ppf

Does this address the low standards required for pork production in the EU? Intensive pig farming, primarily in the Netherlands and Denmark, makes it incredibly hard to compete if your country has higher standards, let alone if you as a farmer care for the welfare of your animals.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/jan/06/animal-welfare-fo...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/30/danish-b...

I concede nothing. From my original comment, "Also, I have yet to see any concrete data on how much the various vaccines reduce transmission.".

It would be nice if it does, and it is plausible that the vaccines do reduce transmission to some extent, but their primary route of action is to save lives by reducing symptoms.

Apparently demanding something better than the level of "evidence suggests" from your linked article (and even that is new news, which means we had no evidence at all until recently) makes me an idiot and worthy of derision. You are not helping the stereotype.

FWIW - how long do you call a coronavirs "novel", given it's fairly rapid mutation rate? At this point, Covid-19 is practically ancient.

And so far - your "obvious path", at least as it was implemented in the country I live in, is quite likely to cause economic and social ruin.

My turn to accuse you of dishonesty - intellectual, this time. All the vaccine developers have promised about the vaccines is that they will reduce symptoms, as I'm sure you are fully aware. Unless some later study is done that provides some more concrete data on exactly how the vaccine is achieving what it is, at the moment all we can say is that the benefits we see (reduced hospitalisations and deaths, as well as some amount of reduced transmission) are a secondary effect of that primary benefit.

In case you missed it - I am not denying that the vaccines have done good - I am just very carefully sticking to what the vaccine developers themselves have said about the vaccine, which does not include anything about reducing transmission.

Reduced case numbers is not the same as reduced transmission. As the vaccines have only been tested to reduce symptoms, it would not be surprising that we are seeing fewer cases. In fact, it would be expected, as people don't generally test unless they have symptoms.

The installation and maintenance of EV charging points is a good equivalent to the much-touted "refining and distribution" costs in the well-to-wheel CO2 and energy efficiency calculations.

The energy cost of the electronics and other heavy-duty components inside an EV charger is quite considerable.

If so, they also have the choice to get vaccinated themselves. Also, I have yet to see any concrete data on how much the various vaccines reduce transmission. It would seem to me tehre isn't much difference between a person not displaying symptoms of Covid, and a vaccinated person.

So close to what I want. I want something I can use as a "home server", with a priority on having as much control over the hardware as possible. Ideally, it would be an interesting project to design one, but I suspect that the result would be exactly like the rpi (but badly executed).

I have an alternative theory, called the "anti-singularity". It posits that there is a point in technological development where both future development AND maintenance of key technological tools will become impossible, and from that point on we will be doomed to use ever-crumbling and worsening systems.

For evidence, see almost any computer-based tool, my favourite examples being Windows, Android, and DNS.

That person used my very questioning of it as an example of something that "assumed bad intent", etc etc, as the memo said, "will not be tolerated". Scale that up to a workplace, and I can see how that could go sideways.

It depends how you interpret it. Someone gets to decide what a "positive workplace" is, and exactly what "casting doubt" and "nonconstructive" mean, and then they are free to be intolerant of those who go against them.

You have just perfectly demonstrated how these new rules can be used to crush even a hint of dissent. I'm out.

>I think that with the fact that fabs/custom silicon are becoming much more accessible

I don't think Google making their own silicon gives any indicator that it is "accessible". If anything, to me it indicates that only the most wealthy companies can afford it, and when they do, they are not beholden to anyone to make the final product open or accessible to anyone else.

As a side note - if you're invovled in CPU design or layout (like a friend is), you don't need to worry about money. If, however, you're a circuit design/PCB layout guy, then you are competing on a global level with people who will get the job done much cheaper.

I am not sure that is the intent of this memo.

> Williams wrote that while counterperspectives and unpopular opinions are “always encouraged” to help make decisions, “repeated interactions that are nonconstructive, cast doubt, assume bad intent, make unsubstantiated accusations, or otherwise do not contribute to a positive environment have a massive negative impact on the team and working environment.”

>He added: “These behaviors are not tolerated.”

That doesn't sound like an unbiased removal of politics from the workplace to me. I think I would be out of the door, too.

>many employees said they appreciated the clarity

Anytime corporate-speak includes the word "clarity", you can be sure it is anything but clear.

A conspiracy? From the independent and free-thinking Guardian? If they have been infiltrated by money-grabbing property ownwers, then there is no hope!

Seriously though. I think that the Covid enforced WFH has shown many people that there are many benefits to at least some form of in-person, workplace-based interaction. Not everyone is a software developer who can just get on with the work with only a laptop.

If only it were that simple to contain an airbourne virus!

It's incredible to me just how quickly "not wanting to live under house arrest" has become a "freedumb", and sad how quickly people are willing to throw away hard-fought liberties in the name of supposed public safety.

To briefly address your point - how did India, which certainly did not wear masks, distance, stay at home, or avoid crowded spots, only just have their "second wave" (such as it is, as it is very hard to find any actual data instead of emotionally-appealing news headlines and pictures), when countries that largely followed the rules (like the one I live in) had one over the winter?

