If they have 5M downloads and $2M revenue in a single month, what they've succeeded at is marketing and activation, which is significantly harder than just vibecoding an app and getting it on an appstore. The app itself sounds like absolute nonsense, but they've managed to make a buck with it.

Unfortunately, Eucalyptus is not native to CA, and has become invasive growth in a lot of areas. If you've driven by giant Eucalyptus groves anywhere up and down the CA coast, then you'd understand why they get out of hand. But yes, getting rid of them would probably help. You left out that they shed and peel huge piles of kindling as they grow!

The Chicago fires would not have taught one how to address wildfire conditions in the ex-urbs and greater metro areas built into the hills surrounding Las Angeles. The actual urban areas of Las Angeles *did not burn*. The conditions that caused the severity of the 1871 fire have largely been addressed everywhere already.

In which municipality was Adam Carolla the fire chief, and for how many years? Oh right, none, so he's been talking out of his ass for over two decades. Got it.

..or extreme weather and Santa Ana winds. California doesn't have incompetence or underfunded fire depts (see https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgavinnewsom.com%2Fcalifo...) that would increase wildfires, but yes, those could certainly be a problem elsewhere.

First off, please stop spreading fake news. Newsom has already addressed all of your misinformation/disinformation here: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgavinnewsom.com%2Fcalifo...

A lot of the property up in the hills is large private lots, so who is going to clear the brush? California already has the leading forestry maintenance in the U.S. in terms of spend and expertise, and that includes clearing brush. The right-wing media apparatus just heard of this term, "brush clearing", and decided California doesn't do it, and that that incompetence exacerbated the fires. In reality, winds were carrying cinders hundreds of meters in all directions due to hurricane-force winds, and it didn't matter what brush you cleared because the cinders were going to reach the next flammable thing, no matter what.

California had plenty of water and full reservoirs. Having the water is different than *delivering* the water. There is no human-made system on earth that can instantaneously move a reservoirs' amount of water from one place to another, just like there's no road system on earth that can move a full stadium's worth of cars across the city at the same time. You don't build a municipal water grid to handle 100x the volume of water that a community could ever use, because the cost to build and maintain it would be prohibitive. Similarly, when dozens of crews were fighting fires all across the LA hills, the rate of water exceeded what the water grid could deliver, because it was a circumstance never before encountered.

Another observation is that there was a correlation between companies that made political donations to Trump and co, and those who received exemptions from tariffs. So, stupefyingly, it appears that some of these broad tariffs are just a very basic protection racket. Trump raises the price of *everything* by 20%, then says to literally everyone, "hey, that's a very nice business you got there, shame if you had to pay 20% more in taxes. Why not kick us a few million, then you can "enjoy" the higher prices while we split the difference?"

How much would your cost to cook your own food change if you didn't have a car, didn't live near a grocery store, didn't have a kitchen, and didn't have time to cook? Additionally, at what point in time did your time become worthless? If you add in the cost of your time to shop and prepare and clean at an hourly rate of, say $25/hr. Now your meals are closer to $20-30 each, and the fast food (with the same time/opportunity costs baked in) is coming in around half that. Having the time and agency to prepare your own food is a luxury not everyone shares. So, first start with an honest accounting, then second, be thankful that *you can afford to save money* by translating your time and effort into an efficient dietary regime. For many people, your routine is enabled through luxuries they simply don't get to enjoy.

Does Van Tulleken have an actual definition of ultra-processed foods? I've read about a dozen books on food politics, food manufacturing, industrial food supplies, etc. by various nutritionists, food anthropologists, and investigative journalists, and I don't know what ultra-processed foods is supposed to mean. Food processing occurs on an infinite spectrum, and there is either some cut-off point after which food goes from 'processed' to 'ultra-processed', or it is a label with little hard-and-fast meaning. Or, maybe, there is just some concise definition, but I have yet to encounter it (it seems relatively recent in the food politics/industry popular literature).

It would take all of a couple hours and maybe a few $100 (in 2024 dollars, scale accordingly throughout history) to create a series of reference photos with a photographer, high end equipment, accurate colors, with the purpose of dedicating those works to the public domain. Note: works do not enter the public domain by "declining to enforce" rights, they enter through express written dedication to the public domain under US copyright law (I feel like Berne or Paris also include this requirement, but I'm not diving into international IP on the weekend), and this can be done by any rights holder. Then all of the image processing industry can start to use these royalty-free, rights-free images.

Realistically, I doubt it. The coding and workplace functions are far more in line with an investment of this size. If all they wanted was to spin up more catfishing bots and generate fake profiles, they can do that with GPT-3.5 or Llama2 and not spend 8-figures a year on it. Purchasing a thousand enterprise licenses is for cheaper GPT-4 powered answers via ChatGPT+, which lets you do very token-intensive queries at a flat cost-per-seat.

Spinning up chatbots was something they already did with BERT and earlier models. Doing that with today's models is much easier, and they would be over-paying by a factor of 100, and don't need enterprise subscriptions of anything to accomplish that.

You are conflating *income tax* with ALL TAXES, which is incorrect. Federal Income Tax comprises about 26% of all taxes collected by State and Federal governments. Top AGI earners pay a large amount of the federal income tax. That's 1/4 of the puzzle. The rest of the taxes are relatively flat, or consumption-based (e.g. regressive), and virtually irrelevant to high earners, but constitute a significant amount of ordinary people's tax burden.

Their model is a form of micro-lending that is not classified as credit in most jurisdictions. It still relies heavily on interest rates being low, so the recent macro economic shifts raising interests rates have made their model considerably worse. Also, to the extent that inflation lowers consumer confidence, that is also hurting their business in the form of fewer overall transactions.

Yes. 230(c)(1) includes "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

So a poster proposing a sale is the speaker who is attempting to form a contract. Liability to the platform for a contract for sale is treating the platform as the speaker. However, Section 230 has two exceptions for both violations of federal criminal law, and federal intellectual property law (and now assisting or enabling sex trafficking post FOSTA-SESTA), so while section 230 might provide immunity for a contract breach claim, it doesn't provide that for federal criminal violations or intellectual property violations.

They had a tiny bit of setup that (according to the internets) referenced some of the other novels in the series that take place on a colony world a few decades later.