nordsieck

> But chemical batteries cost a lot more and don't have lifespans of hundreds or thousands of years in seasonal storage scenarios.

Practically speaking, you're probably not going to get 1000s of years out of any storage method. There's just too much stuff that breaks down.

Heck - a lot of historic dams are in the low hundreds of years old and are experiencing serious problems.

IMO, the shorter lifespan of batteries isn't that big of a downside as long as the "bad" batteries can be mined for raw materials eventually.

> The correct way to write as a left handed person is to turn the page ninety degrees.

That is such a genius solution!

> What suggests that people are becoming less capable?

From the root level comment in this thread:

> Student test scores have worsened more than in other Scandinavian countries, and critics of the government say there are too many boondoggle tunnels and bridges to nowhere.

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> More importantly, what suggests that people are becoming less capable in an irreversible way? If people are less capable, but it is reversible, then wealth can fix it.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that this trend is irreversible.

But big trends like this can be difficult to turn around - if it were easy, the trend wouldn't have happened in the first place (or, at least, it wouldn't have been detectable).

> If people are less capable, but it is reversible, then wealth can fix it. As you said, you can use wealth to get other people to become more capable.

You can't just say "wealth will do x". That's really a semantic shortcut for saying "people will do x". But presumably people are already trying to improve the countries test scores. And people are already trying (at least to a certain extent) to spend government funds wisely. I'm not really sure how wealth will change what's currently occurring.

> What's the problem? Only poor people care about test scores as they imagine high test scores is how one can pull themselves out of being poor. When you are rich you can also do pointless things just for the fun of it like build bridges to nowhere. None of these are problems unless you try and look at it through a poor man's lens.

That may be a reasonable take at the level of an individual. But it's nonsense at the level of a country.

Wealth is the ability to get other people to do things. But if everyone is becoming less capable, then that's not a problem that wealth can fix.

Outsourcing may be a temporary solution to his problem, but I don't see it working well long term.

> It is not so much that used diamonds are worth less (although they might decline in value without provenance to prove they are natural or if they are chipped) but the huge markup on retail jewellery.

Precisely.

And on top of that some jewelry stores are worried that customers would consider a below wholesale offer to be insulting, so they often refuse to buy piece back at all.

> Perhaps other EV drivers can chime in but, if anything, I think I use my friction brakes less at highway speeds where, in general, you're not really supposed to do a lot of braking. I'd say, overall and regardless of speed, my friction brakes are really used only to bring the car to a complete stop or for emergency braking to avoid a potential accident.

Some people are very responsible with money - they have an emergency fund, contribute to their retirement fund, and don't carry a credit card balance.

Other people (who have a choice) spend to 0 every month, don't save, and have maxed out credit cards.

In the same way, some people drive very safely; they keep a responsible distance between them and the driver in front of them, and don't tend to speed much. I think this style of driving would naturally lead to what you say - less use of friction breaks in general, and especially at highway speeds.

And other people are constantly speeding, and tailgate the person in front of them when their path is blocked. For the people who drive this way, the greater acceleration of EVs just lets them drive that much more recklessly. Which ends up necessitating even more usage of friction brakes.

From what I've heard there's a countervailing effect for EVs, though - they end up generating more particulate pollution from tire wear because of greater vehicle weight and greater torque.

The number that I've seen bandied about is ~20% greater tire wear.

> The interesting thing is when this breaks down. Obviously if you eat a weeks worth of food every day for a sustained period of time, you will start to gain weight. Or if you run 12 miles every day, you will be in such a deficit that it won't be possible to lower your metabolism enough. Outside of the extremes, I think it's a cliff, where you have to have some kind of shock for some period of time for your body to react.

Objectively, I don't think this is accurate.

Most people who are overweight got that way slowly.

Dr Mike[1]'s theory is that modern processed food is to blame - not because it's unhealthy, but because it's too tasty. Companies that make food are in an evolutionary arms race with other companies to get consumers to choose their products. And one of the best ways to do that is to make the food as tasty as possible.

Another things many companies probably try to optimize their food for is low satiety[2]. That way consumers consume, and therefore buy, more of their products.

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1. From Renaissance Periodization

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satiety_value

> How many frivilous assault allegations against male drivers are there? I've never heard of this happening personally.

It comes up from time to time if you watch Uber driver videos. There's a reason why many drivers have a camera that records the interior of the car: alcohol + entitlement can manifest in many ways.

Most commonly, passengers cancel the ride and expect to be driven to their destination anyways. But worse stuff happens from time to time.

