1 - Secretary Rollins Blocks Taxpayer Dollars for Solar Panels on Prime Farmland
2- Secretary Rollins Prioritizes American Energy on National Forest Land
Both have quotes about putting "America first" to confuse people to make them think this is better for all. We think the USDA is about getting healthy food to people, but really they're about maximizing the money for farmers and people who own the land. Terrible.
I'm in Wisconsin and if I drive on a county road, I see signs near the road that say "Save our S̶o̶l̶a̶r̶ Farms". Maybe some are fine with them, but seems like lots of internal pressure to say no or unfortunate reasons.
They may feel like grassroots campaigns to save farms, but much of it is backing from large corporate interests. Doesn't mean that there aren't legit concerns, but the sponsorship makes me weary.
Is it affordable because they are dumping though? Or is it because of the slave labor? Or is it cheap because they freely pollute the air water and land? Or maybe all of the above? I would personally love to see a full ban on imports from countries unless they are at parity with US environmental/labor/trade laws.
An interesting take. What happens for all the things where US laws and policy are worse (“below standard”) for many developed countries, which are plenty?
My point isn’t that the US is great at everything (it’s clearly not), it’s that putting restrictions on US businesses while trading with places that don’t have the restrictions is moronic. It puts US businesses at a disadvantage and then still has the negative effect the regulations were trying to prevent in many cases (e.g. air pollution, water pollution, abuse of workers if you care about Chinese people too and don’t want to support their abuse, etc).
I don't get it… isn't up to the landowner whether they farm corn, soybeans, or solar radiation? The government may provide different incentives for each, but AFAIK, they aren't forcing a choice.
Depending on the state, not enough to matter. Farmers are not a major voting block in most of the US anymore. Farmers are a bit over 1% of the US population. I'm trying to find better sources than listicle type things, but the best I can find is that in the states with the highest percentage of farmers, it's still only 5-6% of their state population.
That can be enough to swing things, but it's not enough to be the deciding block that many think they are. A century ago things were much different.
This is very wrong: farmers still have incredibly outsized influence in American politics, mostly to our detriment. We have a number of horrible policies (ethanol subsidies, HFCS in everything, tons of inexplicable restrictions on food stamps, water policy in the west emptying all the aquifers) that are entirely because of lobbying by farmers, and the Farm Bill distributes between 70 and 100 billion per year, much of it well-spent but also with a great deal of graft and patronage because of farming lobbying.
And even that is probably an optimistic number for what most people would consider a "farmer." It always irks me when people are blaming farmers for the polices of farm counties when the vast majority of voters in those communities have nothing at all to do with farming.
Someone can be more specific and accurate with this, but in the US, population percentages don't vote. Or in other words, some votes are worth more than others. So relying entirely on % of population isn't a great measure.
That's a fair point. By the numbers, about 60% of voters turned out in the last election. Historically, though, we've had lower turnouts. Let's say that nationally only 50% turned out but all farmers voted. That would make their 1+% block closer to 2-3% of the votes for an election which is more significant.
Iowa was listed as 63% urban in the 2020 census. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. An area needs 2000 housing units and/or 5000 people to be counted as urban. If you’ve been through the state, you’ll see lots of tiny little 2000-3000 person towns that have an urban street grid around a couple-block downtown core. These things don’t get counted as urban.
The farmland is too valuable for you to see much of any sprawl except in Des Moines and Iowa City. Even Council Bluffs (the Iowa side of the Omaha metro) has very little for the metro size.
Another wrinkle is funding for Secure Rural Schools under the 1908 25% fund act hasn't been renewed. Counties that have a national forest presence have a federal government offset to compensate for lost logging.
My brother in law curls. Asked him about this and he said that it's been coming for a while, the men's teams at Canadian nationals has a self imposed a ban on them, and for amateurs it doesn't really affect them since they're not good enough to have it make a difference. Seems like it means it's not that big an issue and players aren't arguing to keep them.
Now golf on the other hand has a much bigger equipment issues if people want to see some big time drama.
I remember back in the day when the brooms were real corn bristle brooms. You had to have forearms like hams to slap those brooms back and forth hard enough to get those stones to move. The side effect was that every now and then a piece of straw would bust off and cause the stone to veer way off course.
I've been curious about what the best way to recording breathing rates with wearables would be. Thought was a chest strap with springs to measure tension with higher tension being air in lungs. But you're talking about a different way. How does the magnet work to get rates? I'd want something that can get rates and volumes from mouth vs nasal and also tell which vent the air in coming into the lungs from. Probably a case of how much intrusion you want vs how intricate and correct the data is.
>They had banked on Murati calming employees while they searched for a CEO. Instead, she was leading her colleagues in a revolt against the board.
