The most chilling is that this also inflicts the military. Lieutenant Colonel Heffington on West Point, published in 2017: > Academic standards are also nonexistent. I believe this trend started 10 years ago, and it has…
While that was a rhetorical point in the Brexit campaign, in reality the nameless unelected bureaucrats in Brussels were simply replaced by nameless unelected bureaucrats in London Every Western "democracy" suffers from…
To add one more data point - Olkiluoto 3, started 2005, was expected to finish in 2009. Completed late 2021, 12 years late Cherry on top - after producing electricity for about a week, it had to shut down for another 3…
Tesla pulls all sorts of accounting tricks to make gross margin appear higher than it actually is. Warranty repairs are apparently done by pixies for free, so is R&D, factory amortization, or service centers A…
Notice who is pushing the narrative of Russia bogged down - journalists, politicians and their nominees, economists, and people with an active career in the military. There are also some dissidents in the West pushing…
> BRF system in Sweden To expand on this point, and a similar system in Finland called asumisoikeus: Municipalities have a pool of housing units. The tenants do not buy the house itself, they buy a right to live in that…
Unequivocal yes If Playstation is a cheaper source of compute power than consumer hardware, the customer should be able to turn it into a compute cluster, as many people did (1). That doesn't mean Sony has to provide…
On a societal level, once heating, industry, public services and transportation are accounted for, we consume around 500-1000W per person. Saving a few Watts per family is a rounding error. We're talking about the power…
Correct, and the difference is not even close - anything to do with temperature manipulation consumes orders of magnitude more. Literally, not figuratively The laptop I'm writing this on consumes around 10W. Kettle…
That's close to the way things work in Europe Pricing for the next day is decided on the spot market, around 2-3 PM. All large consumers and producers place bids on one-hour slots until the market clears. Prices do not…
My past three workplaces let me choose between a high-end Windows laptop, or a Macbook. I always opted for Windows, due to some tooling I'm used to, but ended up regretting it on every occasion The problems with…
It goes both ways - China claims Taiwan as theirs, but also Taiwan claims China as theirs Due to some obscure legalities, Taiwan dropping the claim would amount to declaration of war
> Furthermore China prefers peaceful solutions where it can In this case, the blind spot of western liberalism - demography. Taiwanese fertility rates are below 1.3 for nearly two decades now, some years even dipping…
Good faith communication is maladaptive on large scale Imagine the war scenario. The honest, good-faith communication would be like: If we capitulate outright, the worst thing that happens is paying taxes to somewhere…
Zelenskiy's #1 campaign promise was to negotiate peace with Russia - meaning fulfilling Ukraine's part of the Minsk accords, perhaps with some concessions. Overall, about 65% of the votes went to parties supporting it.…
They also have an example of...themselves - that all it takes to be left alone is being reasonable and not needlessly bellicose towards their great power neighbor
It gets worse than that. Often, code is pushed into an absurdly wrong level of the development stack, just because it makes testing it easier. For example, something should be a database trigger, but in-memory testing…
This is the best write-up of the Softbank business model: https://www.readmargins.com/p/softbank-robinhood-and-a-margi... In short, the background of Softbank founders is in plumbing of the financial system. They…
Interesting fact about trains - a lot of the diesel and gas locomotives do not burn fossil fuels to propel themselves, meaning there's no mechanical connection between the engines and the wheels. Instead, they burn the…
Because in the US, money has nowhere else to go. Stocks? Wildly overpriced. Real estate? Wildly overpriced. Bonds? Zero returns. Mineral extraction? Risky outlook. Energy sector? Subsidies are likely on the horizon,…
> websites don't follow the "spirit of the law" A perfect counter-example to people rambling about EU legislation - Wikipedia. Consistently in the top 10 sites in the world for 15 years, yet there's no cookie banner, no…
This is already a pattern in HN discussions: legislation is proposed, news outlets vaguely summarize it, the HN crowd interprets the summary in absurdly maximalist way without bothering to read the spirit and letter of…
Also, the term rare-earth metal is really unfortunate. About half of them have no practical industrial use. The other half is neither rare, nor particularly expensive The three most important rare earth elements are…
As far as I recall, there were some measurable increases in cancer incidence among children in Belarus, mostly due to milk intake However, all that was completely drowned by a collapse of life expectancy resulting from…
The problem with this line of argumentation is - why single out phone OS providers as the only link in the very long supply chain that deserves a cut? Why not internet provider? Verizon's infrastructure costs money, too…
