_red

It is helpful that the author quantified some of the issues, however there are many factors involved:

* Does the authors CO2 estimates for battery production actually include "mining" or just "assembly"? From reading it, it seems to just include assembly of final components into a battery.

* Moving tons of rare-earth minerals from Point A to Point B for battery production requires yet more CO2 output.

* Wind + Solar still requires massive batteries somewhere, which still requires massive mining operations.

Further, with $40 shale oil now a reality, its getting harder to make the economic case.

Has anyone ever calculated the total environmental impact of a Tesla?

It seems that Power Stations + Millions of Tons of mining for rare earth minerals must make this a mega-polluter?

Part of the problem in modeling is to also model the tens of thousands of humans interacting with the new schedule. Changing the train schedule also changes their schedules.

Hence, each time a schedule changes there is an uptick of accidents, disruptions, missed trains, overcrowding, etc until all adjust to this new timetable.

Since the economic crises of 2008, central banks have been desperate to induce some positive inflation. "Helicopter Ben" even said he would drive around in a helicopter and drop pallets of cash out of it, before he allowed deflation to take hold (the only way out of their debt crises, is to inflate it away).

Its no wonder that the PTB are now pushing for helicopter money across the debt-laden west, its the last tool they have. Sad its the poor who must suffer.

Moreover, its interesting that he believes that he was targeted because he said anti-Trump statements. Yet, it doesn't seem to occur to him that: This is what you get when you advocate for "big government".

The downside of having big government is that it winds up being staffed with mad-with-power bureaucrats, who will mess your life up just because.

I miss the time when most techies believed in civil liberties and were wary of government. Chickens coming home to roost and all that...

Vegetarian != Vegan

I'm not a scientist, medical researcher, nor even very knowledgeable about biology. However, as part of my work, we deal with some prominent medical research institutions.

Over visits and dinners I've got to talk with a few of their leading anti-cancer researchers. One thing that was explained to me was a researcher saying that current findings are pointing out that cancer would be better thought of as a "immune deficiency" disease, rather than anything else.

For something to be "cancerous", must meet two basic conditions: (a) It short circuits the genes in the cell which limit reproduction, cancers instead reprogram to reproduce continuously. (b) Are in stealth-mode to the bodies immune system.

Evidently, your body can detect "A" and self-contain those micro-tumors basically in cysts as it was explained. However when "A" and "B" combine, your body can't deal with it because it can't even see it.

This particular professors research involved genetically altering cancer cells so that they could again be visible to the bodies immune system and marked as "defective". Thus, the body could rid itself of the cancer naturally.

>and focus on feelings instead of consequences.

Agreed, and I think an unintended consequence of 'focusing on feelings' is that it basically ensures that future interactions will also be all about feelings. (ie. we get more of what we reward)

As an aside: Early in my career I had a manager who was really tough. He was quick to point out problems and was very direct in his language. At first I hated it and was fairly intimidated by him. However I noticed a few things: It was never personal, no personal language was used. It was always factual and consequential. Second, he was good a making decisions and sticking with them. In the end I enjoyed working with him because I knew were he stood on virtually every issue, so it was easy to adjust my work to his expectations.

Next in my career, I worked for a very very different manager. She was very nice, but passive aggressive. That was actually not much of a problem, but her biggest fault is she didn't like making decisions. She would refuse to commit and want everything to be as fluid as possible. In the end, I hated my time there. I normally felt that any meeting with her was totally pointless because she refused to produce any actionable decisions from the meeting. It may sound like a dream job to some to have a boss that "never tells me what to do", but after a year or so it becomes a soul-grinding nightmare.

Let's get this straight:

Someone goes house to house trying to open windows, finds your is open. Then incredibly, they call the FBI and gets an agent to accompany them for a personal visit. You, the stunned homeowner, are now presented with the FBI telling you that they've discovered your house is extremely insecure...meanwhile this same shady person with a criminal past is now hitting you up for a $60K "consulting bill" to teach you how to lock your windows.

While all this is going on you are actively trying to sell your house and you worry this whole FBI-shake down artist saga will torpedo the sale. You happen to be holding an open house this to invite prospective buyers. Coincidentally, the "security expert" suddenly appears at that exact moment to discuss "your houses security issues and his unpaid bill"

Does that about cover it?

The entire "lets search shodan and become a security disclosure company" is shady...

>What is immigration?

Sometime around 2013-2014 it began to be visible that Apple stopped trying to make "the best hardware in its class" and migrated to "how does this fit in a marketing matrix".

Tim Cook and Steve Balmer have curious parallels. Both genius COO-types that can squeeze enormous profits from their processes, but both strategically undermined their brands severely. I think the board at Apple is going to discover that the cost of rebuilding their "content creator / power user" clientele will be far more expensive then the pennies they saved on optimized COO process.

This is totally anecdotal, but we have a family friend who is an undertaker in a small town. He claims bodies today rot at a slower rate then when he started in the 50's. His theory is that its the preservatives in food.

A common thing that happens to me is: Stuck on a moderately complex problem, usually in a field that I'm not intimately familiar with (ie. A complex mail server config). Work on it, feeling frustrated late into evening. Go to sleep and sort of "dream about the problem" in a loosely chaotic way.

Come morning, its not that I suddenly have a solution, but more often than not I've developed a good strategy for how to test the problem. By using this new method I'm able then to trial-and-error the problem in a systemic way, leading to a solution.

TLDR: Sleeping often gives me successful 'approaches' to problems

>I don't see how this will work, unless every country does this, or your currency becomes non-convertible.

You say this as if tax fraud is a consequence free activity.

