Sorry about the link.

This is the link

It was tried by the French (around the same time the Metric system was introduced) and was very unpopular, eventually being abolished.

My bet is that it is because 3600 is evenly divisible by 2,3,4,5,6,8,9,10, ... This is far more practical than decimals which only have 2,5 as divisors. (I also think that units like the Foot/Inch remained popular because 12 is evenly divisible by 2,3,4,6).

My bet is that he did make those companies more productive. He consistently outperformed the market even after he became a significant player in the market which shows that he didn't just neglect his investments. Note: productive does not necessarily mean good. Many employees may have suffered from "productivity gains".

The question is who can better manage those assets? Is it better that those assets are sold to the general market (where the incentives are for short-term gain)? Or to keep it in the family? Do Buffet's heirs have his ability to invest for the long-term? My bet is that neither will be as good as what exists now. Many a family business has gone broke because the inheritors didn't know what made the business successful in the first place.

I don't think "honey" will evaluate it in the same way.... people do still put 2 and 2 together to get 4. Just because there is "plausible deniability" doesn't mean it passes the smell test. People aren't stupid. Well, some are but not all, especially when it concerns a subject that is important to them.

As much as tech people like to think that video conferencing is great, in-person is still superior. Just look at Video Call Glitches Evoke Uncanniness, Damage Consequential Life Outcomes. Maybe the cost/benefit is for video conferencing, but realize that online solutions are much less than perfect.

The US is currently filtering out far more than just terrorists. Anyone who has expressed anything negative about the current administration risks being denied entry. I have a couple of British friends who were stopped and interrogated for 5 hours (both highly paid US professors in their 60s - not terrorists at all, though perhaps a little too lefty). They are likely to leave the country once their contract finishes. Who would want to continue to put up with that? Their story isn't unique and the reason why many are choosing to avoid the US.

Just a few days ago, Trump sanctioned a person (Imran Ahmed) whose crime was to criticize social media (and in particular Twitter/X) - a perfectly legal activity and not at all associated with terrorism. He is a permanent resident of the US with an American wife and child. The first amendment ought to protect him but if he can't get a judge to stop it, he will likely be deported (a judge has prevented immediate deportation).

So, I would say you are very naive if you think it is about terrorists. It is about controlling the dialog within the US.

Good storytelling is going away. The reason? Portable telephones. People interact very differently these days. A lot of communication is via text, photos, short videos. The art of conversation suffers and with it the art of storytelling. As the generation who grew up with this grows older and becomes the generation writing new stories/scripts, the dialog becomes more trite, more forced and unnatural. Market forces too are causing problems. It is more profitable to have short videos than 30+ minute episodes. TicToc is winning.

(And yes, I realize I may need to don my flame resistant outfit for this post... it likely will provoke some reactions).

Damn... yet another red scare

I realize this probably won't be read by many people as the story is getting old.

There may be perverse effects to taxing driving and might have the opposite effect of what you think it does. A dedicated source of funding reduces incentives for the government to reduce use - indeed the government may encourage increased use as it becomes profitable to do so.

If funding comes out of general taxes, there are incentives to the government to encourage alternatives. It costs less to maintain a road for a bicycle trip than a car trip so there is incentive to encourage it. Public transportation becomes more obviously cheaper as road maintenance and public transportation are now in the same budget and the tradeoffs must be debated.

While it isn't part of the study, I am willing to bet that audio-only glitches are less important than video glitches with respect to perception. We are used to audio being drowned out by something else. In another post I referred to evolutionary reasons for video glitches being so disturbing. Audio is different than video... there are often other noises that might drown out the signal (e.g. a bird squawking during conversation or a baby crying) but the video is rarely interrupted. So the effect of audio glitches is probably much, much less. This is a guess and would warrant a study.

Or, we could accept that any attempt at a millage tax just won't work. This is the basic reason we HAVE general taxes. Some things can't be taxed per-use. Indeed, attempting to do so might actually be inefficient as well as incentivizing cheating.

Yes, but on top of that do you want to be billed for your every movement? More seriously, the current state of affaires is that there are still a lot of information silos rather than true centralized data collection. Centralizing it to collect a tax will make things far, far worse. There is no way that information won't be used for other purposes.

Personally, I judge people on whether they can correctly use "too" when appropriate. ;)

Maybe. Or maybe many millions of years of evolution has created brains that make snap judgements because it is more efficient to do so. Evolution has probably created a rule that if something looks odd, it likely is odd and ought to be treated as such. Much of this sort of processing isn't done at a conscious level - so overriding it is hard.