DemocracyFTW

thus far there haven't been any [crazy consequences], despite centuries of human-driven weather changes.

which obviously is not true, right?

@1 the part of the salt being an essential ingredient did escape me so thanks for pointing it out. It does make the whole thing more believable because then maybe (if it works) you can have more clouds for a fraction of mass moved.

@2 yeah I'm all for zeppelins (and trains). It's not immediately obvious to me how to make use of zeppelins (or trains) for this project but maybe they could be used to collect solar power (but do they have enough buoyancy for large solar panels?)

@3 I'm not against sending experimental vessels to the sea and spray water all over the place in order to find out what happens. I'm all for doing some boundary sanity checks beforehand and during such undertakings to see whether basic physics checks out, and this is what motivated my post. I live in Germany, a country with roughly the size of the Great Barrier Reef, and I'm not sure I have a good handle at the size of this country—it is too big. I'd be happy to hear from someone else an estimate for the size, number and horsepower of vessels required to pull this off. If it's a thousand cargo ships, that sounds like an upper bound for being reasonable. If it's a thousand aircraft carriers, then forget about it. If its hundreds of thousands of mid-sized vessels, good luck with acquiring or building, outfitting, maintaining, manning, catering, harboring, and fueling them. Maybe modified oil drilling platforms are better suited for a task like this.

It's good to hear from an Australian that environmental policies like fire management and cloud seeding have made ecological disasters a thing of the past in your part of the world /s

Maybe my comment in this thread can encourage him to take the calculation further, like trying to find out how many Wh are needed based on physics alone to accelerate the requisite mass of water needed on a daily basis, which gives you a lower bound of how much electricity / fossil fuel / m³ of hydrogen / percentage of nuclear power plant output is needed for that.

I think my unfinished back-of-the-envelope calculation strongly hints at this plan being not practical. Another factor to consider is the large scale impacts and assessment of the sheer predictability of outcomes for the ecosphere and for society alike. To me it looks a lot like some people just don't get that messing with the environment on a global scale is qualitatively different from, say, watering your 300m² garden or turning that knob on the radio.

Under the conservative prime minister Scott Morrison, the government has yet to strengthen its climate pledge under the 2015 Paris agreement, as many nations have done in the past year. Morrison has personally ruled out committing to net-zero emissions. Pushing for a technological fix to global warming without moving to aggressively curb greenhouse gases is “sheer lunacy”, says Peter Frumhoff, chief climate scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Morrison):

The 2020 Climate Change Performance Index ranked Australia in last place for its climate policies and was the only country to score 0 for the same metric in 2021.

During the 2019–20 Australian bushfire season, Morrison dismissed suggestions of a link between Australia's emissions or policies and the intensity of the bushfires and initially downplayed the influence of climate change on the fires, but later admitted that climate change may have contributed.

Morrison declined to set net-zero emissions or other climate change targets, unlike other world leaders. Morrison allegedly requested climate change policy targets be removed from a proposed 2021 Australia–United Kingdom trade deal and initially suggested he would not attend the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, but later confirmed that he would.

Morrison's government pledged that Australia would aim to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, but did not introduce this into national law; Morrison said he believed market forces and not government regulation can address climate change.

His government's climate action plan has been criticised as "lightweight", "meaningless", and a "mockery" that contains "no policy or strategy whatsoever".

Market forces, sure.

How much CO2 is emitted by those boats with their high-powered water pumps? How much noise is injected into the water body when these vessels operate in numbers day in, day out? How many vessels and hours of operation will be needed to have a cooling effect? Where do the clouds, where does the water go once it is vaporized and left drifting?

Come to think of it one could imagine to suck huge quantities of marine water to vaporize it and let it drift as clouds over land; thinking in the abstract, that could contribute to more shade, lower temperatures and more precipitation over hot and arid areas, thereby improving conditions for plants, animals, and humans. But, and this is a big one: how much energy will this need? How is that energy produced? How much water would one have to evaporate? What are the consequences for marine life? What are the consequences when the next government decides to cut funding? And what about the salt content of the aerosol, for certainly it will be utterly uneconomic to desalinate the water prior to spraying it?

