ccalloway

The thing about burning gas for heat in your home is that it's either very clean, or there is something seriously wrong with your system. There is no scope for it causing 'respiratory issues' except in a setup so broken that it's not legal (or shouldn't be legal) to operate.

Unlike for example a wood stove which might release some smoke into your house, at a level where it's not good for you, but not violently toxic.

Obviously my original example, "saying that if you don't need to go to hospital while on vacation, you have wasted money on travel insurance" perfectly fits your definition of economic loss.

You didn't directly address anything I said in my post or explain why you think I am poorly informed..

I used to work for National Grid in the Miliband era; I worked, among other things, on theorizing a replacement to the 'circle diagram' for the (then thought to be) coming renewables regime.

That doesn't make sense. Most electricity is consumed in the South-East. Generating power in Scotland means that most of it has to be transmitted across the length of the UK, whereas generating it in the South-East means that it doesn't place such a burden on the transmission network. Therefore, it makes sense that the Scottish generators are charged more for use of the grid.

But for most of the time, the marginal cost of electricity is the same across the UK. The transmission network is not usually maxed out, and this means that generation anywhere can meet supply anywhere for minimal cost.

Consumers already pay per-unit electricity costs which are fixed over a billing period, regardless of whether gross prices exceeded the consumer price, or dropped below zero, for small intervals during that period. So it wouldn't really make any sense to charge different prices in Scotland and England, only for the periods when they actually diverged due to lack of transmission. And if this occasional discrepancy was averaged over a billing period, it would probably be much too small to really affect demand.

But by framing it as a problem of 'curtailment', it looks like a problem which gets worse and worse, the more oversupply of wind capacity that we have. In actual fact, this does not make any sense.

Building additional wind generation can never be more wasteful than the costs of its construction. If it were free, it would make sense to vastly overbuild.

This isn't a real economic loss. Claiming it is, is tantamount to saying that if you don't need to go to hospital while on vacation, you have wasted money on travel insurance.

There is a hierarchy of time availability of power supply:

  1. power available when you want it, and you can choose on the fly
  2. power available when you want it as long as you know in advance
  3. power available at a time that you don't choose, but you can predict
  4. power available at a time that you can neither choose not predict

Examples are (roughly) 1: gas or hydro, 2: nuclear or coal, 3: sun or tidal, 4: wind. You can also think of demand types that require each of these levels or better. Of course each of these categories contains its own sliding scale of how far in advance you have to decide or can predict. Wind is not completely unpredictable, but it is further down this hierarchy than almost any other source of generation.

Moving generation up this hierarchy, or demand down it, is always going to give some benefit. Well designed power markets should make sure that there is some fair incentive for any such step.

You are absolutely right. Building pylons through much of England means dealing with highly organized NIMBYism - from people who care a lot about their local 'environment' but very little about catastrophic floods or fires in other countries, and highly opportunistic landowners who can name their price for use of their land.

It can be designed for, but it wasn't designed for when current UK nukes were built; they were intended to replace baseline coal plant.

The deformity in the general population affects 0.24% of male babies, so 0.12% of the population.

This does explain why Playstations are not dynamically priced, but it fails to explain why concert tickets are not dynamically priced.

By this definition everything that can be resold is dynamically priced.

The GP was trying to explain why airline tickets, but not consumer goods, are dynamically priced when sold by the original vendors.

The problem with this is that a person who makes a mistake when doing something is much more likely than someone else to make a mistake when evaluating that same piece of work.

It bears no relation to the risk of revenue loss for the airline. It is based on demand. An airline runs hundreds of flights a day, and it knows that a certain percentage are going to be less than full. It tries to optimize as best it can. You on the other hand are going to be seriously annoyed if you have to change your plans and you lose hundreds of dollars, maybe a significant proportion of the money you have for your trip. They are going to charge you based on the price you're willing to pay for peace of mind, far lower than the cost to them. After all, most people do use the plane tickets they have booked.

The solution is to self-insure by having $1000, or whatever, ready for if you need it for increased travel costs or other emergencies. And try to avoid feeling either anger or regret if you have to change your plans. If you don't have a spare few hundred bucks then this method isn't available to you.

Tickets for the theater and for concerts are also generally sold for considerably below the price that the market will bear, with enormous effort put into ineffectively preventing resale, despite the tickets being 'perishable' in your sense.

2 is roughly 10^(0.3)

Suppose that you take powers of 2, and then divide by 10 if it's greater than 10.

