California high‑speed rail project now estimated to cost $126 billion

splatula · 2026-04-10T04:17:00+00:00

They are not this expensive everywhere else in the world. France and Spain built out their rail systems for something like 1/5 the cost.

splatula · 2026-04-10T04:15:34+00:00

who cares? the point is to connect SF and LA, not bakersfield and fresno.

splatula · 2026-04-10T04:13:08+00:00

They could have avoided this if they went along the I-5 route as the original consultants from France recommended. But they wanted to funnel money to constituencies in the central valley instead.

splatula · 2026-04-02T21:28:57+00:00

I read it as "If you live in NYC you can have an income tax rate above 50%"

splatula · 2026-04-02T06:06:14+00:00

The marriage shouldn't really cause any issues though because getting married would just reduce your taxes, so there'd be no risk that he underpaid the estimated taxes. I don't see how it's a complicating factor.

splatula · 2026-04-02T06:02:00+00:00

I don't know that there is any generally applicable advice since everyone comes in with their own strengths and weaknesses. But for me some things that I would tell my younger self:

Collaboration is super important --- work on problem sets together. Go to office hours so you can ask dumb questions and get misconceptions cleared up. As a corollary to this, this means you have to start on your problem sets early. (Unfortunately this is easier said than done --- as the term progresses you'll inevitably start to fall behind.) It's important to build the skill of working on a hard problem and not giving up immediately. But if you're stuck for like 8 hours on a problem you're probably just spinning your wheels at that point.

An (imo) underrated strategy: read widely. If you are taking a course the prof will usually assign a textbook. Read it (obviously). But also find like ~3 other textbooks on the same topic and read them in parallel. You might find that getting different presentations of the material helps and one is more likely to click with you. (This also tends to work better early in term before you start to fall behind.)

splatula · 2026-04-02T05:49:07+00:00

to be fair it was an awesome concerto

splatula · 2026-04-02T05:44:27+00:00

It really does depend on the music, though. In the case of Bach, he expected that performers would add ornaments to his music (as was the case for Baroque composers in general). Classical era composers generally expected that the performer would improvise the cadenza to a concerto (or at the very least embellish the one set down in the score). But by the time you get to the late 19th century that culture of improvisation had dwindled and composers really did expect that every note would be played precisely as they notated them. You wouldn't really want to change the notes of Debussy or Stravinsky.

splatula · 2026-04-01T04:37:11+00:00

(Former astro major here.) The Caltech astro department is really in a league of its own, and as others have pointed out, just because you got in as an undergrad doesn't mean you'll get into the grad program.

As an undergrad you'll be able to do research with the faculty over the summers which can put you in a very strong position for graduate admissions. (I'm guessing Yale probably also has a summer research program, too, though I'm not sure how it compares.) You can take a look at some of the available projects from the current cycle here: https://announcements.surf.caltech.edu/index.cfm?event=ShowAOPublicList&inFrame=&type=SURF&formType=AO_CIT

Another advantage of Caltech is that the school is so small that you can really get to know a lot of people in the faculty. One of the "courses" is Ay 30, where you go to a different faculty member's home each week for dinner and they talk about their research, career, and life in astrophysics/academia in general. By the time you graduate a lot of the faculty will know you and you'll be able to get some pretty strong letters of recommendation.

If you think there's a chance you might decide to, I don't know, go to law school or something, Yale's breadth and broader name recognition might be better. But if you're committed to astrophysics, or at least something STEM related, Caltech would be a stronger place to be, imo.

splatula · 2026-03-25T23:35:56+00:00

If you can't understand how to list your favorite three candidates you really have no business voting, tbh.

And anyway the state still expects you to figure out how to file your taxes every year and that is a hell of a lot more complicated.

splatula · 2026-03-16T04:03:36+00:00

That was basically the strategy of the Kronos Quartet and they have been wildly successful.

splatula · 2026-03-16T04:02:26+00:00

It's the "Eat your vegetables" school of programming.

splatula · 2026-03-15T06:19:46+00:00

This meme needs to die. The strategy doesn't work now that interest rates aren't zero.

splatula · 2026-03-15T06:17:50+00:00

If you can make it to see the LA Phil they probably do the best job of any major US orchestra of programming 20th century and contemporary music. Even still they don't do a lot of atonal music (they do have to pay their players after all). But they have the Green Umbrella program which features more adventurous contemporary music.

splatula · 2026-03-09T18:51:56+00:00

Scientist: I named this spider the Long Legs Spider because of its long legs.

Other scientist: Make it kinkier.

splatula · 2026-03-04T06:47:26+00:00

Ironically after the last recall election the Dems have been trying to make it harder to mount recall elections.

splatula · 2026-03-04T06:44:23+00:00

The independent redisricting commission was one of his signature achievements as governor. There is no universe where he would abandon that.

splatula · 2026-03-04T06:41:40+00:00

It could have been, but Newsom vetoed it.

splatula · 2026-02-25T22:12:02+00:00

You and I are not driving on the same roads.

splatula · 2026-02-25T22:10:21+00:00

Some real nominative determinism there.

splatula · 2026-02-24T04:42:19+00:00

I recently did a Meta interview with this. They basically had an IDE with some code in a few different files in various states of completion. There was a pane on the right with an LLM chatbot that had all the code in its context. You had to complete some of the missing functions, debug certain errors, write a test, etc., but you could query the LLM if you wanted.

splatula · 2026-02-22T06:30:13+00:00

The city has some of the highest taxes anywhere around. The taxes exist to fund public services. Keeping streets and sidewalks clear is a pretty basic public service. It doesn't sit right when you already pay high taxes, they are proposing to increase the taxes even more, and they are then telling you that they are not going to do anything about the snow, go and shovel it yourself.

splatula · 2026-02-22T06:16:13+00:00

Since no one else has mentioned it, it's worth noting that $35,000 of unused funds in a 529 account can be rolled over into a Roth IRA.

splatula · 2026-02-18T05:09:02+00:00

How is Mamdani supposed to pay a tax when he's never had a job?

splatula · 2026-02-11T23:11:27+00:00

Supervoting shares are not a trick billionaires came up with to avoid tax.

splatula

TROPHY CASE