danielharan

It's not clear that shipping the sugar to where the cacao is, then shipping refrigerated chocolate is any better than shipping unrefrigerated cacao mass to the North where it's milled with sugar.

Especially if you look at grid emissions in all those countries. Transport uses energy, but so do milling, tempering and packaging.

The chocolate has to be shipped cool, requiring more energy. That said: more and more producing countries are doing initial processing (roasting and grinding into liquor), and derivatives (powder and butter).

Processing cacao in North America means I have to pay to get rid of shell which could be brought back to farms. Hopefully one day I can buy good liquor.

I live in Québec. We never had mass tracking - this was FUD about the app, which did NOT share data... and that level of privacy protection is also why it was difficult to prove its positive impact.

What we did have was public health which sometimes managed to call people after a positive result - to warn their contacts, so they don't infect others in turn. This is absolutely standard for public health for many illnesses, and helps reduce contagion.

Neither of those is mass tracking. Public health doesn't report you if you went to see prostitutes or used illegal drugs; their job is to stop chains of transmission, and contact the people you were around. That's true for TB as mentioned, as well as smallpox, Ebola, etc

Anyways, since you're in Québec you might be interested in this figure, selecting the 0-49 demographic. Public health isn't telling us about this, or simple methods to reduce risk. Hell, HEPA filters are still near impossible to install in schools.

https://statistique.quebec.ca/fr/document/surmortalite-hebdo...

For a lot of executives and business travelers, the alternative is flying in the night before and getting a hotel room.

A night train is a much, much better option.

I learned about AI by participating in the challenge, and ended up co-founding an AI company as a result.

Netflix got more than 1 million dollar in free advertising from it, and are still getting brand value out of it today. They implemented some of the algorithms, and probably got a 10X ROI through retention alone.

As mentioned in the Quora answer, they were also able to recruit top talent - and that's much harder to put an ROI figure on.

There's a genetic component - as there is for Openness, which is higher on the West than the East Coast of the US.

So, maybe ADHD types were the first to leave Europe for the Americas?

You are far wiser at 19 than most founders I've met in their 40's.

Some of the best business advice I got was from pitching VCs. Even if pitching is not what you want to do now, it might be useful to open lines of communication and suss out who you may want to work with in the future.

If there's a board, it may be worth it to let some members know.

Should those board members do nothing, you now know to avoid their companies in the future :)

The Braille example really establishes the importance of that context for me. Thank you!

I'd use a snowball, to convey the growing nature.

The NY study is preliminary, not peer reviewed. The sampling strategy used over-represents people going out, and we have no information on which test was used or its accuracy.

Given antibody testing done in places like Vô, the NY results seem a bit of a stretch.

Hopefully Japan gets it together and starts testing properly, though.

Many of those people testing positive were presymptomatic (some even developed symptoms during the follow-up period). It typically takes several days to develop symptoms.

Also worth considering is the period mentioned in the correspondence is one in which there was very fast exponential growth. When more of the positive cases are recent, it's only normal that they don't show symptoms yet.

Besides the test used showing a lot of false positives, the population of pregnant women looked at had a much higher rate of symptomatic infections 1 month ago than the entire population does today... we should be very cautious about concluding much from that sample.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2009316

Solar's gone down in price 80% in a decade, and is still continuing that downward trend.

Wind, both on and offshore, is also getting cheaper.

By 2030, new solar will certainly be cheaper in China than it is to operate existing coal plants.

I'm a lot more comfortable betting that mass-manufactured things get cheaper, than I am on the price of natural gas a few years or a decade out. With solar and wind going down another 50% and battery prices under $100/kWh, the economics are pretty powerful.

The politics are just as powerful; China has massive internal pressure to clean up the air (and people have been reminded of how clean it could be), and a chance at replacing the US for world leadership if it can show the way forward on climate.

We shouldn't let him anchor to those numbers. More than 10k is already a catastrophe, and difficult to justify given the advance warning.

Everything in excess of that is a shocking mix of incompetence, hubris and malice - including refusing help to states whose governors aren't sufficiently deferential.

Some of the things they did initially were counterproductive; isolating carriers is actually much better than sending them home to infect family. I saw figure of 75% of cases being transmitted by close contacts.