> Hopefully hotels don't yet have an industry-wide "do not host" list without any appeal process...?

There are lots of small operators, so I doubt that there's some industry wide list.

But there are only a few large operators. I'd be shocked if some of them didn't share info.

For a while, I was optimistic that Apple would at least continue to release the SE every 3-ish years. I'm guessing they wanted to finally kill the fingerprint reader and other SE-specific features[1]. And maybe even the SE with its reduced price didn't sell that well.

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1. Yes, I understand that these features were present in other phones, but the SE was the last phone actively sold by Apple that had them

> I don't understand the purpose of consumers owning individual solar panels in a large array. How is that better than a single entity owning the whole array, and what function does the consumer provide?

I don't now if it's better, but it is different.

The benefit to the utility in this case is much lower capex - it's basically like the restaurant franchise model, but for power.

But like you imply, there's a tradeoff that can be made between capex and opex - in this case, the utility could own everything and consumers could pay for electricity on an ongoing basis. IMO, this model is superior due to reduced principal-agent problems.

> I remember reading about this Swedish dude who added 2 solar panels totaling about 1 kW to his hybrid station wagon.

I want to see a picture of that.

Apparently 1 kw fits on an extended box van [1]. But I don't now how you'd do it on a wagon without making it look like some sort of Burning Man art car.

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1. https://www.reddit.com/r/vandwellers/comments/1dpcxu4/if_any...

> Don't want to deal with the logistics of lots of SKUs? Don't sell them. Trying to upsell people is a money move. Selling a SKU where the 80+gb OS is like 40% of the disk is a good SKU to cut.

This isn't a profitable move from Apple's perspective - they try to keep the base unit at about the same price across generations. That's what happened when they moved from 8 GB of ram to 16 GB.

If you're interested in some hard data, Backblaze publishes their HD failure numbers[1]. These disks are storage optimized, not performance optimized like the parent comment, but they have a pretty large collection of various hard drives, and it's pretty interesting to see how reliability can vary dramatically across brand and model.

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1. https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive...

> It's pure robbery on Apple's part. Completely beyond the pale now. Their ridiculous RAM and storage prices were never that big of a deal back in the PowerBook/early Macbook Pro days, because you could always opt out if you were a tiny bit handy with a small screwdriver (my 2008 unibody lets me swap storage with 1 screw, swap a battery with zero!). Now? It's unforgivable. I don't care about soldered RAM, I get it, but it is despicable charging as much as the entire computer to upgrade the RAM a paltry 16GB.

For what it's worth, I completely agree with you.

But.

I suspect that Apple isn't solely doing this for profit. Apple's pricing structure aggressively funnels people into the base config for each CPU.

Thinking about getting an M4 with upgraded ram? A base config M4 pro starts to look pretty good.

In practice, this means that Apple's logistics is dramatically simplified since 95% of people are ordering a small number of SKUs.

> There's profit, and there's actively making your entire product experience worse in pursuit of profit.

It was really egregious when the base config only came with 8 GB of ram. I'll admit that storage can be a bit tight depending on what you're trying to do, but at least external storage is an option, however ugly and/or inconvenient it may be for some.

> So if someone gains access to your email, they also get FB access…?

I mean, that's how it works for most websites. I think I have 2FA turned on for FB, but honestly the phone system is way less secure than email at Google/Microsoft.

> States only believe in their own interests and the narrative always go towards the powerful and the one which won.

And depressingly, even that isn't true - states are plagued with the principal-agent problem[1], as is basically every organization.

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1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

> You can usually get the rights but it costs more. Like in software if you want an exclusive license…

Nah - the correct comparison is to an employee/contractor software developer. Copyright assignment is industry standard.

> If a actor works for a day on a TV show he may get cheques forever.

Most actors get paid either a fixed fee or hourly. It's only the top talent that can negotiate points. And honestly, that's pretty good for the producers, since that decreases their risk if the TV show or movie doesn't do well.

> If you hire a photographer for a wedding, you will pay him the same rate as a contract developer. But you won't own the rights to the photos and keep having to pay the guy if you want copies.

This part is so weird to me. But I honestly suspect that most photography customers don't care so much about owning the rights to the photograph they pay for, as long as they can use it how they want. And over time, the norm gradually became baked into the industry.

> There aren't many things like .NET, MSSQL and Visual Studio out there. The debugger experience in VS is the holy grail if you have super nasty real world technology situations. There's a reason every AAA game engine depends on it in some way.

The reason all the AAA games are on it is because they're on the Windows platform, and more importantly their customers are on the Windows platform.

