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The point is that 'digging holes in the ground' isn't inherently more secure than making sure that you can import fuel from other countries.

Both involve a certain amount of risk and uncertainty. Both require preparation and planning, and some degree of subordination of other national interests.

This is perhaps one of the lessons of the Ukraine conflict - Russia is still exporting gas to Germany and Germany is still importing it, despite diplomatic relations between the two countries being at a nadir. It's simply not in either country's interest not to carry on with the commercial relationship.

EDF is certainly run by state apparatchiks, but it's hard to argue that they haven't done a pretty good job making electricity available cheaply and plentifully to French consumers.

Do you think that Qatar, UAE, Saudi and Iran are going to stop exporting natural gas imminently?

I've been to Macedonia, Poland and Hungary and I agree with everything said and implied about those countries in the GP.

It is not necessary to travel to Poland or Hungary to be aware that the populist governments of these countries have embraced conspiratorialism, anti-semitism, anti-ziganism, revisionism, homophobia, while openly disregarding liberal institutions such as the separation of church and state, independence of the judiciary, freedom of expression, pluralism. You can simply listen to what people from those countries who do embrace the liberal values associated with the EU project have said about their home countries.

It's not about corruption, it's about illiberalism.

Sterling is an anomalously strong and major currency given the UK's size and wealth.

Many republics have a president who is formally appointed, does not have any direct political power, and who often no one has heard of.

France and the United States are the notable exceptions where the president is more important than the prime minister.

I think this way of thinking is trapped in the past.

The reality of atmospheric carbon is that we have to get rid of it or face mass extinction. Trying to build some nostalgic idea of a untouched ecosystem in tune with 'nature' is just a feelgood ideology.

We're actually faced with an engineering project - the first planet that our species will terraform.

Having huge forests full of trees and barren of much else is great if it allows us to protect other more interesting ecosystems.

And perhaps the best way to create a sustainable ecosystem around the trees is to plant them and see what else develops, rather than try and curate a specific balance of organisms.

In a forest full of large trees, the carbon in the non-tree biomass is a rounding error. If you can pack the trees slightly closer and almost everything else now finds the environment too hostile to survive, it's probably a net win from a carbon point of view.

Why can't you just create oil or coal or similar products?

Why do you care about the forest supporting other life? Isn't the goal just to take carbon out of the atmosphere?

To provide a concrete example, TFA said that 'product' was a 'concept'. Another concept could be 'part'. Another concept could be 'package'.

(You buy a product such as a bookcase. You then go and pick up one or more packages which make up that product. When you get the packages home and open them up, each contains several parts.)

There are lots of different systems at IKEA, which work somewhat in parallel but sometimes have to interoperate. For example, point of sale, returns, warehouse management, showroom design. Some of them care about all of product/package/part, but many of them care more about one of those levels than the other. Point of sale just needs to know what products you bought, not what parts are in the packages. Warehouse really cares about what packages there are, but also wants to be aware of which sets of packages are products.

Suppose that one system doesn't make a distinction between product and package, or uses 'product' to mean either product or package. That system might work perfectly fine on its own, but when it has to interact with another system which cares a lot about that categorical distinction, things will go wrong. So you want to have one place where all those concepts are defined. Then when you create a new system, you can confirm that you are using the same categories with the same meanings as everyone else.

How is Google not a monopoly? Their nearest competitor is probably 10 times smaller.

Statistically a large proportion of those people have spent a decade or more avoiding any work at all while making the most of the free salad.

Unlike the Xoogler waves of people who wanted a new challenge and spread Google techniques and philosophies all across the industry, many of the people laid off are going to be the ones who don't produce anything at all.

It might be hard for them to find work; or maybe it will be easy because of a halo effect but those who hire them will go on to regret it.

I do not find it hard to sympathize with them; I have a lot of sympathy for them.

I agree with this.

The example of 1000s of packages having a transitive dep on a package which left-pads strings looks bad, however the two obvious alternatives to this are:

1. everyone writes their own function to left-pad. As well as being wasteful, most of these implementations are incorrect or perform badly or have their own security issues.

2. the function to left-pad is part of a huge package which does thousands of things, eg. the programming language itself, or some standard library. In order to get a new version of left-pad, you have to upgrade the whole thing, and are potentially left with irreconcilable incompatibilities.

The complete graph on 1400 nodes only has a million edges.

They are saying that quantum computing is at the stage that classical computing was at when it still relied on vacuum tubes.

Not that quantum computing is at the same stage as the vacuum tube industry was at at some unspecified time.

> In the case of the Internet Bubble stocks were down 78%, but it was not hard to do well in the end given diversification and a long enough horizon.

This is untrue. If you were invested in what became the stars of that era: Amazon, Red Hat, Cisco, a few others, you eventually made decent money, although far worse than if you had stayed out and bought the dip.

If you had a diversified portfolio of 'new economy' stocks which didn't include a few winners like this, you might have lost over 95% of your money and never got it back. Lots and lots of stocks simply disappeared or were bought for peanuts. Many others, including lots of very very highly rated ones like Yahoo never exceeded their bubble-era peaks.

If someone asks for the median, you supply the median if possible. The assumption underlying the question is that it is difficult to calculate the median.

In fact, in this case, it is not difficult.

Going back to a professional who has requested the median and asking them if they didn't actually want the mean is not a display of empathy. It is patronising. The gender of the stakeholder is perhaps of relevance here.

The right answer.

Locals have a much lower income than Italy or Switzerland. Thus they are still getting priced out of cities where they have lived a long time. In Warsaw the locals are often priced out by the returning diaspora. See Lebanon, parts of Italy, Ireland in the past, etc.

I'm generally a YIMBY and in favor of housing, but are we really so sure that new housing will solve the problems in cities like Barcelona or Lisbon (where tourists and people coming in attracted by the good quality of life generally have higher disposable incomes than most locals).

If you just add housing, isn't it possible that the effect is like adding roads to prevent traffic congestion? The number of people coming in just increases even more until the marginal attractiveness is the same. From the point of view of locals this means that there are even more outsiders, and the affordability is just as bad.

This does not solve the problem of filling city centers with huge company logos, adverts, signs for casinos or night clubs.

There is a whole trolling campaign which has been extremely effective.

Lots of small towns in rural US say prayers before their town council meetings. The courts have ruled that this is ok, as long as there is no discrimination between religions - any citizen of that town can request to have their own religion's prayers spoken. People in these towns who are opposed to the Christian prayers have declared themselves to be adherents of the Church of Satan, and won court orders giving permission for Satanist prayers to take place.

There are videos of this happening on YouTube. It's, imo, remarkable evidence of something awesome about the American system. The Church of Satan sends someone scary-looking who recites something purporting to be a prayer, but is actually a speech in favor of humanism and tolerance. They are not allowed to make any political statements so they have to disguise it as prayer. They also make sure they get in lots of satanic-sounding stuff as well, to mess with the Christians. The local rednecks look worried and righteous and mumble anti-satanic stuff under their breath. They are allowed to say personal prayers to protect themselves from the devil, but not at a volume which covers up the satanic prayers. There are US Marshalls all over the place in these little town halls ready to jump anyone who violates any of these court instructions. And dozens of lawyers acting like it's an execution and they might be needed for a last minute challenge.

Most towns where this process has started simply get rid of the prayers at the start of the meeting.

How did you know the person was addicted to crack?

Betteridge's law of headlines.

Are motorcycles somehow cooler than bicycles?

This is literally state sponsored bicycle use. What would you suggest that 'state sponsored bicycle sharing' should consist of?