chroma

Fukushima shows that even early nuclear reactors are incredibly safe. You take an aging plant based on an outdated design, construct it in an unsafe location, then hit it with the fifth-largest earthquake ever recorded, then hit it with a 20 foot high tsunami, and then it explodes... and what were the casualties? One worker and maybe 50 early deaths due to cancers. A typical coal power plant kills more people every year from the air pollution it spews out. And don't forget that the cause of the meltdown was an earthquake and tsunami that killed 20,000 people!

If we judged other forms of power generation the way we judge nuclear, we simply wouldn't have electricity.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was established in 1975. Since then, no plant license that was initially submitted to the NRC has started operations.

Plant Vogtle was approved by the Atomic Energy Commission (the predecessor to the NRC). Their license was grandfathered in. Building this reactor required a new reactor license (not plant license). Shortly after the reactor design was approved and construction started, the federal government added new rules about containment vessels being resilient to passenger aircraft impact. The NRC applied these rules retroactively, causing the containment vessel to be redesigned and construction to be halted.[1] The companies working with the NRC are reluctant to criticize regulators, as they fear retaliation from the NRC. The NRC supervises and approves each step of nuclear reactor construction, making it very difficult to schedule work with contractors and suppliers. Honestly, it's amazing this plant was built at all.

1. https://www.ans.org/news/article-1646/root-cause-of-vogtle-a...

How would that work? Would the government use money from taxes to pay the drug companies for their costs, plus some profit margin?

What hypothetical evidence would cause you to change your mind about allowing American doctors to prescribe drugs approved by the EU?

At this point I don’t know what could change your mind. Your response to any criticism of the FDA or any proposed fix is to say that we need to make the FDA more competent, as if that’s not what people have been trying to do since the FDA was created. Unless you provide details about what would be different from what we’re already doing, you’re just arguing for the status quo.

It’s as if I were pointing out the uselessness of most TSA screening and someone replied that the solution is to make the TSA more competent.

I’d change my mind if there were more examples of harmful drugs in Europe or Canada that the FDA blocked in the US. The thalidomide scandal was over 60 years ago and caused around 4,000 deaths and 6,000 birth defects. You’d need a dozen thalidomide scandals to equal the FDA’s delays in approving beta blockers.

There is no reason because it wasn’t a deliberate choice. Different countries created their own standards bodies and didn’t try to coordinate until later. The same thing happened with safety regulations around automobiles and aircraft. Fortunately in those cases, most countries have coordinated and manufacturers can sell the same vehicle in different countries with little extra effort. But for rare diseases with cheap treatments (such as in the case of Omegaven), nobody has the both the resources and the desire to overcome the FDA’s bureaucratic hurdles.

It seems that if the Canadian and European regulatory bodies are incompetent or too quick to approve meds, it would show up in some statistics, right? Maybe their life expectancies would be lower or they would have higher rates of certain kinds of deaths. Yet if anything, it’s the US that lags in those areas.

There are tons of examples of the FDA failing to approve things, resulting in Americans dying unnecessarily. A more recent example was Omegaven, an IV nutritional fluid.[1] The FDA took 14 years to approve it, resulting in hundreds of infant deaths. Before its approval, only a few infants at Boston Children’s Hospital managed to get it. The staff there had to get FDA approval to import the fluid from Europe for every infant they wanted to treat, resulting in a lag time of several days. Even though it was clear that Omegaven was much more effective than previous IV nutrition, the FDA’s bureaucratic hurdles prevented it from being adopted sooner.

1. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adumbrations-of-aducan...

I’m saying that the FDA’s strictness cuts both ways. My beta blocker example was not a hypothetical.

Europe approved the use of beta blockers to prevent heart attacks a decade before the US. Although the FDA approved propranolol in the 1960s, and timolol for glaucoma in 1978, they didn’t approve beta blockers for prevention of second heart attacks until the 1980s. This resulted in the deaths of over 80,000 Americans. Amusingly the New York Times article about this approval brags about how many people will be helped by the previously-banned medicine.[1] Nowhere is it pointed out that so many more people could have been saved if the FDA fast-tracked drugs approved in Europe.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/1982/02/02/science/new-class-of-drug...

But that’s the problem. No regulatory body has perfect judgement, so they’ll all approve some harmful things and ban some helpful things. If you’re so strict that you don’t allow thalidomide, you’ll also ban stuff like beta blockers for an extra decade, causing 80,000 deaths. The argument in favor of loosening restrictions is that it would reduce overall death and suffering.