My hunch is that those figures won't work out and that artificial clouds over the Great Barrier Reef also won't work out. The reef is called great because it covers an area of ~344,400km², roughly the area of countries like Finland, Congo, Germany, or Japan. According to the USGS[1], the water in a cloud with a volume of 1km³ weighs about 500,000kg. A 1m thick cloud layer over said area has a volume of 344.400km³ if I'm not mistaken, so weighs around 172,200,000kg. So in order to work one would think it to be requisite to spray in the order of a hundred million kg of water like almost daily into the air from seagoing vessels. There's an almost constant wind over most of the oceans so low-faring clouds will disperse in a matter of minutes or hours; the clouds however would be most desperately needed around noon each day which complicates things. Perhaps one could move the ships to upwind locations each day so clouds generated in the afternoon and the night get a chance to drift over the reef.

But imagine to do that for a country-size area: You'd need a fleet of tens or hundreds of thousands of not-so-small vessels. I cannot imagine photovoltaics to be a sufficient source of energy (for one, space is very limited on any vessel, and ironically, the vessel's reason for being there is to reduce impact of solar power). You'd need nuclear or hydrogen because otherwise you'd have to burn through untold tons of fossil fuels.

At any rate, the waters will not be calm anymore. The noise of the evaporators and the propellers will be deafening in the air and in the sea.

All told, a badly thought-out publicity stunt.

[1] https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/sci...

That doesn't read like an endorsement of planned geoengineering.

No we're not engineers because we find it OK when the poll results get displayed before you even vote. Engineers would study a problem including user experience and user expectations, hence only tell results after the poll has finished or at least until after the user has voted (in low-stake polls like this one).

Yes we are engineers because we find it OK when the poll results get displayed before you even vote—shows how little we know and care about the rest of the world.

That's not "opposition to the science", that's a sane response to a madman's proposal to intentionally f*k with the biosphere at the grandest scale.

solar radiation management first [...] Marine cloud brightening

you mean, like, throwing a spanner into a machinery we hardly understand and see whether "it sticks"? Give me a hundred planets and start the trials!

Generally this is not seriously discussed by experts as a solution to global warming not because it is not feasible, but because it would diminish the sense of urgency

Let us say it is not being discussed because it is not feasible. Unless of course we build massive nuclear power plants in Antarctica with all what that entails. We are not any time soon in a position where we can produce any nontrivial amount of solar or wind energy in the hostile environment of that continent, plus it's dark night down there for half a year each year. Meaning the only remaining option would be to ship coal or oil down there to burn it so we can cool air to –140°C, obviously a non-starter if there ever was one.

and discourage the much more prudent and affordable approach of simply reducing emissions.

This. The entire plan is madness: you'd burn two tons of oil and coal to get rid of part of what burning one ton of oil and coal leave behind in the atmosphere. It is not clear to me at this point if it is at all feasible to use fossil fuel to get more CO2 out of the atmosphere than burning it puts into the atmosphere in the first place. Because in this household we obey the laws of thermodynamic. And if it's possible at all it's not easy to see why continuing to burn oil and coal and capturing the CO2 at other sites should be better than not burning part of those fuels and capturing the CO2 right at their point of emission should be the better option. It is a hare-brained plan.

surplus renewable energy

is where you lost me. Hell coal is projected to get burned by the megaton for another half century or so because China and India have those resources and that demand. Mankind does not currently have surplus renewable energy.

Your assessment of the properties of the display specifically seem to go counter what I perceived as a convincing argument by the OLPC guy brought up in a TED talk at the time, namely, that the two biggest cost factors of a new laptop are marketing and the display unit. He then argued that the project can largely just do away with marketing altogether (plausible) and went on to say that even displays that come out of production with a single pixel error have a massively reduced price tag. From that I concluded that the project could reasonably build cheap hardware if only they went with no advertising and run-of-the-mill display units that narrowly failed quality checks.

Nothing in that talk hinted at the possibility that instead of opting for a established and proven technology like LCD they'd choose to go with RDF (reality distortion field) displays instead.

I feel being lied to.

