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The most chilling is that this also inflicts the military.

Lieutenant Colonel Heffington on West Point, published in 2017:

> Academic standards are also nonexistent. I believe this trend started 10 years ago, and it has continued to get worse. West Point has stated standards for academic expectations and performance, but they're ignored. Cadets routinely fail multiple classes, only to be thrown back into the mix. The faculty is expected to somehow drag them through the academic program until they manage to earn a passing grade. As a result, professors have lost hope and faith in the entire Academic Board process

And this is supposed to be the most prestigious institution in the armed forces, the people who will have nuclear weapons in their hands...Chilling. That's how the West ends up with leaders who do not know how to lead, reporters who do not report, officers who are clueless about real war, and diplomats who are incapable of being diplomatic

While that was a rhetorical point in the Brexit campaign, in reality the nameless unelected bureaucrats in Brussels were simply replaced by nameless unelected bureaucrats in London

Every Western "democracy" suffers from the same fundamental problem - entrenched deep state, and a lack of feedback loop towards it. It's extremely hazy where, how and by whom decisions are truly made, and as a consequence, nobody ever faces any consequences if those decisions flop. People like Biden, Harris, Johnson or Truss are so glaringly incompetent that nobody even suspects them to have any input into the decision process, they're simple announcers. Elections allow us to change the announcers, but change nothing about the deep state that ultimately dictates the policies. Brussels works the same way, it's just makes the fundamental problem more obvious

To add one more data point - Olkiluoto 3, started 2005, was expected to finish in 2009. Completed late 2021, 12 years late

Cherry on top - after producing electricity for about a week, it had to shut down for another 3 months. Then, after ramping up to about 30% of the capacity, it encountered another problem, delaying it for another 5 months. Here we are in June 2022, 17 years later, Olkiluoto 3 provides exactly 0 MW to the Finnish grid

Tesla pulls all sorts of accounting tricks to make gross margin appear higher than it actually is. Warranty repairs are apparently done by pixies for free, so is R&D, factory amortization, or service centers

A like-to-like comparison would have Tesla's gross margin at ~18%, which is decent, bu not all that unusual for a premium car brand. Ford and GM tend to have much lower gross margins than VW or Toyota. The latter two are usually in the mid-to-high-teens, while competing in a cutthroat mass-market

Notice who is pushing the narrative of Russia bogged down - journalists, politicians and their nominees, economists, and people with an active career in the military. There are also some dissidents in the West pushing the opposite narrative - ex-marine, retired intelligence officer, weapons inspector, colonel from a neutral country. Which group knows more about how a modern war is waged? Which group has a better track record so far? Which group openly admits they're releasing unverified claims in order to shape the public opinion?

> How much would it cost to continuously occupy a country of 48 million largely hostile people

If Russia limits the territorial acquisition to Russian-speaking regions, they'll be fine. Minorities are almost always strongly in support of unification with their nation-state. Some historical examples - 77% of Sudeten Germans voted for Nazi Sudetendeutsche Partei. 99.7% of Austrians voted for unification with Germany in 1938 referendum. 95.6% of Crimeans voted for unification with Russia. 95.7% of Cypriots voted for unification with Greece in 1950

> BRF system in Sweden

To expand on this point, and a similar system in Finland called asumisoikeus:

Municipalities have a pool of housing units. The tenants do not buy the house itself, they buy a right to live in that house, which usually costs about 10% of the price of the house, reimbursed when they move out. They also pay a rent that takes care of the energies and depreciation of the house. Socio-economic status is taken into account when figuring out who's eligible

Now, there are some criticisms of the system, mainly that the rents aren't that much lower than commercial properties. However, it does keep house prices in check. 100m^2 (~1100 sqft) house in the capital region is about 9 years of average take-home income - or 5 years for a couple

Unequivocal yes

If Playstation is a cheaper source of compute power than consumer hardware, the customer should be able to turn it into a compute cluster, as many people did (1). That doesn't mean Sony has to provide support or warranty for it, it means they shouldn't raise intentional obstructions in the way

(1) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

On a societal level, once heating, industry, public services and transportation are accounted for, we consume around 500-1000W per person. Saving a few Watts per family is a rounding error. We're talking about the power output of a solar panel the size of an A4 paper

This is a failure of state's energy policy, trying to pass the blame on regular citizens

Correct, and the difference is not even close - anything to do with temperature manipulation consumes orders of magnitude more. Literally, not figuratively

The laptop I'm writing this on consumes around 10W. Kettle 2100W

Making one coffee in the morning consumes enough electricity to power the laptop for the whole workday

The idle power consumption of my home is dominated by the fridge and freezer (around 150W combined). Idle mode of any other devices is a rounding error

