This just begs the next "why". Why are people eating more now?
Such a significant behavior change across a large population is not well explained by "we just did".
I'm not sure fast food consumption or huge portion sizes is a great explanation. If fast food is the problem, why does that matter if it just comes down to calories? As for larger portion sizes, would even larger portions make us continue eating? Would tiny portion sizes make us all deadly malnourished?
We do know that walking rates, across the country, have fallen significantly. In 1969, approximately 50% of children walked or bicycled to school, with approximately 87% of children living within one mile of school walking or bicycling. Today, fewer than 15% of schoolchildren walk or bicycle to school. And we see this generally across the board, where for the most part driving to work alone dominates commute habits. If the only walking you do is from the door to the car, you are not getting much routine physical activity.
This would also actually well correlate with the rate of fast food consumption, since it's primarily car-centric, and is more car-centric than other types of eating out.
I also don't think it's really any sort of secret that fast food companies like return customers and engineer the types of food that become addictive. There is a book called the Dorito Effect which theorizes that not only has artificial food become more flavorful over time, but that our industrial scale food production has made the base products less flavorful in favor of prettier or hardier varietals.
Food got way, way cheaper, including and especially convenient (ready to eat) food. Plus a race between companies selling that food to optimize flavor and marketing strategies for maximum sales, which, at some point, had to start meaning “more eating”, not “more eating this instead of something else” otherwise line could not go up.
The reason a population gains weight is way more complicated and probably best short-handed as “social”. Moving to America typically makes people gain weight. Leaving it leads to weight loss. If you’re trying to fix an overweight population, you need to look at lots and lots of things and, demonstrably (as in: the science is pretty clear), telling people to simply eat less and even very expensive high-touch interventions aimed at diet correction don’t work. Wrong tree to bark up, your solution lies elsewhere—or, probably, several elsewheres.
It seems very different and critically important. Would we have a current obesity epidemic without "optimized flavor and marketing strategies"? Because if we would not, then that is the true cause and of fundamental public health importance.
If we would have an obesity epidemic even without "optimized flavor and marketing strategies", then it is totally irrelevant.
Yes and no. I think there are two levers on the CI side of the equation and only one of them is hyper-palatability (optimized flavor); the other is simply cost. Food costs have fallen sharply, and that contributes to over-feeding. Hyper-palatability also contributes. It's not irrelevant, but not the only factor.
> This just begs the next "why". Why are people eating more now?
Have you been in a US supermarket? It's absolutely nuts and I don't think many Americans realise it.
To be bombarded with monumentally huge portions of everything is just a recipe for...well....the situation the US is in. Theres not many other countries that have whole food groups focused on cramming in as much peanut butter, jelly, marshmallow, chocolate, or whatever other high fructose corn syrup crap is being used.
Massive slices of cake prepackaged and ready to eat? Yeah why not.
50 different coffee syrup flavors? Yeah go for it.
How about a lovely massive bottle of sugary drink to wash it down? Just one? No no have a crate of 20 of the things.
Just for a comparison, look up candy on the Walmart site. Now do it on Tesco UK. Next, try the bakery, or hell even the meat isle, somehow the exact same product ends up being significantly worse for you in the US.
The orthodox reason for why people are overweight is calories in, calories out. Does it matter if those calories are a prepackaged cake or candy? In the end it is just calories.
Would gratuitously large steaks in the meat section and huge rotisserie turkeys instead of chicken at Costco produce the same result?
It seems strange to pick on certain types of foods unless believe those foods are the cause of obesity instead of just eating too many calories of any kind.
If you think cookies and candy are bad but other things are not, why? Is it that they are easier to over-eat? If so, how does that compound over time, given humans are trying to maintain homeostasis which includes a healthy set weight via satiety. Exercise induces more calorie consumption later. Over calorie consumption also induces lower consumption later. This seem like relevant factors.
It is, of course, not as easy as calories in / calories out, although the "Twinkies experiment" proved that you can in fact lose weight via caloric restriction alone. For any kind of "normal" diet insulin plays a massive role in obesity. And that bag of candy will absolutely send it to the stratosphere, especially if you consume sweets frequently. Buy a continuous glucose monitor (it's now available OTC via Stelo), and see for yourself. That's what I did.
