blake1

The main reason I always turn to finite differences is because the formula are so easy that I can get it right the first time without looking anything up. But the cancelation problems are very real, so I might have to look into this, because the formula isn't more complex.

The fear is that the nuclear weapons sitting in storage are assumed to be functional, but might turn out not to be. This could have dangerous geopolitical consequences. We can study how the materials age, but have to use simulation to understand the effects on the detonation given the test ban. This research helps calibrate the simulations.

The civilian applications of the facility are secondary, as others have pointed out.

Not really. The equipment to seal wells and pipelines against leaks would cost billions.

We need more generation, but solar is already cheaper than new natural gas built on the leaky network. It makes more economic sense to just overbuild your solar at these prices.

[1] $250mn for a single state: https://apnews.com/article/business-environment-and-nature-c...

Your first point is not supported by the data. The US Energy Information Agency keeps track of this[1], and the per capita energy use peaked around 2000.

And we are much better at running an energy-efficient economy: energy use/real $ GDP has halved in the last century.

The trend may not continue. People might start to do much more air travel (which would require massive runway building). Global warming might increase the need for AC. But my intuition is that there is some limit to the amount of energy one person can consume.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/pdf/sec1_13.pdf

I know of two examples from the Depression. In Germany, it was a deliberate policy. In France, it was a zealous adherence to the gold standard.

I am also bewildered. So many bad effects of deflation.

Do you mean fiscal policy? You absolutely can infuse trillions of dollars into the economy without causing inflation after the economy takes a $4T hit from a pandemic; the government spending will be what prevents disastrous deflation.

People worry about inflation, but forget how awful deflation is.

(And on a side-rant, it’s really bizarre how the hyperinflation of Weimar Germany is cited as enabling the rise of the Nazi party. The timing doesn’t work. They came to power during the depression-era deflation.)

I strongly agree with your last sentence, but the issue goes beyond operand order: the addressing syntax for AT&T is nigh incomprehensible to me.

So ~5T/person/year, let's plug in the Starship launch costs: at $1mn/T, this is only $500mn/year for the whole base. This seems a little too good to be true.

You seem to be right that the Jaguar is a poor car for road trips. A Hyundai Ioniq 5 will charge in half the time as a Jaguar I-Pace, and the car costs about a third less.

https://pod-point.com/guides/vehicles/hyundai/2021/ioniq-5

https://pod-point.com/guides/vehicles/jaguar/2018/i-pace

Requirements for an accounting system? That’d be hilarious if I wasn’t so traumatized by past experience. Seriously, the tensor product of jurisdictions, clients, strategies, and the various preferences of your rotating bosses—it’s a cascade of requirements that you could never satisfy.

Different architectures have their own function passing convention. It’s convenient to evaluate left-to-right, pushing as you go, if that matches the arch. And vice versa.

Agreed. This code just looks weird to me. Throwing from a constructor? Holding the result of new() in a temporary? This is just asking for trouble.

Another favorite “criticism” I have of C++ goes along the lines of “but someone could overload operator+ to be division!” I have only seen that as a contrived critic’s example, or a joke.

I think an unscrupulous developer would find 10% of $275mn to be a pretty big incentive. Sure it’s relatively less, but still a very large number.

Actually, I speak as someone who has lost a fair bit of money on algorithmic trading. The pattern I’ve observed is consistent, small gains punctuated by sizable losses. That was in a big market, but if the market segment is small enough, then I would certainly grant that your acquaintances could have had that success. Does put a cap on the gains.

If you’re looking for information on quantitative trading, and are considering relying on a YouTube channel, please just park your money in an index fund and go read about LTCM, Black Tuesday/Friday, Knight Capital, Orange County, and the Global Financial Crisis. Just remember, finance is not like betting on the ponies. It’s worse, because the odds aren’t posted.

It’s “Wildcat Banks,” with additional regulatory risk. Crypto in the form of Bitcoin is not systemically risky. Crypto in the form of “stable coins,” which are actually shadow banks, is risky.

Your quote proves my point that Keynesians are the opposite of “statists” when he talks about “technique, taste, population and institutions” driving investment decisions. That’s what I want to see in my economy. Do you disagree with that?

Not sure you’re reading the rest as intended either.

This is not a prescription for the government to drive down interest rates to zero so that no investor makes a profit, ever. It just means that when sufficient liquidity, the marginal return on capital should be zero, like any commodity. What’s wrong with that?

Not sure what the scope of your sarcasm covers. But there is no such person as a “Keynesian statist” outside a crypto subreddit.

Only a little part of Keynesianism involves the state, if you take a conventional definition of the theory. The only part that even involves the state isn’t all that controversial: people buying and selling is fine and self supporting, until the buyers don’t want to buy enough to support the sellers, which is the only time the government has to step in a buy stuff.

