lifeonlars

What do you do when it doesn't work? This seems like a really bad outcome - they approved the design with the glaring flaw, which makes it hard for you to remove it, and they potentially also requested some other 'improvement' which makes the design worse.

Sorry, but read literally what you are claiming is totally acceptable and does not indicate that we shouldn't be using biofuels. You seem to be saying that biofuel generation including burning as fuel using a net positive amount of carbon. There is no reason it shouldn't. It is a viable strategy if it uses less than the fossil fuel alternative. Note that the way to measure the alternative here is not the emissions from burning a unit of fossil fuels, but that plus all the emissions involved in extracting, refining and transporting the fossil fuel. For example, this includes flaring (~1% of all global C02 emissions).

It would even be viable if the total amount of carbon generated by the farming, processing and transportation of biofuels without including burning but subtracting the carbon taken from the air by plant growth, was a net positive by itself, as long as the excess was less than the corresponding total for fossil fuel production, including all the carbon involved in its production.

I accept the validity of what you said about land use in the sister thread, but I don't think you've established that this criterion isn't true (and making the much weaker claim above suggests that you aren't able to).

I also believe that many types of impact on the environment (for example what you mentioned about topsoil and water quality) should be treated with much lower priority than the greenhouse effect. If biofuels, or some other strategy for reducing emissions such as solar or wind power generation has a devastating but localized impact on some ecosystems, it might be worth it to forestall the wider effects of global warming. This is a matter of opinion though, and I do not live in an area which could be sacrificial in this sense.

I accept your point about tallgrass prairies but you're back to the double-counting. The argument that 3 - biofuels are not carbon neutral, is established based on 1 and 2.

Also, it might be true that prairies do long term accumulation of carbon, but not true that this represents more carbon than that which is removed from the environment by biofuel crop growing and harvesting. That was my original claim and I don't think you've shown quantitative evidence that it should be dismissed.

Again, that's more or less a one-off effect of land use conversion, and further biofuels agriculture does not indefinitely continue to release carbon into the atmosphere.

Sorry, but this is a frustrating topic full of double-counting and apples-to-oranges comparisons (arguably on both sides).

Some praries burn regularly and some don't. Most (as I said above, most land types) do not have significant ongoing accumulation of carbon in the soil. Obviously there are some biomes that do. Citing the fact that prairies burn as proof that they aren't long-term carbon neutral just seems to me like a low-quality argument if you are trying to challenge what I have suggested here, that land use changes are a one-off carbon cost which is paid off by biomass being used in fuels which replace fossil carbon.

You're also replying to someone who completely ignored the difference between the amount of carbon biomass and the change over time of that amount.

If I am completely mistaken and land types which are plausibly converted from unmanaged to biofuel crops are in fact accumulating significant stored carbon on an ongoing basis then tell me so and I stand corrected.

I know that different people not only have quite different preferences but also different working styles, but I generally agree with this.

IME the slight extra friction of initiating a call acts as a filter which means that I am less likely to ask colleagues either something which only saves me a few seconds, or to just start a nebulous discussion. Text chat is the right medium for both of these, even when in the office, as it's asynchronous and no one else has to hear it. When I call someone I tend to have at least a clear question or request for something that will make a significant different to what I can get done today.

The other argument against the benefits of face-to-face communication is that, unless everyone in your org works in the same city (or even, on the same floor - since most people don't walk around huge offices to ask colleagues quick questions), you should be practising with the online communications and finding good ways of working with them anyway. Otherwise fully distributed teams degrade into geographic silos, and teams with only a few remote people tend to just leave them out.

> Those people who say that they're much more productive at home must be a minority of a minority, and the rest of them just lie because they want to slack off.

> As for myself, I do prefer the adhoc discussion of issues, brain storming and silly what-ifs during coffee breaks et cetera. I'm much more in the zone in this environment.

You prefer to chat with your colleagues during work, and you work well collaboratively with interruptions, but you can't envisage that other people have both different personal preferences, and different skillsets. Instead you accuse them of slacking off.

That sounds like the worst of both worlds. You're on the hook for all the costs of an office, not just a small uptick in power and data use. You can't put on laundry or chat with your spouse during a break. And you have lost the advantages of in-person communication with your team.

Pretty sure that burning things generally leads to a lot of carbon emissions..

Did you read the next sentence after the two you quoted? The point is not how much carbon is stored in the prairie but how much it changes by each year.

The prairie does not accumulate more carbon each year; it is roughly carbon neutral as decaying matter balances new photosynthesis. The corn field has a large part of the biomass carbon removed from it each year. Within a few years the destruction of the prairie has been cancelled out.

This is true even for most woodland, although of course the break-even is much much longer. I'm not arguing in favor of cutting down first-growth forest to grow ethanol though, and I don't think that is the typical case in the United States.

This seems suspicious. Converting land to be used for crops doesn't reduce the utility of that land as a carbon sink. It's generally the opposite. Most wilderness does not steadily accumulate carbon biomass, but stays at a steady mass in a cycle of plant growth and decay into the atmosphere. Crop land, on the other hand, has lots of the carbon removed each year to be used as fuel.

It seems that there's a clear anti-biofuel agenda when a few comments apart we get "biofuel is replacing food crops causing people to starve" and "biofuels should have land use change carbon emissions counted against them".

That's irrelevant.

By definition, Ponzi schemes involve some investors making a lot of money and others losing. That doesn't make them any less illegal.

If some people are harmed by unlawful behavior, that is a reason to prosecute, just the same as if you mugged Alice and bought Bob an icecream with the proceeds.

