ItsDeathball

One of the mentioned cancelled projects was a coke plant with a small electricity co-generation component. Do steel mills still need coke? If so, the decline of coal in America could be due as much to the decline of American steel processing as to emission regulations on power plants.

I think the key point is that they already have a right of way reserved for cycling use, so even if they all need to be rebuilt the cost is merely that of breaking up and laying down concrete. Generally any bike infrastructure project has to contend with the politics of taking space away from cars.

The piece seemed like it was intended to explain the historical consensus on ethnic diversity in Roman Britain and how that consensus was achieved, which one can't really do reasonably in 140 characters. She mentions the Twitter drama for context, but I think she's trying to keep the debate focused on the point of factual contention rather than personal conflict.

If people want to get anything productive at all out of these constant Twitter flareups they need to allow for de-escalation.

@ethbro: I'd expect anyone who fires on any side on a battlefield to receive return fire. That hypothetical entirely disposes of "alienness" as a variable.

In any case, I've been trying to argue a point on my own rather than being a Scott Alexander repost-bot, but I have clearly failed. Most of what I'm getting at is based on what I remember from http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything... . He presents this far better than I have.

My point was as a direct counter to your assertion that warfare increases with degree of difference between peoples.

That would predict that the Germans would prefer to ally with other Europeans against people like the Japanese, who they are maximally different from. Historically this did not happen. Yes, there are clear conflicts between each of the groups named, but they are more similar to each other than they are to most other populations of humans.

Let's say an alien combat spacecraft crash-lands in the middle of ISIS-controlled territory. Would you expect ISIS to immediately declare a cease-fire and surrender the craft and its weaponry to the UN so that humanity can work together to face this new threat, or do you think they would immediately go about using it as a tool to better murder their fellow humans?

Well, 1930s Germans were pretty similar to Poles and the Dutch, and even more similar to German Jews. Indians and Pakistanis are also not exactly space aliens to each other, nor are Iraqis and Iranians, Russians and Ukrainians, or Syrians and other Syrians.

I'd say the historical rule for warfare is that the belligerents are so similar that tiny differences seem irreconcilable. Proximity and competition for resources also seem more important that otherness.

Several options: pump it back down the oil wells it came from, use fast-growing juvenile trees to "pump" it into house frames and libraries, use algae to "pump" it into useful plastics, or, if you have infinite money, bottle it and shoot it at Mars to thicken the atmosphere.

It has been proposed before, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project, but would have a minuscule effect on sea level rise. Might be worth a look as a local climate engineering method, though, should sea level rise push populations inland to less-than-ideal areas.

That's the average for a new car. Most people don't buy new cars.

That's a problem when the coastline is the reason for those industries and residences being there. It's not exactly feasible to relocate the oil refining and shipbuilding industries of New Orleans and Baton Rouge to central Mississippi.

Most of the Midwestern agricultural products exported overseas get transshipped from river barges or trains to oceangoing ships at New Orleans. Likewise, Houston is a major container port for finished goods. We need these ports for their value as ports. Condemning these ports over some moral judgement for a portion of their throughput shouldn't have any bearing on this kind of cost-benefit analysis.

This sounds plausible, and fits with the incident if basically no one trusts the airline to negotiate in good faith. Employees assume that if they don't make a fuss about getting a seat, then they'll have to fly jump-seat or standing-room-only from then on out. Likewise, passengers don't trust the airline offer of $800 and the next flight out for giving up their seat. I would have taken that offer if I could be assured it was legit, but I'd have a strong suspicion they'd deduct the cost of the flight and the hotel and give me what's left in the form of Chili's gift cards or something.

With trust that low it was probably only a matter of time before a dispute escalated into unnecessary use of force.

In the case of New Orleans, some of that high ground is within the city itself. If flooding eventually becomes frequent enough that the federal government decides to relocate flood insurance claimants and stop funding the Army Corps of Engineers' improvements to the levees, then the city can retreat to its pre-1930 borders. Most of those areas did not flood in Katrina and could get by with a much smaller flood protection system that might be justified by the city's economic productivity.

To be in line with the science, or at least the study [1] that 97% number comes from, they would have to sit through 33 witnesses who believe the planet is warming and humans are at least part of the cause, 66 witnesses who have not stated an opinion either way, and 1 witness who isn't sure but leans towards no.

Also, Curry and Christy would be part of the 66 "consensus" witnesses, having acknowledged that the planet is warming and humans are part of the cause. It sounds like they've managed to get Republicans to consider funding climate science by proposing an adversarial set of studies focused on "how much" rather than yes or no.

