Posts by Schultz 1792 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Oct 2007
"Increasing power on earth has become harder over time and more expensive over time, but in space, it actually becomes cheaper and easier over time."
The production cost of electrical power has come down significantly due to the development of inexpensive renewable energy.
Am I the only one who predicts that we'll just get more ads, more intrusive ads, ads that get better at tricking you. Plus search result that are intelligently engineered to guide your eyeballs onto sponsored content.
Seriously. Either you pay for your AI chatbot, or the chatbot will have to search for another employer. Considering that most of you cannot possible finance your fair share of the giga-$ datacenters, it's gonna be the corporate world paying the bills (maybe borrowing a little from your retirement funds) and, eventually, looking for a return on investment. Free content is funded by ads. Or did I miss a revenue stream?
The legality signals that gambling is a legitimate activity. I think it should be illegal but there is no need for heavy handed enforcement. Just make it very clear that it's not a publicly sanctioned activity. Same should go for drugs. If people want to ruin their life or health, let them, but please don't encourage them. And I fully agree, there is need for public education about the problems with gambling.
A pet peeve of mine is sports betting. Do you really believe that you can run billion dollar businesses on sports gambling and there won't be any cheating? How much will it cost to buy a referee or a player? You only need to find the weakest link to buy a game. So obviously your favorite sports is corrupted by gambling. Go watch you local amateur team instead, they play for fun and not for money.
But the retreating glaciers are due to your stinking BBQ fires, so shut up and get used to cold cuts. Seriously, go hike in the alps if you still have any doubts about climate change. The vegetation gives you a nice indicator of where the glaciers were 50 years ago, 20 years ago, ... oh and you can also look at old photos if your imagination needs a bit of help.
We should be careful when trying to derive universal principles. We are all descendants of thieves, migrants, and murderers and if you try to argue universal rights across generations, then you should be the first to give up your current possessions. If you think your family was on the right side of history, then please remember that, going back /n/ generations, you have 2**/n/ ancestors.
In the list of human rights, ownership is pretty far down the list. There is a good reason for that, because one person's possessions can curtail another's freedom, and dignity. Ownership of something, such as land, is bestowed upon us as part of a social contract. You get to call that land your own as long as the wider society agrees upon it. And if you go back a few generations, you will invariably find that the land was stolen from somebody else. From the clergy during the French revolution. From the natives when the colonialists arrived (going back to the Roman times)....
We should be grateful to our neighbors, if they agree to live in a peaceful society with us. And we should not pretend that there are any fundamental, inherited rights that elevate us above our neighbors, Otherwise, how do you explain to your US American kids that you stopped paying taxes to your God-anointed king George III? He inherited his throne fair and square.
"So the Pilgrim Fathers received an invitation ... basically a member of the abenaki tribe named Samoset ..."
This is the ago old story of "we found someone who said it was OK". And if somebody gave you a finger, it's obviously OK to take the hand, and then drive him and his family off the lands and into some far-away reservation. We saw the same game unfold when the Trump and Vance families tried to play with Greenland, but somehow nobody wanted to wear the Maga hat with Mr. and Mrs. Vance.
The total mismanagement that saw the world economy nearly triple in the last 3 decades? That saw healthy growth in every single western economy? Is is that mismanagement you talk about? Just trying to make sure we talk about the same Western economies here.
I think you may underestimate the power of Trump. He may not be able to take over another country just by talking about it loudly. But armed with a sharpie, he can achieve amazing things. So don't be surprised if you wake up one day to see 'Canada' struck off the map, replaced by '51-st State of the biggest-ever US of A'.
Whatcha gonna do then?
Herman is hilarious. Labeling Marx, Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Maduro as liberals. Maybe some education is required to figure out when and where to use the word liberal.
Etymology:.The term "liberal" originates from the Latin word "liberalis," which means "pertaining to a free man or citizen."
Merrtiam Webster: Liberal can be traced back to the Latin word liber (meaning “free”).
Oxford Leaners Dictionary: willing to understand and respect other people’s behaviour, opinions, etc., especially when they are different from your own; believing people should be able to choose how they behave.
