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My impression, from talking with a few folks who live in HK, is that they expected a long, slow erosion, and what they got was much faster and more aggressive. Protesting isn't safe, government officials have to be vetted by the mainland (so while there's elections, they don't mean very much), new laws keep getting passed to further restrict peoples' liberties, there's a mandatory tracking app you're supposed to install on your phone (ostensibly for covid reasons), etc.
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Jan 30, 2024 15:58
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Borscht posted:The thing about housing supply is, you can’t really move them around that much. But with luck, lumber will get cheaper. I'm no expert, but my impression is that construction supply is pretty local -- that is, you buy from the mills at the closest forest. I'm sure that some lumber, plywood, etc. gets shipped across the world (if nothing else, "Baltic birch plywood" is a well-known product in the USA). But I have my doubts that reduced demand in China is going to meaningfully affect lumber prices in the non-China-local parts of the world. (Notwithstanding that they probably mostly use steel and concrete anyway)
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Jan 31, 2024 03:26
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The "you have to laugh because the alternative is crying" joke in gamedev is that the only people who still have jobs are indies, who can't be fired but aren't being paid anyway.
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Feb 2, 2024 19:45
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Lockback posted:Gamedev has always been big boom and bust cycles though. While this is true, usually the cycles are less synchronized across companies. Like, an individual company laying off a bunch of people is commonplace, but every company laying off 25+% of their workforce in the space of one year? Anyway, point is more to reinforce that some industries are suffering badly, even if the average person is doing better.
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Feb 2, 2024 20:18
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As a non-expert, I definitely have the impression that in the last 20 years, the amount of money sort of "sloshing around" looking for returns has increased, and separately, high-frequency trading has definitely increased. I feel like both of these contribute to instability in the markets. They're not going to cause market crashes on their own, probably, but they make everything harder to predict. That said, again this is just my impression, and I welcome more nuanced perspectives.
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Mar 8, 2024 01:11
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pyknosis posted:what recipe are you substituting peaches for pumpkin Given that it's canned pumpkin, probably in pies?
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Mar 12, 2024 21:30
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:What's the actual national security risk? Mismanagement putting the company into ill health, which causes the country to become reliant on imports from unreliable trade partners. I don't think that a Japanese firm would have any incentive to intentionally sabotage the company. Japanese and American interests on the international stage are thoroughly aligned, and will be for the foreseeable future.
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Mar 13, 2024 19:56
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Cyrano4747 posted:I'd be shocked if it's cheaper for Nippon Steel to import coal from the US than from someplace in Asia, likely China. I think the idea was "the blast furnace must be kept running because it creates domestic demand for coal", not "Nippon Steel wants to buy this blast furnace as a way for them to get access to US coal supplies". In other words, it's answering "why is this smelter a national priority", not "why would NS want to buy it".
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Mar 14, 2024 20:56
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Hadlock posted:Will advanced industrial countries avoid invasions in the future due to drones? Speaking specifically to this point, I think the main thing that drones change about invasions is that asymmetric matchups become more symmetrical. That is, if you're a strong nation invading a weaker one, you can still expect to take a significant amount of damage from drones, because even a weak economy can afford to slap a grenade on a quadcopter or RC airplane. Defending against this kind of offense is hugely more expensive than the offense itself. That said, the disincentives to invade other countries were already strong enough to dissuade most countries. Russia will be feeling the economic effects of this war for decades to come at least, and most of that impact comes from being economically isolated, from their leadership burning through their local and international credibility, and from the death toll among their young able-bodied population. Relatively little has to do with drones.
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Mar 20, 2024 18:19
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Mustang posted:Interestingly it's local government jobs (at least in the Seattle area) that seem to have the most WFH opportunities. Pretty much every government job I applied for was like 90-100% WFH. Government jobs have traditionally had better work-life balance than industry jobs, I guess this is just another facet of that. Plus, it's a thing employees want that also reduces their expenses, it's win-win.
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Apr 5, 2024 23:24
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the silent majority of unemployed workers
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Apr 8, 2024 21:54
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Angry rants aside, I am curious about the average worker's take-home pay, and how that compares with inflation. Where would I go to look up those numbers?
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Apr 9, 2024 00:55
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It's really weird how 10-15 years of ridiculously low rates have skewed peoples' perceptions of what is normal.
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Apr 10, 2024 19:01
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Cugel the Clever posted:Just?! alright, fine, just a pale imitation of a train 
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Apr 11, 2024 16:58
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I'm gonna assume that this is driven more by Musk's feelings (especially, whatever he's going through after his baby turned out to be a flaming turd) than it is about anything to do with running an effective company. It could even be "fire the people who are being effective because they're making me look bad", though that is extremely speculative.
