bearbin

Electrical failure is relatively rare, but resistors are just as susceptible to mechanical and liquid damage, which is probably a more common failure than electrical degradation. Or a failure could cascade from another component and pop the resistor too.

Wholly aside from the privacy and control implications of this antifeature, these dots are actually a significant impediment to the normal use of my laser printer. Sure, they aren't visible when printing on to white paper in a single pass, but when printing on transparency or coloured paper they are very visible, and especially so when running multiple passes (for composition of images without a computer).

They also affect me when I use the printer for producing PCBs using the toner transfer method - the dots act as an etch resist and impose an uncorrectable noise of copper dots on to an otherwise excellent result.

Not really usable for wind turbines though, the energy cost would be significant first of all (compare the blade area of a wind turbine to a plane!) The bigger issue is maintenance. Wind turbine leading edges are a very hostile environment compared to a plane and even normal materials get abraded very quickly, plus they are expected to last for many years without significant maintenance. Anti-ice systems would just not be economical if they had to be maintained to a working condition at all times.

Hardly, similar emergency authorizations have been applied in other EU countries, in actuality these exemptions were applied last year and the UK is late in doing this... Not sure how the EU really comes into this at all.

https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/news/pesticides-efsa-examine-e...

Site appears down, there is an archived version available: https://archive.is/yT3Pp

Although EAFs aren't exactly 0 carbon either - even if the electricity and transportation are zero-carbon, the graphite electrodes they use are consumed in the melting operation. Approximately 5 Kg of Carbon is burned for each tonne of iron, releasing 20 Kg of CO2.

This article is mostly about hydrogen-fuelled direct reduction, the step before the the EAF. Some iron is already produced using DR but using conventional fossil fuels, and this plant would use renewable hydrogen instead of fossil carbon as the reducing agent.

Indeed, that is a possibility. It's possible both for the virus to be engineered and spread from the wet-market, and to be zoonotic and spread directly from the lab (where a sample was stored). Perhaps the ambiguity there does contribute to some of the more extreme opinions and discussion.

But this (escape from a vial in a lab) isn't a strong claim, or at least no stronger than the alternative (the virus escaped from bat in a a wet-market)- why is there no outcry against the wet market hypothesis?

Whenever this topic comes up, the discussion seems to consist largely of _extremely_ strong opinions against the perfectly plausible hypothesis (don't forget, the evidence of zoonotic origin is equally thin on the ground).

My question is, why? What does it matter whether the virus originated from a lab or from a wet market - it isn't any more dangerous if it came from a lab, nor does knowing the origin really help dealing with this crisis at all.

It is certainly interesting to know where it did originate, and that knowledge could inform a debate on the future of (respectively) wet markets and animal husbandry practices, or BSL facilities, but these don't strike me as particularly emotionally charged topics, and in any case the posts I'm referring to don't mention these debates...

Anybody care to explain why you would respond so strongly to claims of lab origin?

Actually, I realise there is another point here, namely the distinction between manufacturer, brand and retailer.

Brands are somewhat confusing to analyse: a brand may manufacture its own products, or it may buy them in; a brand may sell its own products, or it may leave this to conventional retailers. In its purest form the brand does neither and simply exists to advertise itself and collect rent from other market participants.

Generally, it seems that pure-play brands, and DTC sales by manufacturers, are fairly rare, while brands that also sell products to consumers, or that manufacture their prducts are the most common. So it seems that in reality, neither total specialisation as a pure-play brand nor as a triple-play fully vertically integrated brand is efficient, but instead some combination of branding with another function is optimal.

Indeed, there's nothing _wrong_ with direct-to-consumer sales and there are certainly some advantages as a purchaser - not least avoiding any chance of getting counterfeit goods. But there are certainly downsides too.

Especially with the advent of internet shopping, improved delivery speeds, and reduction in cultural inertia, going direct has become more convenient. That said, while DTC shopping may be _more_ convenient than before, it's still noticeably _less_ convenient than retail shopping. This is displayed by the overwhelming preference of consumers for such resellers as Amazon (the likes of which take an extortionate fee, and provide very little for the consumer beyond a single storefront, fast postage and financial trustworthiness).

