As someone who went through the last downturn, this isn't looking good in the same ways. Back then I was on a contract that had just completed and as soon as the housing market collapsed all the VC money dried up, established companies did some purse-tightening which included layoffs, and there wasn't a job available to even apply to for almost 6 months.
I work in a more downturn-resistant company now and I should be alright since we were going to be working on some internal projects for the next 6 months or so anyways. But you never know. Any expenses I have at this time are being heavily scrutinized because, like last time, things are going to take 6 months to shake out.
Just FYI, the local area code and Jenny's number (867-5309) is a default that exists for most loyalty programs. So if you don't want to be tracked you can use that. I've heard that this was implemented for military folks who tend to be a lot more transient than regular locals.
> So if you don't want to be tracked you can use that.
Or just not use anything at all. Or do what I do, and prefer shopping at stores that don't have a loyalty program. In my area, stores that have loyalty programs also have higher prices so that the "discount" from the loyalty card makes the price roughly the same as at similar stores that don't have a loyalty program.
So I go to the stores that don't have one. That's not only better for privacy, but is more frictionless and comes with no price penalty.
Another example people use for the KISS principle is of the 'space pen', where the US spent thousands/millions developing a pen that works in space whereas the Soviets used a pencil. However, almost none of the story is true. Regardless, it gets repeated over and over.
I have heard the real reason was to avoid electrical shorts. Pencils inevitably have bits of conductive graphite breaking off and floating about, potentially damaging electrical components
Interesting read! Although it isn’t clear what the combustion source is based upon, on-orbit conditions are generally different from STP and combustion effects may not translate
Uh, false dichotomy. The problem is fictional stories that are propagated as truthful because they reinforce people's biases and/or advance somebody's agenda.
I'm not OP, but I'd guess its because there is a really limited market for mattresses. People of course need and want them, but the turnover is (or can be) a very long time. I have a mattress in our guest bedroom that I used in college, over 20 years ago. It could probably be replaced, but will probably only get replaced with our main mattress when we replace it. It's fine for the minimal guests we have or when my wife or I sleep in it when we are sick (and don't want to keep the other awake).
So for mattresses you really can't afford low margins if you want to stay in business. I can't imagine mattress stores sell more than several mattresses a month. As for why Casper and Purple mattresses are so much when you are supposedly removing the middle-man (the physical stores), I'm not sure. Because they can? I don't really understand why someone would buy one of their mattresses that you can't test out at a store, when you can pay the same price at a store and test out all your options.
Said another way, none of us need to buy mattresses often enough that we are mattress-buying-experts, so we're chumps easily taken advantage of.
This could apply to cars (and it does a bit) but the higher price and social factor makes people understand them more. Mattresses are just cheap enough (with just enough "bargains") that it's easier to just get it over with.
For your last point I'm from Australia so our brands are different but we have plenty of the online foam mattresses. I got one because mattress stores felt a lot like a car sales lot last time - clingy, pressure tactics from someone with a massive information advantage. The online companies all had full refund policies so there's limited risk apart from time.
> Said another way, none of us need to buy mattresses often enough that we are mattress-buying-experts, so we're chumps easily taken advantage of.
But there are people who do buy them often enough - hotels! I like to find a Marriott/Hilton/Hyatt/IHG standard mattress and it should be good enough. Ask a hotel manager to hook you up, should only be $250 to $500 at most for a King.
> I don't really understand why someone would buy one of their mattresses that you can't test out at a store
As someone who bought a mattress online:
1. You don't have to go to a store, which makes it much more convenient to buy.
2. If you don't like it, you can return it for a full refund, so there's no possibility of wasting money on a mattress you don't like.
It's an interesting conundrum - where does skill end and technology pick up the slack? This has played out so many places from the speedsuits in competitive swimming, to space-age materials used for baseball bats and golf clubs, and now running shoes. While these things probably won't help the average Joe much, even a minute change at the top end can mean the difference between millions of dollars in winnings and sponsorships.
There's a CG video of the last 24 hours of Pompeii[0] which shows how the city was completely wiped off the map. It's probably one of the best ways to visualize the disaster and aftermath.
I'm by no means an expert on any of this, but the visualization seems way too slow. When you see how the bodies of people were found, I think it went a lot faster than this video implies.
Pyroclastic flows have been directly measured at up to 90-130 m/s (200-290 mph), though even more typical speeds of 10-100 m/s (22 - 220 mph) exceed the pace of a walking human in good shape, let alone the elderly, young, or infirm. I'm not aware of specific indicated speeds of the 79 CE Vesuvius flows.
Escape on foot would have been at ~5 kph (3 mph). The safest destination from Pompeii, we can say in 2020 with hindsight, would have been perpendicular to the wind flow, to the north-east, at least 10 km (3+ hours continuous walking), up-hill.
Keep in mind that modern vulcanology, meterology, risk analysis, and disaster mitigation were also in their infancies, as well as wide-area information broadcasting, making such information largely unavailable at the time. In particular, the likely "obvious" safety of water (south-west) lead not only toward the centre of the kill zone, but a dead end as well. Walking strictly away from Vesuvius would reduce risk, but involved a longer path to safety than the NE route.
Few people at the time had access to SUVs, high-speed watercraft, helicopters, motorcycles, or bicycles, to aid in escape.
The wind was blowing onshore, a factor substantially credited to the death of Pliny the Elder, who, with the words "Fortune favours the brave" had attempted a sea rescue with his naval fleet, but found itself trapped at the beach. Pliny died there.
Temperatures within the cloud were a minimum of 100C (212F), and reached as much as 360C (500F) or more, all deadly. Wood and human remains at Herculaneum show carbonisation -- effectively having been turned into charcoal. Temperatures were extreme.