All that said, the math is brutal and you're right about things not being immediately apparent in the statistics. There's a delay for symptoms, and then another for deaths.

Unless another country epicly fubars their response, the USA should maintain its #1 spot. All the more so if states don't encourage social distancing for another week.

They're getting flack from other epidemiologists for doing just that. Curve-fitting the AIDS epidemic suggested it would peter out in 1995.

We only have the same curves if we put in the same restrictions as Wuhan, or get R down as much. Yet we still have megachurches holding services.

And politicians are using these as worst-case scenarios already, which will make them complacent about the urgent need for more ventilators, masks and PPE supplies.

That really doesn't answer the question. That methodology looks extremely dodgy, and merely having funding from the Gates foundation doesn't make it right.

So, you're just assuming other jurisdictions are going to have a curve that looks like Wuhan's?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Farr#Law_of_epidemics

Combining outputs would be awesome.

Given comments on the Good Judgement Project, a lot of people are using the wrong reference class, so have bad base rates. The work could easily be split, defining the right reference class, while having others refine the rates for each.

I'd also like to have easy ways to make conditional forecasts. One of the questions I got much better than the average on the GJP concerned the likelihood of a US-China deal on emissions. Many forecasters assumed China would never agree to such a deal, because of how much they need to emit.

I knew China had been working on renewables, and would be likely to agree to a deal. I just didn't know about the diplomatic world. A way to tell those that know diplomacy that the economic and technology landscape had changed would have changed the calculus.

Averaging is great and all, but platforms should make collaboration easier.

By that logic, no country's emissions matter, even China.

Meanwhile, if you want to convince other countries to reduce their emissions, it's much easier when you're part of the solution.

It's 7% of emissions caused by fossil fuels, not 7% of the fuels: coal is the worst of them.

Australia's emissions are smaller, however they enable much larger emissions elsewhere. Without that coal, India and China would be accelerating their transition to renewables.

That is a completely relevant article, and anyone downvoting this is just willfully ignorant.

Thunderstorms and fire tornadoes say your theory is correct:

https://qz.com/1779572/how-australias-massive-bushfires-are-...

How do you reckon the impact of climate change is marginal?

Australia exports more like 7% of total fossil fuels by CO2, according to this: https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2019-08-19/australia-co2...

"France completed construction on 76% of its current 58 reactors at an inflation-adjusted cost of $330 billion (€290 billion). The complete buildout of the 58 reactors was less €400 billion."

Whoever managed to build plants in the past must have retired. "Flamanville is just one of three projects being built in Europe using the next-generation EPR technology. The other two are the Olkiluoto project in Finland, which is more than a decade late, and the UK’s Hinkley Point, which is also delayed and mired in controversy over its high costs." https://www.ft.com/content/877eedae-f987-11e9-a354-36acbbb0d...

Yes, in theory new nuclear plants could be small, modular and safe.

In practice, the biggest challenge is political rather than technical. How do you set up institutions that can deliver these projects on time and on budget?

In the time these plants have been delayed, solar prices have dropped more than 80%. By the time they're scheduled to be finished, solar should cost 50% less than today.

Germany overpaid by a lot, which is the price for building a local industry and being pioneers in a new technology. I hope it works out for them. Either way, humanity will owe them a debt for this.

You could have parking with rental cars on the periphery of the city or its car-free zone.

Unless we have costs breakthroughs in nuclear, solar is going to stay cheaper.

Sorry, that's just ludicrous.

Putting plastic in a dump is much better than letting it kill animal after animal, decomposing into smaller pieces and getting into the food chain.

Ideally we design most plastics out, but barring that recycling would be fine - and just burying it is still much better than either burning or letting it drift into oceans.

"that implies there's some natural balance we've disrupted"

There's a whole history of colonialism to contend with. What was once nearly a quarter of world GDP in 1700 dropped to less than 5% in 250 years. The whole country was deindustrialized.

It's a lot easier to actualize our potential in some places. I don't think it's demonizing me to admit that if I was born a woman in Sub-Saharan Africa, or in a war zone, I wouldn't have been able to build wealth like I have.