HN user

ldp01

290 karma
Posts1
Comments98
View on HN

Reminds me of a famous prayer... I think it's basically the same idea.

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference."

This reminds me of a detail from the plot of the original Deus Ex. Part way through the game, there is an optional dialogue with a benevolent AI. If you question it enough, it reveals that it is the rejected prototype for an anti-corruption/terrorism AI which was turned off for being too effective: eventually classifying its own masters as a criminal organisation.

However, saying that renewables are the cause of this is the same as saying that nuclear is the cause of Chernobyl. Nuclear plants don't inherently melt down if they are properly designed and operated and renewables don't inherently cause load-shedding if they are integrated to a properly planned and operated bulk power system.

Isn't this just juggling semantics? Nuclear is very much a necessary condition for nuclear meltdown. Removing nuclear power is a foolproof option to avoid nuclear meltdown.

Likewise displacing dispatchable generation with renewables enables the conditions where we can get these super high spot prices. To guarantee supply during peak load you need a lot of redundant dispatchable generation sitting around gathering dust until the $14500 day. On that day it needs to pay for itself, hence $14500 per megawatt hour.

EDIT: Oh wait, I'm a dummy who didn't read your post correctly. I agree with your comments about the market needing to correctly price reliability of supply. In WA we have a capacity market for this reason.

The renewables were definitely a factor in the SA blackout.

https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/Files/Electricity/NEM/Market...

Failure of a meshed power system cannot be attributed to the failure of any single sub-system. Rather it must be a combination of factors including those you just mentioned.

The dependence of the power system on renewables (specifically wind farms)contributed in two ways to the blackout:

1. The majority of wind turbines provide little or no system inertia. By displacing synchronous generation with wind generation, system inertia is reduced which results in greater ROCOF during an event where there is a change in active power demand/supply. In the SA blackout, fast ROCOF overwhelmed the system's last line of defence- under frequency load shedding.

2. Some wind turbines contained a fault ride-through setting which AEMO was apparently not aware of prior to the blackout. Specifically, the setting caused the turbines to disconnect after experiencing a sequence of voltage excursions within a set time period. The disconnection caused a loss of active power supply to the grid which contributed to the drop in frequency and eventual collapse.

I'm writing from Canada. Mother and/or father can share up to 35 weeks of paid leave under the national insurance program. This maxes out at, I think, approx $500 per week. It's not a lot. But it helps.

This. I'm writing from Australia- it looks like we only get $622.10 for 18 weeks, but it seems like a nice middle ground to support new parents. At that low price I would probably agree that 35 weeks is reasonable.

I get confused when people argue strongly against the middle ground position. I don't even want to have kids but I don't begrudge the use of public money in this way- it's a direct investment in the future of society which shields both parents and businesses from undue financial stress without being profligate or forcing too much ideology on the rest of us.

How can you say this with a straight face?! It's a fact that (some) women need to stay off work (bed-ridden before birth, in hospital after birth). It's also a fact that men don't need to.

You're referring to a timescale of days which a woman will likely need to spend in hospital. I believe jschwartzi is referring to the weeks/months of maternity/paternity leave following the initial birth. There isn't a hard biological reason not to evenly share the load after the immediate medical concerns are completed.

I don't understand the message of this article.

"This was a unique event, a moment that unveils a completely unexpected image of the power balance between inquisitors and the communities over which they held jurisdiction. The resulting picture is significantly less one-sided than has traditionally been imagined."

But then...

"Unfortunately the success of this unique uprising was short-lived. By 1301, Guido of Vicenza was back to his old tricks, desecrating the shrine of a popular local holy man."

So the inquisition ultimately was not held accountable and the popular uprising was ineffective.

I don't think you're arguing against education, but it kind of sounds like you are, which explains the downvotes.

I think your general point is correct though. We should be careful who we let set our curriculums and try to ride a reasonable line between ideology and hard data.

Why would we? Asking motor vehicle drivers to "share the road" with bicycle riders is asinine, destined to fail, and uniquely American.

Don't worry it's not uniquely American:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-28/wa-to-introduce-minimu...

But is it asinine and destined to fail? I'm not sure.

I think that it IS possible to share the roads but only under low-traffic and low-speed conditions.

The worst offenders are cyclists on busy dual-carriageways during peak hour and it is horrendously dangerous, with two lanes of traffic forced to snake around a single cyclist.

On side streets however I don't think it's a big deal at all.

Funding research into search is good but the other options are impractical.

If 4 is doable, it would take many years and involve many lawyers and potentially wind up achieving nothing.

1 and 2 involve directly interfering in the operations of other organisations in order to erode 0.000001% of Google's business. How would you enforce this anyway?

The point of mathematical models is to be predictive. But I wouldn't call prediction "the whole point of science". That's reducing science to a means-to-an-end.

I think science is more commonly understood to be about discovery and exploration? Although it is commonly applied and turned into engineering, expansion of knowledge is still an end in itself.

The elephant in the room is that humanities have zero predictive power.

An absolute statement. Do you really think it's true?

Are you really saying you can gain no predictive power by studying history? Ethics? Sociology?

If Trump gets elected...you get stuff like this article "oh my what kind of person we are in this Trump era".

Science did a great job predicting Trump would be elected.

gnaritas is being pretty hard on you and shouldn't resort to ad-hominem, e.g. saying you are terrible at x. I think you obviously care a lot about this topic and actually have a lot to offer.

I will offer a perspective on this exchange...

I think people who have survived many-many math based courses often have an immediate and aggressive response to diving into the minutae of a quantitative topic before they have grokked the intuition behind it. This is a defence mechanism built up from hours and hours of wasted time in lectures where the topic has moved on before the student/s have really developed the basics and are ready for the detailed stuff.

Hours and hours of wasted life.

When a person with this defence mechanism sees a noobie about to fall into the same horrible cycle, this will trigger some aggression. For example: downvoting your post- they are trying to protect the noobs.

So if you are interested in reaching as many people as possible, please don't give up. I think your teaching effectiveness could be improved by finding ways to engage people at their (lower) level of understanding and trying to help then incrementally improve their mental models.

I'll buy that. I am expecting a lot from a random/free study on the Internet!

But I think part of my gripe stands: the study is treating all these skills as independent when they actually seem pretty interrelated. There are also important confounding factors like industry which aren't given a mention.

For example 'judgement and decision making' in any professional field has to be built on a foundation of technical knowledge. And that judgement and decision making is probably not really transferable to other professional fields.

Most of these skills seem pretty vague. How would you quantify "Judgment and Decision Making" in a generic sense? Seems a bit too context dependant to make that generalisation.

Reaching a basic level of success in employment is way more holistic than these bar charts would indicate.

Statements like this are just silly:

"A skill like “judgement” could make you highly employable, but be hard to improve, and so offer poor returns per hour spent learning."

How about this for a pretty generic plan:

- Know your trade: Understand whatever system you are using in depth.

- Understand how you create value within the specific business you are in.

- Have an O.K understanding of how your work interacts with others, and be O.K at explaining your understanding to others.

- Try to consistently interact with others in good faith and try to score runs for your project/business/whatever. Subjugate your own ego as much as possible and remain friendly when things get hectic.