I am aware of this, I am more trying to get those that really believe it is as simple as calories in calories out to break free from that Plato-ey over-simplified explanation.
I didn’t fully grasp how poorly our US bread approximates the real thing until I visited Europe. It’s weirdly spongy and candy sweet, and that’s the “healthy” bread in the bread aisle. Our food culture is just kind of gross most of the time, and the ersatz health food is some of the worst, as it’s been punched up with loads of organic cane juice or pear juice concentrate. Or celery juice if it’s a product that wants to claim not to have added nitrates. And, it should go without saying, truckloads of salt.
The proportion of households with a person with time and energy to prepare a healthy home cooked meal has diminished. We have sacrificed domestic life on the altar of profit.
It really doesn't have to take more than 10-15 minutes per day in total, you just have to be aware of what you're doing. I know several examples — including myself — who eat healthy food on a budget and spend very little time doing it. We had our problems with American-style food when it appeared and became popular (I had a BMI of 30.5 for several years and blamed everything but myself), but quickly self corrected before real damage was done.
Does absolute power consumption matter or would it not be better to focus on per-core power consumption? Eg running 6 32-core CPUs seems unlikely to be better than 1 192-core.
Yes, per core power consumption or better performance per Watt is usually more relevant than the total power consumption. And 1 high-core CPU is usually better than the same number of cores on multiple CPUs. (That is unless you are trying to maximize memory bandwidth per Watt.)
What I wanted to get at is that the pure core count can be misleading if you care about power consumption. If you don't and just look at performance, the current CPU generations are monsters. But if you care about performance/Watt, the improvement isn't that large. The Zen1 CPU I was talking about had a TDP of 180 W. So you get 6x as many cores, but the power consumption increases by 2.7x.
What's really exciting is that this suit is the type of thing that will only make the situation worse for smaller apps. More and more rules have been working so well for the Play Store I bet doubling them will really help.
I'm referring to companies financial statements where these numbers are reported. It doesn't mean the cash comp isn't high or that a specific job offer won't have a lot of cash comp.
What it does mean is that, in aggregate, Roblox has issued $1B in new shares to employees in the last 12 months, diluting shareholders by 4% or so. This is the most significant factor making the company cash-flow positive while remaining not profitable. It's essentially the same as investors putting more money into the business constantly.
I'm a pretty senior IC at Roblox, and my new hire offer was 40% cash / 60% RSUs. It's now closer to 33/67 with refresher grants.
Roblox pays very competitively (see levels.fyi). The apparent strategy is to try to hire lots of long-tenured L6+ Googlers (seriously, it's crazy how many former Googlers I work with).
Having lots of ex Googlers could honestly go either way. I wouldn’t automatically assume thats a good thing.
A former mid size company that I worked at had the same scenario and it was definitely not good. They over engineered not just the systems but literally everything else, including the promotion process which involved the whole horse and pony show and was a constant distraction to shipping features while the companys finances struggled.
Not a good sign for Roblox. Yes, many smart people, but they weren't industry changing (Google almost never loses) and they didn't get or turned down Google's renewal program to retain talent.
Looks like a lot who wanted the high pay, but coast along and leverage their past experience to not be dared questioned.
If you want people who know how to build stable large scale infrastructure it is hard to go wrong by hiring people from Google. Google rewrites all their products all the time, they shut down and launch new internal systems just as often as they do external, and it is still stable, so the people from there has probably been through a few rewrites of some infrastructure part and knows what are required for that to work.
Roblox's salary ranges from $140861 in total compensation ... Levels.fyi collects anonymous and verified salaries from current and former employees of Roblox.
Total compensation means $700K, some of it being cash, some of it being stock. Company cars are pretty rare in the US, since basically everyone has a car already.
Company cars are really common in some industries, very rare in others. Ive never heard of it in tech, but I know people in sales that its just part of the gig.
I've not owned a car in 7 years thanks to my engineering gig coming with a work truck for getting around construction sites. Quite enjoy that aspect of it.
