other group chats due to legitimate concerns about scammers, pedophiles, and other child predators. SMS chat fills that gap, but it breaks horribly for groups bigger than 10 people. Hence if some kid is on Android, they break their chat. Given the penetration of Apple devices, it’s the kids with Android who are considered at-fault. “Just get an iPhone!”

Welcome to anticompetitive practices targeted at your children.

As is typical, this science reporting isn’t great. It’s not only that AI can do it effectively, but that it can do it at scale. To quote the paper:

“Despite these models achieving near-expert human performance, they come at a fraction of the cost, requiring 100× less financial and 240× lower time investment than human labelers—making such privacy violations at scale possible for the first time.”

They also demonstrate how interacting with an AI model can quickly extract more private info without looking like it is. A game of 20 questions, except you don’t realize you’re playing.

Tech has been in aggressive growth mode since 2008 because the Fed was handing out free money (interest rate lower than inflation). That allowed investors to dump money into tech businesses in hope of rapid business expansion, which in turn makes the business more valuable.

The free money dried up. Now these tech businesses are going to find out if they’re sustainable.

I’m not familiar with that YouTube channel, but the story absolutely repeats itself. A business will eventually die if it cannot turn around its finances and cannot raise money.

They may have cut themselves. Usually high level cuts are announced as “leaving for an amazing opportunity” or to “focus on family” or similar. That happens a month or two later after a deep layoff round and reorganizing. We’ll see if these recent layoffs included executives by Q1 next year. Watch LinkedIn if you’re that curious.

Still, it’s unfair to the lower levels, including line management, because they don’t get that option. It’s a “thank you for your service” and a boot out the door.

Note: not all tech companies are like this. Gumroad is an excellent example of a very open and ran-differently business.

Q3 just ended. These layoffs are because the books are not looking good. Everyone is hurting with inflation and higher interest, tech being particularly vulnerable to high interest rates.

I can only hope the execs cut correctly. A second round of layoffs at a company can destroy morale enough to sink the company. Who wants to continue working at a place that fired your close peers, wondering if you’re next?