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elfenix

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Posts posted by elfenix

  1. 4 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

     

    I would bet that in ten years, N. Shepherd from Tidwell south to 610 will look like shepherd in the heights with restaurants, bars, etc. It's probably already 20% of the way.  St. Pius might keep that block free of bars. 

    Should I buy a new construction townhouse in acres homes?

  2. 5 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

    Yeah. The limited streets over the bayou + the Washington RR make driving north-south a pain at times. Too many bottlenecks. We also need to eventually move more of the freight traffic out of central Houston. The perfect time would have been as part of the wider expansion of freeways but we can’t be bothered to be forward thinking.

    the city should be working with the RRs to limit rush hour trains. I once asked council member Kamin about this. Her office only replied that the city can’t make the RR do anything. I was disappointed by the answer because good politicians should have other options other than force.

     

    Trains park on the tracks in the east end, blocking everyone for tens of minutes to hours. It's a huge problem for ambulances and firetrucks.

    Had traffic court jury duty and someone parked a train across Houston Ave. as I was coming back from lunch, had to call the jury coordinator to let her know if be late because of it and she told me to go home.

    The construction on I-10 just west of 45 prompted me to go to Allen parkway last night or I'd have probably been stuck with @Storm the Field

  3. 12 minutes ago, Upgrayedd said:

    You would be surprised how often controlled burns get sideways.  Is someone actually advocating for that in urban SoCal?  Lulz.

    The non-trivial chance a controlled burn becomes an uncontrolled burn is the biggest issue with them. 

     

     

    Weeks to months of permitting for something with that sort of destructive power runs from the seemingly inadequate to perfectly cromulent scale.

  4. The whole Andreesen interview is really bizarre. It starts off with him presenting what he says is the deal for tech bros. Which is that they invent something, get filthy rich go to all the best parties, and then give all their money away to charity. He said that his outlook on this started change when Zuckerberg said that he would give all his money to charity and everybody came out and poo-pooed it. But of course much of that just has to do with who Zuckerberg is. Everyone hates the guy. In large part because everyone has watched what Facebook has done to their family members. And yes, some of us are starting to figure out that having a charity that you donate all your money to and then your descendants control and remain filthy rich for generations isn't quite as charitable as those of us scratching off a check for $100 to United Way or the Red Cross or helping with the soup kitchen. And if you think you'll automatically get plaudits from conservatives, I present Bill Gates.

     

    His next break was Biden appointing big tech sceptics to the FTC and SEC. I guess as a coin bro, he's just constitutionally disinclined to regulation by the SEC, but Sam Bankman isn't the first asshole out there and won't be the last. IIRC, the people who actually run Coinbase (which Andreesen funded) want regulation.

     

    The final straw was a meeting between the Biden admin and big tech execs regarding AI which Andreesen characterized as the government wanting control. Per the NYT, Sam Altman had a somewhat different recollection of the meeting. So who knows exactly what happened. But I know that if you're looking for a boogeyman you're likely to find one.

     

    And let's not forget it wasn't that long ago that conservatives wanted to axe section 230 entirely and also require platforms to host their speech.

     

    All this led to his little tech manifesto. That someone needs to defend little tech and the startup from government, which is stifling innovation through regulation.

     

    But part of me wants to slap him and remind him what happened to him when he was little tech: big tech gave away its competing product, which it used its deep pockets generated from other business to improve until its product was better than his product, and used its network of clients and suppliers to make its product the default on end-users' computers. Little tech's biggest threat isn't government . It's big tech.

     

    So maybe he's forgotten that lesson. But I guess he was insulated from that when AOL decided to burn $10 billion on Netscape in 1998. So maybe that's a lesson he never learned.

     

    Or maybe it's that he learned a different lesson. Founders and funders usually don't get paid through IPOs. They usually get paid by a big tech incumbent buying their startup. Looked at another way, government increasingly scrutinizing mergers and buyouts (think: the government opposing Facebook's purchase of Instagram instead of doing nothing) damages little tech not by regulating it directly, but by putting obstacles in the path of its major source of getting paid.

     

    Looked at in this light, Andreesen's manifesto and turn to Trump isn't a principled stand for the little guy. It is a cynical attempt at covering his own interest as a VC funder in getting paid.

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  5. 16 hours ago, SydneyCarton said:



    In additon to Meow Wolf, the Museum of Illusion has opened in the Galleria, which looks decent. I haven't been with my kiddo yet, but it's on the list, and the galleria has other things to do, like a Lego store if you're happy to spend money, and ice skating. 

    It's pretty small compared to Meow Wolf or Color Factory. It's under the escalators next to the Alabama entrance, so kinda hard to find if you don't know where it is.

  6. 7 double letter words

    Daily #1065
    1️⃣7️⃣0️⃣5️⃣
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    1️⃣5️⃣1️⃣4️⃣
    1️⃣3️⃣0️⃣7️⃣
    0️⃣8️⃣1️⃣8️⃣
    1️⃣0️⃣1️⃣2️⃣
    0️⃣9️⃣1️⃣9️⃣
    sedecordle.com
    #sedecordle

     

    Wordle 1,304 3/6


    🟩🟩🟨
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  7. 4 hours ago, RMac5 said:

    On the oven method, can you just brown the flour and then finish on the stove? Seems like that could an option as well, might be easier too.

    Technically you can just bake the flour without oil since the oil and flour separate after you add stock anyway. Flour will get tan and will darken substantially after getting wet.

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  8. 35 minutes ago, Captainant said:

    Who could have guessed that a guy who made an algorithm to rank the fuckability of his female classmates might be a piece of shit?

    It's wild that their recent changes to remove fact checking are directly driven by their need to grow engagement. They WANT everyone to argue over the basic fundamental facts of a situation - it drives engagement and clicks and ad revenue. Not to mention that sweet monetizable user data to boot.

    I had faint hopes of a US version of the GDPR cutting his knees out from under him, but it was folly to hope as much. Dude has too much money to worry about silly things like laws and the consent of his subjects/users/products now

    Randy method or JT method?

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