pbmonster
23hr ago
best to avoid all such and fry in animal fats I guess.
Depends on what you worry about, but if its linoleic acid, animal fats are not the silver bullet. Pork fat is around 15% linoleic acid, chicken fat is around 20%.
The entire seed oil discussion is a red herring. Avoiding them only works because you end up eating less processed foods and less fried foods.
The energy in the wind scales as the cube of the wind speed.
This is true in theory, and a decent model for small wind turbines in relatively slow winds.
It's not useful for large modern turbines (let's say 3 MW and up), since it assumes that higher wind speed automatically results in faster rotor RPM. But since rotor RPM is critically limited by blade tip velocity, a large turbine reaches max RPM in ultra light wind. After that point, power scales linear with wind speed. See this power curve, first example I found
Add to that, that a large turbine reaches nameplate capacity at around 10 m/s wind speed (and goes linear at around 3 m/s, shuts down at around 30 m/s), and it's really not that much of a problem in a modern park.
pbmonster
1d ago
This is as far as I'm willing to engage on this topic at this time, I might make a top level post in the main thread after Christmas if I get time with more information and sources.
Please do, I look forward to it!
Currently, I'm still bullish on wind. I think there's a reason why the Chinese are installing massive new capacity. Also, I've seen forecasts that global Li-Ion production capacity will be 8 TWh next year, several hundred percent percent above demand. If this is true, the bottom will drop out of the market and grid scale battery storage will suddenly become very feasible.
pbmonster
1d ago
Yeah, but those are all classic decarbonization measures, right? Yes, those work. But the premise was to use a pollution argument instead.
Unless you want to simply rename "decarbonization" into "reducing pollution" (and people will resist that, a gas turbine just doesn't produce enough black smoke or yellow water), this won't work. It's too easy to reduce visible pollution while keeping carbon emissions exactly the same.
pbmonster
1d ago
Do you have more about this?
AFAIK, onshore wind in particular is by far the cheapest form of electricity available, most decent locations should be well below $20/MWh today.
Are Sweden's wind parks doing so poorly because those are all first-generation off-shore parks, using experimental turbine foundations and giant turbine prototypes (where scaling effects from mass production have not kicked in yet)? Has Sweden massively overbuilt wind capacity without investing in storage, and now the wind-parks collectively ruin the spot market for each other on windy days?
In theory, onshore wind parks are cheap to built and cheap to run. Wind in Sweden should have a capacity factor >40%, with barely any hours per year where it goes below 10%. In an ideal location like this, wind should even beat solar (in an ideal location) for the next couple of years - and solar is now cheap as dirt.
when fighting pollution is more doable, easier to gather support for, actually fosters innovation and chances of reducing it - will meaningfully help with CO2
I don't think this is true. Can you elaborate on that?
The big CO2 producers in a modern economy (and even in a modern economy with significant heavy industry) are producing CO2 without adding much pollution otherwise. Gas turbines dump clean CO2 exhaust by design, and much of cement and chemical production also runs on natural gas. Coal plants have marched down the learning curve for 100 years, exhaust gas treatment is extensive and effective. The remaining steel mills still running blast furnaces instead of electric arc furnaces also already need to treat their exhaust.
The only semi-low hanging fruit I could think of is further cleaning up the diesels used in transport, construction and agriculture. But again, you can reduce pollution here a bit, but until batteries improve further, those processes will emit exactly as much CO2 as before you've reduced pollution.
And sure, we probably should flat-out ban two-strokes. But I doubt you'd even save 1% of global CO2, even if pollution in certain cities would improve noticeably. And objectively - both from a pollution an greenhouse gas perspective - we probably also should ban any and all large-scale livestock operations. But the effect on meat prices would be absurdly unpopular almost everywhere.
pbmonster
8d ago
where everyone pools money
there's an algorithm to decide whether it's legitimate and how much money it should pay out
I think we can take out the blockchain and focus on two pretty load-bearing elements of this scheme: you want to automate insurance underwriting and claims adjustment.
Both are possible (and interesting) in idealized conditions (i.e. derivative markets), but completely non-trivial in all real-world insurance markets. This "algorithm" would probably be considered at least weak AGI.
pbmonster
13d ago
Probably says something about how the world thinks about the health insurance companies.
How the US thinks about health insurance. The rest of the developed world doesn't really feel... anything when you ask them about their insurance provider. Maybe it feels a bit expensive, and - unsurprisingly, since its mandated by law - they always pay your bills.
pbmonster
15d ago
We just don't do all the river and coastal hauling of manufactured goods like the Europeans do, not sure whether it's because we have better rail shipping or some other reason.
