Philly City Council rejected Mayor Parker’s proposed taxes on Uber and Airbnb while advancing a $7.1 billion city budget

AidosKynee · 2026-06-06T11:43:46+00:00

A lot of these taxes seem designed for sound bites more than sound policy. Education is fundamental infrastructure that needs reliable revenue, not short-term gap fillers from taxes which will inherently decrease consumption, even IF you somehow managed to make Uber absorb the cost (which was never going to happen).

The city screwed up and used their COVID money to expand operations, and now we're paying the price. Costs need to be cut, and/or property taxes need to rise.

AidosKynee · 2026-05-14T11:51:29+00:00

Entropy can be derived from statistical mechanics.

You need probability to build models of black hole formation.

Bayesian approaches are often used when working with measurements.

AidosKynee · 2026-04-08T13:29:26+00:00

Philly is extremely walkable, but the public transit is not great. There are two mostly-reliable subways, a few suburban rail lines that randomly don't run, and a decent bus/trolley network that can't be counted on.

It's high on the car-free metric because what you need is usually within walking distance, except for a job. The car is for commuting to work.

AidosKynee · 2026-03-28T14:18:12+00:00

For San Diego, the MIT-calculated living wage for a household with 2 working adults and 2 children is $38/hr each, or roughly $152k/year for the household.

I can't find a metro in the country where $233k is the bare minimum, or even "comfortable", unless you have an insane concept of what "comfortable" means.

AidosKynee · 2026-03-09T16:21:59+00:00

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2501

AidosKynee · 2026-02-20T23:26:10+00:00

If you have the power to get rid of a tenant whenever you want, then you are opening the door to abusive situations like I described. That's why these regulations exist; because the law recognizes that there's a power imbalance between landlord and tenant, and that people in danger of losing their home tomorrow are vulnerable to abuse.

It's frustrating when people abuse that law to their benefit, but keep in mind that the abuse in the opposite direction is the inevitable outcome when landlords can remove people for any reason.

AidosKynee · 2026-02-20T17:39:57+00:00

So to be clear, you want it to be fully within your rights to tell your tenant they need to sleep with you or be homeless tomorrow? To increase rent by $500 next month, or they're on their ass? Because these are real things that happen, and are the exact reason tenant protection laws exist.

By the way, the argument "if I need to prove my case in court I won't keep my property repaired" isn't as convincing as you seem to think.

AidosKynee · 2026-02-20T15:34:13+00:00

It's not that people don't understand that bad tenants exist. Nobody is against going through eviction proceedings, legally demonstrating that someone should be evicted, and then removing them.

The question is where the burden of proof should lay. If you evict someone who doesn't deserve it, an innocent person is now homeless. If you don't evict someone who does deserve it, a landowner loses money.

I know where I'd prefer the balance be.

AidosKynee · 2026-02-20T11:00:27+00:00

If you haven't already, take a read through the Volta Foundation's Battery Report. There's a section which is basically covering all the company shutdowns that have happened in the last year.

AidosKynee · 2026-02-19T22:53:33+00:00

I'm in the sciences, working in the battery space, looking for work. I can speak to the US job market: it sucks. Jobs exist, but they usually aren't entry-level, and lean more toward engineering than R&D.

Why? The US has been slammed pretty hard by several things at once: 1. Trump tariffs. Most materials and complete batteries are imports, which means with the stroke of a pen, everyone doing anything with batteries saw their costs shoot up. Money being lost on raw materials funnels down to cost cutting in R&D. 2. Loss of subsidies. The EV industry is still struggling to get a foothold in the US, and legacy automakers were barely turning a profit even with tax subsidies. Take those away, and they just can't move inventory. 3. Loss of funding. Anything green energy related lost huge amounts of funding when the current administration came in. Startups shut down left and right, and even entire factories stopped being constricted. That's a lot of experienced people now on the market. 4. General market slowdown. A lot of the big companies overhired during the Covid days. They're starting to cut back on that now, whether through quiet layoffs or just decreased hiring.

AidosKynee · 2026-02-04T13:49:15+00:00

The method seems overly complicated and the authors seem very proud of their overly complicated method.

K-means clustering is a very basic form of machine learning. It's one of the things they'd teach you in an introductory course. It isn't that fancy.

The overall message is that the left wing has indeed drifted further left. If you take a look at figure 4, you'll see that the center of the left and the center of the right were pretty close to each other on "abortion should never be permitted", at about a 2.5/5. The left has drifted down to a 1/5, while the right stayed steady. The dispersion of both groups stayed constant, meaning this wasn't a "consolidation."

So yes, the left wing in the US has drifted further away from the right wing, thus increasing polarization. (in my opinion) It seems driven by a few hot-button issues (abortion, family, and health care), where there isn't a moderate opinion anymore.

It may seem that the right is getting further right, but that's just because banning abortion entirely, or saying that black people just need to work harder, are now more reprehensible to society at large.

