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sword_smithon Why Does Infrastructure Cost So Much?

Why do people subscribe to the myth that US infrastructure is bad? I am Danish and was on a road trip from Houston to LA, to Caspar WY, to Denver CO in 2017 and the roads we were driving on were excellent. Better than even the German highways which are some of the best roads in Europe. Is it the construction lobby that wants more funding and creates this narrative?

sword_smithon U.S. to set up plan aimed at allowing prescription drugs from Canada

Basic economics is not popular on this site. Unfortunately.

sword_smithon Technician keeps computer made in 1959 still humming along

For my masters project in applied nuclear physics in 2013-2014, I was running the Finnish software Sampo 91 (from 1991) for analyzing gamma spectroscopy lines produced in our Germanium detector. I could get it to work on Windows 3.1 with some backwards compatibility features. It didn't run on a VM but on a physical Intel 486 machine the hospital where I was working had laying kept in store. It was a pretty nostalgic experience to set it up since the 486 was my family's first computer. I learned two things then: a lot of the basic features that we expect from an operating system already existed back then, and using old software is a lot less stressful than modern since computer's only did one thing at a time back then.

sword_smithon Azolla Event

Last I checked about 4 percent of the produced oil went into the production of plastic.

sword_smithon Azolla Event

I have found that exactly this story is the strongest argument against the AGW narrative: Humanity is merely returning the state of the atmosphere back to a earlier state.

sword_smithon Browsers are pretty good at loading pages

The biggest advantage of using modern SPAs is that it forces the developer to build the backend as an API with which you can interact programmatically

sword_smithon Everything I Know – 1975 Lectures by Buckminster Fuller

You are both correct :)

sword_smithon Ask HN: What are some good sources of climate data to analyze?

I have a Master's degree in physics from the University of Copenhagen and I have taught together with one of the leading climate scientists from that university Bo Møllesøe Vinther. He claimed that the best dataset on global average temperatures is satellite based and is the University of Alabama in Huntington dataset (UAH) which goes back to 1979.

You can find it here: https://www.nsstc.uah.edu/climate/

Direct link for monthly temperature averages: http://www.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0beta/tlt/uahncdc_lt_6....