robnado

Software Engineers need to get involved politically and demand regulations that systems that are critical for national security be developed by residents of the US on US soil by actual people with the right qualifications.

Evolution has selected animals that, when they have access to foods with high caloric density, will gorge on them. This has been advantageous to their survival, because the history of life has been characterized by famine feast cycles for most species. Now, what UPF foods are is foods that have had most of their non-caloric content removed or been processed to increase calorie content, triggering this gorging behaviour. This is probably 80% of the obesity epidemic today. The rest is probably additives that affect our hormones that control hunger/satiety signals in the body.

In my opinion, effective regulation would control the caloric density as food as well as ban any additives that can affect hormonal hunger/satiety.

Honestly, that wouldn’t be a bad way to fund education: education is free, but the university gets taxation power over you so they can tax you at x% of your income. It aligns incentives better than the current system.

What is your modest proposal for convincing people to move away from California when the hole in their pocket is not a big enough incentive?

Even if they are only used by family members of cops, this is still nepotism and should be punished. There is no valid reason for these cards to exist. Maybe I am naïve, but I still think that the law should apply equally to everyone.

Reforestation is mostly done by tree farms to regenerate the trees they will harvest in the future. They want good sized trees that are optimally packed and easily accessible. I doubt the capability to capture carbon figures anywhere in their spreadsheet except as a number to justify demanding subsidies

Agreed. Only land should be taxed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism.

This works for Steam because the Steam Deck is a low margin device they sell to ensure they can’t be shut out of their profitable business of selling games by microsoft and apple. To Steam, having a customer use the same steam deck for 10 years is not a big loss of revenue and supports their business goals. Meanwhile, Samsung making repairs cheaper means they are cannibalising the sale of new devices which is their main source of profit and growth.

Combining refrigerator, water heater and heat pump implies the need for transferring the fluid used as refrigerant between these components. This is usually a gas that is not trivial to contain, so creating this shared pipeline increases the points of failure. Further, you now have to insulate the entire length of this system, using material to do so, and you will end up losing a certain amount of efficiency anyways in this piping system. Also, what if your need in hot water is much greater than your need to cool the house or vice versa, what is your backup system for disposing of heat or cold when not required? It’s not certain that after solving all these problems and others, that you still have a net efficiency gain.

Last I checked, the XPS 13 inch was still a serious risk of burning your lap if used as an actual laptop.

I've had phishing served to me through google ads a few times, so this hardly surprises.

Agreed, they should be made an example of. Everyone involved in the fraud of getting this medication approved and then marketed to millions of people should face a fair trial and should be made an example of if found guilty. There is no reason that this medication should have been approved or marketed the way it was, especially considering what the medical community already knew about opioids and the harm they can cause.

I don't feel any sympathy for the developer either: I feel bad for the trees that had to be cut down, the materials that had to be mined and processed, the heavy machinery that had to be moved to that location and burn gallons of fuel, the workers that had to spend their time building it all. All that will be destroyed, some valuable materials will be recycled but the bulk will be dumped in a landfill somewhere. Just the waste of it all. And just because some developer, the city, and many other parties along the way couldn't exercise due diligence. And at the end, there was so much spite between the party that no one could come to an agreement that allowed this building to stand.

Reasonable parties would have found a way to come to an amicable agreement that wouldn’t have destroyed hundreds of thousands of dollars of value, like exchanging lands and offering compensation.

Edit: changed dollar value, thanks Ballas for correcting me

That's why much of the world is gradually shifting over to renewable energy usage. In a world where energy is renewable, does not generate greenhouse gas and (hopefully) does not produce other externalities, our best way of dealing with these resource allocation problems is the free market.

The alternative is regulation, which, I'm not even sure how it could be used to address this particular issue. Ban AI or crypto? Humans will find new ways to waste vast amounts of energy with computers. Require that computers have a certain efficiency rating of megaflops/joules? People will use more of this now far more efficient computing, resulting in more overall usage. Require corporations to be audited for energy efficiency and be certified? Goodbye all small players that cannot handle all the overhead of such legislation.

