HN user
Modern wireless mice from logitech and microsoft last for a year or two on a pair of aa batteries. There is no point making them rechargeable any more. You can always use rechargeable aa nihms if you really want to, but personally I just have 50p of alkaline aa's and in two years I will have to change them again. Some things do get better :)
Equator, poorest countries with 12 hours of sun 365 days a year. If batteries really fall in price it may rapidly have the cheapest, cleanest energy on the planet. The future of energy intensive industries may be Africa, which would be nice, they could use a break. Not to mention the cheapest place to launch your rockets into orbit.
Weirdly themselves. Makes my head hurt but the central bank, the social security fund and some other bits of US government basically own most of the national debt. Then it's the Japanese, British, Chinese and Warren Buffet. But less than you would guess.
Of course that was back when a trillion dollars was worth something.
People leave out that when the wholesale electricity prices are above the Government guaranteed price the Government makes a profit on selling the wind electricity. So in this example when the grid is full to the brim with wind energy but there is still a demand for last resort gas backup generators the wholesale price of electricity must be high and the government is minting money from the wind turbines, even while paying some to turn off... This is not always the case. But it would be interesting to hear, taking into account the high electricity prices since the Ukraine energy crisis, how much the Government makes from selling the power at a profit and renting the sea floor to the turbines, minus the subsidies paid when prices are low or the wind turbines have to be turned off. It's hard to make a judgement on the economics of it all without knowing this. We may be paying far less for subsidised wind power than we think.
"The “pop” won’t be a single day like a stock market crash. It’ll be a gradual cooling as unrealistic promises fail, capital tightens, and only profitable or genuinely innovative players remain."
(This comment was written by ChatGPT)
https://archive.ph/e0bZK In low income neighborhoods they make it easy to turn money into bitcoin but with high transaction costs and hard to turn the bitcoin back into cash. It is not a perspective that had occurred to me before.
Data is working on Vodafone mvno. Can't call Out or text, Can't make calls On o2 or EE either. Edit EE working. Edit all mobiles now seem to be working OK.
Worse for television I have a PVR so I fast forward through the TV adverts... YouTube is about the only place left I sit through video adverts.
Mobiles are made by Asian companies to Asian tastes. They like big screens so that's what we get. The two exceptions are apple iPhones and Google pixel. The two American companies making phones for American tastes. Shame as the old 4.5" mobiles had such large bezels they could have accommodated 6" modern screens...
And long before that Warren Buffet talking about only backing companies who have built a competitive moat.
Survivorship bias perhaps but kudos to a car lasting 34 years in a marine environment. That is impressive.
Mothers mac mini 2014? Slow as a dog, 30 second pauses, became unusable. Extremely tricky to reach the 5400rpm hard disc. Found a third party adaptor could bodge an nvme under the easily removable base flap. Suddenly transformed it to a fast nippy useable machine. (She paid up for the 8gb ram originally). But still rather annoyed that Apple essentially crippled their own product and it could only be fixed by chance. Wasn't a cheap pc...
I think they are all lucky it doesn't say "android and ios only" like many gadgets these days. Desktops are dying, I feel old...
If you are young and give the silence a decent go it's OK to fall back on a book after a bit, or if you are too young to read yet, quietly working on some lego under your seat will not bother anyone. Adults are a little trickier but comtemplating a bible or Faith and Practice works. And, you know, it is meant to be voluntary.
What people tend to leave out is the government guarantees the price wind turbines receive for electricity at say 7p a kwh. So they lose money if the wholesale price goes less that that. But they make money when the price goes above that price. So in the bbc's example while turbines where paid while turned off at one end of the grid, at the other end of the grid the gas booster generating plant was turned on and set the market price quite high, perhaps 15 or 20p a kw. So the wind turbines that were still running flat out made the government lots of profit offsetting the losses from the turned off ones... This produces a head splitting mix of incentives between government costs, taxes and electricity prices to consumers. But overall since the Ukraine energy crisis renewables have probably not cost the government/tax payer as much as people think.
Is every memecoin just a scam? Experts on whether Andrew Tate and Trump are fleecing their followers. After I was turned into a memecoin, I looked into the hype behind the crypto that only a tiny percentage of people profit from. Matt Shea
Denmark, 6 million wealthy people, 4% economic growth, 1.5% inflation, 2.9% unemployment, national debt of 25% of GDP and budget in surplus. How did it all go so right?
And yet sometimes I wonder. In the Uk you need most of your energy in the cold dark winter. So if you require enough non solar renewables to get you through the winter with net zero and those renewables are still available in the summer time are large scale solar not a bit redundant? Sunnier countries that have high electricity demand for air conditioning during the sunny periods would seem to have a better match mind.
Ah but consider if the rich own 87% and the poor 13% and pension funds 40% and foreigners 17% then there is 157% to go around! Or maybe it's 87% of the rich directly own equities? Or maybe this is a wind up for clicks and gibberish. (I am also commenting ignorantly).
Honestly I wouldn't rush to see the Mary Rose unless you are extremely interested. It's a little anticlimactic as a viewing experience.
Perhaps, thought blu ray is looking a little laserdisc like. Never quite got the mass adoption to stay around and now fading away. It's now hard to buy a cdrom drive without dvd support. But ones without blue ray remains common. Notmto mention second hand dvds are available for pennies on bulk for hoarders ...
I think it's the resolution that will kill dvd's. 55" TV's are now entry level. A cinefile in ten years may well have an affordable laser projector filling and suddenly see the merits of 4k.
In the USA... In the UK, for instance, even old copyrights tend to run from the death of the creator. So it's still a long wait for a Hitchcock film.
DC-8 a 1950's jet in 1968 so modern buoyancy may not have applied. Everyone made it to shore without getting wet and the airplane was back in the air within a year. Remarkable.
Cynical archeologists say King Arthur did not exist but looking for him is now you get funding to find the history that did once exist.
I thought the article on the meaning of "energy transition" was more interesting. The idea that oil is reliant on steel and steel on coal is a thought. https://www.economist.com/culture/2024/11/10/energy-transiti...