1: http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article

I had always wondered why aspirin tended to smell like vinegar and rarely helped with headaches. It's quite satisfying to have an explanation for both.

The mortgage interest deduction distorts the market in several ways. Making credit more available does allow people to spend more on homes, but this is then priced into the market. As you hint at, the subsidy is net neutral for homeowners, as it ultimately benefits the housing and banking industries. People who owned suburban land at the implementation of the deduction also benefited hugely, but now that prices are artificially inflated, any removal of the deduction would take money away from homeowners.

Additionally, it makes paying cash for a home unrealistic, making the housing market (more) dependent on banks and their attendant federal regulations. Over time this has had numerous negative effects on land use patterns and urban health by encouraging car-oriented sprawl and devaluing urban mixed-use neighborhoods. There's also the whole race-based redlining thing. The worst of these policies have been mitigated in the recent past, but they still pose obstacles to certain kinds of development (that are highly desirable lately) and would not have existed in the first place without government intervention in home mortgages.

An airburst not only minimizes fallout, it also maximizes the damage done by a nuclear weapon. I would expect a nuclear exchange to be primarily airbust weapons, considering the intent is to destroy the enemy's infrastructure and fighting capability.

Mutually Assured Destruction refers to the combatant countries, after all, not to the human species.

The founding fathers yes, their pawns not so much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shays%27_Rebellion

There is a difference between the NSA being able to trace your identity vs. a profit-driven corporation being able to connect your identity to your online speech, location, and contacts. The first is governed by due process and need-to-know, the second is essentially public knowledge if the ad-tech revenue is sufficiently tempting.

Even in a pseudonymous environment where the venue operator presumably knows who you are (like HN), the assumption that other users cannot easily trace your words to your IRL identity reduces friction in communication. Environments where everyone publicly posts under their real identity, with those posts retained forever, tend towards low-information social signaling.

Desirable tropical beachfront property?

On the other hand, perhaps the answer is that they're just complicated enough. If the big, old cities didn't provide a unique economic advantage through their increased interconnectivity then no one would stick around to tolerate that ancient infrastructure.

I actually know someone who just shuts down and freezes for a few minutes at the mere mention of the word "rape". This person has made their discomfort known to their friends and requested the word be avoided in conversation, which is an easy enough request to comply with out of courtesy.

Note that this is a group of people drawn from 4chan and adjacent communities whose primary socialization is voip and online games, all areas known for a "challenging" discussion environment. The line seems to be, in this case, that one can reasonably expect to carve out a "safe space" among family and friends, but not total strangers.

Of course, they also need separate CO2 scrubbers to keep the air breathable, which consume a lot of power, use caustic and hazardous chemicals, and make the whole ship smell pretty bad.

An artificial leaf that removed CO2 without these downsides might justify a refit.

You might be surprised. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina I didn't have access to a car and instead rode my dad's ridiculous full-suspension Schwinn (from Walmart) to and from work. This was a 3 mile round trip on flat asphalt. After two weeks, the weld joining the downtube to the bottom bracket actually split open entirely, leaving the bike held together by the suspension and chain tension.

This bike was only a year old at that point; clearly it wasn't designed to be ridden beyond an initial burst of post-purchase enthusiasm. It's the only time I've ever seen the failure of a bike frame.

Tennessee Williams certainly agreed with buckbova: “America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.”

Assuming that's a serious request, this is a decent summary and starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_the_United_S...

Tim Ferris's book "The 4-Hour Body" is written with time min-maxing in mind. There's some weird stuff in there ("I supplement with garlic because a random homeless guy told me it's good for weight loss") but the core workout/diet regimen is effective and easy to stick to.

As usual, though, you get what you pay for. The free energy often comes in at a suboptimal angle, and half the time you can't even use it because there's a planet in the way.

Russia may be one place this technology makes sense. They have to rebuild the Trans-Siberian Railway anyway to get it up to modern standards, so why not skip ahead to something faster than a subsonic flight to Vladivostok? Additionally, an elevated tube might be able to take a more direct route, as the pylons could better deal with permafrost than a continuous roadbed.

Paying for it is left as an exercise to the voter.

It's mentioned in the article that this is about local, city-maintained streets. Unless you live directly on a state or federal highway, those gas taxes, state sales taxes, and income taxes do not go towards the street you live one.

Local sales taxes may, and the author includes these in the diagram of the city budget. Your largest contribution to the maintenance of city infrastructure is in property taxes, either directly or through rent. It's also worth noting that the article only accounts for road surface maintenance. Adding in sewage and water expenses would likely not be favorable.