zizee

This is the part that is questionable:

> our far-right government, which loathes and fears any technology more recent than coal & witch burning.

Agreed. As per the HN guidelines:

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle

HN is a great place for considered discussion. Let's keep it that way.

> Two other solutions exist. One is spinning the window, you'll see it on ships. The other is making the window hot.

There are two more solutions I can think of: hydrophobic coatings, and blasted air. I believe these both perform quiet well in less intense rain. Unfortunately both of these suffer from performance degredation from dirt/bug/bird poo etc, so not a perfect replacement to a traditional wiper.

I believe that you have the power dynamic reversed. I.e. The drivers will go where the customers are more than the customers will go where the drivers are.

A driver only gets paid if a passenger rides. If Uber increases the costs of their rides over a competitor, the the customers will opt to the competition.

I'm not super knowledgeable about this, but my understanding is that there are significant losses during electrolysis and probably when burning hydrogen. I expect just using an electric furnace would be more efficient.

Lots of speculating why it is cheaper to ship from China than domestically, a lot of it misguided.

The root cause is that quite a few years ago the consortium of national postal providers which setup agreements on who pays for which parts of international shipping decided that China was classed as a developing country and given subsidized rates by other countries. This wasn't a big deal when the agreement was made because it was before the days of pervasive online commerce, and there just wasn't that much sent from China to other countries via the postal service.

I encourage everyone interested in this to checkout this podcast episode from NPR's Planet Money: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/01/634737852/epis...

> The reason for this price gap, Jayme claims, is a secretive group of postal policymakers that meets every four years to fix international shipping rates. A kind of postal illuminati.

> Today's episode: A conspiracy theory that's actually real. How the decisions made behind closed doors make it cheap to buy things from across the world, but are also distorting the global economy.

> it's inefficient to split water to produce hydrogen

You also have significant losses when you convert it back electricity/heat with fuel cells, or burning it.

> Oxygen is great for producing syngas

This is really interesting. I wonder how much this helps offset the losses mentioned above?

I don't think your landlord was right.

From memory, splitting water into Hydrogen and oxygen via electrolysis, only to be converted back to electricity is very lossy. I believe that most hydrogen generated at industrial scale is derived from fossil fuels.

Storage is also very difficult. Hydrogen is so small it can squeeze through a lot of gaps, making it hard to contain. You probably have to store it at high pressure and at cryogenic temperatures.

> Real cities have metros underground, full stop.

I am not sure if this implies you think Melbourne is lacking a underground metro? Or perhaps you're just making a general statement.

FWIW Melbourne has both trams and a underground metro system that does a fairly respectable job serving the CBD, and good network coverage to inner suburbs.

> Hypoxia is a condition in which the body or a region of the body is deprived of adequate oxygen supply at the tissue level.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypoxia_(medical)

> If the next level above me couldn't spend at least 45 minutes thinking...

Grandparent comment did not say "next level" above. People are often talking to people in different parts of a company, or more than one level up/down.

I'd really like Netflix to add a feature of "hide this shitty show from me forever because I will never watch it", it would be an obvious win from a user's perspective.

Why don't Netflix provide this? Because people would quickly realize how little in their catalog is worth watching.

Sure. I was responding to a comment saying the reason rooftop solar makes sense is the sunk cost in the land overwhich the roof lives. Rooftop Solar make a lot of sense, but probably the main reason is the electricity generated does not come with the cost of having to maintain a hugely expensive grid.

There was an Israeli company trying to do this.

Telsas now seem to be built around the battery pack, which is now a large flat heavy sled. I wouldn't be surprised if it was all to do with the practicality of low center of gravity, structural integrity, safety that such a configuration provides.

Thinking about this more, and extending/tweaking the kernel of your original idea of solar close to consumption, and providing shading: an ideal place for solar is to use it as shading in car parks. Underutilized land, demand in the nearby businesses and to charge parked cars.

Not really my idea by the way - I have seen a number of such projects underway on the web, and in real life.

Please read my comment in the context that it was a reply to someone saying electricity companies in Australia are not moving into rooftop solar because it would undermine their current investments.

I am not arguing rooftop solar does not make sense to install. I have a system and it works for me. I think for a lot of people, especially Australian homeowners it is a sound economic and environmental investment.

