thworp

> Well, that, but they also offer diversification. [...] > are often uncorrelated [...]

Do they really offer diversification and are they really uncorrelated? See http://universa.net/Universa_Spitznagel_SafeHaven_HedgeFunds...

I particularly like this quote as a summary:

> Hedge funds would appear to have lost whatever ability they may have once had to provide risk mitigation value (which, let’s face it, wasn’t very much). Hedge funds just don’t effectively hedge anything; worse yet, perhaps they have even lost sight of that very objective in the first place. They are without a purpose.

Ah yes, clearly it's only those people shopping at Walmart that would not be happy about price increases. More than that, it's only that cheap crap that they buy that would get more expensive. Enlightened people like you will just stand above it and buy nothing but organic, locally sourced crap!

Yes, but look at the loss rates for some of the storage methods.

> but hydrogen has the advantage that it's cheap to store for weeks or months at a time

Where did you get that idea? Hydrogen is extremely hard to work with and really really wants to escape from any containment vessel you put it in. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403212...

No it is the underpinning of civilization.

Funnily enough, in the eastern block almost everyone had to work. But as long as the wealthy people call themselves general secretary or commissar and talk about Marx it's all good, right?

> However in the 1960s they decided different steering linkages were better,

They didn't just arbitrarily decide that, old suspension setups (even ignoring the terrible springs and dampers) were terribly unsafe and unpredictable. I encourage you to search for some videos of old cars going over bumps, taking evasive maneuvers or even just driving around a corner normally. The amount of bump steer, roll and lift is absolutely terrifying.

Oh sweet summer child. Not only do some manufacturers bury climate in a submenu, some don't even give you a simple [-][+] touchbutton arrangement.

A few years ago I had a rental (can't remember the make but I think it was korean) where you had to move a slider. Doing that is of course extremely easy while driving, especially if the manufacturer forgot that touchpoints should be perspective-corrected for the drive (every point was way to the right of where I saw it).

I think older BMWs (with only iDrive and no touchscreen) and current Mazdas have the most ergonomic and easy to use head unit setup. Since there is no touchscreen the headunit is just below the windscreen (easy to glance at while keeping road in peripheral vision). The knob has 6 inputs (4-axis tilt and rotation) and you get additional buttons around the knob. The knob also works in carplay (rotation changes focus, tilt does stuff like moving the map) and I bet after a few hours you'd be faster and more accurate than on a touchscreen with that. The only thing I always wish for is to get CarPlay navigation into the OEM HUD/instrument screen.

> on a nice snappy capacitive display UI.

Heh, until very recently a lot of manufacturers' infotainment was comically unresponsive, VW being a standout there (along with the worst-in-class screens).

I wouldnt be opposed to have an option of touchscreen control (current BMWs have that), except that touchscreens are neccesarily placed so low that you have to take your eyes almost fully off the road.

> the supply price of diamond stones has almost nothing to do with the cost of a diamond ring

Correct. But it does have something to do with the supply of *diamond rings*. Since there is a de-facto cartel between producers, middlemen and retail, it is not easy for new entrants to sell their rings to consumers. So no, there is not an oversupply of real diamond rings that would depress prices. Also, there is a sizeable % of people that want to spend more on a ring, which is quite rare in markets.

Also, I bet that there is a growing ecosystem of individuals and companies producing fake diamond jewellery and selling it direct to consumer (haven't looked into it).

The issue elsewhere is not country-wide net population change, it's people moving into just a few cities. So there is plenty of cheap housing where few people want to live

> getting so much from so little

I feel the same way about directly using or mimicking systems of the natural world. Stuff like using birds as combined pest control and fertilizer or waste water treatment.

I think we haven't even scratched the surface of what is possible, particularly with microbes. I envision things like producing glue, converting plant scraps into fibres/wood, converting toxins into inert compounds, extracting trace chemicals from a massive volume of useless medium.

Right now I think the biggest obstacle to these kinds of techniques is the lack of control and the danger of escape and mutation. Just imagine if a plastic-eating bacterium escaped a waste facility and started eating our world. I hope that with better tools and better simulation we can make it work and make it safe. It would go a long way towards lowering our energy and resource use.

I think you accurately characterized a sizable portion of the electorate, not just in the US but in many Western countries. That still leaves me wondering what the social workers, homeless advocates, Mission workers etc were doing.

Either they have been screaming that this is a disaster and nobody wanted to hear (or amplify) them, or they thought it could work on a fully voluntary basis. The latter despite them being in contact with homeless and/or drug addicts regularly. Neither explanation bodes well for civil society.

This is just about the worst example you could have used for your theory. In this case there are thousands of people that could have just done a 1:1 copy of what they do in Switzerland, Portugal, Netherlands, Scandinavia etc. Instead they copied only the carrot (treatment and harm reduction). Then they didn't just not copy the stick (prison, consequences for missing treatment) they threw away all their sticks.

With this in mind I can understand why many people are now against harm reduction of any kind, when the same people that fucked it all up in the first place now want to try again.

I really don't know where American ""progressives"" (they're sociopaths imo) got the idea that harm reduction and decriminalization involves just letting people rot (and shoot up) in the streets and just releasing people on no bail. That is not done in any of the places these people use as positive examples of the policy working.

This happened on such a scale that I can't help but wonder if the results as seen in Portland, Vancouver, Sf ... were the intention.

The approach of giving an addict that is arrested on theft and other charges a choice of prison or treatment is used successfully (as successful as it can be) in many EU countries. Obviously this cannot work if nobody gets convicted for anything short of murder, the incentives don't work.

> Portland did everything! [...]

They got all of the carrots sure, but there was no stick. The reason these programs have success elsewhere is that they give people the choice of prison or treatment.