You are talking about a difference which would reduce recorded US infant mortality by around 15%, when it's nearly double that of Western European countries, and infant mortality in poor regions and for ethnic minorities is far more than that.

The figure 10-15% of GDP of a rich country seems to be concealing something important: in the US, it's nearly 20%. In Western Europe, it's generally around 10%, for the same, slightly better, or in some cases much better health outcomes.

The UK has a famously stingy system which costs 7.5% of GDP, however the UK has better infant mortality than the state with the best infant mortality, Massachusetts. The worst states have infant mortality 2-3 times that of the UK. (Note that the poorest states in the US, LA and AL, still have GDP higher than the UK. So the 7.5% is of a much lower per capita GDP.)

The average EU country spends a little more than the UK, as a % of GDP. But has health outcomes well ahead of the UK, and considerably far ahead of the best-performing US states.

It seems kind of distorted not to point out that around half of the US spend goes either on luxury healthcare for the rich, or emergency healthcare to those who can't afford proper healthcare, or simple rent-seeking by entrenched players (pharma, doctors, insurance companies) and that none of these improves health outcomes by very much.

But doesn't the attitude that one should trust the 998 system also actively harm people with mental illness?

You're actually asking, would you rather be forced to have all your health needs taken care of, or have the freedom to choose inadequate healthcare in order to save money?

Perhaps you don't understand the situation. Ireland is certainly a tax haven, and the number of jobs in Ireland created by the tax arrangements are trivial compared to the amount of business that flows through Ireland on paper. Most of the tech companies which have their 'European headquarters' in Dublin have their real HQs and most of their employees in other EU countries or in the UK.

The fact that tech in general is a relatively large and important employer in Ireland is neither here nor there.

They are successfully competing with piracy, but not by being lower friction but by being more reliable and trustworthy.

Nintendo are highly focussed on a market where the person making the buying decision isn't the person playing the game.

Buy your 11-year-old son a Switch for Xmas and you know that a) it will work out of the box b) there will be a several family-friendly games with name recognition for any child that age (Mario, Pokemon, Zelda) and c) no one in his class will have a more expensive version or one that works better.

Contrast this with trying to get something to work on a PC with a 'switch emulator dongle'. You have to plug it in yourself, you will end up spending more than you planned in the computer store because each component comes with sucker upgrades, and game choices will be much wider and trickier. Then the game which looks great on your son's friend's machine will play like sh*t and you'll feel guilty for having cheaped out, without necessarily knowing what the operative constraint is.

and "from 2017"

Obviously to the investor, only the average case over a large number of investments matters.

I don't think you are accurately critiquing the point made above. It is right that founders have a vastly different risk/reward tradeoff to employee engineers. I don't think that is the socialist engineers' argument.

Suppose there are 3 people involved in a startup: the founder, the engineer and the investor. The engineer gets $300,000 for 2 years' work. The founder gets $200,000 for 3 years' very intense work + $10 million if the startup succeeds. The investor puts in capital, does no work, and gets $40 million if the startup succeeds.

It is arguable that the founder and the engineer are getting a comparable amount but with a different risk profile. The socialist argument is that the person who only provides capital is overpaid for doing that. Whether that argument has an economic justification, or just a political or moral justification, and whether you believe that argument, is another matter. But it is clear that, if the investor got less, there would be more to pay both of the people who contribute work.

Perhaps a source of confusion is that successful founders often go on to become investors with the money they have collected, for example Paul Graham or Marc Andreessen. You could also argue that someone like Mark Zuckerberg, while still nominally 'working' as CEO, has gone from being a founder in Facebook the product to being an investor who provides capital for various Facebook the company projects, and that perhaps much of his wealth was accumulated in the second stage.

> then one can simply create his/her own startup, bear all the risks (99% of startups fail) and reap all the rewards.

How does that work? Most of the rewards go to the owners of the capital. That's literally the central idea of socialism.

minimum wage legislation does not have an exception for those in a 'temporary rough spot'

there are lots of businesses which would be profitable if they didn't have to worry about laws or regulations, but which are unviable in the real world. for example, selling methamphetamine to middle school kids in tony neighbourhoods.

I'm not sure this is 'seen as normal' (by whom?) but I very much doubt it is legal under minimum wage legislation.

Besides which, this is not the equivalent of making a bartender clock out during his break. It's the equivalent of making him clock out while he stands at the bar waiting for the next customer.

Not sure I agree with "most of the time", but anyway, isn't my friend's critique of ideas somewhat similar to my enemy's invective-filled ad hominem attack? Don't these all fall within perfectly ok behavior between adults who have chosen to spend time reading each others' thoughts?

How should we treat people who have chosen to post their political opinions on the Internet, when we strongly disagree with them?

Isn't responding or critiquing the ideas in a podcast, Reddit thread or a tweet exactly how a) the Internet, b) free speech, and c) liberal civil society are supposed to work?

But the only purpose of writing that paper is for you to practice doing research, thinking and writing. Most people who write deep, thought-provoking work started out doing assignments like that. What could possibly be the point of getting a computer program to do it for you?

Not sure this is a representative sample of "people 2000 years ago".

Nothing has intrinsic recreational or attractive value, including the Grand Canyon, the Niagara Falls and Yosemite. Desire is often mimetic.

The counterparts to this are that a) many people would rather go somewhere slightly less attractive that isn't overcrowded and b) lots of people are attracted, at least in part, by going somewhere novel.

The fact that there is a certain challenge involved in getting as many people as possible (but no more) to the prettiest sites while finding less pretty but still enjoyable alternatives to those who can't make it is exactly why land management and tourism agencies exist.

You're not aware of the existence of water fountains?