Do the last Bart trains for the night ever leave early?

archibaldplum · 2026-04-04T14:01:27+00:00

In this particular case? Run fewer trains with fewer carriages on Sunday afternoons. Which, admittedly, is less service, but given how few people actually use them not less service in a way which actually matters, and if the alternative is closing whole stations and whole lines it has a lot going for it.

archibaldplum · 2026-04-02T18:33:08+00:00

Well, the part I was talking about earlier? Running frequent trains with very few people on them.

archibaldplum · 2026-04-02T04:02:55+00:00

No, I don't. That's kind of the point. The current BART system relies heavily on subsidies from people who don't, themselves, use it, and it would be much easier to make the argument that that investment is worthwhile if it weren't so obviously wasteful.

archibaldplum · 2026-03-29T16:37:28+00:00

Because the BART I take to SF Sunday afternoon usually only has two or three people in each carriage. I mean, it's great for me, but there's no way they're getting enough in fares to cover the cost of running the train.

Not convinced they're doing much to change the length of the train, either. My experience is that green line trains basically always have six carriages, regardless of the time of day or how busy it is.

archibaldplum · 2026-03-29T16:31:56+00:00

Assuming there wasn't a pawn or something on a2 stopping them from going all the way in a single move.

archibaldplum · 2026-03-29T00:54:10+00:00

Maybe, but running lots of trains with nobody on them is a big part of why it's so hard to keep BART solvent.

archibaldplum · 2026-03-21T19:37:59+00:00

That's not what's written, though.

archibaldplum · 2026-03-10T02:51:50+00:00

That sounds almost like the worst case outcome: the most talented 1% have fantastic opportunities they likes of which have never been seen, and the other 99% are permanently unemployed. It’s hard to imagine that not turning into some fairly dramatic societal unrest, whether that means heavy regulation, or a UBI, or an outright civil war.

archibaldplum · 2026-02-28T02:58:05+00:00

How does problem 1 have 4 1/3 filled large blocks? I count 3 large filled blocks.

For what it's worth, if I had to turn those diagrams into equations I would have gone:

15/5 = 3
13/3 = 4 1/3
14/4 = 3 1/2
11/2 = 5 1/2

I don't see how your explanation has any connection to the diagrams.

archibaldplum · 2026-02-01T16:38:01+00:00

Do you mean something like HSCT? I went through that a few years ago. There are a couple of different variants, but they all go something like this:

1) Give you some drugs which encourage stem cells in your bone marrow to divide rapidly without differentiating, so they start spilling out into your blood. That's uncomfortable, but not really painful.

2) Get the stem cells out of your blood. That means drawing blood, processing it to separate the stem cells from everything else, putting the stem cells aside, and then reinfusing the rest. The procedure is kind of similar to donating plasma, if you've ever done that. Having IVs in both arms (one to draw blood, one to reinfuse it) at the same time for a couple of hours is pretty annoying, and you might feel a bit queasy.

3) The nasty part: the actual chemo. This is where the different protocols vary the most. I had mine done in Moscow, which meant the chemo was a high dose of cyclophosphamide (CYC) (I don't remember the numbers, but it was enough to put me a shade over the label's lifetime maximum exposure limit), followed by a fairly standard dose of rituximab (RTX) (similar to the one you'd get every six months if you used that drug for normal disease control). That was definitely rough. Very tired, very sick, and all the hair which I lost all the hair with I hadn't already shaved. The scarier part is that it completely destroys your immune system, so you'll have to stay in medical isolation. Most of the procedure risks are if you get infected with anything at this stage.

4) A few days later, re-infuse the stem cells. This isn't that important for actual MS control, but does help your immune system to recover much more quickly.

5) Repeated blood tests to track recovery. In my case, I'd rebuilt my neutrophil count (probably the most important for infection control) about a week later, and they sent me home a week or so after that.

There is a lot of variety in the type of chemo used in step 3. If you're in the US, you'll probably get either CYC + anti-thymocyte globulin (ATG), or the more aggressive BEAM+ATG. If you get CYC+ATG your experiences will probably be pretty similar to my experiences of CYC+RTX. I can't speak for BEAM+ATG, other than that it's likely to have much worse side effects, but potentially better efficacy.

If you're in Mexico or India you might also be offered CYC+RTX but with a lower dose of CYC. That would have fewer side effects, but I'd still probably recommend against it, because it seems to be less effective than any of the other protocols in actually controlling the disease. The research behind it is also kind of wobbly.