Cambridge Dictionary: respecting and allowing many different types of beliefs or behavior.
Hope you all learned something. But maybe the problem with Herman is not ignorance about the word liberal, but ignorance about Marx, Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, and Maduro. Trying to herd these guys into a single category indicates a massive ignorance about history and politics.
"Who gives a shit, what dumb fucker imagined it would be safe to leave strategically important cables lying around unprotected in shallow waters?"
So when your car is stolen, or your house burnt down, you'd be Allright to hear the same comment from others?
Looks to me you just exposed yourself as the dumb fucker with your comment.
Seriously? You think the persons who decide to migrate to the US do so without any knowledge about the real America? Do you go through your own life, and make decisions in your life, with such ignorance?
The migrants are ordinary humans, who see the opportunities they can have in the US and the lack of opportunities in their home countries. They are willing to take considerable hardship to get to the US and they are willing to work hard jobs that most US citizens would not touch.
I think the average migrants deserves much more respect than the average US citizen. The argument I heard in the recent US election was: "we deserve better because we are citizens", and not: "we deserve better because we work harder". To me, this indicates that the US is full of entitled assholes, who prefer to blame 'others' for their problems, instead of working to improve their own condition.
Sounds like Pennsylvania has an election system with checks in place. I.e., things working not optimally (what does?), but working out the kinks.
Democracy is a long game and should be built to work even with some adversity. The fact that so many USAsians obsess about fringe cases of voter fraud or some delayed ballots doesn't tell us much about problems with the election, but tells us a lot about the US citizens. Democracy only works if the majority of people want it to work. In the US, a growing minority seems to care more about winning than about having a functional democracy and that is the root cause of their problems, not some misplaced ballots.
"Meta [...] certainly doesn't appear to have caused me any harm."
I guess you are lucky, because others have been harmed by Facebook et al. The most egregious case was the spreading of nationalist and racist propaganda through Facebook in Myanmar, resulting in killings and rape and causing 700 000 people to flee their home. It's not that Meta is out to hurt you. They just want to make money and if a million people get hurt along the way, here or there, than that's not a priority for them. When they came for the Rohingya, you didn't care. But who knows, maybe they'll break you society next.
Mired in economic problems, but with an economy that is almost 1 order of magnitude bigger. Oh, and while the European economic problems are a bit of inflation, unemployment, etc., the Russian problems are that they fight a massive war.
So while your statements may seem factually correct on some level, they also totally ignore the reality of the situation. Russia is in self-destruct mode, throwing away a generation of economic development and a good number of their young men. Europe, OTOH, is running through their usual cycle of rich-country problems, one of which is that they start investing about 1% more of GDP into defense.
"if [Musk] sold all [his Tesla shares] as quickly as possible [...] the big shareholders would see their investments plummet"
But then Musk would see his personal wealth plummet. His exposure to Tesla is certainly much larger than that of other big investors, so he has the biggest interest of them all to keep the share price afloat. Unless if he can just pull some cash out of the company. No downside, really to eating 10% of the cake (company value) right now in cash and then sharing the rest of the cake (company value) with the other investors.
With 13 billion dollar debt and a negative cash flow in Twitter, I'd imagine that Musk has some interest to protect his personal wealth ... don't ever want those banks come knocking to ask whether you can still pay back your loans.
According to the March 2024 financial statement, Tesla's quarterly revenue is 21.3 B$, net income is 1.13 B$ and "Net change in cash" is -4.73 B$. Income and profit margins are down some 50% year-on-year, indicating that the market is not moving in the right direction for Tesla. The company future may strongly depend on protectionistic policies because Asian carmakers (especially in China) now sell similar sized electric cars at much lower prices. But protectionism carries its own dangers, because it may erode international sales.
So I guess it's quite a big question whether Tesla can ever earn back that 56 B$ Musk bonus. How do they even propose to fund that bonus? Will Tesla end up as a highly leveraged (i.e., indebted) company that folds as soon as interest rates go up? Institutional investors might end up liable if they vote so blatantly against their stakeholders interests.
