The bigger issue is that helium is a functionally finite resource, and does not remain in the atmosphere (at least IIRC it literally just floats up until it gets blown into space).
The bigger local issue you run into with liquid helium and liquid nitrogen is having it evaporate in an enclosed space. You can "easily" create an environment leading to inert gas suffocation (a real hazard in some industrial cases) - in reality any simple case like this is unlikely to be using enough of N or He, and is unlikely to be sufficiently enclosed, but in principle it would be possible - maybe if you were in a basement and spilled an inexplicably large thermos of them it could do it.
I can't believe no one has mentioned the FDA toxicology lab near the town [0]. There is good reason they put the lab in the middle of impoverished no where. There has been issues with the lab in the past, including missing primates last year [1]. Maybe I'm a bit tin-foil-hat, but this is literally an isolated place to study toxicity and I think it's a unique risk to relocate near it.
The article you linked does not talk about missing primates. They were doing experiments on monkeys. Activist put pressure on them to stop and they did stop. Then they rehomed the monkeys to a sanctuary.
They are “missing” in as much as the monkeys are no longer there, but everyone knows where the monkeys have gone and why the monkeys have gone. The article you linked itself explains this.
I learned SQL before I learned set theory. While learning set theory I remember thinking "oh this notation is just SQL backwards." Afterwards I began to find SQL much harder because I realized there are so many ways to mathematically ask for the same data, but SQL servers will computationally arrive at the end differently and with very different performance. This is a minor deal if you're just doing small transactions on the database, because if you are dealing with pages of 100 objects it's trivial to hit good-enough performance benchmarks, even with a few joins.
I was first introduced to the issue of needing hyper optimized SQL in ETL type tasks, dealing with very large relational databases. The company switched to non-relational database shortly after I left, and it was the first time I professional witness someone make the switch and agreed that it was obviously required for them. We were dealing with very large batch operations every night, and our fortune 500 customers expected to have the newest data and to be able to do Business Intelligence operations on the data every morning. After acquiring bigger and bigger customers, and collecting longer and longer histories of data, our DBA team had exhausted every trick to get maximum performance from SQL. I was writing BI sql scripts against this large pool of SQL data to white-glove some high value customers, and constantly had to ask people for help optimizing the sql. I did this for a year at the beginning of my career, before deciding to move cities for better opportunities.
Lately, I've began seeing the requirements of high performance SQL again with the wave of microservice architectures. The internal dependency chain, even of what would have been a mid size monolith project a decade ago, can be huge. If your upstream sets a KBI of a response time, it's likely you'll get asked to reduce your response time if your microservice takes up more than a few percentage points of the total end to end time. Often, if you are using relational SQL with an ORM you can find performance increases in your slowest queries by hand writing the SQL. Many ORMs have a really good library for generating sql queries they expose to users, but almost all ORMs will allow you to write a direct sql query or call a stored procedure. The trick to getting performance gains is to capture the SQL your ORM is generating and show it to the best sql expert that will agree to help you. If they can write better SQL than the ORM generated than incorporate it into your app and have the SQL expert and a security expert on the PR. You might also need to do a SQL migration to modify indexes.
So in summary, I think your experiences with SQL depends heavily on your mathematical background and your professional experience. It's important to look at SQL as computational steps to reach your required data and not simply as a way to describe the data you would like the SQL server to give you.
Was this before BigQuery/Presto/Trino? To me it seems like those technologies would have been a good fit.
They don't really work with indexes but instead regular files stored in partitions (where date is typically one of them).
This means that they only have to worry about the data (e.g. dates) that you are actually querying. And they scale up to the number of CPUs that particular calculation needs. They rarely choke on big query sizes. And big tables are not really an issue as long as you query only the partitions you need.
Those technologies were brand new at the time, the discussions about the problem started in 2013. The company (I had zero input) choose a more established vendor with an older product. Given the time and institutional customers that were trusting us with their data, I suspect any cloud based offerings were a nonstarter, and open source felt like a liability.
Of course with 20/20 hindsight that decision is easy to criticize. I suspect their primary concerns were to minimize risk and costs while meeting our customer's requirements. Even today, making a brand new Google product or Facebook backed open source project a hard dependency would be too much risk for an established business.