I finally finished the 4th of Caro's books about LBJ, "The Passage of Power", largest part about how LBJ dealt with assassination. Over and over shows how LBJ made sure that nobody, meaning world leaders, citizens, others in government, and, relevant here, also those in the Kennedy administration would feel lost and want to resign. Caro made sure to note how this is a very difficult task and required LBJ to act differently than normal, but also how important it is to not have things go into disarray which easily happens.
Side note: Astounding notes of how LBJ was able to get bills that weren't going to get through congress with Kennedy were pushed through and made possible by Johnson. Quote to end a chapter by Richard Russell, southern complete segregationist and racist, says "You know, we could have beaten John Kennedy on civil rights, but we can't Johnson." Other side, Caro makes certain however about how the coming issues of Vietnam show the darker side of LBJ and not get fully caught up in his stability of power and civil rights successes.
Maybe these are all cases of those who want power are usually those who shouldn't have it.
Stolen bases in baseball is similar to this. In 2023, MLB made two rule changes with stealing being at all time lows (and them thinking fans love stolen bases): 1) Limiting the number of pickoff attempts by pitchers, and 2) Slight enlarging of the bases. Take a look at the jump[0].
It's been interesting to follow some changes teams have made the past two seasons where teams are figuring out how to better time steals when a pitch is thrown, and which players to go after. For example, pitchers with slow releases and bad catchers.
Base running aggressiveness that some teams have been doing as well. The value of going 1st to 3rd on a single is massive and getting speed, and judgement and wanting your players to do that will be more and more valued.
I actually searched "base running aggressiveness" to see what articles had to say, and two months ago Statcast put in a new stat called "Net Bases Gained"[1]. Crazy.
This mimics the changes in NBA talked about here, where value in players changes over times when new ways of playing show their value. It's kind of like the 4 minute mile though, where until someone went out and was able to run under 4 minutes / make all those 3s / run that aggressive on the base paths / go for it on more 4th downs, teams are scared to be the first.
I don't really understand the comparison. The game changes with the rules. The meta shifts with the analytics.
But stealing bases has long been a science. It was something I admired about college level development of players in the 2000's - stealing bases went from fundamental to advanced and well beyond "just let the fastest guys do their thing." UVA's coach had a saying like "every player on this team will be capable of stealing bases"
I think the comparison in general to baseball is pretty apt. Baseball has always been ahead of the curve in terms of analytics in sports. In the last 10 years it really went to extremes that made it unwatchable. The OP didn't mention the pitch clock, but that has made numerous improvements as well. The shift rules too. The game is a lot closer now to its history than it was just a few years ago.
The NBA could use its own blast from the past. There's too much isolation and 3s. When the 3s are falling, it's fun, and when they're not, it's terrible. Much like baseball and its homerun or nothing strategy.
I think the NBA has other problems too, though. The regular season doesn't mean much so their superstars take lots of time off throughout the year. Either shorten the regular season or eliminate some playoff teams.
MLB teams abandoned fundamentals because of the moneyball analyst guidance. Just like in business, following the MBA short-term analysis stuff often has negative impacts. You need to tweak the rules to break the statistical advantage.
When the NHL over-expanded in the 90s a similar thing happened -- there wasn't enough talent so they'd just skate in these obnoxious circles, which is super boring to watch.
The comparison IMO is that how baseball is played changed over time as teams optimized, and some of those changes are undesirable from the perspective of an entertainment product. So MLB changed the rules to increase plays at the margin that are on average considered "more exciting."
Every league does this of course, NBA did it just last year with the stealth rule changes around fouls.
For engineering we had to pick either multivariate calculus or linear algebra for more upper level math courses. I picked multivariate, and I'll say it was also my least enjoyable there. I look back wondering what would have gone different if I picked linear algebra instead, but who knows, maybe I'd have just as blech of an experience with that. Lot of great classes in the EECS department though.
I totally remember 482 (Operating Systems for those reading) being really interesting. Story I remember is one of the final projects and dealing with locks in C++ world where I'd get close to full solution, but some errors from the locks, then I'd make a change and suddenly those previous failing tests passed but new ones failed. I didn't realize that could happen.
Great times. And I really liked how we did it all in C++ (other than computer vision 442 that was in matlab) rather than Python which some places do. Having that lower level understanding of languages in school makes understanding code so much easier, and something I didn't have to learn on my own.
Great stuff. We get told O notation is what matters for data structures / algorithms, but improvements low level with memory and storage with things like rust is much more where improves can be made. These types of tricks for anctual run times are so valuable, and interesting to follow.
It was great while computers were not really a thing yet, but these days it's often so meaningless. We see papers with 2x speedup with a lot of novel algorithmic stuff that sell better than 10x speedup just by exploiting CPUs to the fullest.
