idlehand

Especially considering the fact that alcohol is a drug where withdrawal can be lethal.

Burning at least emits CO2 instead of the methane emitted by a landfill, and can generate heat and electricity for residential use. In the end, recycling isn't feasible for most materials and the solution needs to come from the other pieces of the carbon puzzle.

That makes sense if you think of things in purely monetary terms, the money was skimmed off and given to the 1%.

It doesn't make sense if you think of it in terms of the supply and demand of goods and services. If demand exceeds the capacity of society to produce and import, we get inflation and full employment. The US has had modest to high inflation and high employment for most of the last decade. So clearly there isn't an excess of goods and services, because if there is, sellers undercut each other for market share which keeps prices down.

The money going to the wealthy through capitalist exploitation is mostly removed from circulation, see the marginal propensity to consume. It ends up in the stock market, or bonds or such. Taking money out of circulation is deflationary and makes the rest of the money more valuable; fewer dollars chasing the same amount of goods and services means lower prices and more purchasing power.

Never thought about that before. Ethernet supports extremely high levels of data transmission. ISB C for intrgrated charging ND data transfer makes sense, but why are there HDMI cables?

There are other options than ECT which may have fewer side effects.

Small towns don't have the problems that motivate the construction of super blocks.

So the problem is really that regulations have constrained the supply of housing to the point that rents are set as high as people can afford, rather than at the price of replacement.

Amazon takes a cut of every product sold on their store. They can give their own products a pricing advantage by reducing the platform fee.

Rome was a warrior culture too, especially in the beginning. Even their sports were bloody and gruesome, with people being maimed and dying for the enjoyment of the population.

The problem is that most Java developers like the cognitive complexity that Java EE frameworks entail. Those who like simplicity generally leave Java behind.

As a younger dev I see the opposite in my corner of the world. The senior developers spend countless hours debating the best design, engineering large architectures to bounce a handful of kilobytes of information around in the just right way to achieve architectural purity. Then they do greenfield development with old tech that is simultaneously somehow both old and barely used, as if to generate their own job security.

I have received this comment a few times in my career, "why don't you ask for help more"?

Usually there is a simple reason: I am not having the same problem for very long, but whenever things are going smoothly they get done very quickly. The other, very common reason is that in the process of gathering the information I need to ask the correct question, the answer usually presents itself.

The final reason is force of habit. I went through a school system where the teachers spend all of class, apart from presenting the material, helping the weak students keep up.

Copilot has got me writing some side projects in Java again. I love the fast compilation speed, good enough type system, strong and seamless IDE support, and the abundance of libraries.

The new language versions with things like records take a lot of the tedium away, and Copilot gets rid of most that is left.

Your own code is as foreign as a third party library to a developer who hasn't been part of the writing process.

Third party libraries which have a handful or more users are generally speaking relatively bug-free for standard use cases.

Third party libraries are generally a productivity win for languages which have decent build systems, which is most of them notably excluding C and C++.

Definitely agree with this.

I've stopped worrying about remembering details, and just assume that my neural network brain will figure out what is worth retaining. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't, but life goes on. Not having anxiety about forgetting things feels wonderful.

Very often it's a lot easier to remember the journey to a piece of information than the information itself. I remember reading about some Greek scholar who'd imagine his long speeches as walks, which helped him memorize them. I think we are more suited to learning journeys than destinations. Maybe there's simply more concepts to connect neurons to.

Tangentially, I've gotten better at remembering walks and drives as well, not through any conscious effort, but simply cultivating a sense of curiosity about the world around me. The more I learn about how the world fits together, the more interesting tidbits I notice in a location, and when I see the same place again it reminds me of the previous time I was there.

Estonia is a lot closer to the Russia missiles and planes, though.

Oil isn't running out, the ability of our atmosphere to absorb greenhouse gasses is the limiting factor, not our access to oil reserves. We need to leave oil in the ground to preserve the climate.

There's very little reason to eat grasshoppers when chicken has roughly the same efficiency at converting food into protein. Especially considering that the necessary infrastructure and marketing already exists for chicken.

Sounds like the just-world fallacy.

It took billions of years to get to that point, too. Complex life only really got going during the Cambrian explosion.

React is the same base frontend tech but the way you write React, with hooks and state management has changed quite a bit since its initial release.

That said I've never bothered to try to become an expert in any particular language or framework. I learn the general underlying concepts and end up googling for the syntax for the first few days when I start using a new library or framework.

The issue is rather that due to the unpredictable nature of renewables, sometimes the stars align so that the combined output of wind, solar, and hydro end up far beyond what the grid needs.

During those times, in some parts of Europe for example, renewable energy really is practically free. This is a problem for nuclear and fossil plants which lose money during those times. The renewable operators don't make much either but at least they don't have very high input costs.

There is an abundance of experienced engineers who are willing to work for less than an entry-level engineer in the US. Wages are very low even in Stockholm. Great if you want to build a tech startup.

Unfortunately the employment law is written in support of factory workers, not knowledge workers. So many employers are very cautious when hiring because a non-performing employee is very expensive to get rid of, as long as they have been employed for 6 months or more.

Unfortunately taxes are high. 20.6% corporation tax and 30% capital gains tax.

I find it relieving to be living in a world where things are not static. So I read as much news as I can, every day. I also recognize that I have very little impact on whatever is being reported on, and that it has very little impact on me.

I think a lot of people have to let go of the idea that they will somehow save the world. Embrace your insignificance. It's just as much a blessing as a curse.

I agree. It's hard to work when you have a 10-minute test running, either I wait/do busywork, or I start doing something else and then I don't want to interrupt that line of work to context shift back to a failed test.

I 100% want people to continue spending their free time inventing new open source things. A lot of software I use on a daily basis only exists because some people decided that they could do better than whatever they were using before.

This is the reason why a lot of countries will elect the mayor or governor of some part of the country. Having successfully administered a smaller part of the country is probably the best predictor we have for being able to administer a larger part.

Private sector experience can sometimes translate well, I've seen it in my country in a few places.

Maybe we will see some proper differentiation where mentorships comes with perks to offset having to lead people in person.

If you're targeting well paid jobs at interesting companies, maybe. But we're at the point where practically every municipality, every government subdivision, and every corporation has IT development needs.

Developing and maintaining these boring systems is the primary source of employment in my corner of Europe.