The specific Sonder hotel mentioned in the article is still listed on the Mariott web site.[1]
"A stay you can count on. Experience travel without the guesswork. While every space is unique, you can always count on the Sonder Standard. All stays feature designer details, keyless entry, fast free WiFi and our 24/7 digital concierge."
Trying to make a reservation returns "Your session timed out, but you can start a new hotel search below."
This badly hurts Mariott's brand. Their page reads as if they stand behind Sonder.
Marriott supposedly has about 30 brands, and now you have to ask which of them are fake fronts.
Having been affected by this personally, I don't think Marriott cares about their brand at this point as they have achieved relative monopoly status. There are plenty of other horrible things they've accomplished in the last few years besides this. It makes me want to watch out for CitizenM similarly, because it's increasingly unclear what Marriott's actual role in your stay even is anymore.
I have stayed at a bunch of hotels in the last six months and come to the conclusion that price, brand, and reviews have no relation at all with quality.
"We will pay $500,000 to anyone who can provide information leading to the arrest and conviction of the perpetrators. If the perpetrators can be clearly identified but are not in a country which extradites to or from the United States, we will pay $500,000 for their heads."
Our state similarly tried to get it outlawed by using these excuses but ignoring the many shops where they are just selling quality product, not allowing kids, etc.
Then came John Stevens.[1] Stevens was responsible for converting many American railroads from light to heavy duty. The Duluth South Shore was first. Then the Great Northern and the Rock Island. Then the Panama Railroad for building the Panama Canal. Then Russia, Siberia, China...
The key diagram is the one that shows the signal path through the amplifier. Input feeds grid, plate feeds next grid, final output is from plate. Everything else is supporting circuitry.
Note that between each stage there's a capacitor in the signal path. That's to block DC. If you want an amp that amplifies DC, each stage has to run at a higher voltage than the previous stage. The plate must be above the grid in voltage.
This was a huge headache in tube computers, both analog and digital.
Transistor circuits don't have the increasing voltage problem. Outputs and inputs are in the same voltage range. That's because transistors are current gain devices, not voltage gain devices.
> The key diagram is the one that shows the signal path [...] Everything else is supporting circuitry.
This is also very misleading in that all this supporting circuitry AND the stuff not even shown, such as wires routing with respect to each other and with respect to the inside or outside of a metal case ALSO contribute. All this stuff contributes to basic functionality ("noise", "hum", etc) and to finer performance (frequency response, dynamic, distortion, crosstalk, etc).
It's easy to confuse the map for the territory, the schematic for the physics of the thing. And common electronics schematics abstract away much that does matter. Engineers and builders with some experience will pay attention to this without bothering to include it in the schematic.
Pay attention when following a magazine article for example: most of the time it will point out the why of several decisions. Why they placed this and that away from each other. Why these wires are routed this way...
> Note that between each stage there's a capacitor in the signal path. That's to block DC. If you want an amp that amplifies DC, each stage has to run at a higher voltage than the previous stage. The plate must be above the grid in voltage. This was a huge headache in tube computers, both analog and digital.
You can also stick a voltage divider (and probably some diode clamping) in there to pull the signal off of the plate down to a grid compatible voltage for the next stage if you're just doing digital computing. That was the most common setup I've seen in tube based computing. They tended to play pretty nice with the resistors needed for the plate current anyway so it wasn't that much extra RC constant delay.
It's not exactly what I'd call a rounding error, but it's manageable. But yeah, tube computing in general is an exercise in building a really fancy space heater.
I'm trying to keep my tube computer I'm building down to ~3KW, and that's probably the biggest actual constraint on design complexity.
Transistors in principle have the same issue as tubes with bias stacking in that they only operate biased in one way and so the bias potentials necessarily add up (of course we're talking about much smaller voltages, both in absolute terms and in relation to usual supply voltages). But p-type transistors are practical, unlike p-type vacuum tubes. Well, you could build every other tube out of antimatter.
Nope. See this article in the Economist, "Grand Theft Global".[1]
What happens to the stolen phones? They're shipped in bulk to Huaqiangbei market in Shenzhen, there to be taken apart, reset, repaired, parts replaced, and resold to people in China who can't afford new phones.
The amusing thing is that the phones were probably originally built in Shenzhen.
Whenever you hear a line like that, run the other way.
Raw milk. Alkaline water. Pot. Guava leaves. Acupuncture. DMSO. Iron tablets. Fasting. Long, long history of this. The FDA had a museum of the ones that were outright harmful, but it doesn't seem to be on display any more.
Geomagnetic Disturbance Warning
11.11.2025 19:25 (PJM times are Eastern Standard).
PJM-RTO
A Geomagnetic Disturbance Warning has been issued for 19:25 on 11.11.2025 through 04:00 on 11.12.2025 . A GMD warning of K7 or greater is in effect for this period.
This is only a warning. There are no listed actions being taken. When you see Geomagnetic Disturbance Action, not just Warning, there's a problem. That happened most recently on June 1, 2025.
Extra people are probably on standby all night in case something happens.
CAISO: Nothing.
ERCOT: Nothing.
Hydro-Québec: Multiple snow-related outages near Montreal and some other locations.
Background info from the last time HN got wound up about this.[1]
So then "Montreal and some other locations" probably had the best views of any densely populated areas to watch the Aurora: When power is out, light pollution is no longer a problem!
Nietzsche is one of those thinkers who did a good job of identifying a major problem of their time. Then he went on to propose a solution, which didn't work out. (The same could be said of Marx, who was also active in the middle of the 19th century. The two apparently never met.)
Nietzsche wrote as the era of the landed aristocracy was ending. A society with an agrarian peasantry and an armed land-owning class can be stable for centuries. Especially with a church that tells people that this is the way things are supposed to be.
Then came industrialization, and this long stagnation came unglued over a few decades.
Industrialization replaced the centrality of land ownership and tenants with the centrality of the employer and the job. This is all well known.
Now, we see society's centrality of the job declining. What does that mean? That's the question to address as AI eats into jobs.
I'm not suggesting an answer. Recycling Nietzsche probably won't help, though.
"A stay you can count on. Experience travel without the guesswork. While every space is unique, you can always count on the Sonder Standard. All stays feature designer details, keyless entry, fast free WiFi and our 24/7 digital concierge."
Trying to make a reservation returns "Your session timed out, but you can start a new hotel search below."
This badly hurts Mariott's brand. Their page reads as if they stand behind Sonder. Marriott supposedly has about 30 brands, and now you have to ask which of them are fake fronts.
[1] https://www.marriott.com/en-us/hotels/nycho-the-merchant-hot...
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