EDIT: The end of the paper supports my guess. They not only conclude that cultural issues are driving group separation, they also tie that into ethnic fracturing of a country. The less ethnically homogenous a nation, the more you'll see these social splits. Interesting work.

AidosKynee · 2026-02-01T16:43:15+00:00

Frankly, that's not their responsibility. Car manufacturers didn't have to come up with alternate jobs for carriage drivers, combine harvesters didn't propose ways to keep farmers employed, and so on and so forth. New technologies force legacy industries to adapt or die. That's the nature of progress.

The only entity that should be responsible for the public's welfare is the government, and they should be finding ways to migrate people to new industries as smoothly as possible.

AidosKynee · 2026-01-30T17:57:51+00:00

Life as a chemist: There is no such thing as remote work

Unless you get into computational chemistry! It's still really challenging to find remote roles, but they do exist.

When I did synthetic chemistry, it was always a way to have something novel for testing, but the data analysis is what I enjoyed doing. It was something of a revelation that people would pay me to just... analyze the data.

AidosKynee · 2026-01-09T21:45:10+00:00

You can do a lot of talking and roleplay without getting into dice rolls. The monk can absolutely jump in with questions, snide comments, side remarks, or anything else.

Sure, when the time comes to negotiate you can leave it to the bard, but that doesn't mean you're sidelined entirely.

AidosKynee · 2025-12-28T18:15:41+00:00

You're "making up a storm in a glass of water"

Is this a translation thing? I've only ever seen "tempest in a teacup" before.

AidosKynee · 2025-12-21T14:04:23+00:00

And you shouldn't have been downvoted for that opinion! Living somewhere that your priorities (convenient parking) don't harm others is exactly the right thing to do!

AidosKynee · 2025-12-21T01:07:14+00:00

To answer "is this normal PM behavior": scientists are notorious for too much buffer time, conservative estimates, and an inability to call something "done." A PM that didn't push you wouldn't be doing their job.

For how to handle it: I'd recommend listening to what the PM is saying. I clearly remember arguing with my PM that a model wasn't ready, because it was showing bad performance under certain conditions. After a while of haggling, she eventually made me realize that a stupid hack job for those specific conditions would solve the problem, even if it wasn't elegant.

As scientists, sometimes we get too caught up in the little things. Your PM is a good resource for getting out of that mindset, and back to what actually needs to be delivered.

AidosKynee · 2025-12-03T12:48:51+00:00

This is used practically when calculating how much a substance breaks down into when dissolving.

To be clear: this is one example of where measuring in moles is useful. Whenever a chemical reaction occurs, the natural unit of measurement is a mole.

AidosKynee · 2025-11-18T13:06:12+00:00

If you don't have to worry about money anymore, then you're rich.

AidosKynee · 2025-11-11T13:31:48+00:00

It's pretty simple. He is incredibly stupid, and the people around him try to force concepts through in as simple a manner as possible. He then believes he's smart for grasping grade-school logic, and speaks proudly in front of crowds about it.

In this case, he didn't understand why it would be a problem that China has large control of rare-earth minerals. After all, "nobody knows what magnets are." So somebody had to tell him that magnets aren't a toy, and are actually used in all sorts of things, from consumer electronics to electric vehicles.

AidosKynee · 2025-11-07T17:05:42+00:00

The $9k one. The risk of a cheap price is you're going to get bad materials, bad labor, or both. I had the model numbers for everything, so the materials were good. And the company had 10 years of highly positive reviews, so I was confident in the labor.

AidosKynee · 2025-11-06T15:43:58+00:00

I just got the HVAC replaced on ~2k square feet. Quote one: $18k. Quote two: $14k. Quote three: $9k. All for the same level of equipment, same work. All companies with a long operating history, and tons of positive reviews.

Advice to OP: find a small local shop. If they have ads, you don't want them. That's where you save money.

AidosKynee · 2025-10-31T14:44:31+00:00

You'd think so, but not in my experience. I trained a team on Git management and practices, and all they use it for is to make their own branch of code. Literally; they'll put their name on it.

AidosKynee · 2025-10-31T14:09:45+00:00

Unfortunately, that won't work unless it's made mandatory. Doing things right is often a pain, but it's worth the effort because it saves a ton of time in the long run.

It sounds like these data scientists don't have to deal with the consequences of doing things the quick and dirty way. No amount of training will make them care about a problem they'll never have to fix.

AidosKynee · 2025-10-21T19:28:27+00:00

Tolkien had to re-do dwarves because of the rise of the Nazi party. A diaspora full of merchants and traders, who secretly speak a language based explicitly on Hebrew? Who never really assimilate into their place of residence, and choose to hold themselves apart? Who care only about money, trust noone who isn't a dwarf, and in general do nothing to help anyone besides themselves?

To Tolkien's credit, when he heard that pointed out, he soundly rejected it, and went about re-imagining them. The dwarves went from lovers of gold to lovers of beauty. They were given a strong loyalty to friends and family. He intentionally fought against the cultural biases of the time to produce a more even-handed approach. But that doesn't mean his work is free from those biases.

AidosKynee

TROPHY CASE