skosch

Because everyone and their grandma can whip up a quick Python script after a few days of practice, whereas learning Haskell is a much bigger investment?

I'm with you, but then again I currently live in a nice neighbourhood where something like "serial packet thiefs" are considered a "low-impact black-swan event", as you say.

Not everyone is so lucky, and I'd wager that many folks would be happy to "automatically purge nuisances" if all it costs them is some sidewalk privacy. I would certainly make that trade-off if I lived in a dodgier environment.

Consider that "subjects raw plant matter to complicated chemical processes to produce something meat-tasting" is equally true for fake meat factories as it is for cows. Just because the recipe for real meat has come about via evolutionary (and not laboratory) trial-and-error, doesn't necessarily make it healthier.

If you haven't yet, check out Redshift (http://jonls.dk/redshift/).

There is a huge asymmetry between learning to recognize characters and learning to write them. I've found that learning to read a basic repertoire of Chinese characters is surprisingly doable and a very helpful skill as a learner, to the point where I quickly found it easier to decipher the subtitles than to understand the audio when watching even children's movies. So, to answer your question, yes: it's practical, and a good idea.

Writing, on the other hand, requires truly knowing each character, every little stroke in the right place. Totally different beast. It takes many years to master and constant practice to keep up (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia).

Can you comment on the history of the name, printed as 港 on the bills? For those unaware, the character means "harbour"; it's the Kong in Hong Kong – is there any relationship to the HKD?

... but if you think, "hey, so the models could be wrong, how reassuring", think again. It's just as likely that reality is worse than predicted.

Pragmata is nice. For those looking for a very similar free font, check out Iosevka (https://typeof.net/Iosevka/)

Plenty of evidence has been found.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/18/us/politics/m...

A small flashlight can (and has been) done, see e.g. https://hackaday.io/project/158857-body-heat-powered-flashli...

Since it hasn't been mentioned in this thread, Digital Fortress is nothing special. If you've read one Dan Brown book, you've read them all: the protagonist makes some awe-inspiring, creepy discovery, stuff happens, finally it turns out that the whole thing was just an elaborate setup by one of the other characters, and not actually new science. I've read four of his books and felt cheated every time.

I do echo all of the Greg Egan recommendations here.

> Projections about or population leveling off would change when assumptions change, like the world being cleaner from planting all these trees.

You have it backwards. People in clean, wealthy countries tend to have fewer kids than even the 2.1 required to maintain stable numbers. It's people in developing places, where the environment is often dirty and unhealthy, who have the most children.

Planting trees will not lead to overpopulation.

You're right – so take your argument, and follow it to its logical conclusion.

Precisely because individuals act in the way you describe, change has to come from the top, ideally in the form of economic incentives. Make polluters pay, and the market will work out the rest. If you're worried about carbon taxes hurting the average Joe, well, just give the tax revenue back to the citizens – the competitive incentives still work regardless [0].

Getting this kind of legislation through requires putting pressure on politicians. And they would love nothing more than for us to continue bickering amongst ourselves about whether vegetarianism or plastic straw bans are the greater personal sacrifice.

[0] https://citizensclimatelobby.org/basics-carbon-fee-dividend/

Those are cancers caused by viruses, and it's the viruses getting transmitted.

On the other hand, clonal transmission refers to the cancer cells themselves leaving sick individual A, entering healthy individual B, and continuing to reproduce there.

Oh I agree, it absolutely is the way to go! If you haven't heard of it, take a look at the Giving What We Can pledge [0].

But most people aren't like you and me. I've had conversations about this with many others, and the most prevalent attitude is the one I described: ask them to buy the more expensive, environmentally friendly product, and they'll decline; ask them whether they would support a law that would require all products to be environmentally friendly, and they'll enthusiastically agree.

If that's how people work, then that's how we have to make policy.

It's very healthy of you to be skeptical of government handouts to the Green industry – not because climate change is fake (it's not), but because government rarely knows how to pick the right tech to invest in. (Note that the government also hands out lots of subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, though.)

The more economically rational way of solving the problem is to implement a carbon fee and dividend [0]. You simply put a tax on fossil fuels as they come out of the ground. This makes everything downstream a bit more expensive. You then return 100% of the tax revenue back to citizens – so government doesn't grow and consumers don't suffer, but companies suddenly feel intense competitive pressure to get more fuel efficient so they can lower prices. The market takes care of the rest.

It makes so much sense, even many of the big corporations are onboard [1].

The best thing you can do today is to contact your local representative about this policy [2].

[0] https://citizensclimatelobby.org/why-we-support-a-price-on-p...

