sacred_numbers

The incentive for all parties (except the patients) is to increase revenue, rather than decrease costs. Insurance companies may want to reduce costs on a case by case basis, but on a macro level they want to spend more, since they are required to spend 80% of premiums received on treatment. More treatment means higher premiums, which means the 20% not spent on treatment is higher. Hospitals have similar incentives, since a higher top line means a higher bottom line. We need some sort of patient focused agent that is incentivized to minimize long term costs and maximize patient outcomes. Single payer government healthcare systems seem to do a decent job in this role in many countries. If there's a better method I'm open to it, but nothing will change until the economic incentives change or patient bargaining power increases.

The pollution problems with bunker fuel are primarily local and short-lived, however, whereas CO2 emissions spread through the entire atmosphere and stay there for a very long time.

I think that might be confirmation bias. The people who happily retire and have the freedom to do whatever they want are less likely to talk about it on a forum; they'll just go live their lives. Conversely, if a person banks all of their happiness on retiring early and then is unhappy they are more likely to talk about it on a forum. It's a similar phenomenon to the prevalence of negative reviews outweighing positive reviews.

Yes, it can, although I can't be sure it will work at 500 mph. They tested it with a C-12, which has a top speed of 338 mph, and were able to transfer data at 610 Mbps.

Source: https://spacenews.com/spacex-plans-to-start-offering-starlin...

If something hasn't happened yet it indicates that if it does happen it will happen later. For example, since pigs haven't flown yet, if they do fly, it will have to be later.

Seriously, though, I think the researchers were trying to put a positive spin on a negative result but went too far.

The thing that makes meth heads and crack heads dangerous is primarily that the users are desperate for money to feed their addiction and thus more likely to commit crimes to make money. Coke heads probably started out fairly wealthy, since it's a more expensive drug, so they are less likely to resort to theft to pay for their addiction. It's probably also somewhat of a social class issue. Crack and meth users are probably more likely to have grown up in rough circumstances that make them more likely to commit violence whether or not they are under the influence of drugs. Reporting bias is probably also a bit of an issue. If a rich coke user assaults someone they may be able to sweep it under the rug by writing a big check to the victim, whereas a poor user would be thrown into the criminal justice system. A final hypothesis is that cocaine users have more resources for dealing with addiction (such as rehab) than other drug users. That would skew the population of active coke users towards recreational users rather than addicts.

There are chemical differences between crack, meth, and cocaine, so it's likely that, ceteris paribus, crack users are more violent than coke users, but it's not the only factor. It's really hard to tease out differences in the effects of the drugs when the populations of users are so different.

One big difference is that these EVTOL aircraft are small enough that they can use ballistic parachutes for an extra degree of safety. They usually also have more redundancy due to distributing thrust between many small electric motors. There has been a lot more research into autonomous drone flight than autonomous helicopter flight as well, which is crucial for safety and keeping costs low. I could be totally wrong, but I feel like battery, motor, flight control, and composite material technologies are finally good enough for EVTOLs to start making sense. Just like the tech boom of the late 90s there will be a lot of investment, most of which will be lost, but the survivors will have a big impact on society.

Well, it's not a lose lose situation to the people that don't own property yet. They would greatly benefit from housing costs dropping, since they could afford to buy their own house or pay less in rent. The problem is that the people who don't own property tend to have less political power and influence than property owners.

You could also say it's the same reason asylum seekers and immigrants are called illegal aliens. It's still politics, just in a different direction. Framing something as a moral problem is not necessarily bad; it just has to be a real moral problem that justifies the proposed solution. The problem with the Iraq war was that the government lied about the problem so that they could justify a bad solution.

Part of that is the sheer volume of those books that were sold. People throw away more copies of Hunger Games in a day than many books will ever sell until the end of time. Like the anecdote about Pablo Escobar losing 2 billion dollars every year due to rats and mold destroying his mountains of cash that he was unable to store in banks (for obvious reasons).