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May 1, 2024 01:56
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Hadlock posted:I make somewhere north of that number and we went from a couple times a month as a convenience thing, to, probably twice a month as a special treat for our toddler, entirely due to price. I would have figured 40% or higher You went from 2x/month to 2x/month? I'm guessing that should be 2x/week to 2x/month?
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May 11, 2024 17:42
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Baddog posted:One of the cooler things is the battery swap, where you just pull into a station, get an entire battery change in ~1 minute and just keep moving. Tesla's superchargers are nice enough and way faster than the others, but it still takes about half an hour to get an 80% charge from near zero. And you're tied to your battery, which is slowly degrading and starting to become a problem for the people with older teslas. Getting a new battery is prohibitively expensive. China has had their design out there for long enough to build these stations *everywhere*. Why haven't any of the western designers copied that innovation and made it so that changing the battery pack on your car is as easy as swapping the battery on your drill? Who knows. Slow as poo poo. Batteries being of variable quality, you might swap out "your" good battery for "their" bad battery, and be hopping mad about it. You could also potentially build counterfeit batteries and use the exchange system to get real batteries in exchange. How realistic these scenarios are doesn't do much to affect peoples' attitudes. That said, if these battery exchanges are widespread in China, I have to assume they've dealt with these issues there already. ...though they might have "solved" them through mass surveillance, which isn't exactly ideal.
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May 15, 2024 13:24
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I think it was the Ask a Traffic Engineer thread where someone mused about having a separate set of roadways for cargo, to which it was pointed out that this would make it very starkly clear to everyone just how much road taxes go to subsidize truck-based cargo transport. Damage to roads scales with weight of vehicle to the fourth power (actually scales with axle load, but still). So yes, making everyones' daily drivers ~1.5x heavier would have an impact, but they're still lost in the impact from one or two big rigs, or even just the people driving F-350s.
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May 15, 2024 20:36
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Lockback posted:Those dedicated roads should have metal bars you can clamp on to improve efficiency and keep you moving in the right direction. Yes, that was also pointed out to the poster, how you can reduce road wear by having a metal road and metal wheels. Gotta keep them narrow to save on costs, but with a proper design you can just install a basic guide systems to keep the vehicle on the road.
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May 15, 2024 21:03
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bob dobbs is dead posted:the funny thing, tho, is that the usa does more freight train volume per capita than europe. euros do 3 trillion ton-km, americans do 2 trillion, but there's 750 million europeans to 350 million americans. the vaunted rest-of-world superiority is almost entirely passenger, but that's because american aviation is so dominant How much of that is down to Americans having a vastly lower population density and thus needing to ship things further? Americans also consume more products, generally, so that's also more stuff to be shipped around.
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May 15, 2024 22:25
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Bear in mind that a substantial fraction of the people buying F150s specifically want the biggest truck they can afford. They'd buy 350s if they could swing it. It's not about finding the right vehicle for their practical needs, because that vehicle would be a small sedan or a bicycle. It's about their emotional and social needs (specifically, the social need to be seen as part of an in-group that values big trucks).
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May 16, 2024 01:27
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Lockback posted:I just assumed they cashed in on a couple quarters of Hyrbid sales in exchange for being on their back foot. Just because they're Toyota doesn't mean they don't have terminal corporate brain. It's more "why did they make a big investment into hydrogen cars when everyone else was going EV". And yeah, the rumors I've heard basically boil down to "they weren't willing to abandon engines". Whether that's because they perceived their engine expertise as being a major competitive advantage, or if it was because of internal politics, or if they thought that battery tech wouldn't be able to mature fast enough to be compelling, I don't know.
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May 16, 2024 15:53
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Hadlock posted:A lot of the manufacturing has moved from China to Vietnam, but when someone says "made in Vietnam" I don't see anyone holding their nose My intuition on this is that most American consumers don't really have the headspace to have opinions on more than 2-3 other nations at a time. So if they're already your standard American bigot (anti-China, anti-Russia, anti-*waves vaguely at Southern America*), they're not gonna be remotely equipped to have an opinion on anywhere else.
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May 16, 2024 17:07
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 09:00 |
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Hadlock posted:TL;DR is this electric cars' cambrian explosion period There's certainly a history in the past ~20 years of US companies trying weird EVs, especially trikes, and generally failing at them.
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May 16, 2024 20:21
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