    2^7 ~= (10^(0.3))^7 = 10^2.1 --> 10^(2.1 mod 1) = 10^0.1
    2^4 ~= (10^(0.3))^4 = 10^1.2 --> 10^(1.2 mod 1) = 10^0.2
    2^1 ~= (10^(0.3))^1 = 10^0.3 --> 10^(0.3 mod 1) = 10^0.3
    2^8 ~= (10^(0.3))^8 = 10^2.4 --> 10^(2.4 mod 1) = 10^0.4
    ...

where the arrow denotes dividing out as many powers of 10 as you can.

It seems surprising that the numbers are in the right order but of course it's not. Doing lexicographic sort and then dividing out powers of 10 is the same as dividing out powers of 10 and then just doing a numeric sort. So the lex sort is a sort of (accidental) legerdemain here.

The powers to which you raise 2 are given by the inverses of 1, 2, 3 etc mod 10. In other words you're raising (10^0.3) to a power k, chosen so that the remainder 0.3 * k mod 1 is the multiple of 0.1 that you need.

    1 / 3 mod 10 = 7
    2 / 3 mod 10 = 4
    3 / 3 mod 10 = 1
    4 / 3 mod 10 = 8
    ...

They are also given by multiples of 7 mod 3.

We only know about the ones that get caught.

The hunters said 'a tree might fall on you and kill you'? This is supposed to be a nugget of ancient wisdom. Now it turns out it's actually a coconut falling out of the tree? Are you providing this extra information? Or was it somehow implicit in the original telling?

Is it possible that both the original teller, the reteller and you too, are starting from the (unfounded) assumption that the hunters know what they're talking about, and are adapting the facts to fit this assumption?

or perhaps the main difference between Papua New Guinea and the GP's location is that people feel entitled to make up weird questionable stories about PNG and not about their place.

It seems like 1:5000 is not an accurate probability, but just a number which he chose in order to convince himself that sleeping under a tree was not a risky activity. But he chose a bad number and later realized that an argument based on that number was not convincing.

If the chance was actually 1:5000, the longevity of trees would be similar to that of hunters sleeping under them - or lower, since hunters can sometimes avoid the hazard, but trees are exposed to it every night (and all day as well). Actual data on tree mortality seems to indicate that the chances are much lower than this. Almost certainly they do not make sleeping under trees a significant risky activity.

M = string length and M = number of different possible values are very, very different. One is the exponential of the other.

It makes some sense. You don't want to accidentally make some of your edits on one version and some of them on the other version. That would mean that you end up with wrong data, and also have to slowly unwind your changes correctly, if you want to get back the original.

So you have to arbitrarily choose one and keep in your mind that that's the one to be edited. You could choose the 'bottom' one. But because object persistence is pervasive, you choose the 'new' one.

By the notion of distance from the article (great circle distance around the earth), Lisbon to New York is considerably shorter than the current record.

Well, no. The shortest rail distance between two points is very very short, because you can choose the two points very close to one another.

What if the longest distance meant "longest shortest rail distance between two points".

Ie, the longest track distance between any two places on Earth, subject to the constraint that there is no shorter train journey between those two points.

This seems to me to be a much more logical, and also more interesting, interpretation of the question than the one used in the article.

OK, the Unix philosophy holds that this is one of the most important things, and therefore it's easy to do in shell.

But what if it's not? It's perfectly easy to write code to do the same thing in a programming language without invoking any other executables, let alone piping the output of one into the input of another. So the claim that this functionality is what makes Unix and shell scripting effective is vacuous. They are good at doing something which would not be necessary if one was not using them.

For example, the latter is testable.

Did you read or understand my original comment?

I specifically named awk as a way of solving these type of problems that has a similar applicability and maturity to a scripting language. My real objection is to long chains of cut, head, cat, grep, and so on. I also think that utilities like jq and xargs, which were invented exactly to allow people to do things in shell one-liners which are trivial in a proper language, are worse than useless.

I didn't say that no one should use awk, or no one should use the command line.

In fact I didn't say that no one should use pipes with head, cut and grep either. I just said that most reasons to use them were no longer valid.

Nothing is wrong with them if 1) you have a specifically suited, niche problem and you understand the complexities and tradeoffs of the tool OR 2) it's not a critical requirement to solve the problem using modern, efficient tools AND you want to use something else for fun or learning or whatever.

If this isn't the case, stay away.