The potential upside for Tesla is huge. If they can become the Apple of electric cars and if electric cars become standard, they could be worth trillions. The reason their valuation was not in the trillions is because there is a risk that they will go bankrupt, that other companies will take the lead in EVs, or that EVs will not be where the market is headed in the foreseeable future. The reason for the jump in valuation is that those risks are being steadily reduced. EV competition is scarce, Tesla's cash reserves and consistent free cash flow hugely reduce the risk of bankruptcy, and the market is continuing to demonstrate that it wants electric cars (at least Tesla electric cars, that is), even during a pandemic. There is certainly an element of speculation and retail investor FOMO, but if Tesla's institutional investors didn't think this valuation could be justified at all they probably would have sold by now. Time will tell how reasonable the valuation really is, but betting against Tesla has not worked out very well so far.

I don't know enough about Kissinger to have a strong opinion about him, but I think the idea is that Kissinger got away with a lot of awful stuff because he was responsible for a lot of horrendous things done to other peoples. If Hitler had left the Jews in Germany and Austria alone and just killed the Jews in Poland would that have made things any better?

Again, I am not taking a stance since I haven't done enough research, just explaining why theoretically someone could think that Kissinger committed crimes against humanity without killing any Americans or even violating American laws.

I don't think he's saying that a single species of insect will have specialists in many different roles. I think he's saying that there are millions of species of insects and each species usually specializes in one thing so that they can survive in a specific environmental niche.

I don't think specialization by humans is bad, but I agree that specialization can go too far sometimes. If the person being paid to monitor a tank of fluorine loses the ability to do their own laundry or hold a conversation because they are spending so much of their time developing fluorine tank monitoring skills it's kind of a waste. Part of the human experience is learning and doing lots of different things. Even if our economy rewards hyper-specialization that doesn't mean that a person's entire life has to be focused on their hyper-specialized job.

Grinding rocks to 200 mesh (74 microns) takes about 20 Kwh per ton. Using 100% coal electricity that would lead to 20 kg CO2. Transporting a ton of cargo by truck 200 km creates about 22 kg of CO2. Basalt seems to remove less CO2 per ton than other minerals, but I'm guessing it would still be more than 100 kg CO2 removed per ton of basalt (perhaps much more). Olivine (see Project Vesta) and serpentine are quite efficient; they remove about 1.2 tons of CO2 per ton. Basalt is extremely common, though, so it might win out in some circumstances.

There are different types of mine waste. Certainly you don't want to spread waste contaminated with heavy metals, but most mine waste is just rocks that have been ground up and filtered by a sluice or shaker table to get the tiny fraction of the ore that is actually valuable.

A couple points:

1. These numbers are from a 2015 report that was probably prepared in 2014 and calculated using data from several years before the report was written. Solar tech has improved a lot in the last couple decades. 2. The graph is measured in tonnes per TWh, not thousand tonnes per TWh, so that might be part of the confusion. 2700 tonnes per TWh is high, but reasonable. My estimate would be closer to 1000-1500 tonnes/TWh. 3. You are correct that mass is a pretty useless metric. A more important metric would be energy payback time (how long before the power source produces enough energy to make a copy of itself, essentially). For modern solar this is measured in months, possibly up to a year or two in extreme cases. For nuclear, this is probably measured in days or weeks, since nuclear power plants produce so much energy. However, when looking at power plants with lifetimes measured in decades, the difference is insignificant. Both nuclear and solar are fantastically better than any fossil fuel.

Government does not always mean nation states. In this context I believe it is talking about regional, feudal government for the most part. As for companies, the corporate structure may not have been developed yet, but there were guilds, partnerships and other business ventures. The article does mistakenly use the term corporation in one place, though.

I don't see any contradiction between the linked article and the Wikipedia article. Peasants absolutely benefited from the shortage of labor, while feudal lords lost power. This power vacuum was partially filled by guilds and merchants who were able to take advantage of the new economic situation. I'm not a historian, so I don't know all of the details, but I don't think the two sources contradict each other.

