Robot production lines need robot technicians to support them. I doubt you'll find many of those in Bangladesh any time soon.
989 karma · joined June 2, 2016
I expect most commentary will look at this using a US vs China thing, but I'm more worried about SE Asia and Africa. They need to climb up the development ladder that China's already 1/2-way up.
Say what you will about clothing and sneaker sweatshops, but they were a tried and tested method for building up the basics of an industrial economy. South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong wouldn't have gotten to where they are today as quickly without them. How will Kenya develop?
One my favorite blog posts summarizing some research on this point, on Butter vs Margarine, is 8 years old now, and it still hasn't penetrated the mainstream.
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2009/10/butter-vs-marg...
And I'd never post the link to a HN thread. A good culture and community is a fragile thing.
Don't look at it like a get rich quick scheme. Think of it as an asset class you invest in. Set aside what you can each month and buy a basket of currencies.
Become educated about coins and get a sense of what real market innovation and real teams look like. There's a lot of scams out there. Most ICOs are scams in my opinion.
If you're looking for a coin to get into that's relatively new but has a lot of potential, my bet is Filecoin.
Calorie consumption is easy to see. It's how much food you eat. The numbers on the nutrition label might not be perfectly accurate but they're good enough for dietary purposes.
Calorie rate is where the confusion sets it. Most people think you burn calories by exercise, but by far the greater amount of calories are burned by metabolic activity like keeping your body heat at 98 degrees, digesting food, thinking (brains burn a lot of sugar), and general maintenance (e.g., replacing skin).
The point of exercise isn't to burn calories through muscular effort. It's to keep your insulin response good and blood sugar in the good range, which in turn keeps the flow of calories in your blood directed to your muscles and organs, and to get your fat cells to release excess calories when they need to.
People who only diet and don't exercise, or do exercise but diet way too much, like on the Biggest Loser, usually see their metabolic activity levels drop through the floor. Besides making it harder to lose weight over time, this has knock on effects on your health that are terrible. Your body also loses as much lean mass as it does body fat.
I've finally put it all together and have lost almost 40 lbs over the last six months. I'm down three pant sizes and almost down a fourth, and my weight loss has been consistent and steady, and I feel like I can keep this up as long as I need to. The "secrets" are pretty simple:
Reduce Consumption: I skip or eat a very small dinner 6 days out of the week. When I'm really hungry I just eat a ton of vegetables until I'm physically full. Breakfast and lunch are normal and on Sunday I feast. Basic intermittent fasting/feasting protocol.
Keep Burn Rate Up: Sleep a lot. Avoid stress. 1-2x/week do a very intense bodyweight exercise routine; all sets to failure. Never do cardio.
You're confusing Bitcoin miners and Bitcoin nodes.
Bitcoin nodes verify transactions. You can run a Bitcoin node off your home PC. It doesn't use much energy.
Bitcoin miners are what use all the energy, and their energy use is driven by the size of the mining rewards not the number of users.
Sure, if you take it out of the context of the rest of my comment. But OP asked if Bitcoin would stop being an ecological disaster, and my point is was that Bitcoin's ecological costs are primarily about the source of the electricity, not the amount of electricity.
Bitcoin mining uses about 170 MWe, continuously. That's really not very much in the grand picture of things. A few medium-sized fields of solar panels isn't an "ecological disaster".
You've misunderstood something about Bitcoin if you think this is true. Bitcoin miners use resources based on the logic of competing with each other for the value of the mining reward, not based on the number of transactions they process. If Bitcoin solved all its scaling problems so that everyone in the world could use Bitcoin, but mining rewards remained constant, the resources the miners expend to collect the reward wouldn't be any different from today.
Bitcoin is only as ecologically harmful as the source of the electricity used to run the miners, and it's no more harmful than any other use of electricity. If the world switches over to solar and wind as baseload power, problem solved. If the world doesn't switch away from using coal, that's not Bitcoin's fault. It's not a problem Bitcoin can solve.
Obviously both SpaceX and Blue Origin are the leaders here, but once they do it the other majors will either have to build the same thing or drop out of the industry.
There are so many things about space that we just assume are true, but are actually only true because access to orbit has always been so expensive. If we can get the cost to reach orbit down to a multiple of the fuel cost, then so many more things are possible.
We finally get large satellite constellations for low-latency Internet all over Earth. We get space stations and O'Neil cylinders. Moon bases and fuel depots on Titan.
At the same time, firms like Made In Space are working on in-space construction so you can build radio telescopes in space with arbitrarily large dishes (10 km, maybe?). Eventually we build mirrors that size too.
Basically just those two things are the only barriers between us and a solar-system-wide civilization like in The Expanse.
How dare I disagree with the Perfect Musk!
It's true that LA traffic sucks, but the only solution you need is good transit planning with existing technology. Throw in self-driving mini-busses (which I bet Tesla is working on) and you'd never be stuck in traffic again. Tokyo manages a population more than 10x that of L.A. with just good transit planning.
The problems with US transit are political. We have political problems that makes building infrastructure cost 10x too much and take 10x too long. Hyperloop can't solve those problems with better engineering. And if we fix those political problems, you don't need Hyperloop.
Almost no job is paid the full value it produces. There's always a split between the buyer of the job (whoever is paying the wage) and the seller of the job (who is receiving the wage). If the job-buyer didn't get any value, why would they buy it?
The question is: How is the split determined? Basically it's about negotiating leverage. Someone who is nearly irreplaceable (like Koby Bryant or Paul Buchheit) has a lot of leverage and can demand a lot. Someone who can be replaced easily has little leverage and gets a lower wage.
The problem with teaching isn't that it's female dominated. It's that too many people want to be teachers, because they enjoy teaching. Also because teaching doesn't measure the output of workers it's harder for the great ones to demand higher wages; they just get the average, like the bad teachers.
Unfortunately a few years later they had to issue a correction, because older (more experienced) engineered stepped in and showed them where the mistakes in their work were, and they couldn't eliminate nearly as much HLW as they thought with existing technology.
In other words, a closed nuclear fuel cycle doesn't exist. We could be better than we are currently with investments in molten salt and fast reactors, but I don't think we know how to get to zero HLW using fission.
Considering that HLW lasts for a million years, that's imposing too high a cost on too many of our descendants, IMO.
My personal belief is that solar and wind are the best way to go for now, and if we ever get zero-HLW fission or aneutronic fusion working, cool.
Another thing to think about is that with solar roofs becoming a thing (there are more companies in this market than just Tesla), the additional risk associated with rooftop solar could be seen as "zero", since houses need to install a roof anyway.
But yes, your larger point that renewables aren't risk free is valid and correct.
That's weird, huh? I'm all for a rational assessment of risk, but shouldn't they be on the list?
Actually, I've seen such comparisons, and solar and wind do pretty well. They don't kill anyone from air pollution and global warming, but manufacturing and maintenance isn't risk-free. When you install things on roofs, sometimes people fall off.
Most solar installation these days however are utility scale deployments in empty fields. It's pretty low risk, plus the same pollution and AGW benefits that nuclear benefits from.
As an aside, I wonder if anyone has done the math on storing high-level nuclear waste on the Moon, now that a fully reusable SpaceX Falcon Heavy is almost here. That might be cheaper than the financial and political costs of places like Yucca Mountain.