Also, nowhere except the US just decided to legalize public drug use. In fact one of the goals of harm reduction programs in other places is to get the users out of public spaces.

What would that even be? Sonar would be most likely, but there is very little reason for secrecy there, since all the innovation is in the signal analysis not the signal itself.

Could be communication but why would you use a medium as terrible and lossy as sound in water?

Yes of course, it was all the evil corporations, they forced us to buy nice things, eliminate most hard labor and be able to travel orders of magnitude faster than pre-industrial people. Let's dissolve all corporations and problem solved. Thanks!

Since I rarely get to talk to Malthusians: Do you have a preferred approach for population reduction?

Tangential point: You severely underestimate the impact of scale and specialization on our standard of living. There is no way we could the same variety of nice things at 500million people

As opposed to what? (National) Socialism was for the benefit of the working people on paper, but in practice that meant imprisoning, murdering and impoverishing anybody thought to be working against the people's welfare. Since this included most productive members of society it made everyone poorer anyway.

Human welfare is the domain of politics, not the economic system. The forces that are supposed to inject human welfare into economic decisions are the state through regulation, employees through negotiation and unions and civil society through the press.

If you are suggesting that billionaires like Thiel don't have any skin in the game (of human civilization continuing in a somewhat stable way) you're nuts.

If we hit the iceberg they will lose everything. Even if they're able to fly to their NZ hideout, it will already be robbed and occupied. The people that built and stocked their bunker will have formed a gang and confiscated all of his supplies. This is what happens in anarchy.

Eh, so far they have nothing on the people trying to act out utopias in the 20th century. I will wake up when the billionaire Zeitgeist goes past resource allocation and into "cleanse the undesirables".

Strong claims? So you want proof that an increase in the price of energy, which is an input into absolutely every good and service, causes less goods and services to be produced? I don't think we have a basis for discussion here.

Yes, if your only concerns are the %age of renewables in the electricity mix and the health of an industry that could only continue to exist with direct subsidies it was incompetent.

Personally, I think the Energiewende is one of the most expensive failures ever. It cost about €500 billion in direct subsidies and indirect damage in the trillions due to lower economic growth. Not to mention the waste that was the installation of solar panels and wind turbines that were less efficient and became uneconomical to even upkeep.

And what was gained by this sacrifice? Today solar is the cheapest form of energy generation to build (even with storage and even in Sweden) and we got exactly nothing for being first.

Imagine if the Energiewende was a framework of laws and some light subsidies that allowed for an actually decentralized energy market. You sell your 10kW solar installation's power to your local farmer while you're at work and he sells you the power from his combo natgas and biogas reactor at night. All proceeds from this tax-free with no bureaucratic BS and guaranteed access to your local grid. Pretty soon there would have been small towns that were net exporters and the system would be extremely resilient.

Instead, because of lobbying by the privatized monopoly companies but mainly because politicians are allergic to self-orgazing and self-regulating systems (they cannot imagine them and they resent that they don't need their involvement) we got high prices, centralized and fragile generation, communities opposed to wind turbines because they did not see any benefits.

Wtf? I was not suggesting everyone buy "matchbox-size" cars. Neither was I suggesting that vehicles with a lot of mass and torque should be unavailable. I was just saying that the visibility in many modern pickups is atrocious and that they inflict disproportionate damage on other cars and especially pedestrians.

There is no practical reason that pickups need to have flat grilles made of solid metal and very little practical reason to have the hood be so tall in the first place. You could have your 3000kg vehicles with a torque-heavy V8 without unnecessarily endangering others.

ps: You might think differently after the 100th time you had to emergency brake and drive onto the grass because of a pickup that takes up 1.3 lanes going full speed around a blind corner.

This is like saying all network traffic should be tcp. For many applications there is simply no good reason and nobody would be willing to pay the additional costs.

> There's simply no structural reason for power failure (or application crashes) to be able to put hard disk data into an inconsistent, corrupt state.

No structural reason no, but a lot of other reasons. You can install your favourite atomic file operations library in your PL of choice and run some benchmarks to identify reason #1.

No. A BMW 5-series from the 80s is about the same size as a 2023 3-series. Almost every manufacturer I can think of has been doing this and in all market segments. VW had the compact Golf, the subcompact Polo and the even more compact Up!. The last Up! model is about the same size as the first Polo and the latest Polo same size as first Golf (both also from the 80s).

Of course that growth rate is still nothing compared to some pickup/off-road models. Every time I'm in NA I am shocked by the size of these behemoths. The crazy part is that more and more people are buying these things in my corner of Europe, preferably if they live in an old village with roads that are barely 2m wide per lane.

Some of these child decapitators have worse visibility and maneuverability than (EU) trucks. Ffs, if an 8-year old runs infront of your F250's grille they become invisible. This would be a valuable area of regulation imo, instead of mandatory speed limiters and breathalizers.

My point wasn't about morality, it was about loyalty. The one thing diplomats should be is loyal to their country, to represent their country's interest above their own. Clearly, no sane person could expect someone who just back-stabbed the legitimate government in order to win an election to do that.

Other than that I fully appreciate that morality has no place in international relations.

As a European the "X is a foreign Y" trope in your politics has always amused me. Both of your parties are constantly involved in corrupt foreign dealings (that would be decade-defining scandals in some other countries) and there are never any real consequences.

Nixon and Kissigner went behind the back of the sitting president to torpedo his peace talks with North Vietnam. Basically they commited high treason (secretly conferring with the enemy) and Nixon admitted as much. Decades later Kissinger is still considered a role model of a diplomat in some circles.

That example was picked so as not to kick off a political discussion. I'm