He deserves extraordinary compensation. I believe paying him the 100-fold the yearly salary of his lowest paid employee should do it. If he wants more rewards, then he should invest his personal wealth into the stock with all the risks and rewards that Tesla offers to their shareholders. He should not take money out of the operational budget.
Musk definitely played a major role in drumming up the capital to make Tesla a serious car manufacturer. But it took an army of engineers and laborers to make it work and they all deserve their share of the rewards. Let's be serious, what will Musk do with those 50 billion that would benefit his shareholders or the wider society? Buy another Twitter?
If you look at how these methods scale, then it really is pumped hydroelectric storage. The Tesla powerwall-3 battery has a capacity of 13.5 kWh. A fairly new Swiss hydroelectric storage project has a capacity of 20 GWh. All the 600'000 powerwall batteries Tesla has installed, according to its own press releases, don't sum up to half that capacity.
So we really should build more pumped hydroelectric storage. Batteries, on the other hand, are affordable for individuals and may play a role for those who want their individual installations. Indeed, comparing the cost of the Swiss hydroelectric project with the cost of powerwall 3, the price difference may be less than a factor 3.
The US has a real problem because some wealthy elements of society figured out how to game the political system to protect their privileges. The result is an education system that favors the rich over the smart and motivated, a tax system that collects from the working classes and allows the rich to evade taxes.
The good news it that the US is a democracy and the system can (hopefully) be fixed without massive turmoil once the problems become too big to ignore. The New Deal showed how the democratic system can work. China, OTOH, has no proven system to resolve societal conflict. They depend on a ruling class that may or may not follow enlightened ideals. The cultural revolution showed how that system can go astray.
Let's just hope that the US democracy survives the next showdown between the moneyed and the rest. Make no mistake, the Trump phenomenon is a symptom of a dysfunctional society, where the disconnect between the wealthy and the rest got out of control. In Trump, the wealthy found their piper to lead the discontented into the wilderness. But a decade or two in the future, Trump will be gone and the problems will have to be addressed. Let's hope they manage without bloody turmoil.
Equally, we may hope that the Communist party in China finds a way to improve governance and strengthen democratic elements within and outside their party. Unfortunately, their current leader seems to be more of a Führer than an enlightened party leader, so we may have to be patient to see any positives out of China.
Last time I checked, quantum computing was still a fundamental science project. Yes there are companies collecting investor money and selling access to whatever-bit quantum computers but so far nobody has run a useful computation on these. It's a bit like fusion energy: we know it works in principle but we don't know if we can assemble a device that scales sufficiently to be useful.
Humans love magic. Imagine you can skip the hard work because you can just wave some wand or enter some data into a black box. Wouldn't that be nice? Well, some people just a little smarter than you have invented just that. For a little fee, you can use that box and you can Be Rich without any hard work.
For the person understanding the workings of said black box, the limitations may be obvious, but fortunately more than 99% of humans have no clue. So there is a big market. If you don't want to be the customer, maybe you can be the reseller. And because nobody understands the limitations, the possibilities and the market are truly limitless (no liability!).
... so I switched away from Chrome.
See, Google and I had this unwritten contract. I got to use their free services and browser while keeping annoying advertisements at a minimum (ublock, etc.). In return, Google could use all their tools to monetize the shit out of my internet activities.
If Google doesn't keep up their end of the deal, why should I? Let's move on.
Look up Stasser and the left wing of the nazi party. The party called itself national socialists for a reason.
Maybe we should be more selective with the labels we apply to people. And stop using these labels as a convenient way to discredit those we disagree with. OTOH, your use of language does help me recognize your personal set of biases, so carry on.
All we have to do is look at Ireland / Northern Ireland or Austria / Northern Italy (South Tyrolia). The way to defuse terrorism is by granting meaningful autonomy. One side's terrorists are the other side's freedom fighters and once a reasonable degree of freedom is achieved, the terrorists melt away.
CowHorseFrog: "By having so many babies they are creating a hell hole that is Gaza. Its utter madness to have 8+ kids when theres no future in the shithole tht is Gaza."
