Vancouver BC is magical and (IMO) one of the most beautiful cities in the world. In July & August, hands down the most beautiful place in the world, but still, 8 months of the year it's dark, wet and cold. If you're passionate about getting into the mountains or on the water and you can tolerate the rain, it's a wonderful place. Lots of wealthy people in Vancouver own boats to go sailing in the summer and a condo in Whistler to ski in the winter and their quality of life unbeatable. On the other hand, I know a couple people who moved from Vancouver to Canmore, Alberta because they still got their fill of mountains, but they traded a bit colder of climate for significantly more days of sunshine. It's all a trade-off in the end. Regarding affordability: Vancouver is expensive if you're working for a local company & paid in CAD, but if you're earning a US salary (esp Bay Area), Vancouver feels substantially more affordable than most large US cities (again, IMO, it's very hard to compare cost-of-living between countries).
The disservice is the causal inference that global warming is behind all the recent natural disasters. The sentence I quoted could be better written as:
> Many scientists believe that with a warming climate, certain natural disasters, such as floods, heatwaves and wildfires will become more frequent as well as severe. Scientists also say the world has warmed by about 1.1C which they believe has already begun to increase the frequency and severity of natural disasters and, as climate change continues to warm the plant, anticipate further increases in the frequency and severity of these disasters.
Or whatever. I'm not a climate scientist. The point is, nobody can say for certain that the current set of natural disasters is climate change, or sheer luck. That's not a political statement, that's a scientific statement of fact. Science cannot change the facts to suit it's disposition, regardless of its good intentions.
> With only 1.1C of warming so far, the world has seen a torrent of deadly weather disasters intensified by climate change in recent months, from asphalt-melting heatwaves to flash floods and untameable wildfires.
I'm really bothered by the recent trend in science reporting to take a carte blanche approach to attributing every natural disaster to climate change. Yes, it's indisputable that climate change is absolutely changing our weather patterns, and it's very probably causing and/or strengthening the consequences of disasters happening now, but it's just plain bad science reporting to lump up all recent natural disasters and go "see! Climate change!". And yes, I'm aware that this might be the only way to catch people's attention to the current crisis, but that doesn't excuse the disservice to bone fide science reporting.
$12k for the airframe. Each engine (4x) is another $8k. I wouldn't be surprised if the out-the-door cost of the airframe, engines, avionics and controls surpasses $50k.
I agree. Most of the comments are disappointingly poor and as a result there's little actual critical discussion.
I was really hoping to chime into a fruitful discussion about positive vs negative protection of the first amendment rights. 1A says "... Congress shall make no law ..." but California's Constitution (for example) goes farther to say "Every person may freely speak, write and publish his or her sentiments on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of this right". This lead to the fascinating Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins Supreme Court case[0] which surfaced the careful distinction between the two senses of Free Speech and the government's obligation to protect it. Where does an org like ACLU stand on what precisely defines Free Speech, and, the responsibilities of each State, Federal Govt and NGO like itself to protect it?
IANAL, just someone who hoped we'd discuss things a bit more carefully on HN.
I don't think you're being downvoted for criticizing the F-35 and instead, being downvoted for thinking the A-10 and F-22 programs were epitomes of engineering excellence. The A-10 suffered from wing cracks; the F-22 continues to suffocate it's pilots. In terms of engineering excellence, I'd say the F-16 or F/A-18 programs were far more successful at developing a successful, useful, adaptable and delivered on-time warplane.
So... this thing phones home to activate every time you jump on your motorcycle? I would absolutely love to be the lawyer who's client sustained life threatening injuries because your server was temporarily down precisely when it needed to verify DRM on a motorcycle airbag.
Elasticsearch is a no-sql database that optimizes for full-text searches, built atop Apache Lucene. If you're doing any kind of full-text search, for example, if you're trying to index a university library and make it searchable, then elasticsearch is for you. If you're not, I'd look elsewhere.
Everyone has a "premature optimization is the root of all evil" story and I'm no different. I learned Dvorak years ago in university and stuck with it, thinking it would make me a better 'professional' programmer since I could type faster. Oh, how naive I was. Over a decade later, I've made the switch between dvorak and qwerty several times, and it really isn't too hard to switch, after an afternoon using a different layout I'll reach a reasonable WPM. Lately I've stuck to dvorak although I'm still reasonably fluent in Qwerty and I do occasionally go back to qwerty to ensure I'm still somewhat fluent. What really does me in when using another computer is the standard staggered keyboard layout since I've been living on an Ergodox Infinity for over a year now. Once you've grown accustomed to an columnar arranged keyboard, it's incredibly difficult to go back to a staggered layout.