The most chilling is that this also inflicts the military. Lieutenant Colonel Heffington on West Point, published in 2017: > Academic standards are also nonexistent. I believe this trend started 10 years ago, and it has…
While that was a rhetorical point in the Brexit campaign, in reality the nameless unelected bureaucrats in Brussels were simply replaced by nameless unelected bureaucrats in London Every Western "democracy" suffers from…
To add one more data point - Olkiluoto 3, started 2005, was expected to finish in 2009. Completed late 2021, 12 years late Cherry on top - after producing electricity for about a week, it had to shut down for another 3…
Tesla pulls all sorts of accounting tricks to make gross margin appear higher than it actually is. Warranty repairs are apparently done by pixies for free, so is R&D, factory amortization, or service centers A…
Notice who is pushing the narrative of Russia bogged down - journalists, politicians and their nominees, economists, and people with an active career in the military. There are also some dissidents in the West pushing…
> BRF system in Sweden To expand on this point, and a similar system in Finland called asumisoikeus: Municipalities have a pool of housing units. The tenants do not buy the house itself, they buy a right to live in that…
Unequivocal yes If Playstation is a cheaper source of compute power than consumer hardware, the customer should be able to turn it into a compute cluster, as many people did (1). That doesn't mean Sony has to provide…
On a societal level, once heating, industry, public services and transportation are accounted for, we consume around 500-1000W per person. Saving a few Watts per family is a rounding error. We're talking about the power…
Correct, and the difference is not even close - anything to do with temperature manipulation consumes orders of magnitude more. Literally, not figuratively The laptop I'm writing this on consumes around 10W. Kettle…
That's close to the way things work in Europe Pricing for the next day is decided on the spot market, around 2-3 PM. All large consumers and producers place bids on one-hour slots until the market clears. Prices do not…
My past three workplaces let me choose between a high-end Windows laptop, or a Macbook. I always opted for Windows, due to some tooling I'm used to, but ended up regretting it on every occasion The problems with…
It goes both ways - China claims Taiwan as theirs, but also Taiwan claims China as theirs Due to some obscure legalities, Taiwan dropping the claim would amount to declaration of war
> Furthermore China prefers peaceful solutions where it can In this case, the blind spot of western liberalism - demography. Taiwanese fertility rates are below 1.3 for nearly two decades now, some years even dipping…
Good faith communication is maladaptive on large scale Imagine the war scenario. The honest, good-faith communication would be like: If we capitulate outright, the worst thing that happens is paying taxes to somewhere…
Zelenskiy's #1 campaign promise was to negotiate peace with Russia - meaning fulfilling Ukraine's part of the Minsk accords, perhaps with some concessions. Overall, about 65% of the votes went to parties supporting it.…
They also have an example of...themselves - that all it takes to be left alone is being reasonable and not needlessly bellicose towards their great power neighbor
It gets worse than that. Often, code is pushed into an absurdly wrong level of the development stack, just because it makes testing it easier. For example, something should be a database trigger, but in-memory testing…
This is the best write-up of the Softbank business model: https://www.readmargins.com/p/softbank-robinhood-and-a-margi... In short, the background of Softbank founders is in plumbing of the financial system. They…
Interesting fact about trains - a lot of the diesel and gas locomotives do not burn fossil fuels to propel themselves, meaning there's no mechanical connection between the engines and the wheels. Instead, they burn the…
Because in the US, money has nowhere else to go. Stocks? Wildly overpriced. Real estate? Wildly overpriced. Bonds? Zero returns. Mineral extraction? Risky outlook. Energy sector? Subsidies are likely on the horizon,…
> websites don't follow the "spirit of the law" A perfect counter-example to people rambling about EU legislation - Wikipedia. Consistently in the top 10 sites in the world for 15 years, yet there's no cookie banner, no…
This is already a pattern in HN discussions: legislation is proposed, news outlets vaguely summarize it, the HN crowd interprets the summary in absurdly maximalist way without bothering to read the spirit and letter of…
Also, the term rare-earth metal is really unfortunate. About half of them have no practical industrial use. The other half is neither rare, nor particularly expensive The three most important rare earth elements are…
As far as I recall, there were some measurable increases in cancer incidence among children in Belarus, mostly due to milk intake However, all that was completely drowned by a collapse of life expectancy resulting from…
The problem with this line of argumentation is - why single out phone OS providers as the only link in the very long supply chain that deserves a cut? Why not internet provider? Verizon's infrastructure costs money, too…