>And even then, you would still be able to buy stocks, expensive jewelry, gold, houses and so on

Sure, but everyone will do that, so those asset prices will surge making it a poor investment

The monetary implications are even scarier.

The real reason they are pushing for "cashless society" is so they can impose negative interest rates. Since you won't have the option to withdraw your funds into cashier, you bank balance will be debited monthly as a privilege for giving the bank money.

Its their next hairbrained scheme to try and shore up their ponzi-scheme economy.

>If your Toyota malfunctions and you hit someone, you get sued. You may sue Toyota afterwards, but you're going to get sued first.

You extrapolating that future markets will work exactly like the past, because "its a car".

But its doubtful it will. The reason why the auto industry evolved the way it did (driver gets sued), is because 90+% of the time it is operator error.

Look at another example. Kraft distributes 10M packages of poisoned cheese, what happens: (a) All the local grocery stores get sued? or (b) Does Kraft get sued?

Obviously "B" would be the case, since the local grocery stores would say: "We had no way to test the cheese for poison, it was pre-packaged from Kraft"

This is very similar to what would happen in a 100% autonomous vehicle situation. The owner doesn't have access nor the capability to judge the engineering / code.

>Toyota recalled thousands of trucks about 3 months

Not the same. Toyota doing a recall to replace a $200 part doesn't come close to the potential liability that a autonomous manufacturer that had thousands of accidents...each potentially costing millions each.

>Even if insurance were the issue, it's fairly easy to solve; in the contract you sign to use an automated vehicle, you'd assume liability.

Yes, and the trucking companies will just say: No

Their insurance rates would skyrocket so high, that it would be cheaper to just continue to use human drivers.

Yet, when a bakery wants to "curate" what cakes they bake, thats a civil rights infringement, isn't it?

So true. Further Das Kapital is still for sale on Amazon, even though when put into practice it routinely kills millions.

300M people x $1000 per month.

Where does that money come from? (taxes?). What will stop inflation from just negating that 1000 gain?

UBI doesn't have a political problem. It has a math problem.

>retraining these fifty year old guys who have been truck drivers or coal miners

While thats true, I think the premise is wrong. Techno-types love to imagine that automation is just going to sweep through these industries.

The devil of these things is in the details. Yes, perhaps the tech can get to approximate 90% of what a human can do. However, the real problem are outside of tech. Like liability insurance. Who gets sued when one of Elon's driverless trucks plows into a school bus? Surely not the "trucking company"? So the software company will have to assume that...Now, imagine there are 50M driverless vehicles on the roads, what does that monthly policy look like? What insurance company will underwrite that? What happens if a zero-day is found? etc. etc.

The same happens with 3D. Every 15-20 years, manufacturers and content producers seem to think "this is the year people will want to watch X in 3D".

I'm a little skeptical that either will become mainstream daily-use technologies.

Thats true.

One benefit of the old days is you knew all other participants were sitting in front of a desktop, with a full keyboard. You knew they weren't say: driving, or boarding onto a flight, or paying a restaurant bill.

A problem with features like "Apple allows you to SMS from Desktop" is you still must use lowest-common denominator conversational approach.

All these modern apps have greatly increased the frequency of our conversations, but overall lowered their quality.

A couple of interesting questions:

1. Is being Jewish a race or a religion?

2. Being Jewish is also strongly correlated to class. 44% of Jews earn 100K+. Thats compared to ~20% for Christian, 19% Catholic, 20% Islam. (Interestingly Hindus are close at 36%).

Source: http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/income-dis...

I really like the fact that they acknowledged the problem with a name like "PAN" is that it becomes impossible to search for on internet.

It can sometimes be a problem with names like ".net" or "go", certain use-cases become unsearchable.

The redefinition of the term 'monopoly' to just be 'large marketshare' is very dangerous.

However, as a bit of schadenfreude, its nice to see the leftist big-tech receive the unintended consequences of their beliefs.

Sadly, the realities is that they will just hire ex-regulators as 'consultants' to help enshrine their businesses into quasi-state protected monopolies.

As an aside. Are you posting via a throwaway because: (a) You worry about HN attacking you with downvotes, or (b) You have a somewhat publicly identifiable username and worry this type of wrongthink could be punished by the modern-stasi movement?

(my money is on B).

Colleges are turning into 'adult daycare centers'.

Encouraging people to go into six-figure debt, so that they can get a degree that has zero marketability (except of course to continue on in college), is a deeply cynical enterprise. At least drug sellers and casino owners are open about what they do.

Thats a good solution. For 15 years or so I just used the user.site@domain.com approach. But in the last 4 or 5 years, the spammers have gotten smarter and now are stripping off the site and just emailing user@domain.com.

Yours is a good solution.

>"Running a Business"

The WSJ either intentionally, or unintentionally, is subtly trying to cast this narrative that he is a mafia-boss who is still running is illegal mafia-crew from behind bars. They are doing that simply because it sells papers, I would assume.

If you take away the "business" aspect of it, and just think of it of an asset. Say for instance an inmate owns a house; is it somehow worrisome to imagine a they would want to check up on their asset and make decisions to improve it? Obviously not.

This is just the click-bait style material that "modern journalism" have been reduced to.

I share many of your feelings.

However, I think you should think of this in a different light: Purism's real problem is: How do we bootstrap this device?

That is to say, there is simply not enough money / engineering talent to both develop all the hardware AND all the software needed to bootstrap this thing. It must appear "viable" to the public as a 1.0 product.

Therefore, using convergence to bootstrap the product and then building out native UI's in further versions is probably the best decision.