So Keynesians don’t put the state first. And the people who do put the state first don’t like all that buying and selling on the open market. Really disjoint philosophies.

Second this. Even in the most bike- or pedestrian-friendly neighborhood of Minneapolis, all of the near miss experiences I’ve had have been because of driver inattentiveness. Is there some tautology here—with truck drivers and pedestrians frequenting disjoint geographies? Certainly.

Reads like it was written by someone who reads many inflation “truthers,” but is too empirical to believe the hype. Correctly rejects the asset-price inflation theories, which hold that the stock market, Bitcoin, and fine art appreciations are evidence of hidden inflation. Also correctly points out the flaws in CPI, while ignoring the many improved inflation measures, like trimmed mean, the MIT billion price index, or the Fed’s preferred core PCE measure.

The short height is a serious problem.

I think we can make some conclusions about the power output for a given material input. Based on the the images, my assumptions are: 100m mast and 80m blades; for the vertical turbines, a radius of 50m. The blades look to be lighter weight, but the mast looks heaver weight, so say the two styles use similar amounts of materials. Also, windspeed is logarithmic with height.

Wind power goes as the cube of wind velocity over the swept area. With my assumptions, the vertical turbine outputs about 2.7MW, while the horizontal turbine outputs about 8.4MW. The reason is height: it helps to have the blades sweep more higher altitudes wind, where it's faster.

These might be easier to pack tightly into a windfarm, where the metric that matters is W/m^2. But most of us care about W/kg because that is proportional to W/$: the winner looks to be horizontal turbines because they reach higher.

A hybrid of horizontal behind vertical might be interesting. There are diminishing returns to how "deep" you can make your windfarm: the trailing edge suffers from turbulence from leading edge, and these could work better in turbulence.

Container ships are massive emitters of some pollutants like SO2, but not CO2.

Sources usually put the carbon number at around 3%.[1] this number has been rising in part because the denominator, global carbon emissions, has been falling as power has been emitting less.

[1] https://www.transportenvironment.org/what-we-do/shipping-and...

I agree with a lot of this VW seems to have done the “let’s rethink everything,” but much less successfully than Tesla. Not surprising giving their generations-long corporate legacy.

I’m kinda interested in the Nissan Arya, because it looks like they are trying to learn from the Leaf and make it attractive to not-terribly-into-EV buyers. It just looks like a very nice semi-luxury that has been engineered to be an EV, without rubbing it in your face that it’s an EV.

Batteries are quite likely to continue to decrease.[1] Most industrial processes follow a learning curve inverse to the cumulative units produced. And it makes sense: each efficiency improvement has a fixed cost, and only gets made if enough units get shipped.

Estimates I have seen are that LI is on a 13% annual decrease, which means that your $16k pack will be $4.5k by 2030.

By then, I would bet that the Honda Civic EV is cheaper than the Honda Civic ICE. In addition to the batter, there are fewer moving parts and simpler assembly, which means less labor; this type of manufacturing has barely started to scale up. Not guaranteed, but my estimates might turn out to be conservative.

And as for rare earths: as demand increases, it becomes increasingly profitable to extract marginal deposits. That's what fracking is, after all.

[1] https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/20/5276/pdf

And vaccine escape is non-binary as well. Variants able to do that may displace other variants, but be unable to push R0 over 1 in a largely vaccinated population. The "South African" variant B1351 can break through Pfizer, but it does seem to be controllable.[1]

A booster shot has already been developed, and I expect we'll be able to win the arms race against this virus.

[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.06.21254882v...

The initial tests prior to approval looked to see if severe infection could be reduced. Follow up studies have shown that they are also effective at preventing transmission.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/yes-vacci...

This comes up every now and again, and it's always just as meaningless. This current attempt to unmask the government's attempt to hide the real inflation is insinuating that the official statistics were changed to hide the reality.

The accepted definition of inflation is a general increase in prices.

The best measure of this is not self-evident, and CPI is an estimate of the cost of a basket of goods that represents basic living expenses. The old CPI series did not account for the quality and durability of the goods in the basket which was increasing over time.

Transportation is a big component of CPI, and it was observed that while newer cars cost more, they also last longer and have more features (airbags, antilock brakes, more reliable engines), which meant that CPI had become a hybrid inflation + technological advancement index.

There are various ways to fix this, but it's no conspiracy.

The US has administered 250 million shots, of which 7 million were J&J. These numbers, and the fact that the mRNA started trials earlier makes me proportionately less worried about surprise side effects for the mRNA shots.

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations

We’ve given the mRNA vaccines to enough people to be highly confident that your fears are ungrounded. The mRNA doesn’t linger more than a few hours. People received the vaccine a year ago.

Almost nothing bad will happen—with the current variants. Uncontrolled spread in a sub population will almost certainly lead to new variants emerging. Given the reduced effectiveness of current vaccines against certain variants, this is reckless.