Hacker News Reader

Devils-Avocadoon The next fleet of Breitbarts is already raking in ad dollars

Meanwhile there is literal beheading going on in France - but mainstream media is completely silent on topics like immigration. The general dissatisfaction with mass immigration in the USA and Europe, and the failure of the mainstream media to acknowledge this, is what is fueling the rise of Breitbarts.

Devils-Avocadoon Rolls Royce plans UK class of mini-nuclear plants

We need to begin building that smart charging/discharging capability into electric cars now, then.

We need to establish the regulatory and user interface standards around this ideally before we start manufacturing tens of millions of EVS each month.

It might make sense to also unbundle electricity for consumers, charging the live wholesale rate and indicating the pricing via apps, alerts, or indicators on the meter itself.

Devils-Avocadoon Rolls Royce plans UK class of mini-nuclear plants

If these can be demonstrated safe it seems reasonable to place them close to cities - providing electricity and district heating.

The air pollution problems of Poland could be resolved a year after these were built, for example, by connecting them into and expanding existing district heating systems - meaning no one would need to burn coal or trash in ancient home chimneys.

Devils-Avocadoon A Cyrillic orthography for the Polish language

Cyrillic orthography for the Polish language already exists: its called Ukrainian.

Devils-Avocadoon One in five Covid-19 patients develop mental illness within 90 days – study

https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...

Sweden, without COVID lockdowns, is on track for fewer deaths in 2020 than 2018.

The country also has a lower COVID deathtoll per capita than Belgium, Italy, USA.

Lockdown is not a solution. Dealing with air pollution (ending the burning of coal and oil) and obesity (banning and taxing added sugar) would yield significantly greater benefits and require much less cost and effort.

Devils-Avocadoon One in five Covid-19 patients develop mental illness within 90 days – study

I had COVID and felt like I had lingering symptoms for months. As soon as I moved to a non-lockdown country those symptoms immediately disappeared.

Devils-Avocadoon Covid vaccine: First ‘milestone’ vaccine offers 90% protection

Which is completely sufficient to vaccinate the elderly, teachers, immunocompromised, and healthcare workers in the Western world, and probably anyone else who really wants it.

There's no need to completely eliminate COVID - we don't aim for the same for regular influenza. We should aim to reopen economies as soon as possible instead.

Devils-Avocadoon Bentley to Retire Roaring 12-Cylinder Engines, Go Electric

“As a luxury brand, our customers are more likely to have a home where they can charge a vehicle, an office where they can charge a vehicle, their favorite spots to go where they can charge a vehicle"

Translation: don't expect a lot of range from our heavy and aerodynamically inefficient vehicles.

Devils-Avocadoon Tech Startups Say New Pay Rules for H-1B Visas Are Unaffordable

Hispanics vote Democrat 69%. Change the demographic makeup of the country and you increase or decrease the portion voting for a particular party.

Big Tech will demand cheap labor as payback for their censorship and deplatforming of conservative authors and communities.

Devils-Avocadoon Big Ass Fan’s Clean Air System

Airborne transmission of COVID is sexy, requiring solutions like this, and individual impositions like wearing masks which are easy to police.

But I think the more likely spread of COVID is from mundane surface transmissions. One of the 'mystery' COVID cases in New Zealand was eventually tracked to people touching the same elevator button about an hour apart, for example.

Same here in Europe - everyone is wearing masks, but how many times is the apartment entrance handle touched by people each day?

Devils-Avocadoon Tech Startups Say New Pay Rules for H-1B Visas Are Unaffordable

And those phone and laptop advancements are courtesy of the Taiwanese.

Devils-Avocadoon Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

Now we can get back to destabilizing the Mideast, offshoring our manufacturing jobs, starting more endless wars and transferring the rest of our technology to China. The Trump years were just a speed bump on the way to complete globalization.

Devils-Avocadoon Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

In Europe those services pay for a huge welfare and pension system, and healthcare which is mostly used by the elderly. Very little benefit will be received by a working-age expat.

Devils-Avocadoon Helsinki Relocation Package: City as a Service

Also:

24% VAT (sales tax)

18% employer payroll taxes

10% employee payroll taxes

20-30% typical income tax

Take your American disposable income and cut it in half.

Still worth it for 'free' education and 'free' healthcare?

Also a lot of cold and darkness.

Devils-Avocadoon The Economics of Sex Robots

If you are at the bottom of the dating hierarchy (for whatever reason) as a male in the USA, you are typically limited to overweight women. The gulf between real and fake sex thus becomes much larger, and fake sex more appealing, than in a society without obesity.

Devils-Avocadoon A 20kg hybrid drone that can fly at 50kmh for 4 hours

Do the advantages of clean and quiet burning, and perhaps a lighter and simpler engine, outweigh that?

Devils-Avocadoon The Economics of Sex Robots

The primary flaw of the dating/sex market in the USA and many Western societies is obesity.

I live in a society where obesity levels for women and most men are essentially 0% - due to lower prevalence of processed food and societal pressure to remain slim - and everyone is 'f*ckable', to put it bluntly.

By contrast in a typical Western society the bottom 30% of society is typically very sexually unappealing due to obesity. This also has strong negative impacts on equality, since obesity is usually correlated with education and income, so poor (overweight) women are much less likely to wed wealthy (slim) men.

https://ifstudies.org/blog/less-marriage-more-inequality/

The solution seems to be to place a large tax on sugar, 1cent per gram - in the same way that we tax other products that have negative health outcomes like alcohol, tobacco, gasoline. Use the proceeds to fund national healthcare or displace existing sales taxes.