That's close to the way things work in Europe

Pricing for the next day is decided on the spot market, around 2-3 PM. All large consumers and producers place bids on one-hour slots until the market clears. Prices do not fluctuate minute-to-minute, but hour-to-hour. Consumers might opt in to electricity resellers selling spot prices, or get a fixed but usually higher guaranteed price per kWh. All that changes for the end consumer is that your electricity meter readings will be forwarded to a different company

My past three workplaces let me choose between a high-end Windows laptop, or a Macbook. I always opted for Windows, due to some tooling I'm used to, but ended up regretting it on every occasion

The problems with non-Apple laptops are manifold. Surprisingly, there's very little practical difference between $1k and $4k laptop. System integrators don't spend their budget wisely - they cheap out on some parts, while overspending on other parts purely to drive benchmark numbers, without affecting overall user experience in meaningful ways. Windows laptops get about half the battery life of Macbooks at comparable prices, and Linux is even worse than that. Every Windows laptop I've ever had experienced some problems with drivers after Windows updates (usually Wifi, Bluetooth, webcam or audio) - Linux is even worse. Issues with sleeping, hibernating, or waking up for no discernible reason. Intel Turbo/SpeedStep screwing up thermals and battery life. And more

As much as I dislike Apple, when it comes to laptops, the competition is woefully behind

It goes both ways - China claims Taiwan as theirs, but also Taiwan claims China as theirs

Due to some obscure legalities, Taiwan dropping the claim would amount to declaration of war

> Furthermore China prefers peaceful solutions where it can

In this case, the blind spot of western liberalism - demography. Taiwanese fertility rates are below 1.3 for nearly two decades now, some years even dipping below 1. All China has to do is wait for 30 years - half of the island's population will perish of old age by then, the remaining 2/3 will be retirees

Good faith communication is maladaptive on large scale

Imagine the war scenario. The honest, good-faith communication would be like: If we capitulate outright, the worst thing that happens is paying taxes to somewhere else, and the set of faces on TV news will change to a different set of faces. Anyway, please go and die to prevent that from happening, while the people who have the most at stake hide in safety

It's not difficult to see why bad-faith war propaganda beats that every time

Zelenskiy's #1 campaign promise was to negotiate peace with Russia - meaning fulfilling Ukraine's part of the Minsk accords, perhaps with some concessions. Overall, about 65% of the votes went to parties supporting it. ~72% if Donbas is included. There was a clear democratic mandate to do it

To his credit, he did try to set things in motion. Mere days after, ultra-nationalist right-wing militias threw violent protests, in which they tossed grenades at police, killing three, calling Zelenskiy a traitor and threatening to take his life if peace is enacted. The peace negotiator was arrested for treason. Zelenskiy backed down, reneged on his #1 campaign promise, and started ramping up the tensions. As a result, the polling results for his party dropped from ~50% to mere 17% at the onset of the war. We don't know what happened behind the doors to cause such a 180 turn, but it sure wasn't pretty

They also have an example of...themselves - that all it takes to be left alone is being reasonable and not needlessly bellicose towards their great power neighbor

It gets worse than that. Often, code is pushed into an absurdly wrong level of the development stack, just because it makes testing it easier. For example, something should be a database trigger, but in-memory testing database gets in the way. Other times it strikes all the way to architectural topics - message queues replaced by REST calls, because the former is difficult to mock

This is the best write-up of the Softbank business model:

https://www.readmargins.com/p/softbank-robinhood-and-a-margi...

In short, the background of Softbank founders is in plumbing of the financial system. They intentionally bid up dubious companies into obviously unsustainable valuations, with the aim to make them highly illiquid. Faced with illiquid stocks, many of the assumptions behind trading models break down, and obscurities of the financial plumbing come to fore - the water Softbank knows really well. Eventually, index funds include a portion of the bid-up companies on their balance sheets, FOMO investors roll in - that's when Softbank unloads their bags

Interesting fact about trains - a lot of the diesel and gas locomotives do not burn fossil fuels to propel themselves, meaning there's no mechanical connection between the engines and the wheels. Instead, they burn the fuel to generate electricity, which is then utilized to drive electric motors

Because in the US, money has nowhere else to go. Stocks? Wildly overpriced. Real estate? Wildly overpriced. Bonds? Zero returns. Mineral extraction? Risky outlook. Energy sector? Subsidies are likely on the horizon, better to wait. Infrastructure? NIMBYs

That's not the case for the EU. Money gets reasonable returns in energy sector, industry, any investment in Eastern Europe, tourism, PPP infrastructure projects, etc.

> websites don't follow the "spirit of the law"

A perfect counter-example to people rambling about EU legislation - Wikipedia.

