How easy do you find Unicode input? Isn't "x^2" or "x**2" (Python) much easier to type than "x²" ? In the latter case, I have to lookup the char code for ², which happens to be U+0082 ("Superscript two")
Online grocery delivery was successful in the UK in the 1990s — Tesco started online ordering in the same year (1996) as Webvan, but could use their existing supermarkets as warehouses so avoided one of Webvan's main problems.
My parents used it occasionally, and I remember them/us demonstrating it to other parents. The software was supplied on a CD-ROM, and it connected to the internet only to download the stock list and place the order.
> Renewable energy technology is ready, right now today, to replace fossil fuels. All we have to do is start doing it, but the Oil lobby is just too strong apparently. There is no political will. I wish I was wrong, but I just don't see humanity pulling together to solve this one.
Sorry, but its really not. Perhaps in some sectors such as ground transportation, but definitely not in air and sea transport and fertilizer production, and many industrial processes. At least not at scale, where would have to make massive lifestyle sacrifices which are not politically acceptable outside of extreme authoritarian states who have no reason to do this anyway.
Solar is so cheap and getting cheaper than we can power those sectors with air-to-fuel plants. A carbon tax would go a long way towards leveling the playing field with carbon neutral or carbon negative alternatives to fossil fuels.
Its a case of prisoner's dilemma. Individuals making the proposed lifestyle changes in order to make a genuine dent in AGW amount to jumping on the tracks in order to stop a freight train.
This is the one issue where I feel some sympathy with the right. I hate "Virtue signaling" about as much as they do. I'm sorry, but if you are going to snap at people over eating beef, while you fly/drive all over the country/world unnecessarily, you are absolute full of shyte.
I am not a vegan. My social world in D.C./NYC has many secular, left-wing, vegans. Many of them are friends or loved ones. They demonstrably speak their mind in front of me on countless issues on which we disagree.
I have dined with them countless times at restaurants where they order vegan and I don't. I have never once been "snapped at" about my dietary decisions. Some of these people have dedicated years of their life to non-human animal rights activism.
So I am very skeptical that this shaming occurs at any appreciable scale. I suspect it is mostly psychological projection: one doubts the morality of one's decisions, judges oneself harshly, but experiences this as the judgement of others.
You are correct that this is not a prisoner's dilemma, it is a tragedy of the commons[0]. However, if a wizard could magically control the "personal decisions of 99% of Earth population" and make them optimal for reducing CO2 emissions then, believe me, climate change could be trivially solved.
It is a classic cooperation problem. Perhaps not prisoners dilemma. Perhaps not at individual scale. Probably tragedy of the commons.
Cooperation is not consuming fossil fuels. Defection is consuming fossil fuels.
If you cooperate and other defects you suffer climate impact and expensive energy (expensive everything, worse economic growth than others).
If you defect and other cooperates you suffer climate impact but at least you get cheap energy (cheap everything, more economic growth than others).
People, nations, corporations, etc don’t stop using fossil fuels because they incur a penalty against their competitors if they volunteer to and their competitors don’t.
The assumption here is that fossil fuels are actually cheaper. But an electric car pays back the higher upfront cost in fuel savings in significantly fewer miles than most cars will have put on them. Solar generates power at a lower cost per kWh than coal.
The fossil fuel industry has to be actively sustained through subsidies and government regulation hostile to alternatives. Maybe that wasn't true 50 years ago before the alternatives got viable and cheap, but if it's not true now then why did we stop subsidizing electric cars while we still subsidize oil companies?
WDYM personal decisions don't matter? Industrial and agricultural sectors, which both in sum contribute 50% of total greenhouse gas emissions, produce what is in demand from consumers. Another 15% of emissions is from personal vehicles. Changing personal habits is the only way we can ever reach some utopian climate targets. Utopian because old habits die hard.
Once again, personal decisions on the consumer side doesn't matter here. Unless all consumers cooperate to force a ban on practices that are bad for environment. However that basically means forcing specific decisions on the 1% that control laws and business.
If consumers stop buying gas guzzlers, the impact of personal transportation on the climate will reduce. Are you suggesting the 1% controls the minds of the 99% to do things that are harmful to the environment? Past some point, there is at least some level of personal responsibility?