Here are the actual numbers from Wikipedia (go to the Wiki page for reputable references):
"Out of 224 listed countries and territories, the West Bank ranked 48th with a total fertility rate (TFR) of 3.2, and the Gaza Strip ranked 31st with a TFR of 3.97 according to The World Factbook in 2018.[13] In 2018, the West Bank had an estimated population growth rate of 1.81% (country comparison to the world: 56th) and the Gaza Strip had a population growth rate of 2.25% (35th)."
So we have a nice example of xenophobia coupled with an inability to look up the numbers. Full points.
and found that replacing batteries and screens is quite feasible, if you have the weird screwdrivers, a guitar pick, and some patience. I guess that newly acquired skill will become quite useless in the near future.
Concerning the limited lifetime of phones, I guess it's time to figure out how to prolong that lifetime. For most of us, it's not a hardware issue anymore -- the email app, messenger and browser worked just fine on my old phone. But the software obsolescence made me get a new phone this year.
The fact that there are so many untested (and some times untestable) theories out there indicates that we throw too much money at theoreticians and too little at experimentalists. This results in a lot of pointless theories and then a lot of PhDs ("Quants") messing up our financial system.
Just repaired an old HP-42s, so my kid could have a calculator for school. Turned out to be a real PITA, but free42 somehow violates the school's no-phone policy :(.
According to the Mediazona website:
"These numbers do not represent the actual death toll since we can only review publicly available reports including social media posts by relatives, reports in local media, and statements by the local authorities.
The real death toll is much higher. Besides, the number of soldiers missing in action or captured is not known."
So they don't count soldiers who were not officially killed in Ukraine. And the Russian Army seems to have a lot of I centives to keep the official numbers low: Financially they are on the hook for widow pensions, etc., if they acknowledge a war death. And I won't have to spell out how hight casualty numbers might affect their PR efforts.
So, pointing to the Mediazona numbers to question other counts is a bit nonsensical. RtFM!
are based on the fact that people might figure out how to do bad things with the knowledge provided by it? Well, you could buy physics and engineering books to figure out how to build a bomb ... no AI required. I guess that's how the North Koreans did it.
From my playing around with ChatGPT, it seems that this AI provides an interface to make searchable information more accessible (i.e., summarizes your search results in coherent sentences). It doesn't fundamentally change the available informtion or change the fact that technology can be used for good or bad purposes. Of course, there is the saying that sufficiently advances science always looks like magic. I guess for the uneducated masses, the current AI is the magic engine that will allow you to build a nuclear bomb or perform other sufficiently complicated 'magic' tasks.
...will be Microsoft opting you into sharing all your data within your Windows / MS cloud ecosystem. Win11 already requires enough comupting power that they should be able to train on you data locally before uploading relevant (marketing) information. Suitably anonymized, of course. Except if you reside in the EU, where they'll require proper consent and anonymization, somewhere in the 2030s.
But apart from my cynical view of the MS/ChatGPT cooperation, do you guys think the new AI engines represent a new user interface to information (+(natural language), +(compilation of multiple sources), -(reliability / reproducibility)) or does it acutally 'generate' knowledge? It seem like everybody assumes the second, but I am somewhat sceptical.
I find that pasr 30 I became more selective with the skills I want to pick up. All those wasted hours learning totally useless skills, or skills that age faster than you hamster... Those hours are just not coming back.
Those young kids always think that the latest fad will completely revolutionize their world. Then they spend a large amount of time debugging the latest fad, reproducing and fixing all those old errors, and feeling very smart about it :).
Separate area? Such as signing and abiding by a Brexit agreement.
There is no separate area, the EU agreement is a package deal and you can't pick the parts you like and renegotiate the rest. The EU tried to make this clear from the very beginning, but British politicians were a bit preoccupied with internal politicking and never seemed to get the message.
... so you have given us billions to build this thing. It would be a pity if all that money would go to waste! How about you give us a bit more and we'll consider actually building it. It would be a pity if you'd loose an election because you wasted all that taxpayer money!
It was a mistake to start offering money, but then they did it before and it also crashed and burned back then. But those politicians love this type of thing: they get to spend other people's money, they get a bunch of excited press releases and photo-shoots, and it works magic if they suddenly are out of a job and try to find a place within some friendly industry.
