Jonathan Merritt

Looks like Amazon Australia might be having issues. Lots of one-day deliveries are now two-or-more-day deliveries. Sydney metro area.

(No, Australia doesn’t have any new tariffs.)

What kind of an idiot makes that mistake once and then doesn’t just delete the app from their work phone?

He’s either totally oblivious, or so many other insiders are using Signal too that he can’t abandon it.

No Strava, nooooooooo!

(But that’s a nice way to do an outage message.)

Heavy metal toxicity found in Chinese port poses risk to seafood safety Heavy metals naturally occur in the Earth's crust, but human activities can increase their concentration in the environment, including domestic sewage and waste disposal, fumes from vehicle exhausts, ...

phys.org/news/2025-02...

Review of mercury pollution research in Southeast Asian marine environments Mercury (Hg) is a global pollutant of widespread concern, and modern Hg levels have been much elevated compared to pre-industrial levels. The majority…

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

You can give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Or you can teach a man to fish and watch him die slowly from mercury poisoning.

Ukraine accuses China of supplying weapons to Russia China has previously projected an image of neutrality on the Ukraine invasion, but has forged closer ties with Russia as the fighting as raged.

IDK about that: www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04...

People have all sorts of ideas about Trump’s relationship to Putin, but he’s not literally arming Russia!

(Although he’s probably asked his advisors if the US could make more money selling to both side!)

If this is true:

a) why don’t other Western nations know already? if they do, why are the public being mushroomed? (why is Spain acting pro-China, etc?)

b) can we *finally* talk seriously about widespread severing of Western ties to China?

Brawndo stocks have dropped to zero!

When people talk about crazy bureaucracy standing in the way of innovation, this is what they’re talking about.

Are you really going to stand in the way of the most successful US aerospace company just for a small stretch of usually-deserted beach?

Careful is one thing, but this is nuts!

AFAICT, SpaceX, not Musk, wants to control the beach. So that they don’t have to mess around with closures and miscellaneous red tape every time they want to launch something.

Seems like a perfectly reasonable request to me. I’m not a Musk fan, but this article is just stoopid.

Seems strange. Just accept that you’re going to have to do cardio, and lifting stuff will always be a secondary beneficial activity… not what you should spend most of your time doing!

When I read these studies, particularly popular coverage, I have to wonder: what’s the obsession with resistance training anyway?

We know aerobic exercise extends life-span and health-span significantly. People seem to hope that RT will be as effective, despite the worse evidence so far.

Associations Between Resistance Training and All-Cause Mortality: NHANES 1999-2006 Background: The Physical Activity Guidelines 2nd Edition recommends ≥2 days of resistance training (RT). Evidence supports a dose-response relation between RT volume and cardiometabolic health. We exa...

Interesting; an all-cause mortality study that found no benefit from resistance training: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

I have to wonder whether any association between RT and all-cause mortality is perhaps due to incidental aerobic exercise and better diet.

Q: why was the USSR an economic disaster, but China is successful?
A: access to Western markets.

Neither Chinese nor Soviet style economies work well as closed systems. But there’s a cheat code if they can simultaneously exploit both their cheap/slave labor and the wealth from Western nations.

To anyone building activity / sleep trackers: PLEASE account for different average heart rates!

Just because my HR is 40 bpm, that doesn’t mean I’m asleep!

(I got about 4h sleep last night, but my Apple Watch thinks it was 9h+ because it can’t seem to tell whether I’m asleep or not!)

(And Victorian-era people actually thought like that too! Go read literature from that period about scientific and technical advancement. Go and look at how socialites showed up to the opening of things like water processing plants; when they already had plenty of fresh water themselves…)

Clearly where we went wrong is the misapprehension that the only way to counter an unjust concentration of wealth and resources is to give everyone the very, very small chance to accumulate their own unjust concentration of wealth and resources.

“The marginal cost of labor is dropping to zero.”

Victorian-era people: “How wonderful! Let us all enjoy the bounty of leisure and wealth!”

Modern-era people: “How will I pay for my health insurance? What will all the baristas do?! There will be riots in the streets; PEOPLE MUST WORK!!!”

YouTube video by Blender A Portrait of Tenochtitlan - Reconstructing a city buried 500 years ago — Blender Conference 2024

There was a brilliant Blender Conference talk on this work. If you want to see “behind the scenes” in a technical sense, it’s all there! youtu.be/doln4Txge9g

Australian politicians are now trying to push house prices up by allowing people to erode their retirement savings to buy a house. Desperate to keep those prices from crashing, at the expense of literally everything else.

Yes, so NIH funding is acting as a government subsidy for pharmaceutical companies, right?

After all, it’s not as though profits from those new drugs are going to support the NIH, nor are the new drugs contributing enough tax revenue from positive externalities to justify it.

Also AOC and Bernie both reportedly saw the “split voting” phenomenon, where people voted for both them AND Trump. To me, that suggests a presidential candidate more like AOC or Bernie would have done better.

The difference between having an idea and having an implementation isn’t hammered into the general public strongly enough.

The illustration I like is “There was a talking computer on Star Trek, but nobody’s suggesting Gene Roddenberry invented large language models.”

There’s no extra context here. I just asked for which conveys the lower likelihood. I would certainly say that “improbable” is not the same as “unlikely”, but I’m not American.

Map showing the state of New Mexico highlighted.

“There’s a WHAT?! In AMERICA?!!!” 😁

If you’re down then don’t dismay,
Fix it all with Special K!
If you can’t bear to leave the den,
Try this great hallucinogen!
Your business is now in the trash,
Oh fuck it all; let’s get smashed!

- Elon Musk 😆

“… easily gameable by making it have a better personality.”

Sssshh… don’t give away all the secrets we engineers use to get hired! 😆

Yeah; getting pulled into rooms at places like LAX for interrogation isn’t at all uncommon or new.

Friends of mine have missed flights and other connecting transport in the past (on Australian passports!). Detained for hours.

We’d need data on what has changed, and by how much.

Yeah. When people talk about grand conspiracies that involve Trump and Musk stealing everyone’s details, I really think they’re giving them way too much credit…