HN user

notact

65 karma
Posts1
Comments38
View on HN

To be fair, you can replace ""believes in climate change" with "prioritizes energy independence". I would argue the latter is a stronger motivator for China.

We are already burning coal for power generation, whether we like it or not. I have wondered why we don't "recycle" plastic by shoveling it into the same furnace and a) get some energy out of it, and b) solve the landfill problem. That should be carbon neutral, since burning X tons of plastic is X tons of coal we didn't burn.

My question wasn't so much about the contradiction between regulating & banning authority, but questioning the authority to do either in the first place. I.e. I don't understand why gambling must necessarily be considered to be inter-state. But I now think this is unrelated to the point you were trying to make.

My VW has lane-keeping assist. In general I like it, because it had nudged me when I wasn't paying as much attention as I should have. But one failure mode is that it can detect shadows or other artifacts that it decides are lane markers. For example, at the right time of day hanging power lines will create a smooth curved shadow line on the road surface that the car will want to follow where ever they lead. It's not strong enough to yank the wheel out of my hands, but if I were briefly holding the wheel with my knee while reaching for something, it could get messy.

This is a perfect example of why half the country does not trust the media, including myself. To be clear, I am not a Trump fan. But when newspapers endorse the same party for decades and write editorials like this, TV networks broadcast morning talk and late night shows making it clear who they do & don't favor, etc, I have a hard time believing they are feeding me objective data. They are partially responsible for the massive public distrust that they decry.

I'm not sure why people are misunderstanding my question as "Why not bring more fuel and burn the rockets in reverse". I am simply asking: why not reenter the atmosphere at a shallower angle, spreading the atmospheric braking friction over a longer period of time, which I'd expect would allow more time for the accumulated heat to radiate away before it becomes catastrophic.

I understand the atmosphere is used to slow the vehicle - it's basically free brakes that you don't have to carry with you. I never suggested using rockets in reverse to slow the vehicle down. What I am asking is, instead of effectively standing on the breaks and generating enormous amounts of friction in a short period of time, why can't the vehicle ease onto the breaks and spread the friction out over time so it can be more safely dissipated (via a more shallow reentry angle).

Can someone explain why reentry must be so hellish? The energy gained during the rocket burn into orbit must be bled off during reentry, and that energy is enormous. However, why must reentry occur so quickly? It seems if the descent into the atmosphere was slower, the heat shield would be able to radiate the heat energy away more effectively, thus lowering skin temperatures, and significantly reducing the engineering challenge.

I see a lot of calls for being able to block an area code. That does not seem to be useful to me, living in a major metro area lots of legit calls (doctors office etc) share the same area code as spammers/political organizations.

What I think would be useful is to be able to block based on incoming carrier. During the last election season, most calls were coming from various VoIP services (Twilio, etc), none from normal retail cell carriers. If I could block an entire carrier who specializes in providing text/voice marketing services, problem solved? Legit business users of those services would hopefully migrate away to more ethical providers when their calls start failing to connect.

The stock market may demand never ending growth, to keep generating positive returns. But how does capitalism itself (private ownership of production) demand never ending growth, any more than a planned economy would?

Regardless of what recall means today, in the past it meant a physical visit to the dealership. I believe there are many people (for example my mother) who would see the headline, not actually read the article, arrive at a mistaken conclusion that Tesla's must spend most of their time in the shop, and then spread that misinformation. So I agree, there should be a distinction between "Tesla owners required to visit a dealership" and "Tesla owners' cars receive updates while parked in their garage".

Both parent comments were likely referring to any entity other than Taiwan. If you are a fabless chip designer or one of their customers, it makes sense to diversify away from Taiwan, even if that comes at Taiwan's expense.