Obviously there are confounding variables besides vaccination status, but I find it pretty compelling that the decrease in COVID mortality among the vaccinated group was significantly larger than the decrease in all-cause mortality of that group. This suggests whatever the difference was between the two groups, besides vaccination, either had a much larger impact on COVID than other causes of death or that the vaccine had some positive impact.

One example of the former explanation I could imagine is that people who got vaccinated against COVID were probably also more likely to take other preventative measures, like wearing a mask or avoiding larger crowds of people. Those precautions would be more likely to be effective against a contagious disease like COVID but less likely to protect them against some other causes of death like heart disease.

I'm not sure how likely I find that as an explanation compared to the alternative that the vaccines provide at least some level of protection. My observation was that widespread measures specifically meant to defend against COVID, like masking and social distancing, largely went away well before the end of the time period covered by this study, at least in the US.

Amusingly, I suspect the anti-vax contingent would likely be bothered by data suggesting anything the COVID vaccinated group was doing differently protected against COVID, since their position seems to largely be that not only is the COVID vaccine useless, but so are any other measures meant to reduce the spread.

> I would like to see the metrics on how much time and resources are wasted babysitting all this automation vs. going in and updating a certificate manually once a year and not having to worry the automation will fail in a week.

I would also like to see those metrics, because I strongly suspect the cost is dramatically in favor of automation, especially when you consider the improved security posture you get from short lived certificates. My personal experience with Let's Encrypt has been that the only hassle is in systems that don't implement automation, so I get the worst of both worlds having to effectively manually renew short lived certificates every 90 days.

CRL based revocation is largely a failure, both because implementation is a problem and because knowing when to revoke a certificate is hard. So the only way to achieve the goal of security in WebPKI that's resilient to private key compromise is short-lived certificates. And the only way to implement those is with automated renewal.

I'm glad there are free alternatives to Let's Encrypt, but a major PKI provider also being by far the largest browser provider feels like a disaster waiting to happen. The check on PKI providers doing the right thing is browsers including them (or not) in their trust stores. Having both sides of that equation being significantly controlled by the same entity fundamentally breaks the trust model of WebPKI. I'm sure Google has the best of intentions, but I don't see how that's in any way a workable approach to PKI security.

In addition to energy, the biggest reason I no longer use old desktops as servers is the space they take up. If you live in an apartment or condo and don't have extra rooms, even having a desktop tower sitting in a corner somewhere is a lot less visually appealing than a small NSA or mini-PC you can stick on a shelf somewhere.

Tastes differ. I personally find the 36U IBM rack in the corner of my apartment more visually appealing than some of my other furniture, and consolidating equipment in a rack with built-in PDUs makes it easier to run everything through a single UPS in an apartment where rewiring is not an option.

Some hybrid cars almost work this way. I know at least Honda's hybrids basically do what you're suggesting but at constant highway speeds will directly couple the engine to the drive wheels. They presumably could use electric motors powered by the engine in all driving scenarios, but I believe direct engine drive at highway speeds is more energy efficient.

This is probably why most hybrid systems I'm aware of don't only use electric motors to power the drive wheels. The idea sounds cool and I've also wondered why you can't buy something like that in the US (I think it exists elsewhere), but the math doesn't really work out. Even in terms of engineering complexity, because the engine is only directly driving the wheels at certain speeds, you can get by without a lot of the mechanical drivetrain components like transmissions.

Not to be nitpicky, but that's only really true if you're driving down a perfectly flat, straight highway at a constant speed. Any hills or traffic slowdowns and your car or truck is doing more work the more it weighs.

True, but regenerative braking eliminates most of that as well.

> EV trucks aren't really good at hauling trailers over large distances, as the aerodynamics produce a massive impact on range.

Maybe I'm being stupid, but how could that possibly just be a problem for EVs? The aerodynamic physics don't care what's powering the car so the impact on range should be roughly the same.

Or is the problem that even if EV range impact is similar to fossil fuel range impact, the extra time required to recharge vs refuel makes that range impact more, uh, impactful for drivers?

Yes, that's exactly it. A lot of people have shown that gas trucks suffer range loss as well, but they start off with higher range and get refilled in <5 minutes.

The EVs lose enough range that they often need to be charged deep into the pack to make it to the next station, which leads to >40 minute charging sessions every 100-120 miles.

> If you take the Top 500 companies as an indicator how well your economy is doing, but everything is carried on the shoulders of only 1.4% of those 500 companies then what is the point of looking at the 500 companies in the first place.

It's valid to argue that success of companies in the S&P 500 is not evenly distributed, but if you really want to understand the impact of that distribution on the economy you have to look at the value of each company rather than treating them equally.

The top 7 companies might only be 1.4% of the companies in the S&P 500, but they represent roughly 35% of the market cap of companies in the index. Because of that, they have an impact on the broader economy much larger than the raw number of companies would suggest. "Just" Nvidia doing well is going to have a much larger economic impact than just Newell Brands, which I have never heard of but is apparently one of the smallest on the index. In fact Nvidia's market cap is roughly 1000 that of Newell Brands with presumably similarly disproportionate economic impact.

I'm amazed how many grown ass adults on airplanes act like little kids when it comes to seat belts and basically everything else.

Not just ignoring flight crew advice and common sense to generally stay buckled in order to gain maybe a minor amount of comfort and convenience being unbuckled, but unbuckling even when the seat belt sign is on and again common sense says being buckled in is the smart move. On my most recent flight I heard quite a few people unbuckling their seat belts while the plane was still rolling down the runway after landing. You couldn't wait 5 more minutes until the plane is at the gate?

lol yep. It's like they have the same mentality as being a schoolbus (which, it's similarly wild to me that kids are just implicitly allowed to not wear their seatbelts on them but I guess thats an even more intractable enforcement problem).

Also: people clapping the second the back wheels touch on landing is particularly hilarious to me because it implies an acknowledgement of the precariousness of flying, but a complete ignorance of the fact that you're just entering the second most dangerous 30 seconds of the entire flight.

Can A16Z tell the difference? Insert that meme "At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus, from the classic sci-fi novel, Don't Create the Torment Nexus".