There’s a now quite dated comment from Merlin Mann: "Joining a Facebook group about productivity is like buying a chair about jogging.”
It’s fuzzy - but my recollection was Mann was a fairly renown productivity influencer (although I guess we wouldn’t have called it that then), who had an apostasy about it all.
I think he had a blog called LifeHacker and/or 36 folders (I don't know if they were his or just a writer, but I remember following him back in the day).
It's wild to think that was almost 20 years ago when Getting Things Done was going through tech circles as the organization method dujour. (I also equate the same time period with learning Ruby on Rails.)
Merlin ran 43folders.com[1]. That domain name was a reference to GTD's tickler files[2].
Merlin did not have anything to do with Lifehacker.com. Gina Trapani[4] founded Lifehacker[3]. But, Lifehacker often covered and was inspired by Merlin's work.
F1's official site has improved significantly since 2021, now scoring 75+ on mobile PageSpeed Insights vs ~45 back then. They've reduced initial payload by ~40% and implemented better image optimization techniques, though they still lag behind some team sites like McLaren's.
> Home runs, walks, and strikeouts now dominate baseball, with 35% of plate appearances ending without involving seven defensive players. This has reduced balls in play by 20% since 1980, creating longer games with less action
Do baseball fans ever discuss potentially changing the rules or game setup to mitigate this?
> Nearly a quarter of the way into the 2023 regular season, the rule changes MLB implemented this year are continuing to have their intended effects -- namely, a quicker pace resulting in a significant reduction in overall time of games, more hits and more steal attempts.
Yes. In the past MLB lowered the pitcher’s mound and widened the strike zone to benefit hitters, and there’s been talk in recent years of doing it again, or moving back the mound. The league also recently instituted the pitch clock, which helped hitters a little.
There is no risk free investment that will return you 12%. In a year where you are down 30% are you still contributing 5% on initial capital?
If not, you are just constructing an instrument where you only pass through downside risk
For all practical purposes you can - and the world broadly does - consider e.g. TBills to be risk free (or take your favourite interbank lending rate etc etc).
The US government has confiscated value from T Bills before.
The government used to sell two bond types - dollar bonds that paid off in dollars, and gold bonds that paid off in gold. The gold bonds were safer and hence paid a lower interest rate.
Enter FDR. FDR decided to pay off the gold bond holders in dollars, not gold, and since the value of gold vs dollars had diverged substantially, FDR confiscated the difference.
That was the end of the phrase "sound as a dollar". Gee, I wonder why nobody says that anymore!
The largest risk of TBills is that inflation will shrink their value, and with catastrophic deficits that is a very, very real risk. That's why I don't invest in bonds or any investment that is denoted in dollars.
>>That's why I don't invest in bonds or any investment that is denoted in dollars.
Most investments seem to eventually (?) denominate into USD equivalents, especially if you live in the US. Do you mean hard(er) assets like real estate or commodities (which also leaves me puzzled because they’re still typically denoted in an underlying fiat currency and especially USD if they’re domestic assets).
Being "denoted in dollars" means the returns are a specified number of dollars. Stocks, on the other hand, are "denoted in shares of the company" and the returns are the change in value of the company.
The share value is price x shares, so there’s an effective dollar numeraire.
It’s easy to imagine a well performing stock that neverless loses due to a currency shock. Indeed this is why one would typically hedge currency risk if trading a name outside of accounting currency
This is heterodox opinion to modern financial theory. You’re welcome to hold it, I’m not interested in trying to convince you otherwise — I think it undermines the larger point I’m trying to make in an unhelpful way.
There's no competition that's running on copper -- even competitors without latency sensitivity with still be running over fibre because that's just the baseline infrastructure in datacentres, transatlantic etc.
Of course, yes, the HFT firms will be using also the standard tricks of microwave towers, shortwave radio, weather balloon etc, to beat the fibre route.
> Also worth considering is that, even if higher limits reduce the rate of accidents, accidents at higher speeds are almost universally more severe.
Obviously this is true, and especially important at low speeds, but I wonder how much difference there is between 70 and 80 — I would have assumed they are both typically fatal
The energy is exponential. It takes 30% farther to stop going 80 than it does going 70.
One of my favorite trivia is the scenario that a car going 50 mph sees an obstruction in front and slams on its brakes and stops just in time just tapping it. A car next to him going 70 mph sees the same object, has faster reflexes, and hits his brakes at the exact same spot of the road. He slams into the object at 50 mph.
Just the difference between 70 and 80 is the energy of going almost 40 mph.
Another related pet peeve is when I see cyclists going the wrong way in a bike lane. On a 40 mph road a cyclist has a differential with traffic of 20-25 mph. An accident would be serious by likely non-fatal. When you ride the wrong you you add the speeds and make nearly all collisions fatal.
> The energy is exponential. It takes 30% farther to stop going 80 than it does going 70.
That's when the issue is stopping distance.
The issue on highways is that you have, for example, two cars in the left lane going 55 MPH and a third approaches going 70 MPH. One of the slower cars sees this and moves over but only at the same time as the faster car is changing into the same lane to pass on the right, so now both lanes are blocked, the faster car hits one of them and they're both edged off the road into a stationary object at highway speeds.
Does it matter if they hit the stationary object with significantly more energy? Probably not; dead is dead.
I guess that's theoretically possible, but even in that rare case, people are going to break if they hit someone. Driving too slow causes some accidents but they rarely lead to deaths. AFAIK, driving too slow is such a minor safety issue that no study has been carried out to ascertain exactly how bad it is though.
The trouble with that one is that it's the one caused by people driving too slow, and isn't rare. When people are driving at significant speed differentials to each other, it causes a lot of lane change maneuvers. Which are dangerous because each one is a chance to move into a lane without realizing there is someone in your blind spot, or that the new lane has an obstruction ten feet in front of you, or focus your attention on what's happening in the lane you're intending to change into and fail to notice an immediate hazard in the lane you're still in. So you get more accidents, and those accidents are still happening at highway speed.
Meanwhile a significant proportion of accidents happen not because you couldn't stop fast enough but because you couldn't stop at all. Another driver side swipes you and rams you off the road and you're now three feet from a head-on collision with a utility pole; if you can even get your foot to the brake before impact it's not going to save you. You're driving on an apparently clear road in winter and come across a patch of black ice; your brakes have no effect and you're hitting whatever's in front of you at full speed. It's night, you're tired and you only realize there is a completely dark disabled vehicle in one of the travel lanes when you smash into it.
In cases like this the difference between 30 MPH and 50 MPH can mean a lot, but the difference between 55 MPH and 80 MPH is basically just "you're still dead".
It's correct that it was the Working Time Directive that required the UK to add it to UK law in the first place (over the strident objections of the Tory government at the time) but it is the Working Time Regulations Act 1998 that provides this regulation in the UK, and since Brexit the EU Working Time Directive 2003 has no legal force in the UK.
EU directives never had any direct legal force in the UK, or any other member state. The point of the directive is to say "all EU members need national legislation which meets these standards". It's then up to the member states to implement national laws using their own unique systems which meet the requirements of the directive.
As you said, the Working Time Regulations Act 1998 is the UK law implementation of the EU Working Time Directive 2003.
> when they're the largest video game distribution platform on PC
And just adding on to this, they also a have a stable of some of the most successful (and presumably lucrative) games released in the last 20 years: dota 2, cs:go (admittedly, not in-house to start), TF2.
Granted, a lot of these are towards the autumn of their lifecycles, but it can't be discounted.
It’s fuzzy - but my recollection was Mann was a fairly renown productivity influencer (although I guess we wouldn’t have called it that then), who had an apostasy about it all.
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