Roblox will not be issuing stock options now and likely stopped doing so for 4+ years already. The equity component of compensation now will be actual stock (shares) and not options.
Another commenter mentioned that cash/equity now has a 33/67 split meaning $700k tc would likely be $230k cash and $470k stocks
Total Compensation is the sum of all the different ways you are paid monetarily. This includes, but is not limited to: Base salary, Bonus, Equity (stock) compensation, Benefits
The type of consumer buying an ASUS device is the type of consumer that thinks the spec sheet tells them how good something is. Eg, faster CPU and more RAM, or higher screen refresh rate or whatever is good regardless of any other variables or the package as a whole.
This means they are "some of the best Android phones you can buy", as in, they have some of the best specs per $ you can buy. Not that they are actually good phones.
It makes total sense someone could think they are great phones while they also have terrible software support since software support is not a simple hardware number on the spec sheet.
This is very like PC people that hyper-focus on a few metrics like CPU frequency since it is simple and numerical and easily compared, even if it is not actually sufficient to tell you much about full system performance.
Example ASUS phone description from enthusiast: "It's got good speakers, 2 charge ports, 165 refresh rate, optimal cooling, a set of ultra sonic buttons, ip54, crazy good battery, acceptable camera, storage is crazy high 256GB for 1 grand, 512 for 1.1 grand, 12G ram for 1k, 16G ram for 1.1k, can take 2 sim cards."
Cloudflare is cash-flow positive because a big chunk of employee compensation is paid thru the issuance of new shares (eg constantly raising more money and diluting existing owners / investors). If you include that comp as a cost they are not making money https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/net/financials/cash-flow-st...
I believe Cloudflare (and many other cos like it) have never produced operating income. They are growing and obviously important and potentially very profitable in the future, but when discount rates are much higher and you add in some uncertainty, one could argue they don't look as hot as they used to.
Well if f000.backblazeb2.com is used for any other people's buckets too, which appears to be the case, I guess I am now able to serve other people's files from my domain? This seems terrible.
I'm not sure I understand all of the nuances here (I'm no webmaster), but this is covered in the documentation you linked:
> You must configure page rules to allow Cloudflare to fetch only your Backblaze B2 bucket from your domain. ... Otherwise, someone could use your domain to fetch content from another customer's public bucket. To ensure this does not happen, Cloudflare lets you use page rules to scope requests to your bucket.
The example shows leaving your bucket name in the url as a way to filter out requests to other bucket names. If you want your static site to have http://mysite.com/bucketname/index.html then I guess that's ok. But again, careful configuration and still not for every situation.
I'm sure you can layer more rules to get it exactly right but I'd not be eager to layer on complex configuration through multiple service providers when it is avoidable, unless there is some very compelling overriding reason.
As far as I know, bucket names must be unique at other providers like AWS as well. [0]
I'm no expert but to try and protect my own domain, I use a transform rule to match a subdomain and append "/file/$MY_BUCKET_NAME" to each request. This should return a 404 for anybody who tries to inject their own bucket in the path. I could be wrong of course.
Bolting a Cloudfront distribution onto a S3 bucket is pretty well-trod territory, though, and doesn't have these sharp edges. (Has a couple other ones, but they're less common.)
Does the solution involve using Cloudflare workers? Because, as I said, I'm sure it is possible but maybe we've gone off the deep end a bit. Just how crazy of a configuration do you want just to serve files from an object store?
This looks like an awful lot of setup for "easily solved". Easily solved is what S3 does where this isn't even a problem.
The whole point of IA is cheaper storage that is infrequently accessed, and there is a price to accessing it. If you need / want frequent access just use the regular storage class.
All object stores out there have a flavor of IA class with an access fee that should be far lower than the storage class savings for scenarios where you would even consider using this. If you don't want or understand this cost optimization you simply don't use it.
Such a significant behavior change across a large population is not well explained by "we just did".
I'm not sure fast food consumption or huge portion sizes is a great explanation. If fast food is the problem, why does that matter if it just comes down to calories? As for larger portion sizes, would even larger portions make us continue eating? Would tiny portion sizes make us all deadly malnourished?