It would perhaps be a good thing if one could write SQL clauses in their logical ordering; as [1] explains:

* The FROM clause: First, all data sources are defined and joined

* The WHERE clause: Then, data is filtered as early as possible

* The CONNECT BY clause: Then, data is traversed iteratively or recursively, to produce new tuples

* The GROUP BY clause: Then, data is reduced to groups, possibly producing new tuples if grouping functions like ROLLUP(), CUBE(), GROUPING SETS() are used

* The HAVING clause: Then, data is filtered again

* The SELECT clause: Only now, the projection is evaluated. In case of a SELECT DISTINCT statement, data is further reduced to remove duplicates

* The UNION clause: Optionally, the above is repeated for several UNION-connected subqueries. Unless this is a UNION ALL clause, data is further reduced to remove duplicates

* The ORDER BY clause: Now, all remaining tuples are ordered

* The LIMIT clause: Then, a paginating view is created for the ordered tuples

* The FOR clause: Transformation to XML or JSON

* The FOR UPDATE clause: Finally, pessimistic locking is applied

[1] https://www.jooq.org/doc/latest/manual/sql-building/sql-stat...

[Q] Do we really want to be perceived as book burners?

[A] Tbh I don’t care too much what a bunch of normies that probably didn’t even know the book existed think. The book would still exist but digitized and in the blockchain.

[Q] Why not just use Arweave, IPFS, and a variety of other long-term digital preservation strategies? All of them are less expensive and resource-intensive.

IPFS is not permanent. If it stops being hosted it disappears. Arweave cannot compare to something like Ethereum which is a truly decentralized network. But upmost I would say that cost of uploading is a feat, not a problem. It would make our collection even more special.

These are a bunch of seriously sociopathic, inconsiderate and reckless thugs. I'm happy to see them fleecing each other.

Also worth to understand and remember, from the linked thread: "digitisation does not = preservation. All they’ve done is replace a long term, resource-light asset with a short term and resource-heavy one that doesn’t work in the way the creator intended."

IOW similar to https://github.com/goodeggs/teacup and a few other libraries that produce markup from inside a programming language with minimalized syntactic fuzz?

The answer is we do plunder the planet like there's no tomorrow, notwithstanding what one ought think.

Are those citation quotes you're using around "experts" or scare quotes? The article literally says that the tunnel has been called a death trap by someone on Reddit. The word 'expert' does not appear in the text. What you're fuming about exists only in your imagination. Or, as they like to say among cryptofolks, "stop the FUD, do your research".

The number itself is meaningless without giving some baseline. How many is 'many'? As compared to what? Also notice judgemental assumption creeping in, whether intended or unintended, that this is certainly a bad thing: Those many unmarried people, they surely should be married, shouldn't they?

It looks like any input is interpreted as "draw something"

Æsthetics do play a rôle here

Yet linguistically, it really doesn't hold up. Words are built up from phonemes, which undergo some alterations depending on their order and the context to become the phones (as in sounds, not telephones) which are actually pronounced. But this allophonic variation is never dependent on the spelling of the word†, and the word "debt" is in all dictionaries transcribed with three phonemes: /dɛt/. The set of phonemes in the English language is also limited and the consonants clearly demarcated, a hypothetical ghostly "b" phoneme would not go unnoticed.

You describe the popular version of a linguistic theory, not established fact. There are facts corroborating it, and also some observations (such as the multitude of variations in basically unwritten dialects) that speak against this simple view (that I for one really want to be true, having invested years of my life into, but that doesn't make it any more valid).

An Achilles' heel of your argument is that it is generally very, very hard for people using a more-or-less phonetic writing system (such as an alphabet or a syllabary) to discuss speech sounds without referring to orthography, without mixing up speech sounds and written signs, and without hallucinating subtle differences (or their absence) in speech perception where there are differences (or the lack thereof) in the spelling.

