Hacker News Reader

Armisael16on Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

One of the core elements of the 2008 meltdown was when someone abandoned a house, all the other houses in the neighborhood would see a substantial drop in their value. This made it more likely that other people would go underwater on their mortgage and also walk away.

Education doesn’t have this kind of contagion. If you stop paying your student loans it has very little impact on the value on my education.

Armisael16on To make more stingers, U.S. needs to revive production technology from scratch

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppression_of_Enemy_Air_Def...

These are questions the US has been working on since Vietnam - they’ve gotten pretty good at it by now.

Armisael16on Ford EV Customers to Gain Access to 12,000 Tesla Superchargers

Depends strongly on the area. I’ve never seen any above 41c/kWh, and one of my local chargers does 13c/kWh after 8pm.

Armisael16on Downtown SF has 18.4M square feet of empty office space. We mapped every vacancy

It’s often more expensive to convert offices than it would be to knock the building down and start from scratch.

Armisael16on U.S. Navy wants to sell off its troubled littoral combat ships to allies

For what it’s worth the Bradley has performed quite well, and the flaws that have shown up weren’t noted in the movie (some discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/erpmjm/having_j...)

The scene is very funny, and it’s an excellent story - it just happens to not be particularly accurate.

Armisael16on Lego breaks ground on first US manufacturing facility

Americans do generally call them legos. The company hates it.

Armisael16on Work-from-home is the new normal in Canada

That would be true if the people on the bus were selected truly randomly from the full population. They aren’t - not even close.

Armisael16on For the first time, renewable energy generation beat out coal in the US

The tariffs and policy in questions are being set by the US - of course the discussion is US-centric, the question being discussed is ‘how should the US be approaching this?’

Armisael16on The symmetry that makes solving math equations easy

The principal square root (ie, the one with positive part) is commonly referred to as the square root, especially since the radical symbol is explicitly defined to produce the principal root.

Armisael16on Reasons the banking crisis isn’t a repeat of 2008

The US is not a petrostate. Petrostates are defined not just by the large amounts of oil and gas they extract but the relative absence of other economic activity and the dependence of the state on that money.

42% of Saudi GDP is petroleum. 35% of Kazakh GDP is petroleum. 8% of US GDP is petroleum.

Armisael16on Reasons the banking crisis isn’t a repeat of 2008

The idea people can get more done by working together is literally older than writing.

Armisael16on Yellen says government will help SVB depositors but rules out bailout

All of the money the bank gives out comes from deposits or shareholder capital. The bank isn’t the mint; it isn’t allowed to print money.

The way that banks expand the money supply is by providing the illusion that all my money is there and available while at the same time being loaned out to someone else.

Fractional reserve banking means that banks don’t have all their deposits in hand. It does not mean that they invent cash for loans.

(The distinction here is less obvious in a digital world, but it’s quite clear if you think about how it would work if physical cash was used)

Armisael16on Alaska’s Fisheries Are Collapsing

Per capita figures do include full-time residents, even migrant workers. They do not capture international commuters (most relevant for Luxembourg, which gets something like half its workforce from neighbors).

Armisael16on Alaska’s Fisheries Are Collapsing

The US is top 10 in PPP gdp per capita, and almost all of the states that are higher up are either tiny oil and gas states (eg Qatar, Brunei, Kuwait) or small states that focus on financial services for much larger areas (Luxembourg and Ireland for the EU, Singapore for the indopacific).

Seriously, the highest population in any state with a higher GDP per capita than the US is the UAE.

#1? Maybe not, but it's certainly pretty close in any useful discussion.

Armisael16on What Redwood learned in its first year of EV battery recycling

> Mining virgin materials uses much more resources than recycling.

That depends heavily on the material in question. Aluminum, yes. Plastic, no.

Armisael16on IRIS²: The EU’s Response to Musk’s Starlink

Yes, precisely like that.

Armisael16on No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health

The human body also has ways to heal broken bones - are you arguing that it’s a waste to not use those as well?

We’ve developed means to more effectively handle certain common poisons. That doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous.

Armisael16on Math breakdown: Anime homing missiles

It was a bit of both, really (and the snaking path was only present in early versions of the missile).

Sorry to mislead!