Time for the government to remember its core functions: pay your teachers, maintain a reasonable social net to keep your society stable, fund the army.
They should bring out their ad-supported version of MS glasses and they can start replacing billboards in real life! Imagine the possibilities, those hours of driving enlivened by interactive ads. It'll be good for the economy and good for the user too. (Honest, judge, that cyclist jumped out from behind the Budweiser ad.) Also imagine Clippy offering you a helping hand in those mundane daily tasks. What could possibly go wrong?
Latency is only important for high-frequency trading, i.e., some broker trying to interject himself between a buyer and a seller by buying faster and then selling with a mark-up. There is no benefit of high-frequency trading to the wider economy -- it has a negative effect as it drives up the cost of trading. So this shouldn't be a good long term business to invest in, as the business model will vanish once the regulators get their act together and agree on shutting it down.
But there is a benefit of low latency data transmission for almost all aspects of computing. The only question is whether hollow-core fibers are the tool for the job. Trading signal attenuation versus speed means that the benefits of hollow core fibers come with a significant cost. So it's a matter of finding the right niche where this trade-off is worth the cost.
Temperature describes the average energy in matter. To talk about temperature only makes sense when all molecular degrees of freedom are reasonably equilibrated, including kinetic, vibrational, and rotational degrees of freedom. Molecular collisions very rapidly equilibrate these degrees of freedom and the equilibration between rotation and velocity is actually faster than that between vibration and kinetic energy. It therefore makes no sense to separate out rotation or to claim that rotation is a form of latent energy. While the earth is warmer than space (at a cool 2.7 K, or -270.5 C), all that heat will eventually be re-emitted into space, but fortunately the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere (predominantly water vapor, but unfortunately also CO2) retain the heat from solar absorption long enough to keep us at comfortable temperatures.
Latent energy is energy consumed in a phase transition. E.g., a cooling earth might spend a lot of time at -2 C while all the oceans freeze, emitting a lot of latent heat. Latent heat does not play any role in the understanding of global warming.
In my field of research, we use supersonic molecular beams, expanding a molecular gas into vacuum. Within mm distances from the molecular beam nozzle (microseconds of flight into vacuum), molecules cool from room temperature to few Kelvin. So rotation is not special and equilibrates almost completely within microseconds (faster near room temperature!).
I'll be happy to recommend some textbooks if you want to learn more. I know this stuff pretty well, considering that I develop and perform molecular spectroscopy experiments for a living and teach all aspects of physical chemistry.
As a scientist, let me inform you that rising atmospheric CO2 does lead to increased temperatures on the earth surface. It's as simple as filling a bottle with a transparent liquid and another with a dark liquid, placing both into the sunlight and observing how one warms up with respect to the other. Only we fill the earth atmosphere with a 'darker', more absorbing gas.
If you want a deeper understanding of the earth thermal equilibrium, you'll have to look up the blackbody radiation spectrum for sun and earth and account for the place where sunlight is absorbed (mostly on the earth surface) and how heat is re-emitted into space (as IR/THz radiation through the atmosphere, with CO2 absorbing some of that, trapping the heat). This has been understood for some 100 years. We now have very good observations that CO2 concentrations and climate were coupled in past millenia and we have good observations showing the correlation of man-made CO2 and climate. The controversy is no more among scientists (crackpots excepted), but among the uneducated and populists.
The whole idea of this change to UTC is to remove leap seconds and the announcements stated that this will remove any requirement to play with time until the end of this century. So we'll leave it to the next generations to decide if they want to fiddle with the clocks or accept a few second's shift in time versus the day/night cycle. Stop worrying and trust your grandchildren to make a competent and informed decision about UTC versus UTC1, it's not your business anymore.
So the company incurs the full cost of developing and producing powerful hardware and software and then sells an inferior product instead. Doesn't sound like a great business decision to me. I'd rather buy from the competition who sells a fully functional product.
To sell a deliberately inferior product sounds like a bad idea to me. It might work if you are the only supplier in town, but it is not a way to build and gain market share in a competitive environment. I believe these managers should go sell razor blades, printer ink, or coffee pods instead.
