Was $10k before or after the insurance negotiated discount? Pre-discount prices mean nothing: I had the same tests ordered twice (needed the results urgently), once through my PCP/HMO and once paid to a walk-in doctor's office in cash. The cash price was $700. My PCP claimed a price of insurance $3500, who then negotiated it down to a "discounted" $710. So the worst of both worlds would have been a high deductible plan.

The way you have those loopholes and you have to watch out for them else you're on the hook for thousands of dollars is nuts. I mean, sure, you _might_ get a good deal or you might get completely screwed. This is absolutely not normal or fair. A society of gotcha's induces a lot of inefficiency. And as much as the US sometimes rails against inefficiency, it seems it's only a problem when you're not used to it.

There use to be "Raccoon cafes" in Seoul. You go buy a drink and pet the raccoons. IIRC animal cafes were banned around 2019 or so.

Looks like IoT devices are the next frontier in residential proxies ... or provide spies the next leading indicator into SV business performance.

They've been the current frontier for nearly a decade now! Mirai, back in 2016, famously was heavily composed of IP cameras, one of the earlier examples of what we now call IoT.

Human infant intestines in the ancestral environment are natively colonized by bifidobacterium infantis, which completely metabolizes oligosaccarides present in human breast milk and outputs highly acidic byproducts. This acid kills most other gut bacteria, allowing B. infantis to consist of 50% of the intenstinal microbiome in healthy infants [1]. Oligosaccarides cannot be metabolized by babies without gut bacteria, but human mothers produce more of them than most other mammals we know of, and the specific oligosaccarides present depend on maternal generics [4]. NICU infants untreated with B. infantis are 5x more likely to fall into sepis as a result of necrotizing enterocolitis[2,3], probably due to increased intestinal permeability to pathogens.

But B. infantis is coevolved for the digestion of human oligosaccarides, and those are specifically genetically coded for in human milk [4]. As a result, "vegan baby formula" or even baby formula without the correct oligosacarides could be a disaster for baby intestinal health, and even cow's milk has a different oligosaccaride profile, and we don't know how adaptable the gut microbes are.

[1] doi.org/10.1038/s41390-020-01350-0 [2] doi.org/10.1542/peds.2004-1463 [3] doi.org/10.1038/s41372-019-0443-5 [4] doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-45209-y

This is called an FCU (fan coil unit) and is common in Asia. It consists of a high efficiency central chiller run by building management, and pipes to bring coolant to each unit. Then in each unit there is a heat exchange coil with a fan to blow the room air through the coil. Hence fan coil unit.

The advantages of this system are that the only sound in the unit is the fan, and air is not circulated between units. The disadvantage is that building management can turn off A/C centrally if they want to save money.

For some reason Americans are slow to pick up HVAC innovations that are common elsewhere: heat pumps, split-system air conditioners, FCU, etc. I guess it is because energy is cheap to them and they don't mind noise.

> For some reason Americans are slow to pick up HVAC innovations that are common elsewhere

Few want to spend the money to convert older buildings. That includes homeowners, building owners, and condo/co-op boards.

Someone a few weeks ago posted a long essay about how much heat pumps make sense from an investment and environmental standpoint. It glossed over the fact that most American middle income households, when presented with the choice of dropping $25,000 on a heat pump/mini split or sticking with window mounted ACs and that cost a fraction in terms of up front costs, will go for the cheaper option ... or spend the money on some other home improvement or accessory like a car.

Not saying it's right, but that's the way it is.

One of the big questions that I haven't seen a compelling answer for re: heat pumps in the US is why heat pumps are so expensive compared to AC exchanges. The amount of equipment differences between an AC and a heat pump are largely a valve to reverse refrigerant flow and the small bit of electronics to control said valve. Yet heat pump units in the US are significantly more expensive for effectively the same COP and operating efficiency ranges as their cooling-only brethren.

But why would this be any different in America than the rest of the world? What you've written seems to me like a universal.

It's more expensive in America - larger houses requiring larger units and more ductwork/labor, and probably the manufacturers pricing for the world's richest market.

We do have ductless AC in the US. It's technically a bit different but accomplishes the same thing using the same principles.

Of course, most of those systems are made by Japanese companies like Mitsubishi...

How does ventilation (the V in HVAC) work for FCUs? If the pipes only bring coolant to each unit where does fresh air come from? Conventional HVAC systems have Heat Recovery Ventilation so what's the equivalent here?

I don't know. I don't think that most Asian apartments have central fresh air. Usually the unit owners open windows regularly.

But opening the windows would negate most of the benefits of the higher efficiency of the FCU, would it not?

Heat pumps (for heating) and split air conditioners are fairly common in the US.

The White House press release had links to the eight grants in question. The claimed values of the grants were inflated by the press release, but they did actually involve studying the effects of cross sex hormone administration, so in this case the claims of confusion between "transgender mice" and "transgenic mice" were the fake news. (Also, the claimed 8M USD over N years is peanuts compared to the money spent annually on developing actual transgenic mice.)

The default setting on ChatGPT is to now include previous conversations as context. I disabled memories, but this new feature was enabled when I checked the settings.

That used to be the function of undergraduate and Masters theses at the Ivy League universities. "For the undergraduate thesis, fix someone else's mistake. For the Master's thesis, find someone else's mistake. For the PhD thesis, make your own mistake."

The unfettered computer and internet access was a desktop machine (which needed to run a minimalist distro) on dial-up in a very public room. The fun that taught me tech stuff was getting to distro to work, and there was no privacy. Parents were much more aware of the dangers back then.

Nowdays everythibg on smartphones "just works", and the OS won't even let the user access system files. I meet college students who have no idea what a file system is, or what a DNS server is.

Times have changed, indeed.

When I was a child, my parents had me work on a lot of puzzles. They saw this as a way to build attention span, ability to focus, and persistence to achieve long term goals (not to mention that we had the coolest, most intricate puzzles). I would probably work with my children work on something a bit more constructive and realistic, but the point is that as children we build intellectual habits and attention span from what we do, and being unable to focus on highly addictive stimuli for more than five minutes is a symptom of a strong deficit. One might even consider it an intellectual disability.