Armisael16on Math breakdown: Anime homing missiles

The real-life reason for this wild spiraling behavior would be that the launch tube isn’t pointed directly at the target and the missile overcorrects. That’s actually how the sidewinder missile got its name.

This kind of mid-flight course change is a characteristic of real missiles in other cases , though:

* almost anytime a submarine or ship launches, the missile goes straight up for a little bit to clear the ship before sharply turning

* if you shoot a guided missile straight up unguided to clear terrain (eg a hill) before turning on guidance you’ll see this

* cruise missiles in the gulf wars famously did this by following the street grid - even turning at street light

* if you launch a torpedo in a random direction then activate guidance later it can disguise where you are, since the torpedo is coming from a different direction

Armisael16on Why America Should Ban Crypto

That’s nonsense. You can’t pay taxes with other currencies, but issuing IOUs/gift cards is absolutely legal.

Armisael16on Easter egg in flight path of last 747 delivery flight

The 787 has a 330 minute ETOPS certification, so as long as it’s within 6.5 hours of an airport it can fly there.

That’s almost everywhere on the planet except the South Pacific and Antarctica.

Armisael16on Haiti left with no elected government officials as it spirals towards anarchy

They did, back in October: https://apnews.com/article/caribbean-united-nations-port-au-...

As you say, no country wants to get involved. The US would be the most capable power in the area, but it’s almost impossible to imagine that ending well.

Armisael16on Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022

Electric heating and cooling (instead of gas, which while still energy doesn’t go in the same bucket) and probably a larger house.

His usage is high by the standards of the region, so it probably is also something like an electric car or crypto mining.

(For what it’s worth, a swamp is far harder to cool than a desert - five of the top six states in the US by energy usage are on the Gulf coast. The average Floridian household uses ~13700 kWh/year whereas New Mexico is ~8000 kWh/year. On the other hand, the household average in Canada is higher than in the US, so…)

Armisael16on Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022

The average New Englander uses between 567 kWh/month and 711 kWh/month (different values for different states - areas farther south generally use more).

The answer is probably that you live 5-10 degrees north of him and don’t use as much air conditioning.

Armisael16on Japan’s business owners can’t find successors – one man is giving his away

Turks make up less than 15% of immigrants in Germany.

The US currently gets more Asian immigrants than Latinos.

Armisael16on Why Not Mars

A mission from the surface of the Moon would cost ~3 km/s of delta-v to get an intercept with Mars (and more from there, but that depends on how much aerobraking you can manage).

A mission from the surface of Earth would cost ~13 km/s to get that same intercept - so, yes, it’s considerably more expensive. The majority of that is just making earth orbit in the first place (~9 km/s).

The big problem is that the mission on the moon has to come from somewhere. If you can fabricate your mission entirely at your moon base then the numbers above are accurate. However, if you have to ship stuff in from Earth - well, the Earth -> Moon -> Mars trajectory is more like 17-18 km/s. You’ve lost horrendously.

There are certainly perks to things like off-Earth fueling and assembly, but unless you’re getting a lot of the mass from somewhere other than Earth you’d be much better of doing that in low earth orbit (just from a fuel efficiency perspective, and there would of course be lots of other benefits to being so close to home).

Armisael16on Why Not Mars

The Moon is not a useful launch site for projects elsewhere unless a lot of the mass comes from there (ie, lots of fuel or the mission itself).

You lose a lot of dv by stopping mid-trip; this isn’t like pulling off at a rest-stop.

Armisael16on Paper-Thin Solar Makes Any Surface Photovoltaic

Man, I was just trying to answer the question “why does this work in Northern Europe but won’t in the US”. Not everything is an attack.

Armisael16on Paper-Thin Solar Makes Any Surface Photovoltaic

Most of the US is in fact better for solar than most of Europe (Iberia is fairly good).

However, energy prices in the US are considerably lower, so the bar for profitability is much higher.

The EU also has colossal subsidies for renewables, which obviously skew the market. In a purely market-driven world Europe would not be investing in solar.

Armisael16on The Decline of the City Grid

The traditional US cul-de-sac is rounded at the end, and usually has a house at the end (the road was never intended to continue)

Here’s a fairly representative picture of the geometry: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS8zguy...