No, it's literally the Jones act. Look at how energy gets into the northeastern US. A huge part is provided by Canada, just because that bypasses the Jones act (and because they have legacy pipelines and transmission lines - and the blue states up there keep killing any new projects of that kind). Which, by the way, makes energy prices kind of a problem for the Northwestern states when the tariffs come.
If we're only talking about braces: Significantly lower risk, less invasive, in theory much easier to reverse - you could just pull teeth out of alignment again if you wanted to, to the locations they where before if you made imprints/photos. In my mind, braces are much closer to resistance training (or daily wearing a weighted vest and ankle weights) than they are to surgery.
And besides the obvious non-cosmetic benefits of aligned teeth (which we're going to ignore as instructed), there's also the mostly-cosmetic benefit of tooth prosthetics and veneers fitting much better/easier onto an aligned set of teeth, allowing them to be thinner, cheaper and being seated more securely on the jaws. Just in case they're needed in old age...
The Migration Period starting 300 AD ultimately resulted in the fall of Rome and a massive decrease of technology on the European continent. A billion people moving away from the equator (after the first wet bulb events), and later several billion people moving away from coastal areas (after they're sick and tired of rebuilding after getting flooded every year) easily have the capacity to "seriously effect human civilization".
It doesn't have to. Unprecedented development of infrastructure for those people and an unthinkable change of culture (both of the migrants and the native people they join) could mitigate this. So could unprecedented violence at the borders.
I'm a pessimist. The west doesn't have the capacity for either of those options.
pbmonster
20d ago
our primary concern should be consumption inequality, because consumption is ultimately what really matters
Even if the first premise is true (big caveat), we'll have to look at how an increase in consumption scales when isolated from wealth. Because we'll run into fun non-linearities pretty much immediately.
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For a very slight increase in your "consumption of housing", you can get a massive increase of your living standard - because for close to the price of rent for a shitty apartment, you can afford the interest on a mortgage. Sometimes, this could even mean a decrease in consumption allowing you the quality of live jump of renter --> home owner.
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For another increase ("only" double digit percentage) in "consumption of housing", you can decrease your commuting time by >100 hours per year.
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Especially at the lower end, food quality also scales non-linearly.
And of course, when comparing two subjects with equal consumption, the presence of wealth makes a huge difference in the feeling of security in life.
billionaires would have to consume 3,300 times more per capita
In all three metrics (consumption, income, wealth), statements like that make little sense. In the end, only quality of life matters. But that's notoriously hard to measure.
Honestly, then just use feedly.com or feeder.co
Both have decent Android/iOS apps. If you want to mess around with it only for a few minutes to begin with, Outlook also still has a built-in RSS reader. It's really easy to use. Rightclick the "RSS-Feeds" folder, select "Add Feed" and paste something like "https://www.astralcodexten.com/feed/". Done. (All Substack blogs provide their RSS feed just by adding /feed/ to the end of the address.)
RSS doesn't need to be this open source nerd fest, that just happens to be the guys who still use it most consistently. The reason for that is a bit historic. RSS used to be hugely popular 15 years ago. Everybody in tech was using it, every day. But it's by definition a decentralized technology - and Google, Meta and Amazon really have no use for something like that. So they worked hard at replacing it.
pbmonster
27d ago
Yeah, but almost nobody self-hosts on their PC. You either rent a server/virtual machine somewhere for cheap, or you put something like a RaspberryPi on your network. That uses less electricity, and you can mess with your PC without taking your private cloud offline.
If don't have a server somewhere already anyway, or if you're not extremely privacy conscious, or if you're not actively looking for a beginner's hacking project, don't bother with self-hosting.
pbmonster
29d ago
Mine is the fear of missing out on potentially helpful information. What is yours?
This is certainly part of it. Even if you don't 'like' any content at all, twitter, youtube et. al will feed you only more of what you consumed previously - even worse if you follow other accounts. But I also just really don't want those companies to built up a profile about me in order to sell me ads.
It also has previously unintended side-effects: for example, people now frequently report having trouble ad-blocking on youtube. This isn't an issue if you're not logged in.
Complicated question. Quick answer for normies: Feedly.
Complicated answer: Are you OK with making an account and maybe even paying for it? Do you need cross-platform support (sync between your phone and a tablet/PC)? If no, your options are endless. I like miniflux.
If you want cross-platform without a third party, you need to self-host your feeds. I really like the RSS features Nextcloud brings. Use and app on your phone, the web interface anywhere else. Miniflux can also selfhost.
pbmonster
30d ago
There are some drugs that you probably don't want in the hands of the general population due to third-parties being harmed
There's also the point to be made that people in countries without a culture of medicine prescriptions just love taking antibiotics for anything that ails them, and those people not finishing an antibiotics regimen once they have started one.
