1,654 karma · joined May 9, 2018
The rest of the world may be able to learn a lot from them as we face declining resources and the effects of climate change.
> Without artificial fertilizers, hydroponic equipment from the Soviet Union was no longer usable. Instead, this was converted for the use of organic gardening. The original hydroponic units, long cement planting troughs and raised metal containers, were filled with composted sugar waste, thus turning hydroponicos ("hydroponics") into organopónicos.
So it seems the name might come from the composted sugar waste that was used as an organic substrate for the plants to grow on (as opposed to the prior water-based hydroponics systems).
Therefore it seems the name might not be related to "organic farming" etc. as we tend to see in the West.
This isn't to be confused with the economic definition of GDP per hour worked - which has far more to do with the sectors of industry that a country has.
After all, a few financiers doing million-dollar deals is always going to generate more GDP per hour than coltan miners, even though it's not obvious which is actually generating more wealth. Robert F Kennedy famously said the GNP "measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile".
Nowadays I'm very unlikely to buy a game that doesn't have a native Linux version.
“For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape.
He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”
>Philippe Girard writes "when the genocide was over, Haiti's white population was virtually non-existent."
That seems pretty in-line with what OP stated, I'm not familiar enough to know if Philippe Girard is a reliable source but the reference seems legitimate.[1]
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0031322050010619...
At least in Europe, even Engineering fields (let alone sciences and god forbid, the arts/humanities..) have pretty dismal job prospects compared to CS.
It seems like everyone and their grandmother wants to "learn to code" these days and it really doesn't seem like a sustainable situation.
That said, it's quite a hard field to actually learn enough to be a useful, paid professional so at the moment I'd still say it is the best degree choice.
At least then if I screw up it's on me.
I'll have to check it out!
While it's seems true that "High IQ can mask early Alzheimer’s symptoms"[1] I would be surprised if that could explain such a large decline in incidence as they mention in that report that while it did mask the early symptoms, that just made the decline appear more sudden.
The cognitive decline is really incredible, I saw it happen to my grandmother and she went from being a perfectly normal person to not recognising family members and becoming increasingly confused and aggressive all within a few years.
So I think even more educated/intelligent people would eventually be diagnosed (perhaps a few months later) and thus any effect on the incidence would be small (due perhaps to these people dying prior to diagnosis).
Furthermore, the Flynn effect is quite small, no - around 14 IQ points over more than half a century and now some talk of a decline, the "reversed Flynn effect" so it's not even clear how substantial an IQ difference we could expect.
If the decline is due to "improvements in childhood nutrition, healthcare, and education" then I think that's quite good though, as those are things we can control.
[1] https://www.heraldnet.com/news/high-iq-can-mask-early-alzhei...
I hope it's successful as I feel nuclear fission power has been unfairly maligned.
I strongly recommend the book Atomic Accidents by James Mahaffey[2] to learn more about how fission power plants work and what went wrong at Chernobyl etc. - it's one of my favourite books of all-time.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96et8ZGsxJY&t=545s
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20579068-atomic-accident...
Not on internet discussion boards.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Future-Fusion-Energy-Jason-Parisi/dp/...
This far more true of ICF than MCF (i.e. tokamak) approaches.
With the excellent results from MAST, it seems the spherical tokamak approach could allow for a much smaller tokamak to built than previously thought - given the size of the tokamak is strongly related to the capital costs (which are the biggest economic hurdle by far) this is great news for economic fusion power.
With the plans for STEP (UK), the US Pilot Plant (in design, seems it will follow similar route to STEP) and the CFETR (China) and the planned experiments at ITER - I suspect economic fusion will be outright proven by 2040 and perhaps even delivering commercial power to the grid by 2050.
Fusion doesn't have the same fundamental physical limits that solar and wind do. That said, I think this sort of zero-sum approach to science is what is going to lead us to imminent worldwide disaster.
In the Manhattan Project they pursued both the Fat Man and Little Boy designs simultaneously despite the cost - this needs to be our approach with the energy crisis, we can't afford to try and pick winners, the cost of failing to do so is far higher than the cost of funding multiple avenues.
And we are shifting and broadening that bell curve.
But equally, I suppose low humidity might increase the chance of forest fires etc. It seems some have already broken out in the area[1]
[1] https://governmentofbc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/ind...
[1] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/313367-star-citizen-deve...
Except these days it seems the whole of Europe undervalues software engineering.
The Welsh Valleys too since the loss of the mines.
I went to a state school (i.e. public school in American terminology) in a poor area and studied hard and did well, got scholarships, went to Uni etc.
There are some problems with people not being able to afford to dedicate time to study - this can be solved by offering a maintenance allowance to all students, as I believe is done in some Nordic countries.
But the biggest issue I saw in my high school was people either giving up on education altogether, or having unrealistic expectations leading them to choose University degrees with poor job prospects.
Note, I include the trades in education as in fact they better than many University degrees when it comes to helping people improve their lot in life.
I know people who started start-ups and spun out side projects here in Europe (both the UK and the continent).
One thing I noticed was that when it came time to raise money almost of all of them ended up needing American investment. We don't have anywhere near as much VC capital here in Europe and the banks are incredibly conservative.
Plus depending on the country the taxes/fees for being self-employed or starting your own business can be incredibly punitive.
> One interesting thing is that Europeans benefit from American innovation.
While we do benefit from American innovation I'd also argue it's a sort of 'digital colonialism' for want of a better term - we don't grow our own huge firms like Yandex, Baidu etc. and instead just hand our cash over to American ones (Google, Facebook etc.)
I think a lot of Americans don't realise just how much higher salaries are in the USA.
I guess the grass is always greener.