I was a computer science student at NC State in the late 1990s. I took his Discrete Math course (a big seminar) and did a graduate-level independent study led by both him and Thom Hodgson, an IE professor. As an alum, I always stopped by his office to visit with him and his students, and he could always find time to ask what I was working on and if I had time for lunch or a game of handball.

Don loved students and teaching, allowed his graduate students far more breadth to run the office and the courses than most professors, and was a pretty dang good handball player. His office had an old couch facing a chalkboard, and there always seemed to be undergrads, grad students, and/or professors working on something on that board. He allowed his undergrad students to work and rework and rework assignments; anyone who eventually did A-level work earned an A in his course. Between the chalkboard and the students re-working, there was always a buzz in the office that made you feel like you were part of something special.

We'll miss you old friend.

Perhaps you missed the part about the fact that she was shot to death. Of course the modern interpretation of the Second Amendment plays a role in the massive number of guns in America and, by extension, the ease with which people obtain them.

C'mon, man.

But you did blow past an important point -- you assumed a single breadwinner was paying the full $2k rent.

If you've got a spouse or partner, you might well could both be working. If you don't, you might could get a roommate.

I'm not arguing this makes you Monopoly moneybags man, or that every person will be able to cohabitate in some way with a second breadwinner, but it's quite common, and it gets each of the two people an additional $1000/month in their pockets, significant in your example.

Not quite. Two "half buses" still cost more than one bus with respect to both capital and maintenance costs. In addition, I would presume the capital costs of a self driving bus are higher than a human-driven bus of the same size, but am not certain of that assertion.

The upside is that more "half buses" means the bus comes more frequently, dramatically reducing your wait time (at the stop or inside because the bus isn't scheduled to arrive for x minutes).

Build (or buy!*) a Research 1 university and endow a treasure large enough so that tuition (inc. fees) is ~500 hours of federal minimum wage, in perpetuity.

It's not just those students who will benefit from a high-quality low-debt education. Every student will benefit when colleges and universities competing against those low-debt schools find ways to tighten up their own tuition and fees. The consequence is making college more affordable to millions of kids a year, and that's one hell of a multiplier.

* consider Rice or Carnegie Mellon, or Cooper Union for a smaller effort.

Power plant are typically described with a unit of power (MW, or GW). A 600 MW power plant can produce a peak output of 600 MW. Run it for an hour, and you've got 600 MWh of electric energy.

This plant is described as "60GW in size" and that it "will be powered by 60GW of behind the meter solar and wind power." Surely they're not using units the same way; no way it's powered by 60 full-size nuclear units worth of power.

Elsewhere in the writeup, we see "60 gigawatts of green hydrogen every year." I'm wondering if they mean 60 GWh of hydrogen per year. At 8760 hours per year, that maps back to a 7 MW power plant, about the output of a single modern wind turbine in good, windy conditions.

So, what gives? Just how much electricity will this facility consume in a year? How much hydrogen (in kgs, or in MWh-capability, or some appropriate unit) will this plant actually produce?

Biden apparently made no such promise. According to this article, Why Hasn't Joe Biden Forgiven All Your Student Loan Debt? Short Answer: He Never Promised To. If you have evidence to the contrary that he promised it rather than encouraged it, please provide that evidence.

What percent of the population is under 18, 18+ but a full time student, or retired? Not 61 percent, but a good chunk. After all, just about 40 percent of Americans are under 18 or over 65.

Putting gasoline in an automobile is work. Ringing up groceries is work. If you are employed in this job, and you are paid for it, it is in no way fake.

Houston proper is 669 sq miles.
San Francisco is < 47 sq miles.


If your stats are for the data within city boundaries, you're comparing avocados and watermelons. Downtown areas have much higher housing costs (and smaller homes) than more suburban areas. San Francisco is urban proper; Houston as a whole is incredibly suburban.

Again, if you're comparing city proper. If, on the other hand, you compared equal land areas around the cities, all the area with a 75 mile commute to downtown, or some other apples-to-apples metric, good on ya.

Is it blocking ads only for elections that are held on November 3? I couldn't find an answer to that.

1. Some states have runoff elections. The November 3rd election determines the top-two finishers, who then compete in a second election. For example, Louisiana's runoff is December 5, 2020. Georgia's is December 7, 2020. For candidates who are in those elections, can they run ads?