Being patient and buying used is entirely the way to go for furniture. I'm typing up this comment sitting at a nearly perfect condition solid oak desk my girlfriend found at an estate sale and paid $100 for. In a similar story, we found our vintage solid wood pineapple bed for $35 on craigslist. There's no way you could buy, let alone make, either of these pieces for 10x the price.
In a past life I owned a full size metal tanker desk I bought $40, stripped down to bare metal and I loved that desk until I had to give it up when I moved countries.
People don't like buying used, but furniture doesn't wake up one morning refusing to work because a dependency is no longer available.
It's enough for me to have an extremely bad taste in my mouth, that goes for both Azure and Canonical. On the topic of linux distros, we do use Ubuntu, mostly because that's often the least effort distro to spin up, but the choice of distro is fairly arbitrary nowadays, especially for Ubuntu. My current employer uses AWS so the question of switching platforms probably won't arise now, but whether it's at this company, a new company, or my own side projects, you can bet the decision over which platform to use will come up, and horror stories like this aren't easily forgotten.
As a Canadian in a happy relationship with an American, we quickly realised the difference that you've pointed out. We also realised that I had a tinge of the stereotypical Canadian "sooorry" sound, so we ran with it. If it's a situation where one of us intends to express remorse for a situation occurring, we slightly intonate towards the "o" sound, and for situations where we're accepting blame, we edge towards the American "sarry" (again, over emphasized to get the point across). It's subtle, but it's worked well for us.
Government != military. The military has its own logistics command that, like the parent comment mentions, is unbelievably well tuned. Vaccines are something they do extremely well-- every sailor, soldier and airman in the entire 5 arm military needs regular vaccinations, even when deployed. Can't have GI Joe catching a flu, giving to the rest of the battalion only to sitout the rest of the conflict. All the stuff you need to safely distribute a vaccine, they've got, and know how to use it. Things like a chain of custody to keep cold things cold, and SLAs to meet perishable goods requirements, transport and delivery from remote locations with little infrastructure, the command and management to ensure enough supply gets to where it needs to be, etc. From what my friends who served in the Navy & Air Force said, they don't fuck around with vaccines. You get lined up, jabbed or misted with the vaccine and sent on your way. There's no reason they can't scale up from hundreds of thousands of soldiers to millions of civilians.
Oh boy. Someone high up in the WF foodchain didn't do their homework before deciding this policy. Wearing poppies in Canada is a big deal. Fun fact, Canada used to celebrate Thanksgiving the same date as America, but they pulled it 6 weeks forward so it wouldn't crowd the mourning period around Remembrance Day (Nov 11). That's just how serious Canada is about this particular holiday. Although an old hockey commentator got fired last year for ranting about how immigrants don't wear enough poppies, there's widespread support from every section of Canada about wearing poppies and in general paying some respect to the war effort around Remembrance Day. Outside of Don Cherry's rants though, people rarely make a political statement about it. It's just one of those things you do.
> I think it's safe to assume that overall drug use won't go down under this policy
I don't exactly think people actively weigh the probability of punishment when considering to consume drugs. There's a wealth of research that suggests stiffer penalties don't dissuade drug use. If this is true, then the inverse is likely true.
I also think it's fairly well understood that traffickers thrive best in an illegal marketplace, since the threat of violence and imprisonment is effectively a barrier to entry for people with less violent means. If the outcomes of marijuana legalization hold true for other drugs, we'll see more market participation from legal organizations and that additional market competition will drive the violent cartels into other unregulated markets where their competitive advantage in violence can be better leveraged. The takeaway is that violent cartels work best when they can exploit their advantage in violence. Take away that advantage by making the market legal, and you cut the economic legs out from those organizations.
The big difference between the Ergo/Moonlander and UHK is ortho vs staggered layout. Ortho (rather, "ortholinear") is an increasing common layout where the keys are arranged in straight rows and columns. The jury is out on whether it's useful, but legions of OLKB fans swear by it. Also, UKB hasn't shipped yet, where the Ergodox has been out for years, and there's excellent support for flashing using QMK. The Moonlander just landed (heh) a few months ago, I haven't heard too much about it, except that finding custom keycaps for the thumb console is going to be hard/impossible. I guess that's the biggest hindrance of all these ergonomic keyboards: it's really hard to find custom keycaps.