This directly leads to things like India being a global hotspot of antimicrobial resistance, which kills at least 300k (likely a multiple of that) people a year.
I also refuse to give the algorithm anything. I'm not even logged in almost anywhere, and I certainly won't use an app.
The best way for me to keep tabs on content I regularly follow is - still, after decades - RSS feeds. You can even "subscribe" to a youtube channel and/or twitter account by just adding it to your RSS reader. And of course it works naturally for blog-style content.
Also, skimming hackernews and curating a list of decent subreddits still works OK for content discovery.
More density nearly always results in higher property valuations and therefore higher tax revenue; density dominates building quality: a very nice single family home will still be significantly less valuable than however many mediocre townhouses you can squeeze onto the same plot of land. I guess the non-obvious part is how the cost of infrastructure like roads (cheaper per household with higher density) compares to the cost of services like schools (which should approximately scale proportional to the number of students.
Side note to that point: cities have slowly been figuring out the exact math on that - which is why many new low density suburban developments necessarily come with a HOA, and the cities forces the HOA to take on road maintenance for the new development. Otherwise, fancy suburban neighborhoods can be so low density that they become a net loss for a city once the infrastructure starts to show its age and the city is forced to re-invest in the neighborhood.
pbmonster
1mo ago
Is the technical difficulty of an attack like this significantly below building a two-axis gun turret or building a bomb?
If you still need to aim the laser, might as well aim a gun. If you don't need to aim the laser (e.g. you use some clever way to reflect the light onto people, which will cost you in effective range), might as well build a bomb.
All those things almost never happen, because the people with the skills and high agency to do something like that almost universally don't want to.
pbmonster
1mo ago
So, how to defeat akrasia? How does one lengthen their time horizons and truly spend time better?
I think for many people, this is the one clear advantage the structured environment of university/community college has: it takes the long-time-horizon task of "get a degree" and breaks it down into many medium-time-horizon tasks ("this semester, I need to pass those two courses") and short-time-horizon tasks ("this week, I need to hand in these exercises"), and it introduces an element of accountability that these tasks get done within a certain time frame (failing a class).
So if "living up to your potential" means getting a more impressive job and a college degree, start by finding a degree that interests you and find out what its course requirements are. Then work towards getting an associate's degree that shares many of those classes. You can probably do the first few classes online, at night, and not pay much money for them. If that works out, you transfer the credits to a 4 year college and get a bachelor's.
If you're in an industry that works around certifications, you can also start getting a couple of those. Basically same principle, but you might get your company to pay for them and find it easier to work it in around your job.
pbmonster
1mo ago
The entire transport sector is 20% of CO2 emissions. But ocean shipping is only around 3%. Ships are incredibly efficient.
pbmonster
1mo ago
For overall purchasing power, it might go either way. But what I can say for certain is that it will significantly reduce purchasing power of cheap consumer goods, the kind of crap you buy from Shein, Temu and AliExpress. Stuff that will never ever be made again in the US.
And if you look around the house of a lower middle class person, it's often really all they have.
Ah, I see. I feel the goalposts keep moving, but that's not necessarily your fault.
Maybe hydro's Lions are really a different beasts than the ones I know. I wouldn't call them a conservative institution at all, they are purposefully fully centrist. My local club is currently assembling Christmas boxes for the refugees in the city - most of which the average conservative on this website would directly deport, I'm sure. But anyway...
So the goal is a conservative, but atheist community, at low cost. Unfortunately, that kills a whole lot of religious resources and stuff like the Young Repulicans, respectively. Is service even a criterion? Because if we drop that, you could just go to a rifle club meet-up or the cheapest sailing club you can find. I've done both at below $100 per year, and got to use club equipment for that fee.
This seems like exactly the sort of regular, scheduled volunteer work that gets Social Security deciding you can hold down a job and aren't really disabled.
I wonder who would tell them? And if someone did, 2 hours a week is a long shot from a job. But I have no idea how they work... I would probably just ask them flat out, they shouldn't fault you for giving a structured activity a try.
Our food bank hasn't been doing so well lately with regards to supplies, and from what I've seen, has been scaling back their operations
First link on Google was the most impressively professional effort to organize volunteers by a non-profit I have ever seen: https://foodbankofalaska.org/individual-volunteers/ They seem to place hundreds and hundreds of volunteers every month. 30 seconds in, the system looks to be uncharacteristically efficient and streamlined for an NGO.
What's your level? After 15 years of zero exposure, only extensive ruins of the language remain to me, so I've been listening to innerFrench and I love it. But if your level of understanding is close to fluency, that podcast will feel slow and annoy you with frequent elaborate definitions (in French).
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