volkl48

There is no local "base load" generation to begin with. 73% of power in VT is imports from out of state/country. Primarily from Hydro-Quebec.

- There are no coal plants left in New England at all.

- Most of VT doesn't have access to Natural Gas (the Burlington metro does, via a pipeline that is only served from Quebec, it is not connected to the US pipeline grid). There are no Natural Gas plants in the state.

- The nuclear plant closed over a decade ago.

- Actual in-state generation on a normal basis is a few biomass plants, some modest hydro on the rivers, and some scattered wind/solar.

- The power plants being "replaced" here, or at risk of being replaced, are some small and rarely used oil-fired peakers that run a few hours a year currently and have nameplate capacity in total of <200MW even if they shut down all of them.

- Transfer capacity to stressed regions (NY-ISO, PJM) is low so they can't really draw that much off the region's grid (ISO-NE).

- Power prices are always some of the highest in the country, the region in general is known for regulation and disliking development - and VT even more so. Making it unlikely you see some sort of AI data center boom here or the like.

- The most realistic source of significant new demand in the state is probably electrification (heating, cooling, vehicles).

They aren't mutually exclusive in the least.

The ease of buying things that the prior poster referred to is basically just three things:

- A massive common market with few to no internal trade barriers/complications. The EU is still nowhere near as integrated and has all sorts of odd hidden complications to actually moving + selling things.

- Hell, just this week I've seen that one of the indie record labels I pay attention to will no longer sell merch within the EU other than to the country they're based in, because the new EU packaging regulations make it infeasibly expensive to comply with for every country for the small volumes they move.

- A common language that ~92% of the population speak fluently.

- Relatively efficient logistics.

None of this has anything to do with "dismantling the welfare state" and has only a little to do with differences in workers rights/benefits - giving delivery workers in the US better wages/job security would not make the "Amazon" logistics model infeasible.

I'm certainly willing to be corrected, but as far as I can tell from some brief searching, indigenous populations that exist in the region today aren't living some nomadic life out in the wilderness either. They're living in cities and towns like almost everyone else does.

So a post like this is still correct in how it's presented.

Almost no one is actually living out at "the end of the world" in the wilderness with few or no other people around, and it is potentially a topic of interest/curiosity to hear about those who do.

The US is not currently a signatory to that, just to note.

If this is the case, they probably outright do not want you as a customer.

Significant sales (beyond for excess stock clearance/discontinued items) exist largely to generate some excitement from potential customers and to lure them in to taking a look at the site/store and to hopefully get them to buy some extra stuff that's less discounted while they're there.

The actual on-sale item is potentially losing money for the business or at break-even.

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A person who's running a series of bots like this to track the exact lowest price on the internet for items over time and to always only buy at the lowest price it's ever been sold for....is probably the least likely kind of customer to buy anything extra that's actually profitable for the business.

Sorry, but no. This does not pass the smell test in the slightest.

This is:

- A single author paper with no academic affiliations.

- A search on the internet for this author finds them also pitching essential oils and a wide variety of other "alternative medicine" on the Youtube/Podcast grifter circuit and not the sorts of alternative medicine anyone seriously thinks might have some merit.

- The address listed for his supposed place of practice appears to be a roadside "clini-spa" advertising beauty treatments.

- This could only get published in some low-impact journal that's solely about the purported benefits of mushrooms, even though if true this would be a pretty revolutionary finding that would be of interest to far bigger journals.

Can I prove it's fraud? No, especially since I'm not paying $25 to look at the paper details.

But unless this finding replicates from someone with credibility, I don't think this means much of anything and I certainly don't think you should be taking anything in this paper as a fact.

Tough economics to imagine attempting to effectively gather mulch from in between the trees when we're talking areas so remote they often aren't even harvested for actual lumber and are a huge distance from the nearest power plant (or grid connection of any significant capacity).

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However, this isn't addressing the other problem: Fire is an actual part of the ecosystem in those areas. Various plant/tree species are adapted around it. Some require fire for their seeds to germinate, others need the cleared ground that results (and their seeds can survive the fire), others rely on it to keep other species out with adaptations that make them much less likely to burn in a moderate intensity/natural fire (and so they survive while an invading species doesn't).