Consistently in the top 10 sites in the world for 15 years, yet there's no cookie banner, no GDPR consent screen, no personal data hoarding, no dark patterns, etc.

This is already a pattern in HN discussions: legislation is proposed, news outlets vaguely summarize it, the HN crowd interprets the summary in absurdly maximalist way without bothering to read the spirit and letter of the law; outrage ensues. This is coupled with an "I-know-better" condescension towards authorities, reinforced by a weird ideology that code is above law

The legislation, at least the one coming from Brussels, is nearly always reasonable in scope, extent, impacts, penalties, and tends to strike a fair balance between specificity and vagueness as to allow the courts for some wiggle room for interpretation

As an example, with interoperability, the final legislation might stipulate something similar to this:

* once a software service reaches sufficient market size

* the core functionality of the service must be exposed for interoperability

* any breaking changes to core functionality must allow for sufficient period of backwards-compatibility and deprecation warnings. Exceptions for security breaches or other emergencies

So, for Youtube, this would mean logging in, viewing videos and history. It doesn't mean that every single feature of every single web site must be publicly exposed and be backwards-compatible for eternity

Also, the term rare-earth metal is really unfortunate. About half of them have no practical industrial use. The other half is neither rare, nor particularly expensive

The three most important rare earth elements are lanthanum, neodymium and praseodymium. The first two are about as "rare" as copper or nickel. Praseodymium is less abundant, about the rate of lithium or lead. Neodymium costs around $50 per kilo. About 3 kilos is necessary in an electric car. One container full of neodymium ingots is enough for 30,000 electric cars. It's not a geopolitical ace up the sleeve it's made out to be

As far as I recall, there were some measurable increases in cancer incidence among children in Belarus, mostly due to milk intake

However, all that was completely drowned by a collapse of life expectancy resulting from the chaos of the 90s. We're horrified at a few tens of extra cancers, but 100M men losing 10-15 years of their life due to socio-economic circumstances doesn't raise anyone's eyebrow

The problem with this line of argumentation is - why single out phone OS providers as the only link in the very long supply chain that deserves a cut?

Why not internet provider? Verizon's infrastructure costs money, too - should they also be eligible for a 30% tax?

The data will be transmitted through Cisco routers or Nokia's BTS - it costs a lot of R&D to develop those

What about the phone manufacturer - Xiaomi or Samsung would definitely not reject their fair share

None of this would happen without electricity - power transmission companies deserve a portion

There really isn't a coherent moral argument in favor of the current status quo - it's simply about market power, nothing else

There's some "lots-of-money-involved-therefore-valuable" fallacy going on here. The thinking goes:

* NFTs are explained, they sound kind of pointless

* but there is so much money involved!

* so much money involved brings lots of smart folks

* there are lots of smart folks working in NFTs space, they cannot all be wrong

* hence, there must be a there there, and we're are not smart enough to understand it

intense post-truth world vibes here

Just because a criminal hasn't been caught and sentenced doesn't mean they didn't commit the crime

Large part, likely the majority, of Intel's CPU dominance had been a result of their "unfair" advantage in fabs, not in hardware design. Often quoted rule of thumb - 90%/10% - 90% of the progress in semiconductors is attributable to process shrinkage, 10% to improved the hardware design. TSMC contributed the lion's share in making AMD competitive again. Design-wise, chips from Intel, AMD and Apple are all incredibly impressive. Afaik, Apple pays the top dollar to get access to the highest-end TSMC process - any performance comparisons should keep that in mind

This approach suffers from the same fundamental problem as the comparative advantage argument - that there is an infinite reservoir of companies that can immediately rehire the now laid-off talent at equal or better productivity

Real world doesn't work that way. Real world looks much more like the deindustrialized parts of the UK or the US, or the collapse of Soviet economy after switching to capitalism. Companies go bust, taking the whole supply chain with them, workers are laid off and disperse. After a few years, the skills atrophy and the experience vanishes - you cannot put humpty dumpty back together again. More often than not, the workers stay unemployed, underemployed, or just cheat disability. In high-end consolidated markets like semiconductors or aircraft manufacturing, we're not talking about an infinite reservoir, it's a handful of corporations per continent

I recommend looking at some WW1 depictions of Germans (often called 'Huns' back then). Or even better, German or Japanese depictions of western Allied forces in WW2. It's pretty much the same

Ukrainian state is already in a state of total war, they don't lose anything by escalating. Their goal is to drag other countries into the war, or at the very least maximize external support. Exaggerations, taking stuff out of context, hyperbolizing isolated incidents, or even outright lies - all the tools of trade are normally shunned are now allowed. Level-headed assessment of ground-level truth is not on the agenda right now