[1] https://www.clcouncil.org/

[2] https://citizensclimatelobby.org/write-your-representative/#...

That's a false dichotomy. We don't need your technocratic oligarchy.

Most people already do agree on what's "good" and what isn't, and yet they (rationally) choose to put their money elsewhere, because they have no guarantee that everyone else won't freeload off of their contribution. If I invest $100 in protecting a public good (like the climate), I only get one seven-billionth of the benefit; the rest goes to all of the other people on the planet. So I'll only invest if everyone else chips in, too.

The easiest solution to force cooperation like that is called ... taxation. The more difficult, but perhaps closer-to-ideal solution involves more math, see e.g. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3243656

Even better – economists have already worked out how to create this kind of investment incentive in a mathematically optimal way:

https://medium.com/coinmonks/breaking-down-buterin-hitzig-an...

https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=4960960851100740...

Related: I've found that to run time-consuming number-crunching code from Elixir, the most convenient approach is to call a Python script via ports. It's super easy and can't crash your VM.

To convert from/to Erlang terms in your Python script, you can use a library like https://github.com/skosch/python-erlastic (a fork I maintain, the original project was abandoned).

Congratulations, and best of luck!

It's 154% of the design load, not 154% more than the design load. So 1.54×.

The life/reproduction cycle of jellyfish makes it difficult to talk about "common parlance" age. Someone even made a website about it: https://immortal-jellyfish.com/

The article explicitly concludes that the speaker is the bottleneck, not the listener. You can understand sped-up Youtube videos just fine.

This looks great, and I wish you all the success in the world. The domain is your key asset, IMHO.

1) When did you start, and how long does it take you to sell an acre?

2) How do you plan on "releasing" more regions? Is the next region going to be (drumroll) the adjacent 160-acre square? Do they want you to complete one square before opening up the next? Does anyone actually keep track of which acre belongs to whom? How difficult is it to get more land trusts on board?

3) I'm looking to offset my emissions, so my key metric is $/t – how much does it cost to sequester a ton of CO₂ that otherwise would have stayed in the air? Any rough estimates?

It's great that you understand how supply and demand works, but look beyond that.

At some point in the mid-term future, automation will take over enough labor that a sizeable chunk of the (educated, motivated) population won't be able to find a job at all. Supply non-zero, demand zero, ergo price zero.

In that world, should we just let people starve?

That article is from over a week ago, and it cites http://www.globalfiredata.org/forecast.html#amazon, which has since been updated.

Indeed, people are burning more this year than they did in the past few years – any burning at all has always been unacceptable, but if the current spike is what it takes to finally create some international outrage and put pressure on Bolsonaro, then I'll gladly take it.

False. The 2019 fires are way outside of the average: http://www.globalfiredata.org/forecast.html

Also, what you call average is only the average over the past few years, which means: illegal loggers and ranchers burning the forest on purpose.

The true long-term average is a healthy forest with very few fires.

> Two super-deep-pocketed customers that pay them about a million dollars a month each.

This sounds like a perfectly legitimate way to earn a living, and more mature and wise than chasing some unvalidated unicorn dream and running out of cash after a year of exhilarating misery.

Good question. Republicans in particular need to worry about primary challenges in their science-illiterate districts, and many may be wary of attaching their name to this directly. But there are a good handful of deep red congresspeople who are happy to discuss policy details around carbon pricing, even if they can't politically afford cosponsorship [0]. I imagine that several of those may be willing to vote for such a bill. This is why it's particularly important to write to conservative lawmakers – most of them understand that this makes economic sense, but citizens have to demonstrate to them that they won't lose votes over this kind of legislation.

Also, consider that if Democrats gain control of the Senate in 2020, they can pass this easily, and once such a fee-and-dividend scheme is around for a few years, it will likely become very popular with citizens (because of the dividends [1]) and big business (because of the predictability, compared to regulations/bans/subsidies/political favoritism [2]), so it won't be easy to get rid of it again. Instead, the battleground will shift, as we currently see in Canada, to "how fast do we increase the price per ton?" and "which industries get special treatment?".

[0] https://citizensclimatelobby.org/climate-solutions-caucus/

[1] https://citizensclimatelobby.org/household-impact-study/

[2] https://www.clcouncil.org/

The difference is: the dose makes the poison.

Organisms may be able to handle everyday quantities of dsRNA, but beyond a certain concentration, you may suddenly see unexpected problems, which then cause domino effects throughout the ecosystem. These kinds of relationships are unknown unknowns, and they rarely behave linearly.

I really like the RNA-based approach, don't get me wrong, but the other commenters here are right to point out that hubris is dangerous.