Fire also opens up areas and causes natural forest succession - which creates an environment for more than just the biggest trees to exist for a few decades. Etc, etc, etc.

You simply can't have the natural environment out there exist as it is evolved to function without fire in the long-term.

Your cause/effect doesn't have all that much truth to it with regards to rail.

German rail has been an under-invested in mess since reunification, it's a long slide not a recent one. They are finally investing the kind of amounts in it they need to, to actually revive it to what it should be. It's going to be a long road to actually get there, of course.

Paywall but a decent read on that note: https://www.ft.com/content/db75e347-b13b-4753-8130-6301bb55c...

We tried "preventing forest fires" for about a century, and it's a large part of why they're burning so intensely and destructively now.

Forest fires are a natural part of the life cycle of many forested regions - particularly in Canada and the Western US.

Suppressing all fires as soon as possible means that dead, dry plant matter continues to build up for decades longer than it naturally would, creating a "tinderbox" effect where eventually you have vastly more intense and destructive forest fires than would typically have occurred if you'd just left nature alone in the first place. And because these fires have so much more concentrated fuel they also burn hotter and can make the recovery of the forest in the area take far longer to come back.

The correct answer is to regularly perform controlled burns in areas near human settlement and to mostly leave things alone in areas away from it. Much of Canada's land area is literally uninhabited and dozens if not hundreds of miles from the nearest road, much less actual settlement.

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Additionally: Strongly discourage new construction in the Wildland-Urban Interface (aka: low density settlement in a wooded setting, your typical picture-esque rural mountain home - that wood is meant to burn one day, taking your cute house with it). Beyond that, strict building codes for whatever does get built there + ordinances for maintaining the space around the home to reduce risk.

Although to a significant extent, property insurers are basically already taking on this role in recent years. I have family out in the hills in CO, their insurance rates are multiple times that of their property taxes and they are now quite strict on evaluating properties in terms of risk-mitigation. And failure to adhere to all of what they want to see means you're getting dropped by the insurer and you will have a very hard time getting a different company to pick you up.

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Anyway, as another poster noted: The forest grows back and recaptures all that carbon in a few decades, making those fires basically carbon-neutral.

This headline/article is about cleaning up sites from the early years of nuclear experimentation/research and from nuclear weapons production.

There were various accidents and a great deal of improper (at least by modern standards) handling of materials and wastes. The cleanup being talked about here is about cleaning up that contamination.

There's no dispute from anyone on any side that I am aware of that these places are heavily contaminated, need to be cleaned up, and are complicated to clean up.

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This headline and the findings have absolutely nothing to do with handling nuclear waste from commercial power production or commercial nuclear reactor sites.

Cigarettes kill about 480,000 people in the US annually. Lung cancer isn't the only kind of cancer you get from smoking cigarettes, and cancer isn't the only way it can lead to your death, so it seems very strange to only pay attention to lung cancer here.

You don't need lung cancer to have an absolutely miserable decline and death from COPD, for example.

https://archive.cdc.gov/www_cdc_gov/tobacco/data_statistics/...

Such as? Word hits the sweet spot of having support for all the complexity the average person may encounter/want to create.

Libre, Apple Pages, and Google Docs all seem like clearly worse tools in most aspects in my experience.

LaTeX is extremely powerful, but also way too complicated for the average non-HN person/person who doesn't live in complicated documents.

USB 3.0 powered hubs that give you more USB 3.0 supporting USB-A ports are pretty easy to find these days.

USB-C ones (that actually give you more than 1 additional USB-C port) are still more challenging, but they do at least exist now (after having been virtually non-existent for years). Caldigit, Plugable, Sabrent, and probably others all have models that will go 1 device port to 3-6 USB-C ports now, and are powered with decent power per-port limits.

I do agree the landscape is far more confusing than it was a decade ago.