> I know Walmart gets lower quality products than other places and whatnot, and manufacturers make subtle adjustments to products to meet resellers' desired price points.

This, and more generally the market data held by retailers, is also a benefit of retailers. By aggregating information about purchases of many different consumers over many different brands, retailers are able to drive product development towards products they know will sell even if these preferences will not be expressed directly by consumers or manufacturers.

To summarise, going back to your original point:

> What's the problem with [manufacturers selling direct to consumers]

Manufacturers know how to make things, they don't know _what_ things to make, or how to sell them to consumers. An market where only DTC sales were allowed would have products that consumers generally want less than they do now, with worse service.

Aggregated retail is beneficial to both consumers, because they have a many competitive locations, at each of which then can buy many varieties of good. Similarly this benefits manufacturers, as they can specialise in manufacture rather than retail. Such aggregation increases the efficiency of the economy.

Limiting retail would therefore decrease global efficiency, going against the principle that taxes should not incentivise inefficient behaviours.

rickets, not crickets

It had HTTP originally, twitter just munged it.

Relevant context: https://twitter.com/zofrex/status/1319286955314614275

Apparently the name used to be

    \"><SCRIPT SRC=MJT.XSS.HT></SCRIPT> LTD

NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is the registrar I use. They're a web hosting company, so domain registration is not their only service, but they have an excellent company philosophy and customer-friendly policy set.

I've been using them for about 10 years now, and they have been extremely reliable, zero-maintenance; and the web-interface is very easy to use and logically organised. (no javascript!)

Their prices aren't too bad either, since domain registration isn't their main priority.

Only downside is that they don't support all domain types, only the legacy GTLDs and a small list of new ones: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/domains

Yes and no. The recent issue with the NYT is certainly the immediate trigger of Scott Alexander's decision to change jobs; but it seems to me at least that this course of action was inevitable (once the blog became popular).

If (you feel that) your job is incompatible with a personal association to a popular 'rationalist' blog, and you write a rationalist blog under your own partial name, and it then becomes popular - well you will have to take that decision at some point - resign, or shut down the blog.

Scott has put off that decision as long as he could, and the NYT journalist's behaviour certainly forced him in one direction; but fundimentally this controversy is of his own creation.

Evidently he has taken the logical decision that the blog matters more to him (or there are more opportunities as the writer of a popular blog) than his old job and he's actioned this; I don't think it's fair to characterise this as the New York Times 'costing him his job'.

For pedestrians, yes that type of road is fairly dangerous. But for cars it's not too bad, drivers know they need to pay attention and nobody is going at high speeds. It's also easier than you might think to see oncoming cars, especially when it's dark and their headlights are on.

Fortunately/unfortunately that type of road is becoming slightly less prevalent, as efficient modern farming means hedges are maintained less than they were historically and they either get chopped down or neglected and end up growing into larger trees that are much easier to see through.

As a reflective display, you want to optimise for the percentage of useful light reflected back to the user. Switching the white (or black) out for another colour will necessarily reduce the contrast ratio of the display, which is of course not ideal when you don't have much light to work with in the first place (as it's a reflective display after all). That's why reflective LCD displays were pretty much a disaster, since the LCDs require a polarisng filter which absorbs a large portion of the light, and reflective colour LCDs more so, because that multiplies with the effect of the colour filters.

Of course, you could simply make a matrix of tri-tone capsules, with white, black and colour. Then you have the contrast ratio and the colour space advantages. I don't know why this hasn't been done, I'm not an expert on e-Ink!

It is possible (and yes, I tried it!), although other payment methods are available, including some more conventional methods.

Not that I have any stake in the accuracy of electricitymap's statistics, but I don't think there's any point seperating out OCGT from CCGT generation. OCGT makes up a negligible share of realised generation (and indeed, even generation capacity is rather limited). The few plants that are still in operation need very specific market conditions to make their operation worthwhile, especially considering that 3x CO2 output means 3X fuel input, and 3x fuel costs. It's better to think of them as grid-stability mechanisms, like diesel generators, or the industrial load-shedding schemes.