The surges themselves occurred well into the eruption, after substantial damage to the city by both earthquakes and bombardment, lasting overnight.
Total volcanic deposits on Herculaneum, which was spared windblown ash and hence resulted only from pyroclastic flows, were 23 meters (75 feet). Digging your way out of 7 storeys of searing-hot rock is a challenge for many people.
Any remaining survivors at the time of the surge would likely have been in terror, sleep deprived, utterly confused by the transformation to their surroundings, and probably not most able to have escaped in the first place. The eruption occurred during a festival in which the local population would have been increased by tourists and visitors. In Pompeii, though the initial pyroclastic surge saw lower temperatures close to the ground, later surgers (by surviving evidence) saw consistent temperatures throughout the vertical column, even at or below ground level. Surviving in a basement or cellar was not an option.
Total population of Pompeii and Herculaneum is estimated at ~16-20k, with about 1,500 bodies having been identified to date. Total victims clearly lie somewhere between these two numbers, and there's little agreement as to the precise number, though a fair argument can be made that mortality was a minimum of 10-20%.
At some point, if you were within the kill zone of Vesuvious, regardless of your mental state or fitness, you were walking dead. You might not have been dead yet, but there was simply no way out or to survivable shelter. There was no survivable shelter within the zone.
Again: by midnight August 28, if you were anywhere but heading north-east of Pompeii, or north-west of Herculaneum, you were already dead.
with about 1,500 bodies having been identified to date.
I had no idea DNA extraction from charred bodies, and XXIIIandMe was so good. Presumably, these were the ones who had vesta scooters, but not fast enough to get out of the pyroclastic flows.
This comment is a rare gem. I'm not sure how you're an expert on all this, but even if you made it all up, it's presented very well with strategic sarcasm to boot.
Some general familiarity, a few recent items read and viewed (prior to today), along with general historical context, and harvesting heavily from the linked Wikipedia article as well as the one on pyroclastic flows.
I may or may not have been trying to put a few additional edges on my principle point.
The problem with the Bitcoin game is there is no longer the 'millionaire overnight' scenario as a possibility. Sure, you could buy 1 coin and it could go up 10x, yet you'd still only be (at this time) $90k richer. Which isn't bad but the big climb from decimal places up to full dollars is where there was more possibility. Common folks can take a gamble on 100 coins for $1 a piece, they really can't take a gamble at $3k+ per coin. Thus, that's why we sit in the $3k to $9k range. Too few people to join, too many people holding on because they bought at a higher price.
I also don't think psychologically people want to own a decimal place of something but that's a different issue. If people could still buy 100 bitcoins, they'd probably do so.
Like I implied, yeah, it would be fine with a lot of people. But that's not the same as buying 100 coins for $100 and then those coins are worth $10k each and you're a millionaire. That big multiplier is what got people interested in the first place, but it's gone. The equivalent of that now (with coins at $9.3k) is 100 coins at $933k. Sure, to make a million you just need to just over double the bitcoin price but you need almost a million dollars to make that happen.
Another psychological phenomenon which I suspect is relevant- people don’t want to buy into something at an exponentially higher price than their peers. I think there’s a spite/jealousy thing between “OG Bitcoiners” and “no coiners”
If you had bought $10 worth of bitcoin starting on Oct 21, 2015, and continued to do so every month for the next four years, your total investment of $480 would be worth around $3,337 today — a gain of 595% (as of 10/21/19).
I live in Beaverton, OR. I'm not a fan of red light cameras but it's not that easy to get a red light ticket. We only have 4 intersections that have red light cameras[0], and they were put in because of the egregious abuse of the intersections. To get a red light ticket you would've had to either ignore or respond to a yellow light way later than anyone would agree is acceptable. There are intersections here where 3 or 4 cars will continue to turn on a red signal - it's insane.
Mr. Jarlstrom's wife may have been an outlier for the hardware and software that calculates the tickets. But, overall, the system is catching folks who are breaking the law.
I bet adding less than 1 extra second to the length of the yellow light will reduce accidents in those intersections too. What he's doing to fix the problem seems fair.
Reducing the accidents (injuries and damages) is better than catching more people.
> There are intersections here where 3 or 4 cars will continue to turn on a red signal - it's insane.
Sounds like targeted enforcement at those intersections is called for.
I spend a lot of time in Beaverton and have had quite a few close calls as a pedestrian. There’s something about the way they teach driving in Washington County...
Yup. If a developer wants to have a FAANG company on their resume they're obviously going to have to jump through some hoops and do what's necessary. Non-FAANG companies are going to have to take what they can get and hope it works out because they aren't worth a long drawn-out hiring process.
Yeah, I can get a bunch of phone screens for opportunities with nearly no effort. If comp's high across the board and I have, say, three or four promising calls within 36hrs of flying my "I'm looking" flag, and one says "we'd like you to come in for a whole day for a half-dozen one-hour interviews" or "we'll give you a 4-hour coding challenge" and the others don't, guess which one's not getting a second conversation? And they know that, so most places aren't pulling that crap. Economy turns around, who knows, probably swing back the other way, but right now? No.
Excellent point. Companies need to make money to keep the doors open. There is no money made in fixing something that isn't broke on the off chance you might end up needing to utilize that code later. Tech debt should be addressed when necessary, not just on a whim because someone is uncomfortable with less-than-optimal code. Refactored code requires testing just like any code update, sometimes more depending on how significant the change is.
I work in a more downturn-resistant company now and I should be alright since we were going to be working on some internal projects for the next 6 months or so anyways. But you never know. Any expenses I have at this time are being heavily scrutinized because, like last time, things are going to take 6 months to shake out.
God speed, everyone.