> poses no danger to your hair,

Last I checked, the only study actually focusing on this is n=38, out of Iran, and has heavy conflict of interest issues (funded by the supplement industry).

That's not remotely sufficient to consider this a settled fact.

> I make an effort to use Spotify to find and listen to albums, but it wasn’t built for this

I rarely say this, but you're using it wrong.

There are a number of good ways to utilize Spotify for music discovery that aren't "pray to the auto-play algorithm". The best resource IMO is artist pages.

- Artist pages:

- Artist Playlists - Many artists, especially smaller ones, curate their own playlists. I've found many good, new to me artists through what other small bands I like recommend on their playlists. If I hear a track I like on it then I click through to that artist and dive into their stuff.

- Discovered on - sometimes you'll find interesting user-curated playlists in here.

- Fans also like - I suppose it's "an algorithm" as well, but it's a deterministic one, and in most genres you're going to find other real bands there of similar popularity levels.

- Live Events: Pick your area, see who's playing. I'm not sure why but at least in North America it seems to be pretty much the most comprehensive nationwide concert listing at this point (better than BandsInTown, the remnants of Songkick, etc), and has a lot of little bar-tier shows that don't make it on most other live music trackers. (Some cities with a strong local scene have some kind of good local resource but they're only for that metro area + may only be for a specific set of genres.). I find a lot of the little shows I attend through this now.

- Playlists - not the ones algo-generated by Spotify, search for something and go down to the user-curated ones. Still have to check them over a bit to see that you're not getting AI slop, but there's a lot of gems.

But ultimately, you are never going to find + fall in love with much if you are just acting in a purely passive way. If you hear a song you like, you need to....actually hit like on that song, click on the artist, and explore that artist's discography.

Spain is historically trying to attract old foreign retirees with money who will spend their retirement savings/pensions there, but probably doesn't want that same group voting unless they really have assimilated. So that set of rules makes sense for their immigration model but is also probably not a place to look to for setting policy if your immigrants are working-age adults (that are coming there to work, not retire early).

Iceland is an independent country, although I suppose it is involved with NATO. But I think you may be thinking of Greenland (which is a territory of Denmark).

Apple price hikes announced this morning...

I would expect most would cite a thought process more akin to "I'm a safe driver, have never hit a pedestrian or cyclist before, and don't expect to in the future, either." for why they aren't swayed by this warning.

I expect very few went "I don't care about killing people with my car", for their reasoning.

Now, people are a terrible judge of their own talents at driving, and so many of those people are much less safe drivers than they think. But the point here is that most of those people believe they specifically are not at risk of causing that terrible outcome. It's faulty risk assessment rather than total lack of caring about others.

Seems reasonable if you want to be connected to it.

The grid costs a significant amount of money to build and maintain, and maintaining the available capacity to serve you electricity even if you only use it a couple months of the year (or even a couple days of the year) still costs money.

If you don't want to be connected to it at all - then I mostly feel you shouldn't be mandated to be.

I can't see any realistic way that the ergonomics would be better than your haphazard hotel room setup. Reality is that the device still has weight on your head and neck and is still kind of tiring to wear for long periods of time.

It's still 1.5lbs hanging off the front of your face and over hours that's still straining.

Lying down or in a recliner or something where you're not really having to support the device yourself is about the only way that I feel you might achieve any kind of better result in an ergonomics sense for a significant length of use time.

(Disclaimer: I had one to demo for a few months and used it/experimented with it sporadically, I don't own one.)

As someone in New England: We don't have enough gas infrastructure up here either, you can't just add more gas plants to our grid and accomplish anything.

As it is, in the coldest periods of winter you will at times see the ISO-NE grid running on 40% oil because we don't have enough natural gas pipeline capacity to run all of the gas plants and meet natural gas heating demands. So many of the gas plants have to kick back over to burning oil.

Maritimes:

- New Brunswick is very economically depressed and only has a few things of interest to your average tourist (primarily along/near the Bay of Fundy). It's about a 8hr drive just to get to Moncton from Boston.