Even myself I kinda think theoretical contributions are cooler, and we really need to get rid of that (slightly exaggerating).
There are two ways to look at this Big O wise. One is that insertions and deletions would be asymptomatically faster since memmove() is a linear operation while bubble up/down are logarithmic operations. Look ups would not be any different asymptotically, but the constant factor might improve from being able to do prefetch. The other way is that the N is bounded, such that it is all O(1) and the difference is how big the constant factor is.
I imagine I could implement it and benchmark it. However, my intuition is that the end result have lookups be marginally faster to the point of splitting hairs while insertions and deletions would be slower. While memmove() is a technically a linear time operation, it is a sequential operation that has a very low constant factor. The bubble up and bubble down operations needed to do insertions and deletions in a Eytzinger ordered array are technically random access, which has a higher constant factor. At some point, the Eytzinger ordered array operations should win, but that point is likely well beyond the size of a b-tree node.
My reason for saying this is to say that Big O notation still matters, but understanding when the constant factor is significant is important.
Same with async and throwing threads at a problem. People love do those and think it's the right answer, but you can do a ton with smarter memory management and actually looking at what the code is doing lower level rather than abstractions.
He is improving the constant factor in big O notation. University algorithm classes tend to ignore cases where the constant factor difference is significant enough to favor a asymptomatically slower algorithm. Matrix multiplication is the quintessential example of this, since a good implementation of the O(n^3) algorithm will outperform asymptotically faster algorithms, such as the famous O(n^2 * log(n) * log(log(n))) one that uses the FFT. At least, it outperforms it on matrix multiplications people actually do in practice.
I did computer engineering in college some 10-15 years ago, where these projects were super basic and difficult to get into. Seems like massive advancements in the past decade. Maybe my eye has been watching for these, but I'm seeing many more posts about ESP32 projects, for example, being linked here. Same for RP2040s, along with sensors galore and wifi / bluetooth connections.
Picking Rust as language for the chips instead of the C and MicroPython. Rust has applications beyond the embedded systems and learning it lower level can be helpful if wanted in other cases.
It seems like the options are 1) MicroPython, which is really easy to use (use python for everything) but lacking in anything lower level to a quick restriction on what you can do. 2) C, which I've used before and understand, but going from the Arduino or PlatformIO experience would require a lot of learning as well. 3) Rust (with embedded_hal and embassy), which is newer, along with different language, but with ability to go lower level with complies, and seeming overall goal to be more widely used.
College was all C/C++ so I've used that before, so I can understand and pick up the code. Since I have brief experience rather than your experience, I'm betting that the time it'd take for me to get up to speed with C and fuller dev environments would take as long as with Rust, and since I can use rust in more applications for what I do professionally, I'm figuring to put the time there.
What have you built and with what in your 25 years? Too many posts and vids about these things are intro rather than more in depth. It's great to hear from people who actually do this into production rather than mini-projects.
I'm learning Ada next year. I'm not interested at all in doing low level programming with it, but the text books I have note that it's actually an area where it excels. Maybe worth a look.
Great timing. I've been wanting to learn how to do projects like this, but been so unsure what types of microcontroller I should get and what else could be needed. Similar in the software world where we all have our preferred tech stacks, I was so uncertain of what stack to use for these projects that it definitely causes a hurdle.
His mention of the ESP32 and how
>While working on the game I used my newfound ESP32 skills to do some other projects, such as automating the remote-controlled blinds in our bedroom as well as a motion sensor that would send Pushover notifications to my phone.
is absolutely what I'm wanting to be able to do. Learn the tech needed for one controller that can be used on tons of different places. That, plus that talk with MicroPython (and other parts) gives some confidence about learning this hardware stack.
I'd say you're on the right track, then! It's kind of like software — figure out how the components talk to each other and figure out where to hook in. Instead of APIs, you've got multimeters and oscilloscopes.
In the case of the blind automation, the remote uses some kind of proprietary wireless signal. Instead of figuring that out, I soldered some leads into the remote's momentary button terminals, which I connected to transistors on a breadboard. The ESP32 simply pretends to press a button and complete a connection on the remote.
Also check out ESPHome (https://esphome.io), a firmware for ESP32 that lets you more easily integrate with home automation systems.
1 - Secretary Rollins Blocks Taxpayer Dollars for Solar Panels on Prime Farmland
2- Secretary Rollins Prioritizes American Energy on National Forest Land
Both have quotes about putting "America first" to confuse people to make them think this is better for all. We think the USDA is about getting healthy food to people, but really they're about maximizing the money for farmers and people who own the land. Terrible.
[1] - https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2025/08/... [2] - https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2025/08/...