2. What about special elections for vacancies that occur after November 3? Districts (states, cities, counties, etc.) could have elections in January or February 2021, often as a result of a current officeholder winning an election on November 3, 2020 for a different position. For candidates who are in those elections, can they run ads?

3. Some communities have elections in months other than November, including in some cases in the Spring. For candidates who are in those elections, can they run ads?

4. What about future elections, say primaries and the general election in 2022? For candidates who are in those elections, can they run ads?

I get that lots of folks on slashdot simply don't like political ads. I suggest that the alternative may be worse -- allowing Alphabet and Facebook and Apple and a few others the ability to influence politics in the US without allowing those with other points of political view from creating advertisements that persuade viewers in favor of policies that are antithetical to Silicon Valley's profit margins.

Want to keep pavement cooler? Put it in the shade. Street trees that give shade (not palm trees) provide all kinds of benefits to human health, as well as the health of other flora and fauna.

I have a family of four, live near good mass transit, and don't own a car (nor does my spouse). We own two parking spots at our home and live comfortably.

Lyft -- along with walking, mass transit, ZipCar, car rental, bike share, and my own bike -- allow my family to continue not owning a car. Lyft is a pretty important part of that, because it covers trips to the doctor, trips with a big package, last minute efforts, etc.

If I owned a car, I'd drive it a whole lot more than my current ZipCar, car rental, and 2x Lyft rides. This is intuitive. The marginal cost of driving your own car is something like $0.50/mile, and that's if you internalize all costs and not just gas. The marginal cost of an uber is a few bucks a mile in a dense area, due to congestion. Higher price, reduced use. Econ 101.

Lyft helps me reduce traffic in my region by reducing my total miles on the road because it's a key component of me being voluntarily car-free. Is my status unique? Nope. Does it dominate the stories across all urban areas? Probably not. But if we characterize vehicles on a roadway as (a) commercial, (b) personal owned-and-operated, and (c) taxi/TNC, what category do you think is biggest? I think it's rarely (c), particularly during times of peak congestion.

Single occupancy owned and operated autos dominates congestion. Focusing on Uber and Lyft as the cause of congestion is focusing on the sawdust in another driver's eye and ignoring the plank in one's own.

Cooking with electricity: you could use an old, electric cooktop. Or you could use induction. Induction uses about half the Btus to boil water, because the energy is directed to the pot itself, not the air around it. So in addition to being faster, not emitting pollutants in your home, and not being a fire or explosion risk, induction cooktops use less energy for cooking.

Heating water with electricity: air source heat pump tanked water heaters are more efficient than gas, particularly in places that don't get especially cold (like, say, Berkeley).

Drying with electricity: Gas dryers use more energy (kWh-equivalent) than electric models. Newer electric (condensing, or condensing with heat pump) use even less electricity than traditional electric dryers. See Table 6, third column of
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.energystar.gov%2Fsit... (pdf).

If you prefer gas cooking because you like to see the fire, because you like to light your smokes off the flame, because you don't have magnetic pots, that's cool. If you prefer gas dryers because they dry faster, that's cool too. But don't make energy efficiency claims that are flat wrong.

You're right that the variable operating and maintenance cost is low. VOM is fuel and all costs that scale linearly with the amount of generation. Simple wear and tear, some labor, that sort of thing. However, nuclear power plants have significant capital investment requirements. CapEx are expenses on infrastructure that depreciate over 5, 10, even 20+ years. CapEx investments are necessary to maintain a safe, efficient plant, and are often executed during a refueling stage. As plants get older, CapEx gets even more challenging because more investments are necessary. Because you might be replacing parts on something designed 40 or 50 years ago, replacements aren't always easy to obtain "off the shelf," driving up prices even more. In the United States, we've had several nuclear power plants retire in the past few years because, despite "already built and running," their VOM + CapEx requirements penciled out at more than the ~$30MWh that we're seeing for wholesale electricity prices (plus very low capacity payments in many markets). Dozens more have been placed on the dole, receiving (or claiming need) for subsidies to remain open. A strong case can be (and is being) made to pay the subsidies to keep the plants open, because the sheer quantity of very-nearly-carbon-free electricity is enormous. But the claim that nuclear power plants are "dirt cheap to operate" isn't true on a multi-year basis, because of the CapEx requirements.