HN user
I was too optimistic about card payments when I went on vacation with my electric car in EU this summer. In some countries it worked perfectly but in other countries I had to scan a QR code, which usually ended up in an "sorry, there was an error" page. When I eventually started using a charging network the rest of the vacation was great.
Having video lunches with friends in other cities. As everybody is working from home, this has been an opportunity to reconnect with some old friends.
Walker's response to the criticism can be found here: https://sleepdiplomat.wordpress.com/2019/12/19/why-we-sleep-...
IMO he has mostly satisfying answers. He agrees with some minor points and he doesn't address important stuff like cutting out parts of graphs, but I don't think the criticism is strong enough to conclude that the book is "riddled with scientific and factual errors".
Thanks for the link, will check it out. I note however that Walker has responded to the criticism (https://sleepdiplomat.wordpress.com/2019/12/19/why-we-sleep-...).
I highly recommend "Why we sleep" by Matthew Walker. It does a great job describing the science of sleep.
What would the ransomware industry look like without cryptocurrencies?
BKS argues that you cannot take solar panels on the roof of the battery factory into your calculations since "otherwise you just take away green electricity elsewhere". My point is that if you allow that reasoning (which I think is correct) then it also follows that using dirty electricity in the EU takes away dirty electricity elsewhere. Therefore, the calculated emission impact of electricity use should probably be much closer to zero.
And since diesel use in transportation is not included in ETS, there is an even bigger impact of switching from diesel to EV: you stop burning fossil fuel in your car and the electricity you use will crowd out emissions elsewhere.
Since the electricity produced in the EU is a part of the Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), one could argue that any electricity used will have no impact at all on the CO2 emissions. The reason is that in the ETS, there are a fixed amount of emission allowances. So if a coal power plant produces extra electricity, someone else will decide to emit less CO2.
I believe that a small minority could turn things around. If about 3 % of the population in the rich world would donate $100 per month, we could use that money to force the other to change. How? One example is to remove all coal power plants (which are responsible for 25 % of the greenhouse gas emissions) by building wind farms. This would drive the price of electricity down and make coal unprofitable.
And that is an open standard that works with Skype, Duo and other non-apple alternatives?
Someone should build a meta video calling app: Make a normal phone call, and if the app detects that both parties have a common video calling app installed on their devices, the meta app notifies the caller ("Press * for video") and helps reconnect the call with the video calling app.