- Nova Scotia - Also struggling economically in many areas outside of Halifax. Halifax is 11hrs out of Boston and what's arguably the most interesting scenery in the province (up in Cape Breton) is more like 13hrs.

It's also cold much of the year so the optimal tourism season is short and even in the warm months it's often not that warm (and the ocean water certainly never is).

Quebec:

- Quebec City is decently known and about 7hrs. The rest of the province besides that and MTL I agree are basically a mystery to most.

- That Maine is basically a remote wilderness along the Quebec border and has almost no land connections (and no good ones) makes exploring up beyond Quebec City less common than it seems like it should be. (Also no bridges over the St. Lawrence beyond Quebec City).

Just to remind, the mobile + desktop lines are not the same thing even if they both get the same branding.

The top end chip in the 2019 MBP was the i9-9980HK, which had a TDP of 45W.

Would have been reasonable in a chunkier workstation/gaming type of laptop with the kinds of cooling solutions those usually get, it's not something that needed an actual desktop liquid cooling solution to run well.

But obviously the 2019 MBP design/cooling was not up to that task.

Usually when people are asking questions it isn't that they don't know how to find a possible solution at all, it's that they don't feel they know enough to evaluate the correctness of the solutions they may find, and they think you do.

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Google will turn up plenty of sites with solutions to problems that are a bad way of going about it, and some that are actively detrimental/will make your problem worse - but sound plausible.

A LLM will potentially even take this a step further and present the same thing in glowingly confident terms. And will have chosen to ignore that the source it took it from was obviously questionable in reliability or had many comments below it disagreeing. Now, you can of course check into the sources, but that still just brings you back to the Google stage.

Costco doesn't even accept Mastercard (credit cards), so they're kind of a unique case here where they intentionally choose to only accept one particular type of credit cards.

It implies a close race or a strong reason to believe there's some sort of systemic polling miss, and if it's a blowout you still look pretty bad. Especially if you don't have some kind of good explanation for the miss/you keep making those kinds of misses frequently.

Also there's more going in those forecasts besides just the "% chance to win". There's expected results in terms of %'s of the vote for the candidates, and that's what people tend to focus on for actually analyzing your performance and credibility after the fact.

You getting the outcome correct but being off by 20 points on the margin is a much worse performance than you getting the outcome wrong but being within 0.5 points of the margin. (ex: Results are 49.75/50.25, you predicted 30/70, another outlet predicted 50.25/49.75).

Generally I'd say public sector unions (especially in essential services) are of very questionable benefit and need limits, but robust private sector unions are much more obviously beneficial to society.

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In the private sector the incentives are mostly aligned for producing reasonable deals, because both sides rely on the business being healthy and making a profit and the jobs fundamentally rely on that.

In the public sector they aren't aligned. The politician is most incentivized to avoid immediate political turmoil. Voters are not market analysts who recognize and have a problem with deals that produce massive costs in the long-run (ex: exceptionally young or exceptionally generous retirement). The union is often aware it can extort the public with the threat of causing chaos. Government can raise taxes/take on heavier debt, which further weakens it's negotiating position - in all but the most extreme cases it won't be going into bankruptcy or ceasing to exist, taxpayers in 30 years will just be on the hook for paying a bad deal made by a previous generation.

Unless I've missed something here, there are clearly no airbags in the passenger seat or anywhere else in the upper shell (side curtain, etc) from skimming around the video/interior shots.

I guess there's probably still one in the stock Tesla steering wheel/unit.

You also have none of the heavy structure that makes it so you don't die in a rollover or side-impact in a modern car. Look at how skinny that A-pillar is.

Hell, half of this interior is just the raw exposed sheet metal with no insulation/noise-dampening/softer materials either.

The Mustang is from before modern safety laws (and feature expectations) and therefore weighed a lot less than your average modern car.

A stock '66 Mustang hardtop had a curb weight below 3000lb, in the lightest configuration close to 2500lb.

Less mass to move will do a lot for efficiency just like aerodynamics will.

Of course, you will also die or be horrifically maimed in an accident in a 1966 Mustang that you might walk away without any serious injuries from in a modern vehicle.