Posts by conel 87 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jun 2010
Taking the average of 30 something models always seem bizarre to me, is there any other field where this is done?
The weirdest thing is the models/ IPCC don't predict doom at all, there's a huge disconnect between what's actually in the assessments and the hysteria in the media.
As per the article, Musk has publicly state this position for over a decade (I remember a friend being very disappointed when I told him).
If the government believe he's mistaken why not write him a letter first (and the rest of the rocket industry too, because most seem to be under the same impression as Musk).
The not needing advanced degree thing is nonsense. Welders work to drawings, drawings are classified. Even cleaners need security clearance.
Imagine if the EU had succeeded in mandating micro usb a decade ago. We'd be stuck waiting on the politicians to allow progress/ innovation. For people claiming there is no more innovation to be made, who saw laptops/ phones using the same charging connector 10/ 15 years ago?
There is no environmental savings here either, this does effect the charger but the phone. Apple are already shipping ithings with usb-c to lightning connectors and all the mandate will do is cause people to throw out their existing lightning cables.
Amazon are gradually pushing themselves down market and they should be allowed to continue. I've been automatically translating "Amazon recommends" into "garbage with a high profit margin" for a few years now.
The idea that Amazon are some behemoth that can't be competed with is simply not true. If you want generic garbage you can get it from ebay/ alibaba at a lower price. If you want reasonable quality there are numerous other retailers that are at the same or lower prices for the different market segments. What Amazon has is convenience and that will only go so far.
Government regulation targeted at a specific company isn't a sensible route to go down. Improved transparency such as "country of origin"/ "affiliation with retailer" could be applied to all retailers to benefit consumers, but the politicians are not really interested in that.
They want to centralise decision making on what crops to put in what fields!
In engineering when working on things as mundane as aircraft strutures testing/ benchmarking of the simulation results is necessary. Someting that is impossible with something as gradiose as an earth digital twin.
The notion that they can simulate the entire planet and make better decisions than specialists - quite literally working on the ground in some cases - is simply science fiction.
From the pdf; relating to a seperate lawsuit:
"The UMB Complaint accused Revlon of improperly amending the 2016 Loan Agreement to avoid paying the Lenders, and alleged that Revlon had defaulted on the loan. More significantly for present purposes, it alleged that Revlon was unable to repay the loan because it was “insolvent and facing a severe liquidity crisis.”
"The non-returning lenders believed, and were justified in believing, that the payments were intentional," Judge Jesse Furman ruled."
"Indeed, to believe otherwise — to believe that Citibank, one of the most sophisticated financial institutions in the world, had made a mistake that had never happened before, to the tune of nearly $1bn — would have been borderline irrational."
I think the lenders would've known it was a mistake on the basis that the debtor wasn't liquid enough to repay the load. Don't think the judge's reasoning here holds up. I'm sure the lenders were sophisticated enough to realise bad loans don't get repaid in full, ahead of time, intentionally.
It's because decades old large corporations treat people properly compared with newer cynical firms using politics for cover.
Went for an interview with Intel as a student for work placement and was shocked when I got a cheque in the mail for travel expenses, big bluechip firms don't do bullshit like this from Sparta Global.
This company started off with a concept for a gas-turbine powered hybrid truck, an obviously dumb idea which could never hope to compete with a diesel engined truck. Open cycle gas turbines, although a lot lighter and more compact than diesels are far ess efficient, more expensive, louder and require more maintenance.
After a while I guess they figured the above out so they pivoted to hydrogen powered, but of course they didn't actually have any solutions for the usual problems related to hydrogen.
And now they've pivoted to battery electric and couldn't even come up with the same level of functionality a scrapheap challenge team would manage.
They seem like legit con artists.
See below for the original pitch:
https://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/future-cars/news/a29127/nikola-motor-hybrid-big-rig-natural-gas/
The MCAS system is bad enough without exaggeration:
"MCAS could not be overridden despite receiving erroneous data from an Angle Of Attack (AOA) sensor".
The MCAS could be overridden but the pilots weren't familiar enough with it to know how. A combination of the system being very difficult to deal with and the pilots not being appropriately trained.
The immunity is a good thing for platforms and shouldn't be removed. But the more social media sites go down the route of promoting/ censoring content based on political preferences the closer they are to publishers and publishers shouldn't have immunity.
The platforms can of course define what content they want to host at a certain level, in the way that sub-reddits are for particular topics. The rules should be transparent and clear to users, so if a platform wanted to be political and be pro/ anti a particular position that's fine and should be in the rules of the platform. If a platform claims to be politicaly neutral but actually censors/ promotes political views they should be considered a publisher with all the liability ramifications.
