KSteffensen

Ursula K. LeGuin's 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas' deals with this

https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf

Well, it happens:

https://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/incident/chinese-serbian...

It's possible to work for someone else without being a mindless drone.

Depends.

Political harmony is a problem if forced, but a common vision shared by much of society is a strength if arrived at through healthy, intellectually honest debate.

Political debate is fine and healthy, but it should not be possible to end a debate by being louder, more obnoxious and more ready to do violence than the other debaters.

Why is the direct flight to LA more expensive than the flight to San Jose with a stop in LA? You'd think the price for the San Jose flight would be the price of the LA flight plus the price of the LA to San Jose flight.

Can't we fill the Sahara with solar panels? If transmission lines are problematic hydrogen or methane could be used to transfer the energy to where it needs to be used.

This of course has a lot of political implications, but if we wanted to do it we could.

In all of the places I have worked both for pay and voluntarily money has very rarely been the problem, but it has always been the excuse.

E.g. how many billions of euros were collected within a week after the Notre Dame burned? At the risk of offending a lot of french I will say that the Notre Dame is just a building. In the big scheme of things it is not important. Nobody will starve if it is not re-built.

The problem is 'mental inertia', convenience and (perceived) risk aversion.

The problem here is that it is much easier to create bullshit than it is to refute it. At some point you have to stop addressing the points of people who have repeatedly been incorrect, because there are better uses of your time.

A large part of the energy loss in electronics happens in switch-mode Buck-Boost DC-DC converters, as I understand it mainly due to internal resistance in the components used and due to the magnetic field not being directed enough to transfer 100% power between two inductors.

Would a cheap room temperature superconductor bring any benefits here?

We're going to need one big centrifuge to ball mill all the thousands of tonnes of soil that needs to be cleaned up. I wonder how long the steel balls will last?

Terry Pratchett quote: "If you're building a house you want someone who's driven a few nails in their time"

Why the hell are government agencies using Twitter/Facebook for official communication in the first place?

At the very least if these sites are being used for official communication that might be critical to peoples safety some sort of privileged status or ToS should be negotiated. Can you imagine Musk banning some random non-USA government agency because he had a fit while high at 3 am?

Also: https://xkcd.com/743/

As a mid-level leader I personally rarely feel I have control or that I am doing a great job.

Shutting up and refusing to answer a question makes it very clear that you have something to hide, much more than a lie.

I'm not sure whether that's good or bad. I guess it depends on what you are accused of.

My understanding is that the distinction hinges on whether the data is available to a US based employee. Can the NSA show up at a US address and tell the people there to hand over the data? Can this data transfer happen without an EU based person taking some action? If the answer to both questions is yes, the data handling is not compliant.

Of course, IANAL, do your own research, etc.

Didn't BetterPlace try to do battery swap and failed?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company)

As I remember my education time from high-school onwards, all-nighters were usually a consequence of slacking off during school time.

In college/university a fairly big part of the education was learning what was compulsory reading and what was optional. There was always more reading than hours in the day.

Another aspect here is that there will be no change or evolution in society if no one dies from old age. Everything will be controlled by grumpy old men! They will look like they are 25, but the mindsets will be ossified.

Let's make it so everyone's body is 25 until they suddenly painlessly die around age 125 or so.

> requires high pressure systems, leaks are dangerously explosive

Is this different in some way from natural gas? Why can't we use the existing storage and distribution infrastructure for natural gas for handling hydrogen?

Minor nitpick, prescriptions are written by doctors, with a medical degree, rather than pharmacists with a degree in pharmaceutical science dealing mostly with analytical chemistry and biochemistry.

I disagree that what you call internet literacy can be taught. In my opinion people fundamentally disagree what the 'reliable sources' are and some (many?) actively distrust the official recommendations.

With that analysis internet literacy becomes a question of showing people that official recommendations are not actively trying to trick you into doing something harmful to yourself. How will that be done when nobody trusts any official authority, be it government, universities, news media or anything else?

This trust will take generations to re-build and currently it doesn't seem like anybody thinks it's even a priority.

This also means that you the likelihood of ending up with insurmountable personal debt in case of a default on the mortgage is a lot smaller.

In some cases the down payment can be a bank loan at significantly higher rates. I did this for my house and the rate for the down payment loan was something like 8% while mortgage was 2%. I forget what percentage of the total was a bank loan but it was around 10-15%.

There are not the same conditions on the bank loan, though. E.g. a bank loan can in theory be called in with a months notice, while this is not the case for the bond based mortgage.

> Or do we just blend the risk with everyone so if you always paid your loans on time, you pay the same rate as someone who has a loan write off and is 3 months behind in loan payments?

This is how it works in Denmark for property mortgages. There is security in the house and up to 80% of the house price can be lent. It's up to the credit institution and bank to decide whether to approve you for the loan based on an expense budget provided by you, pay slips for the past 3 months and the property valuation. Bank provides the contact between you and the credit institution as well as budget vetting, the credit institution sells bonds to investors to raise the money for the mortgage. Risk is spread over the bond series and is carried by the credit institution.

We have some of the lowest mortgage rates anywhere. Current 30 year rate is 5%. This is after a huge hike in the last year after having been at 0% or even negative for at least 5 years.

So yeah, for large investments like property mortgages with considerable security drop the credit rating and spread the risk across enough people. On average it will be cheaper.

The article doesn't state why they are using helium. Could the same be accomplished using some other cheaper, less leaky gas like N2?

I'll speculate that since it's compression and decompression (as opposed to phase change) that's being exploited, you need a small gas whose behavior is as close to the ideal gas law as possible. Smaller gasses are also more volatile and leaky though, so there is probably some tradeoff.

The people wearing these things are probably not at any risk, but producing these chemicals means that they eventually end up in nature, which means in ground water, farmland, etc.

These flourinated organics don't break down in nature, they are known as 'forever chemicals'. They just stick around and get concentrated as they climb up the food chain. Like dioxins, the best way to get rid of them is burning them at sufficiently high temperatures, which apparently not all industrial incinerators reach.

I guess if enough of this stuff is pumped into the environment eventually some fungus or something will learn how to decompose it, but there will be a lot of cancer case before we get there.

Libertarians are typically against regulation. Where the boundary between regulatory red tape and anti-fraud legislation lies is a matter of taste.

Well, yeah as long as you trust the employees and they know what they are doing, sure. Otherwise, those 50 desks are going to be expensive.

"questions I was never aware I needed to ask"

This can be intentional rather than a misunderstanding.

Including the kid in the chores from as early as he possibly could has been a huge win for us. At 6 he can now handle stuff like simple food preparation, emptying the dishwasher and folding his own clothes pretty much unsupervised. That saves a lot of time on the evening clean up.