1,554 karma · joined May 3, 2020
Of course, if someone has used LLM during development as a helper tool and done the necessary work of properly reviewing and fixing the generated code, then it can be borderline impossible to detect, but such PRs are much less problematic.
It may be reasonable to do at early stages, but after the colony is able to produce metals in situ it would be better to build more radiators. Especially considering that you also need to dispose latent heat from other sources.
Do you think that nuclear fuel is some kind of green glowing stuff like in Simpsons? New nuclear pellets is just a bunch of uranium dioxide, which is mildly alpha radioactive. In other words, as long as you are not inhaling its dust, it's more or less safe to handle even with bare hands.
Even the worst possible kind of accident is likely to be absolutely irrelevant from the radiation safety point of view considering high levels of natural solar radiation on the surface of Mars.
Ideally, access to the financial system and secrecy of financial transactions should be protected by constitutions in the same way as secrecy of correspondence and right to privacy. Unfortunately, most constitutions were written in the age when it was a given, since most people relied on physical cash and were was no need to explicitly protect this right.
Not only we can, but it also done routinely. For example, see this Practical Engineering video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQbaVdge7kU
I explicitly mentioned this line of argument in the GP. The problem is that renewables only sometimes cheap and plentiful and often not when we want it. Even without accounting for the politically-driven preferential treatment covered in the sibling comment, from the purely technical point of view intermittency above certain threshold wreaks havoc in the traditional grid architecture designed for the traditional easily controlled "rotating" generation. It becomes really hard to manage the grid with existing tools when you have too much of intermittent highly distributed generation and in the extreme it leads to collapses like this.
As I wrote, yes, you could upgrade the grid, increase transmission redundancy, add battery/pumped/flywheel storage, introduce "smart" tools to manage the grid, and do a plethora of other things to accommodate renewables. Hell, you could even migrate the grid to DC!
But the cost of doing it is substantial. It's effectively a form of externalities of renewable generation, which are not accounted for in naive "cheap" $/kW metrics. Properly accounting for those externalities and adding them to the cost of renewable generation is possible, but politically unappealing.
>Your comment suggests move back to good ol' expensive fossil generation instead of looking at how to bring the market rules up to date with evolving technologies.
No, I believe we should remove the politically motivated shoehorning of renewables at the cost of grid stability. There should be a limit on how much intermittent generation we can have depending on the preparedness of the grid and we should pay less for power from such sources, not guarantee purchase from them!
As you say, we should have proper incentives structure which accounts for various externalities (including CO2 emissions!). We need to remove the existing subsudies on renewables which made sense in the early days, but not now. Let the generation sources play at the even field.
Also, have you read after the market part? Please watch this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7G4ipM2qjfw if the last quote is gibberish to you. It discusses somewhat different issues, but the point still stands.
Using a very debatable inflation metric (e.g. should deflationary technological advancements in electronics manufacturing boost the "real GDP" metric?), which is quite muted (even with the post-COVID spike!) on top of that because of the "exorbitant privilege".
>that's not how it works
Suuuure. The recent examples of collusion between banks, the government, and the central bank to quickly increase amount of base money is not outright "money printing", just benign "quantitative easing", nothing to see here.
>crowding out
This works only when government engages in "fair" and competitive debt issuance. But we see a different picture, government bonds are counted as bank reserves and even worse banks do not even have to apply the mark-to-market accounting rules for them in some cases. And everyone knows that the Fed immediately will ride to the rescue on the first sign of trouble in the bond market as was done during not-QE.
>reckless fiscal policy alone doesn't "manipulate the GPD values"
Alone? No. But it certainly boosts GDP (both real and nominal) in the near term and makes the economy look better than it really is. It's the same story as in China where they had massive "infrastructure investments" to artificially stimulate the economy and make GDP numbers look good. We can see in the real time how it unravels.
I am not sure against what you argue exactly. My point is that if we use GDP as a metric of economy strength, then it's easy for the government to cheat it by fueling it's spending by printed money (ah, sorry, the reputable economist use the "quantitative easing" euphemism instead) or by unfair debt issuing practices (like forcing banks, pension funds, or even people directly to buy government bonds), then it results in a short term "sugar rush" GDP growth, while consequences are kicked down the road. In the US case we also have an additional masking factor in the form of having control over the world's reserve currency, which significantly dampens the usual inflation reaction.