As for historical articles not supporting political proposals, that may be a faux pas in academia, but I would hope that the people making and evaluating political proposals are carefully studying similar periods in history to understand the possible effects of their proposals.

It's almost always cheaper to overbuild renewables than to use seasonal storage. Seasonal storage is used once a year, so if you can store a Kwh of energy for $1 it still increases the cost of the stored electricity by 4-5 cents per Kwh. Let's look at a 1 Kw average output. Assume that you have 6 Kw of solar, along with 18 Kwh of batteries. This will work fine 7-8 months out of the year, but will not be sufficient for winter, so you will need seasonal storage. About 2000 Kwh should be sufficient to make up for the deficit. Alternatively, how much solar would you need to avoid seasonal storage? About 10-12 Kw would probably work. That would mean an additional $3,200 to $4,800 in capital costs, assuming 80 cents per watt of solar. In order for seasonal storage to compete it would need to cost less than about $2 per KWh. For hydrogen this would equate to about $40 per kg. That's on the low end of estimates I've seen for underground hydrogen storage, and doesn't even take into account the cost of generating the hydrogen. It also doesn't take into account revenue generated from selling excess electricity in summer. Even if you sold excess electricity for only 1 cent per Kwh you could still offset about half the cost of the extra solar capacity.

I think many people see excess capacity as a form of waste to be reduced, but it's like thinking that gigabit fiber is a waste because it's not used to it's full capacity. The value of oversupply is that it's always available when you need it. The fact that new industries can spawn from the super cheap rates for excess electricity or data is just a bonus.

The problem with generating power in the Sahara for use in Europe has little to do with transmission losses and much more to do with the capital cost of building high capacity power lines over thousands of kilometers. There's also the cost of protecting those lines, since they would have to pass through several different countries that are not always politically stable.

Just because rent seekers spend their money does not make them productive members of society. In nature parasites have their own parasites, which can again have their own parasites. I suppose in a zero sum economy rent seeking doesn't hurt the economy (just certain members of the economy), but in a positive sum economy, if non-productive rent seekers are taking money from productive people this will cause the economy to be worse than it could have been. If people who would otherwise be productive are lured into rent seeking by the potential profits then it's a double loss. Not only are they taking capital from productive people that could have been used to create more wealth, but they themselves could have been producing wealth instead of being a drag on wealth creation.

There are certainly situations where organizations that seem like rent seekers are not entirely rent seekers, though. Government is the main example. Taxes can seem like a drag on wealth creation, and sometimes they are, but they also fund infrastructure, education, and stability, which are wealth multipliers.

The issue is also complicated by the fact that the world economy is very connected, but economic growth is often measured on a per country, corporation, or even individual basis. Also, aggregate wealth is not the be-all end-all metric. Wealth redistribution can sometimes lead to greater aggregate happiness, even if the amount of wealth stays the same or even decreases.

Overall, though, I think that the majority of rent seeking hurts the economy and the people in the economy more than it helps, but I would be very interested to see empirical data showing otherwise.

This article is from March and is referencing this research paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-020-0575-z

The research looks interesting, so the question is whether they can develop an inexpensive mass manufacturing process. If they can, can they do so before other batteries upstage them? These batteries appear to be about 23% more energy dense (volumetrically) than Tesla Model 3 batteries, with some possible safety advantages as a bonus. However, by the time these batteries hit the market (2-3 years minimum, I would guess) Tesla will probably be at or above that energy density level. The safety advantages will probably make it competitive for at least some applications, though, and they may be able to increase the energy density even further, so we will have to wait and see.