If 95% of gamers ran MacOS instead of Windows, you'd see a very different tech stack among game developers.

> I think the challenge is certainly the costs of enforcement.

IMO, this is fundamentally a mismatch between how software is developed in practice and how copyright works.

If software was like a book, where it's finished and published once, then simply registering it with the copyright office would be all anyone needs to do: up to $10k/copy statutory damages is a stiff enough deterrent that few large companies would want to take the risk. And even if they did, it'd be easy to find a lawyer to take the case on contingency.

As a non-lawyer, that doesn't seem to match nearly as well with software as a constantly evolving work. But I'm not an expert - maybe periodically submitting versions is enough.

> GPL definitely does.

Clearly it doesn't because companies get caught doing it with GPL software all the time.

... and the only recourse is to sue them into compliance.

> One major reason why EU capabilities are lagging is because they hitched their geopolitical wagon to the US and assumed that the US launch providers would be sufficient for commercial purposes, and that ESA/Arianespace only had to preserve enough capability to meet truly strategic requirements.

This is just not true.

Ariane Group was a market leader in space launch when SpaceX started launching rockets, and Ariane 6 was designed specifically to help Ariane Group maintain commercial competitiveness with Falcon 9. They just did a bad job of it[1].

The story line of Ariane 5/6 only being there to preserve independent access to space only appeared on the scene after SpaceX conclusively trounced them in the market.

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1. The reasons why this happened are complicated by some of them are:

* For a long time Ariane Group leadership maintained a belief that SpaceX was selling F9 launches below cost and that the USG was subsidizing them with higher cost government launches.

* Ariane Group publicly claimed that reuse was not economically feasible and that that capability in F9 didn't matter.

* Ariane Group has long maintained (and continues to do so) a policy of "economic return" where countries get contracts for subcomponents in rough proportion to the amount of money they contribute to the program. This necessitates a "big design up front" approach, and makes iteration very slow and difficult.

* SpaceX was able to improve Falcon 9's performance far more than anyone probably expected through aggressive iteration, more than doubling its payload to LEO over its lifetime. This was, in large part, due to the Merlin 1D engine doubling the thrust of the Merlin 1C. For context, over 30 years, the Space Shuttle's RS-25 engines increased in thrust by only ~10%.

> People who have been left behind by Apple's push towards phablets

It's my impression that Apple really tried to service this market - that last model was probably the iPhone 13 mini. I assume that there just isn't enough demand for smaller phones to justify the effort to develop them.

I was honestly hoping that we'd get a small phone as the iPhone SE 4. But it seems like that's not to be. At least, if the 16e is the closest we'll get to an SE in the near term.

There's MacMiniVault (nee MacMiniColo) https://www.macminivault.com/

Not sure if they count as niche or not.

> Is anyone other than a vanishingly small number of hard core hobbiests going to upgrade from an M4 to an M4 Ultra?

I expect that the 2 biggest buyers of M4 Ultra will be people who want to run LLMs locally, and people who want the highest performance machine they can get (professionals), but are wedded to mac-only software.

IMO, backpacks are better at conforming to size limits.

They're typically advertised by volume, so 30L, 40L, etc., so you can get one the size you want. I think carry on size is typically advertised as 35-40L. They've got all the same stuff as roller luggage - straps, dividers, etc., depending on what you want. Although, IMO, the best setup is to just get a bag with the volume you want and use packing cubes.

The great advantage of backpacks is that they're soft. Every carrier has their own "box" that your item is supposed to fit into. As long as you don't have too much stuff, you can just squeeze your bag into the box. But with a hard sided roller, it either fits or it doesn't.

I'll admit that I don't travel outside of the US much, so those issues don't really apply to me.

> 7 kg is laughably little, a standard cabin bag already weighs 2

One thing that I have done is move from roller luggage to a travel backpack. I personally use the Osprey Farpoint, but there are many in the category to choose from. Not only is it much lighter than hard sided luggage, but it's typically much more forgiving of dimensional requirements, and can often fit in overhead bins, where hard sided luggage may not be able to (if you're the last person trying to put something in the bin).

And on top of all of that, it's been much more reliable for me - I've had and seen roller luggage fail pretty often - at both the wheels and the handle. Neither of those exists on the bag, which just keeps trucking.

I get that for many people a travel backpack isn't an option. But if it is something that might work for you, I highly recommend it.

I don't know. At this point, I personally know multiple people who've "lost" luggage when flying.

Thankfully it's not as big of a deal now that airtags/trackers are readily available.