subtenante

Not to be pedantic, but Stoics do not attach to health either. Only virtue.

Markets won't solve anything. We are talking about the see "contaminating" very large areas of arable land with brackish water, lowering fresh water supplies and preventing to cultivate a lot of what is currently done.

We have picked ourselves up, precisely, by using fossil energies, the ones that are causing the current troubles, and the ones that are getting less and less available. What will happen in the future can not be inferred by how we managed in the past to get where we are ; I have no doubt that humanity will survive the collapse of our societies, but there is no possible way to know where the equilibrium will be restored in terms of number of individuals on the planet once the stress on fossil fuels is too big. It may be anywhere between where we are now and the hundred millions, combined to a dramatic lowering of the life expectancy.

So, electricity. So, coal?

You can paste snapshots / screenshots. With mezer tools, I can do a quick Win S, two clicks, one paste, copy/paste the URL and you get https://ctxt.io/2/AAAA4MNyFw .

I am trying to provide context regarding the whole problem. Besides, the guy I talked about uses heavy technology whenever he can (he needs special equipment to take macro pictures of bugs, he needs social interaction with other people in local vicinity spotting larvae of a pest, he needs way to statistically test land lots, he needs ways to measure sun exposition and time, etc.) ; the last thing he needs is robots doing his job though.

And every question is as loaded with philosophy as any of its answers. :)

Agriculture in our age must shift from productivity first to sustainability first, because we are running out of fossil energy allowing to produce most of the fertilizers, and we have already killed our soil with it. A farm involving a lot of machines (i.e. a lot of need for energy) might not be the way to go in order to keep the agricultural system stable. The most you ask from the soil, the poorer it gets, and then you have to dump fertilizer to keep some level productivity.

We have created flawed models of what was good for productivity. I work with a guy very invested in research on olive growing (here in the south of France), he's achieving results believed to be impossible by many agricultural researchers. His method is entirely organic, shifted towards correct use of pollination, cross breeding and a lot of care, the kind of which automated sensors remain lacking of. From what he told me, he's able to develop the root system of an olive tree ~4 times as fast as researchers using what is believed to be optimal conditions.

We already have excellent robots able to take care of farms, they're called humans. Farming is a very noble activity and instead of less farmers, we need more, with more time to study the impact of pollinizers on their crops, how to deal with the new pollinizers they'll get due to climate change, etc. All of which can't be done unless we re-humanize farm work.

Hydrocarbons are useless without an oxydant.

Forrester was himself very involved in the Meadows report. Forrester wrote "World dynamics" which is the system dynamics basis for the Meadows report.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World3

As wonderful as they are, the fact that languages like Python, Perl, Ruby, JavaScript, etc. require having the runtime bundled up with them makes just shipping a tool a lot harder

Not true for js on Windows, though. Windows runs JScript natively (same language as JavaScript, only a different name).

I'm glad I encountered a honesty oracle!

Sure, it does not cost much to say that. Cost and risks are a relative thing, and 'through the roof' is subjective. You have to compare with the other possibilities. No energy is clean. With PV, the cost of treatment of wastes (silicon tetrachoride for instance[1]) and the risks associated with their pollution if not treated are also a problem, especially if we want to make PV substantially more used than it is now in proportion.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03...

There are other designs. Molten salts for instances, still promising.

Cost

I'm interested in seeing data backing this. It is taking real wind turbines/PV panels lifetime and real production? Nuclear reactors have a lifetime of 60 years, wind turbines/PV panels less than that.

Security

Some GenIV reactor designs also should be helping with that.

No no no. She's not freaked at by the rats at all, but by the kids! That's why she lets the rats pick them up.

"They totally freak me out," says Courtney Bledsoe, as she sees a rat dart across the street while picking up her son at a Lincoln Park preschool.

And we're having rats picking up children at school, now.

Previously:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11608100

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11588698

Not sure. PV generated electricity is around one percent worldwide. CH4 and coal thermal stations have the lowest investment price per kW, so booming economies won't invest massively in PV until CH4 and coal get very expensive. Add to that that PV is very dependent on geography and does not work at night, to make it more than a day peak adjustment you have to also invest in batteries that cost even more carbon-wise.

True, that depends on the country where the PV panel is installed. The original argument was probably made for France where electricity is very low on carbon.

Don't have the details of the study, it was from an informal evaluation from Jean-Marc Jancovici, a well known (in France) climate/energy specialist. A similar argument is made here:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/solar-energy-isnt-...

Related quote: "If the photovoltaic panels made in China were installed in China, the high carbon intensity of the energy used and that of the energy saved would cancel each other out, and the time needed to counterbalance greenhouse-gas emissions during manufacture would be the same as the energy-payback time. But that’s not what’s been happening lately. The manufacturing is mostly located in China, and the panels are often installed in Europe or the United States. At double the carbon intensity, it takes twice as long to compensate for the greenhouse-gas emissions as it does to pay back the energy investments."

Chinese PV are made in a country where electrcity is mainly produced with coal. All construction carbon emission taken into acount, they need around 30 years of use to get carbon neutral, generally more than their expected life time. This is not sustainable at all yet.

The only solution to this problem is technology.