I didn't consider those second order effects. When I wrote my comment, I had in mind only the dollar cost of averting the disaster. When we spend whatever trillions of dollars shutting the economy down and limiting output, we necessarily take from other priorities, like strengthening emissions controls, or making cars safer, or re-wilding spaces, or spending money on providing people with affordable preventative medicine that could extend the duration of life.
The better question that Sweden may help answer is whether shutting down the economy was worth it. Was the deaths of 5,500 people worth keeping the economy open, in other words, could you have saved more lives by pursuing other health priorities and let covid run it's courses as Sweden elected to do?
I'm highly skeptical of this ever taking flight (heh).
He says this will enable a single pilot to conduct many more cargo flights per day than is currently possible, significantly reducing costs for air freight carriers. “Today, with the concept of operations and the patterns in which they fly the aircraft, the pilot is grossly underutilized,” he says.
I'm not aware of any significant cargo flights using C-172 aircraft because they're just too small to be economical. There is cargo flown with larger C-208 aircraft, but at that point, the cost of the pilot is a small fraction of the cost of operating the aircraft. Think about it: the pilot is only going to cost you a few hundred dollars a day in wages, whereas a 208 costs at least $500/hour to operate[0]. Pilot wages aren't the limiting factor holding back thousands of these micro-cargo planes from operating, it's the economics of operating an aircraft. Finally, there's an old adage about flying that's particularly pertinent: "being an airline pilot is 99% boredom followed by 1% of sheer terror." When everything is going smoothly, flying an aircraft is _easy_. When thing's don't go well, well, that's when you need a pilot.
Very disappointed. I've been a Dark Sky API user since 2015. It's a huge disappointment that a cash flush, closed ecosystem company is purchasing and shutting down a unique data source for point prediction weather forecasts.
I'd amend your post further to say that the mortality rate ∝ rate of infection b/c the more attention healthcare staff can give to each infected person, the greater their likelihood of survival will be. In addition, the illness vastly affects a subset of the population more than others, should we be able to isolate the young and elderly so that we have fewer of those cases to treat, we have a good chance at lowering the mortality rate.
It's taught in even the most basic teaching curriculum. I learned about it as a teenager learning to teach swimming. To be honest, it's nothing new or special, and I mean, I don't know where you're coming at with the snarky comment about management, but humans are human and sometimes _how you say something_ matters as much as _what you say_. Nobody likes taking criticism, so it helps blunt the blow, while still allowing for critical feedback to be communicated and heard.
It turns out that aircraft have a very sensitive centre of gravity that needs to be close to the centre of lift. If you were to design a "battery bomb" you'd have to carefully engineer the pre- and post-bombing centre of mass and ensure that your control surfaces can respond adequately. In addition, you'll need bomb-bay doors and associated mechanics which adds mass and complexity. All of this takes a toll of efficiency, cost and reliability. However, it's an intriguing idea, especially if you use steerable parachutes that can neatly fly themselves back home, maybe all the way into a recharging slot.
I've heard so much about Estonia's digital economy, but I struggle to see the effect it has on it's own economy. Now, my data might be bad, but a cursory look at Estonia's GDP growth rate shows perfectly normal growth alongside Lithuania and Latvia [0]. Using Latvia and Lithuania to control for a digital economy, Estonia should see greater growth, but it doesn't. If going head-first into a digital economy had a significant pay-off, it should show up in the data. Until it does, I'm still sceptical.
Can you just not let it dry up a little bit more and sell it as sea-salt? I suspect it's not that easy, but on the other hand, the Bay Area has lots of "salt fields" where seawater is dried into useable salt.
As another poster mentioned, when countries don't trade, they lose their comparative advantage in producing the products that they can produce most efficiently. With free trade, countries can focus on building the products that they're most efficient at producing. Now, it's important to bring that with free trade, the distribution of benefits is not equal. Those who produce a product that is now competitive in the global market stand to gain. Those who produce products that now face cheaper foreign competition stand to lose. It can be shown that the gains are always larger than the losses, but there may not be an effective mechanism to re-distribute the benefits and losses so that everyone wins. This is known as Kaldor-Hicks efficiency.
I've dived ~1 mile away from anchored cruise ships and it's jarring, and frankly, pretty scary how loud they are. I can only imagine how the whales feel.