Several car companies had plans to stop making ICE cars at some point in the near future. Everyone stopped buying their cars and they have had to backtrack (e.g. Porsche). We have all collectively decided that environmentalism is hot air (tee hee) and we'll just continue with business as usual.
> The real problem is we don't have a low-friction digital payment system that allows individuals to automate sending payment requests for small amounts of money to each other without requiring everyone to sign up for a merchant account with a financial bureaucracy.
>First you have to make it low-friction. If I want Joe Average to send me $1 in cryptocurrency, how is he getting $1 in cryptocurrency to send me?
Absolutely. You're 1000% correct. Cryptocurrency is way too high friction for stuff like that. When I wish to spend crypto, I need to:
[If you don't have an exchange account already, you'll need the 0.x steps too!]
0.0 Create an account on an exchange which is legally allowed to operate in your state/country;
0.1 Provide all sorts of KYC/AML info including photos of yourself and your government ID;
0.2 Wait hours/days/weeks for the exchange to "validate" your KYC/AML info and allow you to purchase crypto;
1. Log in to an exchange which is actually allowed to operate in the place where one resides;
2. Purchase Bitcoin or other coin the exchange deems appropriate (leaving aside the hefty fee charged for using fiat currency/traditional credit card);
3. Wait days/weeks until the exchange allows you to transfer the purchased cryptocurrency out of your exchange-hosted wallet;
4. Transfer crypto to a wallet you actually control;
5. Convert the crypto purchased on the exchange to the crypto coin required for whatever your purpose may be;
6. Transmit the crypto to the destination wallet.
Total time (not including setting up the exchange account, which can take anywhere from 1-10 days): 3-10 days.
All the setup is no worse than setting up a bank account
And technically it can be avoided through back channels if you know someone who already has it - can just pay them cash or whatever and they can send crypto to you
Crypto is very easy to transfer once you have a wallet
Its the exchange to/from real world currency where the friction is.
> All the setup is no worse than setting up a bank account
Which is a huge pain in the butt. If someone invented a new lower-spam email ecosystem that required everyone to make a new bank account, very few people would join.
I would say something about a combined account but many countries have already figured out free bank transfers without needing crypto so maybe do that?
However, we weren't talking about using cryptocurrency in general, but in a very specific way: Making micropayments to devs as a mechanism to limit AI slop PRs to open source projects.
Doing that effectively would require broad implementation of some sort of payment scheme.
Given the current (as I documented) hoops one needs to jump through to obtain cryptocurrency if one doesn't have any, especially just for a random user to get crypto to send $1 to a github repo with their PR makes exactly zero sense.
Yes. Buying drugs and other stuff outside of the mainstream economy is definitely worth the effort. To send $1/PR for escrow to limit spam? Not so much.
If the power was used over the whole year (and not just one hour)
(2600 MWh / year) / (24 * 365 h/year) = 0.29 MWh = 296 kWh. Thats like hair dryer levels of power consumption (if the hair dryver was left on all the time)
Why are you even trying to argue energy consumption when the topic is eWaste due to bitcoin ASICs?
Even if we continue down this route, its something like 15% of global stock transactions going through NYSE, per transaction its extremely efficient when compared to Ethereum; but thats not the argument anyway- its that the hardware used for mining is barely useful outside of that use-case, and the shelf-life is very low to boot.
If there was a use-case, we’d have found it by now, since 30,000 Tonnes a year of it ends up in landfills, surely someone would dig it out or buy it if it had utility.
Speed of light doesn't adhere to Moore's law :) and it's made worse by the fact most everyone connects via WiFi these days and it alone adds a few ms more.
I'm not surprised; you need a lot more servers and even so, there are a lot of places where something low ping times is difficult. While there is a lot of room for latency to go down, 1 lightmillisecond is ~300 km (~186 mi). This means that if a computer is 150 km away, 1 ms is the minimum ping allowed by physics, if I am talking directly to it.
By that yardstick, we've actually done very well in a lot of cases. :)
Use C, C++ or Fortran for the heavy lifting, and Python for UI/business logic/non-high perf stuff for rapid app development.
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