For those who are curious, the term was coined on this blog post[1]:

> The Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics says that you can have a particle spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time – until you look at it, at which point it definitely becomes one or the other. The theory claims that observing reality fundamentally changes it.

> The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster. I don’t subscribe to this school of thought, but it seems pretty popular.

The post provides real life examples of government programs, nonprofits, and individuals being criticized for helping in the “wrong” way.

1. https://web.archive.org/web/20210125231725/https://blog.jaib...

Has any country voluntarily decreased car usage? Even the Netherlands has seen per capita private car ownership increase over time. Cars are very compelling and useful products. That’s why they’re preferred by heads of state and rich people.

Car usage will only decrease when someone invents something better.

The Kubernetes implementation is on the server side, not the car. The only way to control the car is through Tesla's API,[1] and that doesn't let you do dangerous stuff like turn the wheel while someone is driving.

Even if you could overwrite the software on the car, you'd still have to contend with the physical controls available to the driver. The steering wheel is physically connected to a typical rack and pinion setup. The brake pedal is physically connected to hydraulic lines just like every other car on the road. And like most cars, the brakes are more powerful than the motor.

1. There's no official documentation but a big chunk of it has been reverse engineered: https://tesla-api.timdorr.com/vehicle/commands

It's in reference to a company owning a fleet of Teslas, not Tesla owning the fleet.[1] The point of this reference implementation is to make it easier for companies that own a bunch of Teslas to collect data about their cars.

1. https://www.tesla.com/fleet

That may be mostly true in the US, but many other parts of the world are more authoritarian.

For example, Australia passed a law forcing Google to negotiate with news publishers regarding payment.[1]

When France passed a law requiring that Google pay news sites for linking to them, Google tried to stop linking to those sites. In response, France sued Google for half a billion dollars for antitrust violations.

1. https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/25/after-facebooks-news-flex-...

There have been a lot of ridiculous things in cryptocurrency land, but what's wrong with Basic Attention Token? It has been around for six years and seems to solve the problem of paying content creators via microtransactions. The only wrinkle is that finance laws force everyone to verify their identity with a government-issued ID before transacting BAT.[1] This is a problem for all microtransactions, not just cryptocurrency.

1. https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032158891-Wha...

Google isn't circumventing paywalls. Most paywalled sites whitelist search engines so that their content gets crawled and more people visit them.

They're more than a few years behind SpaceX. SpaceX reached a similar milestone back in 2016, when they test fired a subscale Raptor engine[1] that produced 1 meganewton (~100Tf) of thrust.[2]

By 2019, they'd tested their full size Raptor at 1.5 meganewtons (172Tf) of thrust.[3] The current production version of Raptor produces 2 meganewtons (225Tf)[4]. SpaceX has successfully tested a newer version of Raptor that produced 2.4MN (269Tf) for 45 seconds.[5]

1. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/780275236922994688

2. "With a thrust of 1MN (225klbf) at sea level, this was to be the first methane full flow engine to ever reach a test stand." https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2016/10/its-propulsion-evolu...

3. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1093424663269523456

4. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1295498964205068289

5. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1657249739925258240

I don’t believe you. Teslas have a cabin camera that monitors your gaze and quickly emits warnings if you look at your phone while autopilot is on. If you ignore the warnings, the car puts it emergency flashers on, pulls over, and disables autonomous driving until your next trip. If you do the five times with the FSD beta, you are banned from using FSD.

The difference in FSD behavior is due to the EU’s laws on autonomous vehicles. The EU mandates maximum lateral acceleration, lane change times, and many other details that make for a worse (and less safe) driving experience.

If criticizing a regulatory body causes them to go after you, then that regulatory body is corrupt and should be dismantled and replaced with something else.

It's no longer proprietary. As of last year the standard is open and anyone can adopt it without paying Tesla a dime.[1] Of course car manufacturers will have to negotiate access to Tesla's charging network, but that's also true of Electrify America. Considering the advantages of Tesla's connector (much more compact, much more popular than CCS in the US), I hope it wins. Now that Ford[2] and Aptera[3] are adopting it, I think it will.

1. https://www.tesla.com/blog/opening-north-american-charging-s...

2. https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/fna/us/en/news/2023...