As an example, take final obstruent devoicing as observed in Standard German[1]. The majority of the phonetic / phonological literature of the 20th c seems to leave no doubt that a final systematic -d- (as in 'Rad' [ra:t] (wheel; bicycle)) is phonetically indistinguishable from final systematic -t- (as in 'Rat' [ra:t] (counsel)). Yet there is a minority view (held among others by a well-respected language teacher of mine) who insist there is a minor auditory difference. We can test against that by presenting material that has been so cut and sliced as to erase the meaningful context of utterances and then ask people to vote for the one (Rad) or the other (Rat) based solely on auditory perception. This however is complicated by the fact that not all people speak pure standard high German (in fact—nobody does, of course), so what people do get to hear will always be a blend of dozens or thousands different dialects, idiolects, and mannerisms. Listeners are also faced with the task to accept that, depending on the speaker, 'Rad' may get uttered as [rat] (with a short [a], somewhat similar to En. 'rut'), and while the same may happen to 'Rat', that pronunciation seems to have a slightly differing geographical distribution than the short version of 'Rad'. So when I'm from Bremen, I will probably say 'Ich fahr mit dem [rat] zum [ra:t]haus' (I take the bike to city hall), whereas someone from Westphalia or Wuppertal may prefer short vowels in both words. The effect might well be that the listener's 'phonemes'—more generally, their internal systematic understanding of speech sounds—are much more tied to probabilistic aspects and the history of their personal experience than the clean, orderly phonological models presented in textbooks may lead one to believe.[2][3]

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auslautverhärtung [2] see doubts about the reality of the phoneme expressed by BE Vidos Handbuch romanische Sprachwissenschaft https://www.amazon.de/Handbuch-romanischen-Sprachwissenschaf... [3] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=47503 and a number of other threads on the reality of linguistic models

The Alliance for American Manufacturing blasted this latest move by Tesla. “I'll be blunt: Any company doing business in Xinjiang is complicit in the cultural genocide taking place there. But Tesla's actions are especially despicable,” AAM President Scott Paul said in an emailed statement.

Nitpick: the place is apparently the city of Baotou 包头市; pinyin: Bāotóu; Mongolian: Buɣutu qota, not Baitou; source: linked article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baotou

git is as simple as possible while being as powerful as possible

This is far from being a foregone conclusion and would need a careful analysis to justify. FWIW Fossil manages to make do without Git's (insanely named) 'index' (what everyone calls the 'staging area').

This is of course exactly what I've been meaning to say here. We want more specific datatypes (e.g. a true date(time) ADT) with better functionality (say interval computation) and constraint checking (AKA domains, such as 'let n be an even, positive integer gt zero').

The proliferation of field types has made data more difficult to transfer or share data between different applications and generates confusion. ITOP has only two fundamental data types: numeric and character, and perhaps a byte type for conversion purposes. (I have been kicking around ideas for having only one type.) The pre- and post-validators give any special handling needed by the field. A format string can be provided for various items like dates ("99/99/99"), Social-Security-Numbers ("999-99-9999"), and so forth. (Input formats are not shown in our sample DD.) Types like dates and SSN's can be internally represented (stored) just fine with characters or possibly integers. For example, December 31, 1998 could be represented as "19981231". This provides a natural sort order.

This is very nineties and I must disagree. The datetime-as-string example shows it most clearly: wanting to sort by full date is only one thing you want to do with calendar data; often you will want to compare, say, things that happened on Mondays vs things that happened over the weekend, or things that happened within so-and-so many hours around a given point in time and so, not to mention the complexities of DST and timezones. You can do all that with text-based strings but you'd have to write quite a bit of logic that will get applied to strings over and over again, or else you can store the results of parsing a date string into separate fields. Dates expressed as text also don't allow you to validate "19990229" or "20020631" in a very straightforward manner.

I think our collective and by now decades-old experience with duck/weakly-typed languages like Python, JavaScript, Ruby and so on clearly shows that what you gain in simplicity you lose in terms of assured correctness.

to be fair, in case the dependencies are pegged to specific known-good versions and are bundled into one or a few files then two concerns with dependencies go away, namely, insanely deep and wide file system trees and the lingering danger of any one of hundreds of software titles getting malware-ized. One could even add that it's probably a good idea to prefer tried-and-tested existing software over writing everything from scratch.

What you say applies to the Kowloon New Territories north of Boundary Street and the outlying islands (and it wasn't 100 but 99 years but I digress).[1] It does not apply to Kowloon south of Boundary Street and Victoria / Hong Kong Island.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Territories

"Xism is not good or bad; it's just a way to organize power". Excuse me I gotta puke.