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horseAMcharlie

572 karma · joined August 1, 2022

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horseAMcharlie··on We have to build differently with concrete
I recently read Construction Physics' post on concrete use:

https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/so-you-want-to-us...

and I consider it to be required reading for people outside of the field on the topic of concrete emissions. Globally, concrete production emits like crazy but this is largely a product of scale; other building materials emit far more GhGs by mass and volume but are used in much smaller quantities than concrete.

I'm all for a broad package of carbon taxes to both reduce growth and force the development of political and financial solutions for a low-growth, steady-state or degrowth economy but don't be misled into thinking the end result is a smaller share of concrete as a building material. More likely, carbon taxes will reduce the proportions of plastics, steel, aluminum and glass in construction in favour of more concrete.

horseAMcharlie··on TSMC founder Morris Chang says globalization and free trade 'almost dead'
Kotkin spoke to the Hoover Institute in Q1 this year about China and he had the insight that in any communist country you can't be half communist. It's a binary choice which means there's almost no opportunity for centrist constituencies to arise. The only constituencies are pro-central government, anti-central government and apathetic.

This makes government legitimacy the central political object that almost all political discourse revolves around, whether there happens to be a taboo in acknowledging it or not. Following this, policy mistakes become comparatively much harder to reverse in communist countries than in liberal/illiberal democracies, monarchies and pseudo-monarchies.

with Chinese characteristics.

horseAMcharlie··on TSMC founder Morris Chang says globalization and free trade 'almost dead'
I'd argue that PZ's idea of what globalization is is v. different to Morris Chang's idea of what it is.
horseAMcharlie··on ChatGPT produces made-up nonexistent references
Do you think a version tweaked for much greater incidence of "hallucination" would be a profitable sell to people who like cheap artistic text without being overly concerned about a human factor (eg: strapline writing) or too correlated with perceived low quality to sell well?
horseAMcharlie··on Web Archive appears to be down
Is there an existing service where I can query an URL and get a list of preservation projects that have successfully archived that URL?
horseAMcharlie··on Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?
Wealth is unevenly distributed because the acquisition of wealth by agents is (and has been) unevenly distributed.

What property do all extant technologies possess (that some, yet undeveloped technologies, may not,) that has ensured that none of them have been able to flatten that distribution? Is it comprehensibility?

horseAMcharlie··on The economics of Costco rotisserie chicken
Was this article assembled by an AI from a bulleted list of story details? The structure is erratic and some paragraphs are repeated entirely.
horseAMcharlie··on Show HN: Get your Twitter roasted by an AI
Might work better if you use twitter frequently. I have less than 50 tweets and had three duplicate roasts in a sample size of ten.
horseAMcharlie··on Spanish airline reserves 10 Airlander airships
Would expanded civilian nuclear power provide some kind of sustainable helium production as a side effect or do the numbers not work out?
horseAMcharlie··on Spanish airline reserves 10 Airlander airships
Although it is a cliché at this point, a carbon tax would allow the market to efficiently balance these two concerns.
horseAMcharlie··on Values Are Facts
To paraphrase a joke from model theory, allowing facts to make claims about other facts up to recursion is a fine way to prevent any long-term success in natural language processing. If you drop absoluteness, the consequences will never be the same.
horseAMcharlie··on Fandom Acquires GameSpot, Giant Bomb, GameFAQs, TV Guide and Metacritic
There's a collaborative effort ongoing here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/xuhbv1/psa_fan...

horseAMcharlie··on How Big Is Infinity?
I'm not really familiar with math beyond linear algebra and googling was not very helpful; could you please give an example of an obviously incorrect result enabled by the axiom of choice? No need for detail, just the name of an example is good enough for me.
horseAMcharlie··on Luxury Media
It occurs to me that there's a market opportunity here for better online magazine experiences, too. Some kind of reading client that can reliably remove all prompts, adverts, etc. Spotify Premium-style from a wide series of magazine-style websites and reformat their content's layout according to user preferences, for a fee that covers operations and payments to publications.

But would it, if successful, lead to a repeat of the tv-streaming giants' arms races and declines? Cause right now, to give an example, most Condé Nast and Springer websites are not as obnoxious and unfriendly as Netflix and I wouldn't want to get two or three years of them being better than they are right now if it meant that, in the long run, the entire publisher-run parts of the web went down the toilet. If nothing else, I like Scientific American.

horseAMcharlie··on Ask HN: Is recycling lithium virtue signaling or greener/cheaper than mining?
I don't know about whether lithium recycling supply chains are better or worse than lithium mining supply chains from an environmental or GhG perspective but there is no doubt a great deal of academic literature on the topic, as there is for all other economically significant metals. I do however know that the numbers for steel production are heavily in favor of recycling, if that helps.

Prices, being social constructs, have very little to do with the green attributes (or lack) of any traded commodity.

horseAMcharlie··on Meta is helping the Islamic Republic in its war against Iranians
AFAICT it's unclear if this is true, but I am certainly hoping for the (apparently unlikely) possibility that there are officials in the USG that are willing and able to intervene domestically to prevent stuff like these allegations from happening because it seems like no other entity would be in a position to do so at any point in the next decade or so.
horseAMcharlie··on Judge rules Charter must pay $1.1B after murder of cable customer
Now I'm not in the USA or familiar with this case, but if anybody wants to reply with even a brief explanation of why there appears to be no criminal charges regarding the forged documents, I'd appreciate it.