Don’t forget the A pilar in cars that keep getting bigger for heavier cars (like say, electric cars or SUVs). A lot can be obscured to a driver by a particularly thick A pilar.

This is an economics problem: if the cost of energy is lower or equal to the benefit of consuming it, the energy will be consumed. As more and more energy is consumed to run these datacenters, price of energy will go up, and datacenters will learn to either be more efficient, or will pass on these costs to their users who will learn to be more efficient. Of course, there might be inefficiencies like subsidies and monopolies that distort the market for energy for a while, but in the long run, this is a self-fixing problem.

You're talking in the order of hundreds of thousands of those things to replace the current electricity production of the world. A conservative number for their cost is in the order of 10 million dollars per unit. Therefore, around 1 trillion dollars to replace all the worlds electricity. Multiply by 10 just to be safe and consider cost of land, cost of maintenance and operation and the fact that those things don't work at peak capacity all the time: so around 10 trillion dollars. That's about the amount of money the world pays for petrol in 3 years. Let's also consider that the cost of those things will go down as we build more and become more efficient at building them.

The world has everything to gain by building as many of those as current wind patterns permit.

You know what they say: a healthy mind in a healthy body. Focus on eating well and doing regular high intensity exercise and your stamina will increase.

We are still deciding between an SUV and a minivan. What might make us choose the SUV is the ground clearance. Where we live there is a lot of snowfall in the winter, and the extra ground clearance can mean the difference between getting beached on packed snow or ice.

Agreed, instead of addressing any of the problems that push people to buy big gas guzzlers, they leverage those problems to divide the population. If you look, you will see these wedge issues everywhere. We won't get anywhere at addressing any pressing issues in our society if we let the medias keep dividing us.

I feel that all those people who talk about reducing car size and use probably don’t have a family. I have twin 6 month olds and the only cars we currently use is the Toyota Corolla from a local car sharing service. Two car seats in the back leave basically just enough room between for my wife to fit sideways inside the middle seat. She can’t stay in there for longer than a few minutes and if we get in a car accident, she is not gonna have a good time. Also, have you tried putting a child in a car seat while avoiding hitting their head on the roof of the car? It’s a tricky thing. Those are two reasons that two people who worked hard on reducing their environmental footprint end up in a situation where we have to look into buying an SUV. And don’t get me started on avoiding cars altogether: with hospital appointments that take 15 min to drive to but would take hours of public transit to get to, the need to buy more food at a cheaper price and the fact that transit options are often not accessible with a stroller (good luck bringing a double stroller up and down a few flights of stairs) means that you need to use a car. My suggestion: please either fix public transit so families can actually use it and organise the city so services are accessible, or offer cars that can accommodate a reasonable sized family while being environmentally friendly.

Fyi, I live downtown in a major North American city that is known for having good public transit.

In a world that has gone so far in the direction of hedonism, the opposite message is a centring force that helps people find balance in their lives. As one of my coworkers used to say “always choose the middle way”. I’m honestly more surprised that people aren’t talking enthusiastically about asceticism to be honest.

You are describing narcissism or even anti-social personality disorder. I agree that they have little in common with true stoicism.

This raises the question of why passion and empathy are so in vogue these days.

When i loaded the website, a popup came up that everything there is just their opinion and nothing is to be taken as fact. Why take them seriously when they even say they have no facts supporting their allegations.

USB-C is only the connector. I wonder what the rules say about the protocol used. It is quite possible to use a USB-C connector and use a completely different protocol. They could simply implement the 5v, 500mA capacity of USB 2.0 to be fully compliant with the EU rules, then only implement higher charging speed in their own proprietary Apple USB-C cables.

There is something to be said about the laptop form factor and macOS enabling productivity. That said, I would definitely see the guts of an iPad being put in the frame of a laptop with macOS.

They were recently acquired by OpenText, so that probably has something to do with it.

If there is plenty of competition in their field, let them do what they want. If they have a monopoly or an oligopoly of a few providers that all conspire or are coerced to censor, then they should be forbidden from censoring.