3. https://aptera.us/tesla-charging/

The other car manufacturers will probably negotiate deals with Tesla to gain access to the supercharger network. Ford has already done this.[1]

1. https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/fna/us/en/news/2023...

Probably nothing. EVs can run the heater for at least as long as gas vehicles. A Tesla in camp mode can last days even at -25C.[1]

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPudpniOmxY

The limiting factor for electric vehicle production is batteries. Trailers spend a lot more time sitting around than tractor units. It's more economically efficient to use the batteries as much as possible rather than have them sitting around.

Trailers come in many form factors: container, flat bet, end-dump. Heck, sometimes you just want to tow another tractor. Those different form factors have different constraints in terms of battery size and shape.

You'd still need big batteries in some tractor units so that they could drop off trailers. All tractor units would need small batteries so they could go short distances without a trailer.

Battery swapping is one of those ideas that sounds good but has enough disadvantages that it's rarely worth it.

- Your vehicle design will be less efficient and more expensive than one without the constraint of an easily-removable battery.

- Just like with phones, removable batteries mean that you have more ingresses for water and dirt, hurting reliability.

- You have to standardize on battery sizes and interfaces. If some new battery technology comes along, or you want to change the chassis (to improve crash safety, for example) you'll have to create a new standard.

- In modern EVs, batteries have liquid coolant pumped through them. This lets the vehicle keep the battery at optimal temperatures for charging, discharging, and avoiding degradation in hot climates. Swapping batteries means coming up with another solution for controlling battery temperatures.

- In addition to specially-designed cars and batteries, you also need specially designed swapping stations. Again if you ever change the standards, you'll have to upgrade these stations.

All of these issues mean that battery swapping drastically increases cost and complexity for little benefit. A swap will take five minutes, while charging to 80% can take as little as 15 minutes. There's also the issue that batteries are valuable, and the owner of the vehicle probably wants their original battery back (or at least one without more wear & tear). Then you get into issues of compensating or charging people thousands of dollars depending on their new battery's degradation level. It's much simpler to give up on swapping and focus on improving charging speeds, which is exactly what Tesla did.

I read the page before commenting and it didn't address my point. That answer is about why it's not satisfactory to simply disable all color in the terminal. I'm talking about adding a color whitelist/blacklist feature to a terminal emulator.

Instead of trying to get every CLI tool in existence follow this standard, it makes much more sense to put this support in the terminal emulator or shell. Both can know what process is in the foreground and can strip color or let color through based on a user-configured whitelist/blacklist.

The adderall shortage is because the DEA sets quotas on how much can be made per year. Despite increased prescriptions, the amounts produced have remained the same.[1][2]

The Wegovy shortage is because it was recently approved to treat obesity. The number of new prescriptions was larger than Novo Nordisk predicted, so they're still ramping up production.

1. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/12/02/2021-26...

2. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/12/02/2022-26...

You don't "just hook it up to the grid". You have to work with the local utility company or companies to negotiate pricing, SLAs, and safety concerns (eg: shutting off power when linemen are working). Helion's fusion reactors are small enough to fit in a couple shipping containers. The idea is that the units can be mass produced in a factory, then transported to data centers and replace the grid hookup as the primary power source. Another potential market is stuff like remote mining operations which currently use diesel generators. The cost of transporting fuel to such sites can be quite high. A fusion reactor, while more expensive up-front, could be cheaper in the long run. And unlike solar cells, the reactor can be easily moved offsite when the operation is complete.

I'm suspicious of that paper. The largest source of non-exhaust emissions comes from brake pad wear[1] and EVs use brakes far less than combustion vehicles. Also the amount of particulate matter put into the air is highly dependent on vehicle speed. Densely populated areas have more traffic, which means cars drive slower and create less non-exhaust pollution.

And it's no longer true that EVs are heavier than comparable combustion vehicles. The Tesla Model 3 weighs 3,550-4,070lbs. The BMW 3 Series weighs 3,200–4,330lbs, though the lightest model is a two door convertible. While combustion vehicles don't carry heavy batteries, they do need exhaust systems, more complicated drivetrains, and bigger cooling systems. Also, more and more combustion vehicles are becoming hybrids to meet stricter emissions standards. That means adding weight for batteries, an electric motor, and a transmission that can handle both propulsion sources.

1. See figure 6 in this paper: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/12/2/190