Viewing profile — travisb

Off-shore isn't available on the same schedule. My AIntern is available the moment I start my day (not normal for off-shore in a different time zone) _and_ is available after the e…

I think a lot of the cost comparisons to employees are off by a factor of 2 or more. AI is the ultimate contractor. Available instantly. Doesn't charge during idle periods. Pre-vet…

Bed length is a silly metric to use. It's single dimensional and doesn't capture any of the other important metrics. Such as width, air-volume, cubed-volume, or weight capacity. Sl…

That presentation doesn't support your claim. The closest it gets is that solar attached to 4 hours of batteries is, ignoring tax credits, about (it's hard to read accurately from …

A big part of it is the industry standard for using the Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCoE) as the benchmark metric. By that metric, solar IS the lowest cost power source. But tha…

Using mandated breaks for recharging heavy trucks isn't actually helpful in much of the world. Maybe it is in parts of Western Europe. The problem is that those mandated breaks are…

I think both Slate and Telos will be failures. They will be too expensive to make economic sense for people, as opposed to businesses, to buy over a more conventional full-size hal…

All the participants in those pilot programs *know* they are in a time-limited pilot programs and that in a handful of years the money will dry up. This is a major flaw in all UBI …

In most cases every residential system is getting payment rates at least that good. The problem is that wH-for-wH doesn't take into account distribution costs, which is most of the…

Even beyond mutual exhaustion is housework. When both partners works outside the home, they still have to do the housework when they get home or on the weekend. Previously that wou…

Linux kernel drivers often end up being GPL'd, but out of tree. This is because Linux releases many very useful (and sometimes critical to the use-case!) functions behind a GPL-lic…

In my experience in corporate environments, that ability to forward to new participants with most of the context is really useful. If few people are going to read the history anywa…

According to this article, a rather weak argument about people not liking to wake up before sunrise based on questionable correlation of commute times to sunrise times, ignoring fa…

I think the hypothesis was more true in the past, but mostly because both the necessary dependencies it is based on are less true today than in the past, and the products and servi…

I think the author is missing the forest for the trees when they try to construct a taxonomy of 'elites'. Firstly, there is little reason to believe that per-capita is the correct …

Harberger taxes seem like a spherical cow solution. It works in abstract economic theory, but encounters serious problems when you introduce pragmatic complications like cash-flow,…

But that's not how it'd work in practice. In practice the spiteful billionaire will monthly send you offers $10K over the higher of your estimate or fair market value. So you'd be …

At 100 people, every desk-job company is already a remote company, even if they don't know it yet. Travel distance between desks has already become so large that many people won't …

Battery swapping has so many serious pragmatic problems I don't think we'll ever see it offered at scale for public use. It could be a fit for large private fleets however. On the …

Your average, rather small, gasoline pump 'charges' an ICE at an average speed around 4000 KW, effectively 1200 KW after accounting for moderate efficiency -- hybrids will get bett…

I've never understood why people have such trouble with having their camera on during video meetings. Is it just some people being conscious of the always true fact that everybody …

My vague understanding of the related laws is that as long as the company has a consistent retention policy and is under neither a court order to increase retention nor retaining r…

At least one video call a day is more about socialization than work; chat and email doesn't really strengthen psychological feelings of connection to the team. Regularly putting a …

Video calls. If you aren't having at least one video call a day something is probably wrong. Configure it such that starting a video call takes no more than 4 clicks. Have a compan…

It sounds like a good deal, hopefully they have mortgage support arranged with their local banks. For many young people, the ticket to getting ahead these days is moving away from …