I'm forced to use a Mac for work, and I use yabai. It's far superior to the default mac experience, which seems to be designed to actively hide windows and make your life more difficult, but it's still a pain to use. It's obviously a hack and that makes itself known in daily usage - dialog boxes are tiled just like regular windows, or alternatively hidden behind the tiled windows where they're inaccessible; suspending and resuming randomly messes up the position of my windows; and the stupid mac detached-titlebar is almost unusable when you drag your mouse over another program and the focus gets yanked away.

Customisation and configuration are also plainly inferior to i3/sway, plus there's the complicated installation process and necessity to disable apple's walled garden features to get full functionality.

At home I have i3/sway, which is a nice polished user experience; there's no comparison really.

I think the poor optimisation performance described in this post is really a deliberate tradeoff made by the go compiler team. Rather than producing highly-optimised code for the best performance in some cases (which is often a fool's errand anyway), the compiler produces good enough code; quickly, and its architecture is not overly complicated by advanced optimisation procedures.

In my experience, go's high compilation speed compared to C++ is a great help to development, and I would gladly give away complicated optimisations for this enhancement. For high-throughput programs, time spent on manual optimisation or architectural work has a much higher payout than the marginal improvements of optimising compilers, when considering the continuous cost of slow compilation.

Unfortunately there don't really appear to be many good alternatives.

https://pricesearcher.com seems to be a fairly featureful replacement for Pre-2012 Google Shopping/Product Search/Froogle, but it's UK only and I'm not sure about its long-term survival prospects (and it doesn't include eBay listings).

> Froogle (est 2002) and has continued to exist as one incarnate or the other

Indeed, this article is about Froogle (now Google Shopping search) moving back from the change Google made in 2012 to become a paid advertising platform rather than a open-index search engine.

Before they made that change and simultaneously rebranded from Google Product Search to Google Shopping you could make a search there and be fairly sure of finding lots of websites selling what you wanted, and you could compare prices between them easily. But Google didn't get a cut, so now if you repeated the same search, if you get relevant results at all you'll only get the bottom of the barrel shops with inflated prices.

Google certainly has tried to attack Amazon, but the only way they're trying to reduce that duopoly is to insert themselves as a monopoly player! By heavily promoting their advertising platform and pushing deep integrations between merchants and their platform they're forcing out smaller independent shops and marketplaces.

Trying to recreate Amazon, just better, is doomed to failure. The alternative of iterating on their at-the-time working product and extending the usability and visibility of alternative options would have been far better. Amazon's ridiculous 20% fees would get found out soon enough if consumers could actually see a viable alternative.

All that considiered, a better replacement for Paypal integrated with Google and other services is something missing from the world and it's a shame their lack of commitment meant Google Pay hasn't taken off in most places.

This is a good move but several years too late. Google has already squandered it's lead in shopping when they replaced an excellent shopping search engine with a crippled advertising board that neither shows the cheapest prices nor a wide variety of products to buy. This has been compounded by introducing absolutely no substantitive improvements to the product over the past few years.

Meanwhile, because nobody used the useless shopping search, the homepage search experience has been ruined by the assumption that every search is somebody who wants to buy something.

And let's not speak of the amazon/ebay duopoly that's developed. Google could have fought against that but chose not to in the hope of slightly increased advertising revenue.

In technology, it seems to be the case that once some fact is old enough to be known as gospel, the world will have moved on enough that it's not true anymore.

And when challenged by the new norm, the old guard repeat their gospel louder and in greater numbers! So if you hear some technological rule of thumb repeated often enough, you should doubt it even more than if you hadn't heard it at all.

Thanks for letting me know, I've replaced them with archived versions.

I have compiled an index of the new stories arranged by year of publication on my website, which is a bit easier to navigate than scrolling through the (incomplete) list on the Register website: https://bearbin.net/bofh

By that logic, nobody is a shareholder at all, thanks to the magic of Cede and Co. [1] The only real owners are the holders of the physical stock certificates - and almost nobody does this in real life for numerous reasons.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cede_and_Company