Devils-Avocadoon Protecting land and animals will mitigate future pandemics, report says

We need to prevent the population of Africa reaching 4 billion by 2100, then.

Universal access for women and girls to education, contraception, abortion is the solution.

Additionally advancing development of Vasalgel and making this freely available in developing countries worldwide.

Once all this has been established, direct cash incentives not to have children would also be suitable. This alleviates poverty and overpopulation.

Devils-Avocadoon Treat artificial light like other forms of pollution, say scientists

Its even worse when cities use 6000k pure-white LEDs to eke out an extra 2% efficiency. This color temperature shocks the body into thinking it is still daylight, leading to sleep disturbance.

Devils-Avocadoon Silk Road Bitcoins worth $1B transferred after seven years

Negotiate with the Russian Government to cash out in return for anonymity, citizenship and them taking an 80% commission.

Devils-Avocadoon Denmark to cull millions of minks over mutated coronavirus

I would consider it the danger of lockdown. We guarantee that the virus is still festering somewhere on the planet, and that vulnerable populations remain around the world, risking flareups.

With zero response - ie. what we do for influenza - we establish herd immunity over a short, sharp period, and the virus immediately falls over.

In any case, even if this mink-mutant variant is slightly deadlier, the data from Sweden shows that COVID deaths can be effectively reduced to near-zero from basic herd immunity strategies - Sweden yesterday recorded a single COVID death. So it makes sense to adopt the Swedish approach now, for a variant of the virus we know how to treat.

Devils-Avocadoon A 20kg hybrid drone that can fly at 50kmh for 4 hours

What about using methanol? It has been cleared for use powering laptops. Cleaner burning and quieter than 2-stroke petrol?

https://www.zdnet.com/article/methanol-powered-laptops-clear...

Devils-Avocadoon MI5 moves UK Terrorism threat level to “SEVERE”

Why do these attacks seem concentrated in the UK, France, Germany, Sweden, but rarely or never occur in Czechia, Poland, Hungary?

Devils-Avocadoon Banks, QE, and Money-Printing

In the US they will print money to bailout poorly run cities and towns, and especially to bailout pension funds (the two are often linked). This is presuming a Biden victory.

Devils-Avocadoon The Case Against More Ethanol (2016)

Ethanol has no long-term future because the vehicle fleet is already shifting to using no fuel at all.

John Deere already manufactures electric tractors and farmers can simply utilise replaceable battery packs, charged on-site using solar power.

Devils-Avocadoon The Case Against More Ethanol (2016)

No, the real problem is that that the externalities of Internal Combustion Engines - noise and air pollution - are fully absorbed by society and not adequately captured with fuel taxes.

Increase fuel taxes to the level necessary for carbon neutrality and ICE vehicles look immediately unappealing.

Devils-Avocadoon The West has failed – US and Europe have made a mess of handling the crisis

Little excess mortality seen this week in Europe:

https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps#z-scores-by-country

Deaths in Sweden tracking 2.4% higher than 2018, and even then explained by very low deaths in 2019 due to weak flu seasons:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...

Our mess is listening to frauds like Neil Ferguson from the Imperial College who have a track record of consistently over-estimating deaths from each new pathogen.

The West is aging and each flu season will have greater mortality spikes. COVID at best is a once-a-decade unusually strong flu variant which we have severely overreacted to - probably spurred on by Chinese propaganda and their fake reporting.

Devils-Avocadoon No new locally-acquired coronavirus cases in Australia yesterday

In Sweden 0.06% of the population has died from COVID, and those that did have a median age of about 80.

Would you pay $25,000 in order to have a 1 in 1,666 chance of living an extra few months when you are 80 years old?

No one would take those odds - but it has been forced on the population.

Devils-Avocadoon No new locally-acquired coronavirus cases in Australia yesterday

Australia will be the slowest to go back to normal since they will need to maintain national quarantine forever - until a suitable vaccine is found and administered.

$25,000 per person is a huge amount of money, far greater than for any national scheme, ever. Probably approaching Australia's expenditure for a world war or major international conflict.

Keep in mind that currently in Europe - there is very limited excess mortality. For example in Belgium right now, there are less excess deaths than from a heatwave in August:

https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/#z-scores-by-country

Sweden and other non-lockdown countries are already back to normal. The only thing preventing normality is politicians who insist on lockdowns for a virus which is currently not causing excess deaths beyond what we would expect from regular influenza.

Devils-Avocadoon No new locally-acquired coronavirus cases in Australia yesterday

The Federal Government forecasts debt will increase by $500billion due to the pandemic response.

If we take the deathtoll from Sweden (lower than the USA, Spain, Italy, Belgium), Australia could have expected 15,000 deaths, adjusted for population. Less if we consider only excess deaths.

This is $33 million per life saved, typically for a person in their 80s.

Is this a good use of funds?

If this money was devoted instead to tackling climate change or domestic air pollution (basically the same thing), how many lives would have been saved and improved instead?

Its likely that the country could have been completely decarbonised - all coal power plants shutdown, urban wood burning banned and new efficient gas heaters and insulation subsidised, and all new vehicle sales replaced with electrics.