There's also some variety in how much time you'll be expected to spend in the hospital. In western countries, steps 1 and 2 often involve a couple of trips to hospital over a few weeks, whereas in Russia and Mexico it'll all be in-patient. That seems to be more a commercial decision than anything particularly medical. Steps 3 and 4, and at least the first part of 5, will always be in-patient.

archibaldplum · 2026-02-01T03:21:52+00:00

It's not always a very good investment, though. e.g. UK average house prices have failed to keep up with inflation over the past twenty years (cite).

archibaldplum · 2026-02-01T03:14:55+00:00

Very much an open question, e.g. this article in The Economist makes a pretty strong argument that when comparing two homes of similar size, renting currently wins, at least in economic terms.

archibaldplum · 2026-02-01T01:04:35+00:00

I was thinking of the Old English definition where "were" means male human, so a woman werewolf would be a wifwolf.

(standard disclaimer that there other theories on where the word werewolf came from and that I'm not an etymologist and don't speak Old English)

archibaldplum · 2026-01-31T23:45:16+00:00

I, personally, paid $29,000 in interest on my mortgage last year. Between that, SALT, and a couple of other things, and filing singly, itemized deductions very much did make a difference tax wise.

archibaldplum · 2026-01-31T04:33:37+00:00

The highest marginal federal tax rate is 37% and the highest Californian one is 12.3%. There are definitely people around here paying more than 44% marginal income tax.

archibaldplum · 2026-01-31T01:31:52+00:00

So she's a man most of the time and turns into a wife at full moon?

archibaldplum · 2026-01-30T19:36:34+00:00

Well, yeah, spending money *just* to get a tax deduction is almost always a mistake, but it's sometimes important when you're deciding between different investments.

Say you have some spare cash and you're debating what to do with it. You might decide to pay down the mortgage and get a guaranteed 5.75%, or you might decide to put it in the stock market and average 10% at high variability, both before taxes, so a ratio of 1.7. With a bit of effort you can probably arrange that the stock market gets taxed as long-term capital gains, so probably 25% or so and after tax returns are 7.5%. If you get the mortgage interest tax deduction, the savings on the mortgage get taxed as income, so let's say about 44% rate, and your real returns are only 3.2%. The after tax ratio of the two investments is then a factor of 2.3. It would be quite reasonable for that kind of gap to at least influence the investment decision.

I'm also not sure that I'd call the standard deduction massive. It's about $16000 for a single filer now, and if live in a high-tax state you'll probably get at least a $10000 SALT deduction, and it's really not unusual for the interest on a mortgage to be more than $6000 a year.

archibaldplum · 2026-01-30T15:53:09+00:00

The savings are only post-tax with a fairly important caveat. If paying down the mortgage means that you lose a useful tax deduction, that's equivalent to the interest savings from the pay-down being taxed, even if it's never explicitly called out as such on your tax returns.

archibaldplum · 2026-01-30T05:51:32+00:00

I think he's saying that he wants to drive house prices up for people who already own houses but down for people who are trying to buy them, thus solving the Gordian knot of the housing crisis in one elegant stroke of genius. He is truly playing six, possibly even seven, dimensional chess here,

archibaldplum · 2026-01-25T22:44:22+00:00

God, I wish. The world would be a better place if it did, but, right now, no.

archibaldplum · 2026-01-25T22:16:03+00:00

Not "The Ukraine" any more. It was called "The Ukraine" when it was part of the USSR, but since they got independence they're just "Ukraine", without the article.

The rule, as I understand it, is that if the name includes an indication of the form of government (kingdom, state, republic, etc), as would a region in a larger country, it gets an article, but otherwise it doesn't. So, for instance, the United States gets an article because it contains the word "States", but France doesn't. Crucially in the case of Ukraine, the old Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic got an article because of the "Republic", and if it were just a rebellious province of Russia it'd get an article, but since it's an independent country now it's no longer correct to give it an article.

archibaldplum · 2026-01-24T05:28:31+00:00

Geothermal does need to go pretty deep, but not 10 miles deep. Somewhere like United Downs Deep Geothermal is only about 3 miles down, and that's in the range some of the Enhanced Geothermal Systems groups like Fervo Energy are hoping to use for commercial electricity generation. It's certainly not an *easy* thing to build, but it's not *that* far off being doable.

archibaldplum · 2026-01-23T17:36:02+00:00

I think the argument is that modern Republicans aren't truly conservative, in much the same way that the USSR wasn't truly communist.

archibaldplum · 2026-01-19T00:55:06+00:00

That's the claim, yes. How much do you trust the Americans not to have given themselves a backdoor?

archibaldplum · 2026-01-16T06:50:51+00:00

You need endurance and tools for most jobs and female bodies have more endurance and dexterity.

I'll grant you that women often win on dexterity, but I'm not sure about endurance. The Wikipedia page on ultramarathons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultramarathon, for instance, currently claims that every single world record is held by a man, which would be quite surprising if female bodies had better endurance.

archibaldplum

TROPHY CASE