A related problem is the compounding nature of wealth. Let's say there are 100 investors with a million dollars each. 90% of the investors pursue socially beneficial projects and make a respectable 10% average annual return. The remaining 10% of investors pursue profit maximizing ventures and make 20% per year. Within about 25 years the profit maximizing investors have more wealth. Within about 50 years the profit maximizing group has 90% of the wealth. Chastising the profit maximizing group doesn't really change anything. Not because they don't deserve to be chastised, but because even if the vast majority of them defect to the social good group it only delays the outcome where the profit maximizers own everything. I think the solution is to incentivize socially valuable businesses and de-incentivize less socially valuable businesses. One example of this would be a carbon tax. Another example would be for Medicare to only pay hospitals that charged the same price to both insurance companies and individuals. There are major concerns about companies gaming these incentives, but companies are taking advantage of the lack of disincentives right now anyways, so I don't think the outcome would be any worse.

2,116 officers were assaulted with a firearm, but only 6.1% of those 2,116 were injured in the assault. That's approximately 129 firearm injuries. That means the rate of non-fatal firearm injuries is approximately 16.1 per 100,000. In 2012 the rate of non-fatal firearm injuries from assault was approximately 15.67 per 100,000 for the general population. When adjusted for the sex demographics of the police (88% male) the rate is 24.93 per 100,000.

Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4700838/#!po=19...

Edit: It looks like the non-fatal firearm injury rate for officers is actually 23.6 per 100k. I had the wrong number in the denominator because not all police stations responded to the FBI survey.

Beginning January 2020 ships worldwide are required to burn fuel with less than 0.5% sulphur or install scrubbers, so the problem has been greatly reduced. It's still way worse than regular diesel, but it's much better (about where diesel was at 30 years ago).

Tankers are extremely energy efficient. A round trip journey from Reykjavik to Shanghai would consume about 90 kg of fuel per ton transported. Since 2 tons of alumina is converted to about 1 ton of aluminum, the round trip cost for aluminum is 135 kg of fuel, which generates about 420 kg of CO2. If the aluminum were produced using electricity from coal it would generate about 14,000 kg of CO2.

Of course, China wouldn't have to use coal if they chose not to, and cargo ship bunker fuel produces some very nasty pollution besides CO2, but in the world we live in it is far better for carbon emissions and probably for the environment in general, to use Iceland as the aluminum smelting hub.

It kind of is an unbelievable concentration except in certain exceptional circumstances. A 0.1% concentration by weight for just the first 30 cm of topsoil would require about 5 tons of microplastics per hectare (or about 2 tons per acre). That's a lot of microplastics. It would be the equivalent of about 52 plastic water bottles per square meter. Unless the farm is on an extremely mismanaged landfill, I don't think that kind of concentration is likely.

Edit: I'm not saying microplastics aren't a problem, they're just not likely much of a problem specifically for agricultural yields.

A ground station doesn't have to actually be on the ground. They could park a boat in the ocean between London and NYC with equipment to act as a repeater. This YouTube video (along with others on this channel) does a good job of explaining how this could work. [https://youtu.be/m05abdGSOxY]

It's both. They are buying batteries from suppliers in China in order to keep up with demand, but they are also working closely with Panasonic on the chemistry for the majority of their batteries. In addition they are directly funding and performing in-house research on next generation battery chemistries. We also don't have many details about this new CATL battery. Almost all Li-ion batteries are capable of lasting a million miles under the right conditions, so the devil is in the details. A true million mile battery will be able to last a million miles under most real world conditions, which hopefully both this CATL battery and the Tesla million mile battery will be able to do. I think Tesla might have a bit of an advantage there since they control the whole stack, but we will have to see.

Thank you so much for posting the source! I don't understand why so many reporters write an entire story about a survey or scientific paper and don't link to it or even mention the title of the paper.

Starship will launch into orbit well before it is considered safe. If it reaches orbit this year it will take at least 5-10 more launches before they put cargo of any value on it and at least a hundred launches before they put humans on it. The good thing about a rapidly reusable rocket that is being mass produced is that you can launch a hundred times within a few decades months if you want to.