Then platforms can decide for themselves what they are and consumers can know what they're getting rather than this pretend neutrality.
Funnily enought a flat rate of tax is very popular amongst economists. Redution of adimistration costs and a removal of sweet-heart tax breaks which distort markets (how much tax an industry pays is a function of how effective they are at bribing lobbying politicians).
This quote from Boeings CEO on why they moved the headquarters goes a long way to explaining the problems they're having.
Condit makes no secret of another factor: as CEO, he didn’t want to be bothered with tiresome “how-do-you-design-an-airplane stuff”.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/01/21/what-went-wrong-at-boeing/
They've been going wrong for about 20 years now.
It was the McDonnell Douglas acquisition, the same thing happened when McDonnell purchased Douglas.
The below paper was written by a Boeing engineer 19 years ago and is eerily prescient about the problems they're having now.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e9da/f5cc1c94c6e34e29095ca168e8fa2d750df9.pdf
Slavs were so commonly enslaved in the middle ages that's where the word comes from. Most every people at some stage in history were slaves/ slavers, St. Patrick was a Welsh slave brought to Ireland for example.
The history of slavery and its abolishment- with the obvious modern exceptions - is nearly the opposite of what the woke crowd are trying to intimidate people into believing.
What if the EU had made micro usb mandatory. Would we now be waiting on new rules so we could move to usb-c?
51,000t might sound like a lot but split across 500Mn people in the EU it's only 0.1kg per person. And that's not an annual figure, it's total.
What's the best case scenario with these regulations, reduce the waste by 10%? 20%? So maybe a few 10s of grammes of waste saved per person...
The author claims that "the controversy centred on the fact that James has repeatedly expressed transphobic views". Surely there must be some very strong evidence to claim this as a fact. I mean, it's not simply that some loonies have called her transphobic on twitter, is it?
Of course, it is and this is one of her "transphobic" statements "If they can change the definition of women to include men, they can erase efforts to empower women economically, socially, and politically.”
The left really has gone bat shit crazy when they're going after a black woman because she's opposed to having people with penises in women's bathrooms and sports teams. It's kind of funny and the ideology will inevitably eat itself alive, but it's disturbing to think how much damage they might do first.
"Those defending Damore pushed an article published on a website that specializes in promoting controversial views (example lead story: Should We "Stop Equating 'Science' With Truth"?)"
The first line in that article: "Actually: no."
The website in question, Quillette published their article in response to a Slate piece titled "Stop Equating “Science” With Truth" (hence Quillette's use of quotation marks). And yes, the Slate author really meant it.
The Reg's editors should consider if they're ok with this kind of blatant dishonesty.
http://quillette.com/2017/08/11/stop-equating-science-truth/
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2017/08/evolutionary_psychology_is_the_most_obvious_example_of_how_science_is_flawed.html
You also stated: "Just to be absolutely clear here: If you ever make a statement about what a broad group of people are like, especially in comparison to another group of people, you are going to be wrong. And the bigger that group, the more wrong you will be."
There are real average differences between groups, debate the accuracy, question the research but to advocate for blank slatism is silly.
The irony of your piece is that the memo and responses appear to have brought out the worst in you.
According to the author anyone who studies variance between population groups and considers how the averages affects society is a bigot.
This is truly bizarre, it's extreme blank slatism and is the far-left equivalent of creationism. The inability to consider group differences and still treat people as individuals is the most concerning part of identity politics.
"Just to be absolutely clear here: If you ever make a statement about what a broad group of people are like, especially in comparison to another group of people, you are going to be wrong. And the bigger that group, the more wrong you will be.
And, no, simply inserting the word "average" does not excuse you from making such false generalizations about groups of people; in the same way adding "allegedly" does not let you accuse a random person of being a child molester."
If I was to say that on average women live longer than men would I be wrong?
I'd love to know where people get the notion that charging an electric car is so cheap, £2-3 my arse.
60kWhr * £0.14/kWhr = £8.4 (not including charging losses)
Although that's four times what you're claiming, it still sounds kinda cheap compared to diesel/ petrol. But it's not when you consider the taxes.
A similar car would need about 18l of diesel/ petrol to go the model 3 range of 215 miles (assuming 54mpg). That would be £20.7 at £1.15/l, but when you strip out the taxes it's only £6.84 at £0.38/l.
Add back in the electricity VAT rate of 5% and you get £7.18 worth of petrol to go the same distance as a Tesla model 3.
Electric cars do not work without subsidies.
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