Qwertious

Plus he can hail you a cab.

Skylights are usually terrible because they heat the most at midday (when it's already the most hot) whereas conventional windows heat the most at dawn/dusk when it's colder.

Skylights also suck because they're exposing the window directly to the sky (and thus rain), whereas conventional windows are somewhat protected by eaves and the fact that the window is vertical so water can't pool on it.

I'm pretty sure the subtext of that comment was that the benefit of electric motors in retro cars is the emission reduction (and possibly cost and maintenance reduction), and not improved specs/experience. Saying "ye but it worsens the experience" misses the point.

Renewables are very predictable, they're just intermittent.

Facebook/etc aren't a free-for-all, they're much worse than that - they selectively provide a stream of news designed to drive "engagement", of which angry obsession is one type. Social media aren't "platforms", they're content distributors (despite the industry's own efforts to establish use of the term "platform", which sounds far more neutral).

Housing is also really weird:

- the main input (land) is also an output, so when the price of the output goes up, so does the value of the input.

- economies of scale don't really work, due to the impracticality of transporting the good (houses) and fitting the good inside a machine (in house "factories", normal workers go inside the house and work on it by hand; not a lot changes compared to traditional construction)

- more supply in one area increases the value (and therefore demand) in that area, so it's not actually clear-cut whether building more would reduce the price more than it increases it, at first glance.

So you want all parents to be helicopter parents?

A CD is 100% technologically capable of having the duration and physical size of a vinyl.

I don't dispute your own personal motives, but if it's never been a goal for most people, then CC0 would be more popular than the BSD or MIT license - it's simpler and much more legally straightforward to apply.

PACs.

Certification isn't a moat; either the software is certified as safe/bug-free or it isn't. If it's safe, that just makes it more valuable to pirates.

Okay, but you don't have to - and "efficient" coders won't bother, thus starving the commons.

They are largely concerned about employment (and more generally economic stability) and to that end seek measures intended to protect workers.

Pffft no. Most of us think that AI is being used as a political trick - like firing unionized workers "to replace them with AI" and then hiring new un-unionized workers to replace them, 2 weeks later. Replace the AI with an empty cardboard box labeled "AI" in black marker, and nothing changes.

See also: using AI to launder pirated material, for big businesses.

That would be insane for aerospace software, where you might spend most of that time getting the code certified (required to break the $0 revenue threshold), let alone paying back your costs and then making an actual profit.

Meanwhile, there are cases where copyright of more than 2 years is overkill.

I don't know what, but it seems like we need some sort of mechanism for variable-length IP duration is needed.

Lots of people who don't read the HN Guidelines, apparently:

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Chinese state govt is building them in response to poorly thought out federal govt incentives. That plus backup plans (since China had plenty of coal but needs to import gas, so it could easily be navally blockaded by the US). Also gas turbines are a specialty of the West (which again doesn't work well geopolitically), and their demand has massively outstripped supply (we're even seeing jet engines being converted into gas turbines) and the order backlog is years out - all of which doesn't jive with China's "build everything right f'n now" strategy.

China is building everything at a pace never before seen in history. Partly because their construction industry is a jobs program, and their economy is so dependent on it that they prefer building things at a loss rather than not building at all. Which is financially dumb, but welcome to politics.

Now ask it whether it produces more renewable energy than the rest of the world combined.

BREAKING NEWS: China is big.

There's at least as much battery production of batteries in Ireland as there are viable coal mine sites.

Indonesia would be the obvious replacement - Indonesia is a pacific island nation (the islandiest) which exports a ton of coal.

Nuclear also relies on sea imports - nuclear fuel still needs to be imported, unless Taiwan has a uranium mine on the island. So nuclear doesn't solve the problem, it just kicks the can down the road.

Snarky response deleted.

We appreciate your restraint.

It is. But solar produces most around midday and then tapers off toward dawn/dusk, so it might supply 100% of demand at midday but only 10% around sunset.

If you build more solar it'll meet 100% of demand for a larger portion of the day, which is what we're doing.

Only if you ignore all externalities

Not even then. Coal is dead, and gas killed it. The externalities are a distraction, coal plants are just straight-up uneconomic.

It's because of the rules of the European Energy Market where all electricity has to be as expensive as the most expensive source.

Are you talking about the marginal cost? Don't blame the govt, blame the economics textbook.

Coal is cheap

No it's not. I'm not talking about the environment either, coal plants are just straight-up more expensive than gas plants and renewables.

Coal plants are necessarily steam turbines and not internal combustion, because coal is filthy and the mercury/sulfur/etc would wreck the guts of any machinery it goes through. Thus, it's only used to boil water.

Gas turbines don't have that problem, so they spin the turbine with the combustion products directly. They're far more efficient, the machines are smaller and cheaper, and because you don't need to wait for a giant kettle to boil before ramping up the power, they're far more flexible and responsive to demand. It also helps that the gas is fed with a gas pipe, whereas coal needs to be fed with a bobcat.

Which is why nobody is building new coal plants - they're way more expensive than gas plants, even if the gas fuel itself is more expensive than coal.

Anglo-Saxons like to make fun of the French for surrendering easily but as a regular citizen, it actually makes logical sense. I think it just shows that the government is better aligned with the interests of the people.

Strategic surrender is smart; if you know ahead of time which force is most powerful and can evaluate it objectively, you can save yourself the trouble of dying and you end up with a better outcome than you would have otherwise. It's risk management.

France didn't particularly surrender early. WW2 France surrendered because they were fucked and didn't have a choice; if they hadn't surrendered when they did, they would have been slaughtered and then their replacements would surrender just the same.

Russia would have done the same (and in fact, Ukraine tried to switch sides, especially with the Holomodor in such recent memory), but the Nazis were not pragmatic about permitting 'subhumans' to live.

Iran's theocracy is pretty ideologically motivated, they're not just in it for the money.

Also, domestic crude of mostly light, sweet crude whereas many US refineries are designed to deal with heavy, sour crude. Google is telling me 80% of the crude that goes through Hormuz is heavy, sour crude.

The US has some of the best chemists in the world; light sweet crude is easy to refine but heavy sour crude is hard, so US refineries refining light sweet would be a waste of their talents - better to export it out for newbies to refine and buy the harder-to-refine and therefore cheaper heavy sour crude. But if heavy sour becomes more expensive, then the US will switch to the easymode option in a heartbeat.

An increased cost of inputs will always hurt the entire industry, but it won't particularly hurt the US any more than anyone else, and will probably hurt them the least - especially when they have plenty of domestic shale oil that will be financially viable to extract if prices go up.

Putin mainly benefits from the increased price of oil - black-market oil prices are a discount relative to standard-market oil, so he'll have a much healthier budget, even if his sanctions stay "airtight".

China benefits here - they import Russian crude oil over land, so their costs won't increase as much as the international market (unless Russia uses the leverage to absorb all the benefit, which I doubt), but more crucially: the alternative to oil fuel is renewables, and China dominates renewables so a spike in demand for solar/batteries will be a godsend for them.

And because Europeans have the most Neanderthal genes, it's all "Neanderthals are smarter than we thought!" and not "are Europeans the missing link?"