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I think what the parent comment meant was that for the environmental impact of producing and transporting a glass bottle (glassware are heavy), one can produce and transport many PET bottles. The ratio can be high enough to the point where producing a glass bottle is more environmental impactful if they are not reused enough.

For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvzvM9tf5s0

If the supremacy of democracy is not absolute, then who's to judge whether China is or is not one?

I'd argue McCarthyism ended not because the US has "progressed" socially, but because the US had won the Cold War and there has not been a "worthy adversary" for the US until the rise of China.

I wouldn't be surprised if the US start to make the life of China sympathizers difficult in near future if China becomes more competitive.

Do you think there can be good authoritarian regimes? Or is democracy the only way?

This is pretty neat. I saw that Docker is required on the local side; what's that for? (My understanding is that it sets up Docker on the remote server and build the container using the project's Dockerfile.)

On Chrome: right click on the audio player and "Download audio as..."?

I suspect it's just that many PhDs have first hand experience working with cutting edge technologies --- they understand how fragile and unreliable they can be sometimes despite all the extraordinary claims made in the publications.

Also PhDs tend to form their own opinion on things and be quite stubborn about it (that's how they got their degrees in the first place after all :), which explains why their hesitancy didn't change much.

Knowing a password consists of three random words makes it significantly easier to guess it. Knowing a password contains at least a digit and a special symbol and a upper-case letter does not make the password much easier to guess, and, as others have pointed out, it encourages the use of password managers.

> There had been many bad things going on in Tibet, but it does not mean you can just invade the country, destroy all forms of religion, put people in prisons, starve and kill your victims, grab the resources, make the life of Tibetans miserable, and pretend you are the great liberator - only because of superior military power.

Is it just me or the sentence also makes perfect sense if Tibet is replaced by Iraq/Afghanistan/Libya?

Indeed; but I don't think it is "class struggle" that China is promoting to its people. It would seem to me that the Economist made an conscious attempt to conflate Xi's advocation of continued "class struggle" within CCP with what is being "urging" as seen in the current affairs; to quote:

> Such ideas ("Tangping") are at odds with the Communist Party’s rhetoric. Its leader, Xi Jinping, likes the word “struggle”. In 2019 an official summary of a speech he gave to young officials included more than 50 mentions of it. Struggle is an art, he told them. “We must be good at struggle.”

I find the Economist's choice of wording to translate this message quite intriguing. How about another way of putting it: "China encourages its people to strive".

> Trade deficits are bad because the deficit nation has to take on debt.

Not if the deficit nation can pay off the debt using its own currency whose supply is also controlled by the same nation, no?

Well one can immediately achieve that by donating half of their income to help those who can barely survive --- no need to wait.

> rather than letting them take responsibility for their own lives

It would seem to me people sometimes don't want to bother figuring out what's the best way of doing X, therefore I feel it is still valuable for someone to do the research and productize his know-how on "the best way of doing X".

You mean the Jevons Paradox[1]?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

> Doesn’t this generally describe all contemporary forms of advertisement? Or, for any given advertisement, how would you demonstrate it is out of scope of this qualifier?

I guess if one is told (clearly) that "this is an ad" then it's probably fine?

Hmm... so I guess the African Americans should be thankful that only some of them are being abused/oppressed by the government, that must be very comforting.

How about the incidents described in this article: https://www.acslaw.org/expertforum/mass-surveillance-and-bla...

Well I guess Wikipedia is a starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Human_rights_abuses_i...

About the US immigration centres --- I am not sure if those who suffered there would had come to those camps if they had knew what's happening in them, especially the children.

To be honest I do wonder what other countries' government do with the data they have gathered on their citizens as well as foreign personnel. I guess it must be that the justice league countries are using those data to protect their citizens and defend human rights across the globe.

I probably won't. Has this particular locksmith (Huawei) been shown to stalk people? Who are the people that accused the locksmith of stalking? Are they competitors? Should I trust their words?