What happened to South Korea, once lauded as the example of what can happen if everyone would just wear a mask?

There is very little in the way of a clear indicator that one approach is better than another.

>on the flip side it also vastly accelerated telework which allows people to escape cities with insanely high costs

Not really. We aren't lucky enough to have space in our family home for an office for either my wife or I to work from home For that reason, I am very grateful that I work in a company that has allowed staff to work on site for the last year.

I don't know what she's going to do when she comes off maternity leave. I'm sure that women less determined than her will just return to becoming the defacto childcare for the family.

Teleworking will favour some and disfavour others.

Edit: Your general point is, in my opinion, correct. Covid lockdowns have massively accelerated all that was going wrong, and stopped everything that was going right. Given that at least some forms of gender, wealth, and income inequality were previously going in the right direction, that is one of the things that has been stopped.

Try explaining that to the "any death with Covid must be avoided at all costs" crowd. There is a good chance that the months preceding the global lockdown will mark the high point for all forms of progress on wage, wealth, and gender equality, and that the post-lockdown world will strongly favour the already wealthy and powerful.

It really makes me mad how predictable this has all been.

If it's that bad, we should stop nibbling around the edges of the problem with complex and wasteful solutions that make a few percentage points difference, and just ban cars.

It blows my mind how people cannot see this is what has happened. No conspiracy theory needed - the rich and powerful just got a whole lot more rich and powerful by continuing to act like they do while everyone else was placed under effective house arrest.

>Maybe overall CO2 production would be less, maybe more

According to most EV proponents, that is the entire point. We are being slowly forced to switch to EVs that are much less convenient, and incur a much higher manufacturing cost (in materials, rare minerals, and energy), because the overall CO2 reduction will (help) stop the planet overheating. If that's not certain, then what is the point?

I'll say it again - yes, we may have some capacity to generate enough electricity so that domestic vehicle usage can change to EVs. However, that would be done by burning more gas, which obliterates any CO2 benefits, and does nothing to address the (I assume) higher commercial usage of petrol and diesel.

>At least with electric vehicles there's a clear technological roadmap to 0 emissions - there's no credible roadmap for 0 emissions with internal combustion engines.

Which is what? In my opinion, the only credible roadmap involves nuclear power, and it looks like the UK is mostly decommissioning its nuclear plants.

No, it's not an order of magnitude, although I find it disingenuous to use the peak load from 20 years ago, when the UK National Grid has changed quite considerably since then, and has lost 16GW in production capacity [1]

We're also apparently in the process of nuclear decomissioning, and I'm not sure where that lost power will come from.

At the moment, we just ramp up gas-fired power stations to meet demand, so yes, we can just burn more gas to generate more power. In this scenario, transmission/distribution and charger losses wipe out a lot of the CO2 gains.

We also haven't even touched on the idea of commercial EVs - I'm not sure of the figures, but I suspect that the energy requirements for making all vans, trucks, and lorries electrically powered will outstrip EV domestic usage (and, for that matter, should be more important from a CO2 reduction point of view).

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Engl...

True, but mandating a switch to EVs is certainly not an engineering limitation.

As parts and systems (cabling, transformers, etc) get replaced, I have no idea if the new parts will maintain this "excess current" (assuming OP really was talking about that), but even if they do, the power still has to some from somewhere.

> That's about 70 GWh of overnight capacity that could have been used...Our grid excess capacity of 70 GWh means we can charge just under 11 million cars before we're using more than our current peak electricity demand.

You've ignored all losses. Transmission and distribution losses, the latter of which are worse for low-voltage customers (ie, domestic use, and is over 10%), total around 15% for domestic use. As well as that, charger loss is around 15%.

Adding all that up, a car that needs 20 miles at 333 Wh/mile needs 9kWh of generated supply power, or barely 8 million cars (assuming this power is actually available).

There is also the obvious problem that there is no solar availabe at night, which makes up a relatively large percentage of the UK's energy mix (over 8GW right now, as I just looked).

>The maximum delivered power in the last year was 47.275 GW

How much of that peak power was from peaking plants, for example, the 1.8GW pumped hydro storage at Dinorwic?

A huge part of the problems with EVs are related to unrealistic and misleading estimates. Please be careful with the maths.

This is an opinion I am slowly arriving at - EVs are a very expensive way to force a change in how far people expect to be able to travel.

As I understand it, the UK's original street lighting served the dual purpose of absorbing the night-time production of coal power plants, which are hard to throttle. Now that we barely use coal, and instead regularly throttle our gas plants, there isn't the "leftover" current that you think.

Exactly which parts of their business model should be illegal? It's pretty standard Silicon Valley stuff - give away your product until there is no competition left, then you can do what you like.

Stop buying their product - ie, advertising.

Uber, Lyft, Air BnB, Paypal, etc etc, would beg to differ.