servo_sausage

The area I'm in, Victoria, goes from about -4 overnight at the coldest, to 45 at absolute peak (Celcius). Energy wise we are a "more heating" area, but comfort wise I personally prioritise cooling.

It's a big place, the north is essentially a cooling year round climate.

Most of the older places have very little insulation, lots of airflow, single pane leaky windows.

Usually the areas you need to fix are air leakage, better windows (double glazing), then in ceiling insulation. In order of impact.

Our construction industry is pretty much broken, and considers double glazing advanced luxury alien technology... So it can cost so much to replace the old windows that you can run heat pumps as much as you like with the interest on the sum.

And without that the improvement from more diy insulation upgrades don't really achieve much in a monetary sense.

On the other side, we have a much better solar and battery uptake, and the cost to install is fair. So a typical house might be a leaky wooden crate, but with enough solar and battery to be comfortable anyway.

Depends where you are, and what your start point is.

I've looked at improving old houses in Australia, and you would usually be better off putting the cash in the bank. (After heat pumps, and sometimes a battery).

I think it's very much a combination of American "you are what you do" mentality, combined with making money automating what other people do... Very much a frame where people are evaluated compared to the complexity of replacing them with tech.

Academia is often the path of least uncertainty; you do exams, get a student stipend, and follow a very linear path.

In some ways it's the ultimate short term thinking, taking the mediocre but predictable steps, instead of risking the real world with its unbounded upsides.

Possibly that mindset is good in a parliament, but I wouldn't really classify it as long vs short term.

I think it's a scale issue. A small group or individual can build up a trusted source of reviews, but the brand is worth a lot compared to people who are selling things, compared to the direct revenue from people who are buying.

So the incentive to sell is way more than people will pay for the reviews.

Combine that with a timing problem, a review at one year is pointless to new car buyers, since the new model is a bit different.

Depends on the market, Australia has a massive issues due to migration for a few reasons; the big one is that the rate of growth attempted means that the rate of public infrastructure build is also high. This is expensive, and since the migrants are not earning more than the naturals, the GDPpc is not growing to balance the increased cost of infrastructure.

The other big issue is density is expensive; it costs much more to build an apartment at the 10th floor than a detached house. Combine that with density being inherently a bit shit, you get less quality and less housing for the money spent.

Seems like there have been too many AAA flops, to the point where you can't really say that the launch week of a new title is going to be all that important.

It used to be that a big release was reliably interesting with everyone figuring out how to play, and a bit more emergent chaos. Few new titles have captured this. Either they are overly sterile, or buggy live service titles with no real reason to engage at day one.

Possible that the size of the teams is part of the problem, but if the industry needs to drop from 500 man to 100 man teams, I can't imagine how the industry will be healthy during that.

I've found that the mentally around medicine in JP is pretty different to the west, dentistry included.

It's a bit different to the quality of care.

Personally I'd say the quality and availability of the latest technologies is limited, but the honesty around up selling and responsibility for ongoing outcomes resulting from their intervention is better.

There are some other aspects, like the general bias against intervention in JP.

Not really, even if you have a great improvement, you need to spend the overhead to keep it up to date long enough to gain traction.

Then marketing it to convince others to even try... If the idea is too niche it might never hit that threshold for uptake.

I do the same with a lifx bulb, it can be set up to fade and colour shift over any duration you like.

It would lead 195 per year if it stays at that trend; only 1.3x the high end of "normal".

The anus on the helmet represents which ai vibecoded the software in each vehicle.

In this case, the motivation to finish a product in India is mostly about tariff bypassing; with the final assembly being pretty minimal. Not quite putting the badge on, but close.

A good metric is the difference in value between the precursor and the final product; for most Indian phone production, it's less than 1%. This is also a big reason why Indian export headlines are a bit silly; they never account for the increased import associated with the high value components.

Unclear if this will change going forward; there are some companies doing a higher proportion of the value chain in India, and some big incentives... But to me it's unlikely.