Or taxes.

It's not guaranteed to be unique?

Indeed, thanks!

I use it especially for enums so it's like:

  MatchMap.of(someOptional, defaultValue)
    .whenEquals(MyEnum.VALUEX, v -> someFn(p1, p2))
    .whenEquals(MyEnum.VALUEY, v -> otherFn(p1, p2))
    .resolve();

Funny, I happened to code something just today very similar, but a lot lighter (just two classes, Match for consuming only, and MatchMap for mapping the optional. No when/get, just a when taking two parameters : the predicate and the mapping function.

  public class MatchMap<T, U> {

    private final Optional<T> opt;
    private final U defaultValue;
    private final AtomicReference<U> result = new AtomicReference<U>();

    private MatchMap(Optional<T> pOpt, U pDefault) {
        super();
        opt = pOpt;
        defaultValue = pDefault;
    }

    public MatchMap<T, U> whenMatch(Predicate<T> pPred, Function<T, U> pMapFn) {
        if (result.get() != null) {
            return this;
        }
        Optional<T> lFiltered = opt.filter(pPred);
        if (lFiltered.isPresent()) {
            result.set(pMapFn.apply(lFiltered.get()));
        }
        return this;
    }

    public MatchMap<T, U> whenEquals(T pExact, Function<T, U> pMapFn) {
        return whenMatch(t -> pExact.equals(t), pMapFn);
    }

    public U resolve() {
        return Optional.ofNullable(result.get())
          .orElse(defaultValue);
    }

    public static <T, U> MatchMap<T, U> of (Optional<T> pOpt, U pDefault) {
        return new MatchMap<T, U>(pOpt, pDefault);
    }

  }

It's interesting, but I find peculiar the choice of the words which are overspaced. I would expect works like 'that', 'from', 'with' far more important for chunking than 'to' for instance.

Hiring someone is taking power over someone else's life. When you become a boss, you become the main source of income for someone. He/she becomes your subordinate. And you will make a part of your profit from his/her work. That's a lot of reasons to treat the employees with respect.

I don't know if it's a slip of the tongue or a figure of speech or whatnot, but you are already showing suspicion and disrespect for your future employees in saying that you won't be able to 'get rid of them'. You want to be your own boss and created your own company, that's fine ; you owe nothing to anyone , great for you. If you take an employee though, you'll be owing something to someone, who will become your subordinate and work for your profit. You will pay them less than they produce in value. You will choose when and how much to raise their salary. You will be able to put pressure on them, tell them they don't work good enough, you will assess them, and judge them. They will work 6 months for you in trial period when you have complete right to 'get rid of them' with no justification. And then yes, they might earn their right to have a stable relationship with you, because they also have a right to a stable life, with stable income, so that they also can make life plans. If you are not in position to provide that, you should contract with freelance workers until you are sure you can.

If you do things right, though, and consult regularly with a lawyer when you need to create, alter or end an employment, there is no reason things will go wrong. There are a lot of obligations from an employer that, when not followed to the rule, can be taken as an advantage by a well counselled employee. So choose a good lawyer, not an old one (they generally don't work themselves anymore and make younger ones work for them - and are more expensive), with specialty in social law who does not defend only employers. (I might be able to refer to a good one in Toulouse if needed.)

It is generally considered that prud'hommes courts are prone to strange decisions, because the prud'hommes counselors are not professional judges, but a. you can appeal (it costs 35€), b. you don't risk much if you follow sound legal counsel, c. the aim is to not have to get there, and you have plenty of room to have a fruitful relationship with your employees. Respecting them is the first step.

35 hours, in France, is just the legal threshold over which hours are counted as extra (and thus are paid more). No one in France is forced to work 35 hours "only".

Besides, we are talking about employees, which means a hierarchical subordination. No employee that I know of chooses how much time he works: it's the boss who chooses. This arbitrariness (from the boss) is no better that another arbitrariness (a supposedly fixed time fixed by 'we the people', of which the government is only an executive representation).

How does your bank create free money when you make a loan ?

The argument "where does the extra money comes from?" is looking at it the wrong way. The right question is: does it stimulate the economy?

Currently, people do not spend, and accumulate as much as they can, because they are being told there is a crisis (not for the richest). In Western Europe, governments generally agree to make "reforms" destroying all social advantages inherited from the reconstruction after WWII. In France in particular, the biggest investor if the "local communities" (cities, departments, regions), but the national governement now lowers the money affected to them, leading to less investment from these public investors, killing a lot of jobs.

So we don't care where money would come from. What we need is somethin that gives people confidence in their future, like a stable job. If you have a job but feel threatned in it every day because your boss can replace you with the "reserve army of labour", you tend to let your social advantages go away, and earn less. Collectively, this profits to the richest who drain huge parts of the economy to use it in bubble speculations - which also profits them even when the bubble explodes.

Besides, we had to transit in a few decades from a social model where women did not work to a model where women now are an active force. Couple that with huge productivity improvements... and we don't need a full time job for everyone, for everyone to live correctly.

So where does the money come from ? Last of the question to ask. First question : what do we want to do with our society, what do we want to do collectively to stop having the poor constantly fighting each other ?