That sounds very difficult to maintain. Land outside cities is cheap, and the percentage of loss transmitting electricity long distances (at very high voltages) is usually overinflated in most people's minds.

Better to put them out in a big barren field, fairly low to the ground.

If they charged the true cost of the grid and dropped kw pricing to the true cost, people would have little incentive to conserve the limited resource that is electricity generated.

It is more like the supply/demand has set a price for KWs and the margin the electricity companies make on it is used to subsidize the cost of the network.

I think you'd be surprised how cheap land can get outside of cities.

> A 6.6 kW system installed retails at(AUD 2700 /USD 1870)

That sounds too little to pay for a decent quality system which will last 20 years. For decent components, from a reputable supplier you'd be expecting to pay around twice that.

You're also discounting the need to have power after the sun goes down. If you compare roof top to mains, you really need to include the cost of a battery large enough to go off grid, which is at least another $10k, and quite a bit more if you don't want to have any lifestyle changes.

I have a 5.5 kw roof system that I am very happy with, but I won't pretend that it replaces mains power.

I also expect to be keeping mains for a long time yet. I have a desire to make my next car electric. I used to think that the grid would go into a death spiral inches batteries got cheap enough. Now I think electric cars will save it.

I think solar and storage are the future and really want that future now, and I think you do as well. But you do it a disservice by overselling the case.

It's possibly the same reason people wear clothing with a large brand-name printed across the back/front. People often associate brands with their "tribe", and liking posts could be another way to signal that they are part of the in-group.

Disclaimer: I possibly don't know what I am talking about as I don't really know Instagram mechanics at all, but I am guessing they are similar to Facebook's.

Interestingly the three responses to my comment are quite similar, which makes me wonder that I misunderstood what the grandparent was writing.

> That logic assumes humans want to share equitably the ownership of robots and their benefits.

I read that as the robot ownders not wanting to share, but now I see that perhaps the grandparent was talking about society as a whole.

I suspect the difference here is one of context. I live in a country that has a fairly strong social safety net when compared to the popular conception of the safety net in the United States of America.

I often see this pessimistic prediction, and I don't get it.

What benefit would someone have to not pass on cost savings to consumers if they had a super effective robot to do something? And regardless of their motives, how would they stop it from happening? Patents have limited lifetimes and and techniques developed will be quickly replicated/democratized.

Perhaps someone could corner the market for a while, but not indefinitely.

In the end, the result of automated production will be downward pressure on prices, with consumables trending towards $0.

With this in mind, it strikes me that the pessimistic predictions stem from the idea that there is a secret cabal of the "wealthy" who take great pleasure* in keeping their fellowman down. Today, by many measurements people living in wealthy countries have a standard of living so far superior to that of kings of old. Has the secret cabal been just lying in wait until now to strike?

* sure, some percentage of billionaires are probably sociopaths, but I'm sure most are not.

Yes, clearly suggesting limiting reproduction is equivalent to suggesting a person should kill themselves /sarcasm.

Many of the world's problems are a result of overpopulation. It is not an unreasonable point to make that individuals reducing reproduction world wide could help.

P.s. no need to now reply to me explaining how impossible / impractical / unfair / unimplementable such a suggestion might be.

Interestingly Western Australia is within their rights (granted under the constitution) to succeed from the federation.

I don't know who said it first, but we see a lot of blog posts that could have been condensed into tweets, and a lot of books could be condensed into a blog posts.

Gitlab also raised 100 mil on a 1.1 billion valuation fairly recently: https://www.businessinsider.com/gitlab-valuation-microsoft-g...

I know you're just being humourous, but your joke highlights a challenge with people and safety equipment. People resist using safety stuff for a variety of reasons. E.g. not looking cool, convenience, anti-authoritarism etc.

We could make cars significantly more "death-proof" with rollcages, harnesses, helmets, speed-limitors etc. But we don't, and for many good reasons.

My (somewhat drawnout) point is that design of these features matters not just from a safety result pov.

I think that you can recognise that there would be key differences though. It would be less conspicuous, easier to put on, and not an all or nothing proposition.

I wonder why Volvo never went further with this? I can't imagine the cost would be prohibitive to add these to a high end vehicle like Volvo produces, and it would fit perfectly with there safety first image.