Because proposing to limit something needs better justification than a fundamentally limited group can't use it.

It's an out of place performative moralism.

Brexit is such an odd case, that it seems not worth comparing.

It's so tied into British classicism, and the generally pathetic nature of the middle class English, that trying to extend the results outside of the UK produces absurd ideas.

Essentially the British people took a (not particularly economically motivated) deal to reduce migration, at the cost of economic connection to the EU.

This upset the UK political class greatly, so much of the following policy was about punishing the population, rather than long term economics.

Depends on the billionaire. If it's someone with a large chunk of a large company, each billion dollars represents hundreds of skilled people employed to do something. If a state is hostile, then why not move that activity? And that's before the direct lobbying at a federal level.

Accessibility should only ever be an addition, never a limit.

Have a look at the solar endurance cars; they are pretty interesting on their own, and have had some "functional" designs over the years.

It's possible to make a sedan sized car that can be power positive at highway speeds in summer; even with modern safety and features. It's the rest of the year...

OLEDs are an odd example... Their warranties are generally just as good, and the lifespan due to burn in is still improving.

This is exactly what I mean by cheap digital production tools; but it's been possible to do it right since well before cds.

It's well above the rate you need to reproduce everything a human can physically hear; this is one of the big points that shows the author as a moron...

The change from cd to vinyl "sound" was largely about mastering, and cheap digital production technology being not that great. But you can find examples of the same master going to cd or vinyl, and there's no benefit to the vinyl.

And I say this as someone who enjoys the physical medium, huge art covers, and tube amps.

Chicken and egg problem. If you start with the assumption that you have a car, they are pretty great. Quiet, no through traffic and can become neighbourly, potentially large blocks. Somewhere to park your car...

Basically trying to retrofit busses to a development built around cars is stupid.

So what? It's a genuinely irrelevant detail...

We don't need to optimise for space, we need to optimise for cost of transport, and door to door duration.

What happens, is your underserved bus has to increase stops per loop for viability.

You have areas where leaving the cul-de-sac zone takes 15-20 minutes on foot; so you need a stop or two in the zone.

Now you have a short walk to the stop; but if you want this to be a viable alternative, you need some frequency of service.

And that means that the routs need to be active across the whole week, not just the hypothetical peak (otherwise everyone needs a car anyway).

So how do you actually get a high average number of riders per bus? More stops?

But if each stop needs to go in and out of a cul-de-sac, the travel time goes up.

Eventually people stop tolerating the extra time, and get cars.

So you end up with a case of empty busses running... Seems much worse than a waymo.

Because people are not nearly as rigid about a 9-5 as you are imagining in aggregate; enough people commute off hours to increase the number of round trips per car significantly.

Even in an office, there are plenty of people doing a 10-6, or an 8-3 then the school run... That's before you consider that many people are not office workers only going between the burbs and the city...

What? Autonomous cars can park wherever...

Because a transit method that follows a fixed route, on a schedule, is inherently worse than an on demand one; unless you can separate the traffic.

As infrastructure, busses don't make sense if you assume self driving EVs are going to be widespread.

Trying to keep using something that is comprised by fixed routes, schedules, and stops makes n little sense.

See, I would call getting a breed of dog that has been identified as dangerous, as incredibly selfish. Genuinely an insane degree of self centred reasoning. My special dog is fine, because it's my dog, and I know better than everyone else (but also can't convince anyone that you are in fact right, in order to change the rules).

It's all the behaviour that we have identified as better overall if everyone follows it, and deciding that it doesn't apply to you, because you don't feel like it.

Run a red light, because you are in a hurry. Drive a truck without a licence, because you think you will be fine. Throw a party every night, because your having a great time and there is not enough resources to limit how shit you can be to your neighbours.

It's interesting, as an Aussie, the decline in rule following is honestly a bit upsetting.

Part COVID, part mass migration, but the general decline in social trust is something that I really feel.

I guess I see breaking rules as fundamentally a lack of empathy.