So if we want a better metric, we should somehow discount this factor. Obviously, simply removing the government spending is too simplistic (or you can call it less charitably as "dumb").
The private sector can also spend on dumb and inefficient things and we are fine in counting it in the GDP metric, the difference between private sector and the government is the source of revenue. The private sector has to produce something for the economy before spending (it may be done indirectly through debt, but it's not important here), while the latter forces the economy to share it's productive capacity (using violence if necessary) while not producing anything itself (well, technically it does, but it's usually a tiny amount of the total revenue). It's still fine, since it's just a form of re-distribution from one private entities to others. It can be grossly inefficient, but so can be the private spending.
The problem is when a significant portion of the government revenue is fueled by debt which can not be paid by the future economy growth. The government quickly engineers negative real interest rates either by forcing commercial banks and pension funds to buy it with regulations, or by outright money printing, which is easy to do in a fiat system. Such debt-fueled GDP growth is not a sign of strength, but instead a sign of weakness, and ideally it should be heavily discounted.
Most people who are familiar with how electric grids operate are in agreement that high degree of renewable generation has likely made the situation worse not better. We know that right before the blackout the grid had a sudden dip in frequency, which is exactly the condition which leads to unstable work of inverters used by renewable plants. Just watch this Practical Engineering video [1], if you are not familiar with the topic. It discusses exactly the problems I wrote about. So renewables may have not been the direct reason for the blackout, but they are highly likely have helped to tip the gird behind the critical point.
- Closeness to the equator.
- Ease of access by rail.
- Lack of populated/foreign areas at the path of falling booster stages.
- Relative closeness to production centers.
- Far enough from borders and small population around the site to make spying harder (remember that in the early days it was also an ICBM launch site).
Other central Asian Soviet republics were farther south, but much worse on the other factors.
Russia simply continues to use it because of the existing infrastructure and tries to gradually move its civilian space program to the new Vostochny Cosmodrome.
From the safety point of view it's not as bad as it seems on the first glance, especially if you don't plan riding on it faster than 20-30 km/h.
Use of local currencies is certainly on the rise, but the problem is lack of bilateral financial trust caused by various factors, including capital controls. There is the recent example of Russian companies being unable to get rupee-denominated profits out of India, they had either to buy something from India or invest money there. China is also quite strict with its onshore RNB flows which is multiplied by risks of secondary US sanctions.
Honestly, I am really surprised that BRICS+ countries haven't yet developed a gold-based settlement system centered around central bank reserves. My main guess: such system would work fine with a more or less balanced trade, but many countries intentionally pursue the export-oriented model, which would work poorly with such system.
They "just" appropriate "profits" from those assets, which effectively means inflationary erasure of purchasing power on the scale of several billions per year, and use assets to back Ukrainian loans with everyone's tacit understanding of future prospects of those loans.
It may not be even an outright scam. Those 99 claims may be backed by claims on someone else's gold, but it's likely I will not be able to exercise those claims in a timely manner, making me insolvent. Thus we have a "bank run" situation.
And there is the example of Poland which has repatriated all of its gold from UK years prior and stories like this: https://x.com/SenatorRennick/status/1891051795159429514
The most interesting theory is that it's effectively a "bank rank" on "paper gold" issued by London, i.e. traders may fear that there are significantly more claims on gold than physically exists in London vaults. If this market blows up, it would be the most spectacular failure with very significant consequences for global financial markets.
You can easily verify that the jamming has started _before_ the plane started to lose altitude. In the first place, your scenario makes little sense, since its useless to cover things with jamming while this cover will be immediately blown up by inspecting the black box records. And wouldn't it be better to land the plane on your territory for anyone attempting a cover up?
Even worse, inside US and Russian governments there are groups with their own interests and agendas. The military-industrial complex can be interested in further escalation and fearmongering (i.e. "good war"), while civilian industry would prefer some kind of compromise as soon as possible (i.e. "poor peace").