I don't get it. Won't your logic imply that all locksmiths are trespassers now? Because, you know, they have unauthorized access to most premises secured by locks.

> we all do know that a hundred consecutive heads is possible, still you are not going to bet your week pay on it, even if you were promised 2^100 weeks of pay in return

The expected reward is just one-week's pay --- you have to offer better than that with all the uncertainty ;)

What if the reward is potentially infinite amount of money? If the investigation proved our current understanding of physics wrong, that could lead to historic breakthroughs in natural science.

Better yet, we don't know what the odd is. It might only need 32 consecutive heads.

There is a difference here: cars are built by car mechanics; they know cars inside out --- cars are never designed to drive in reverse. Physicists, on the other hand, didn't invent physics, so they know their current understanding of physics could be wrong.

When the rational thing to do (e.g. lying about the effectiveness of masks to prevent PPE shortages) contradicts the moral thing to do (i.e. telling the truth), what's the right choice?

Well there is no type stability or scoping rules to worry about in Python, so just for the sake of comparing the two, I was indeed thinking of 'naive' Julia code vs 'naive' Python code.

The thing with Python is that 'naive' Python code is already pretty close to 'unoptimised' Python code, so one can write naive Python code with numpy and still ends up with not-too-shabby performance, provided they chose an efficient algorithm, of course. In other words, there are not as many performance mistakes one can make with Python (perhaps because it can't get any worse). I imagine that's also why so many Python users who tried Julia were disappointed that direct translations of their Python program fail to perform as fast as advertised.

Yes I get your point. I guess I should have phrased my first question like the following

1. Can unoptimised Julia code run faster than unoptimised Python code (with numpy being used to do the heavy lifting)?

Let's say one is prototyping some algorithm so iteration speed is more relevant than running speed. Then one can choose either Julia or Python (with the help of numpy perhaps) and get an implementation in similar timeframes. So Julia won't necessarily be more attractive here.

Now if the prototype proved that running speed is very critical to the successful application of the algorithm, then it would mean the developer now has to optimise the hell out of it. One can either:

1. Optimise the Julia codebase, if Julia was used to prototype, following the many tips and tricks available (e.g. type stability, various macros, etc.).

2. Port the algorithm to C/C++, applying the many performance best practices that people have accumulated over the years.

So if the optimised C/C++ port is capable of being any faster than the optimised Julia code, then the rational choice would be to port the implementation using C/C++; it would also mean Python would have some advantage over Julia in the prototyping phase too due to its popularity. Otherwise I'd agree that using a single language to both do prototyping and production is the best.

> That's true in literally any language. Some languages require inlined assembly. Others require preprocessor directives. In almost all languages, you need to understand the difference between stack and heap, know how to minimize allocations, know how to minimize dynamic dispatch, know how to efficiently structure cache-friendly memory layouts. And of course, data structures & algorithms 101.

I think what s/he meant to say is that Julia is not "magically" faster than other languages. The real questions are:

1. Can unoptimised Julia code run as fast as unoptimised c/c++ code? I think the linked benchmark suggests this is not really the case.

2. Can optimised Julia code run faster than comparably (i.e. requiring similar amount of effort and expertise) optimised c/c++ code? If not, then why use Julia?

One alternative could be for Sony to launch a new line of PS that is optimised for crypto mining but way less cost-effective for gaming.

I wonder if the move will be that straightforward. A group of like-minded, privacy-aware people might move away from WhatsApp when one user advocates for it, but I am not sure a couple of people leaving a large group of average users would be enough to cause the rest to migrate.

Also, human have limited amount of attention --- if Telegram/Signal cannot make it to the critical mass soon then average users who had been convinced to try the alternatives might eventually revert back to WhatsApp because maintaining multiple chatting channels can be quite annoying at times, especially considering majority of their contacts might still be on WhatsApp and it is just easier to post there.