Why do you want successful cities to stop growing? Especially ones that have zero desire to stop attracting employers. Offices take up very little space so if you let developers build commercial real estate you will always have a mismatch between housing and jobs if you stop building residential real estate. This will displace lower income people in the end and lead to gentrification rather than a stop to growth.
Having a mechanism to reduce growth is actually great.
It's hard to increase transportation infrastructure in a built-up area. And when you do, everybody says it didn't work because traffic is still bad or trains are still overfull. But they never notice that population increased during construction. If you could stop growth, then your transportation needs stabilize.
Doesn't really feel fair to me though, because it's so hard to move into the closed city.
Personally, I'm a fan of limiting rent increases to a max of something like 5-10% per year. Not so much that it's a total hardship to deal with a max increase; not so little that landlords have to do max increases every year or get way off market; also not so little that a landlord can't catch up later if they purposefully lag on increases to keep a preferred tenant.
The biggest problem I see is that learning usually requires effort/work and AI requires students to do less effort/work to achieve the same output. So the worry is that the quality of education received will decrease.
Example: no one cares that you wrote 5 pages on To Kill a Mocking Bird. They care that you read the book and thought critically about it. AI allows students to skip the reading and critical thinking portion, which is the most important part.
That's a valid way of testing a student's knowledge. I do think that tests somewhat different skills and knowledge than the 20+ hours I would spend on large undergraduate essays. Most critically, the longer format probably is better at training students to get published in academic journals.
> We really need to change the regulations around the introduction of new chemical compounds to our environment on a mass scale.
What specific studies should we have done to notice this association? What specific safety studies need to be done before introducing a new chemical compound into our society?
Historically speaking, the only conceivable way they would have learned this if they feed aspartame to pregnant women and then studied the offsprings. This is fine for a final testing phase of safety, but is inhumane to do unless you are incredibly sure it is safe. Animal models for studying autism are flawed, and wouldn't come at all for decades after aspartame's introduction.
In modern testing, we could theoretically generate a super long list of safety checks to do. This test might look like raising a large generation or two of the specific line of mice used for studying autism. Then checking the offspring autism rate of those exposed to aspartame compared to a control. This would be a single checkbox every new chemical compound would need to do, and there could easily be tens of thousands of similar tests that would need to be done. We would need to add to the list overtime, as our understanding of optimal human health improves over time.
Imagine the investment required to pass these safety tests. It's a minimum price tag of 25M, if the safety tests are standardized and lab techs are trained on them and do them in an assembly line like fashion. I wouldn't be surprised to see the cost be 10-100x. At that level of investment there's two issues. The number of new chemical compounds added into our lives will move to a very slow rate. The other problem is this is just the safety test portion of R&D, after spending so much money this seems like a likely target for corruption and my skepticism for the results of such a test will be high.
> The number of new chemical compounds added into our lives will move to a very slow rate.
Could you elaborate on why this is a problem? It seems to me that there is not inherent right to introduce new chemicals into our lives, and I would prefer this not be done without thorough risk assessment studies.
In the medical industry, introducing a new medicine requires years of testing for something that will be given to a tiny slice of the population. I find it odd that there does not seem to be a similar process for chemicals that could be spread throughout the entire population.
I'm not capable of doing a full analysis on this question. I don't mean to say that this ban isn't worth doing, I meant to acknowledge that this has a downside. Let me throw out a few bullet points of those downsides of reducing the rate of new chemical compounds introduced to society.
* We are often creating chemicals that do the job of existing chemicals safer and more efficient. This ban would probably include a grandfather clause for old chemicals, and thus we might be using inferior products and doing more harm than we otherwise could. Look at refrigerants as an example of a chemical compound that has improved over the decades.
* Many chemical compounds introduced in the last 100 years directly improve productivity. The United States is in economic competition with other regions of the world. We could be creating a disadvantage that reduces our geo-political power.
* Many of these chemical compound increase quality of life. There's a strong unitarian argument for sucralose and polyurethane insulation.
Why use it in the first place? There is no need in general to consume aspartame. Its very raison d'etre is treating the symptoms of the root cause: excess consumption.
The bad stuff we may already be eating is a given, and something to be distinguished from introducing new things with no existing role in the foot chain.
Is it more humane to launch it without testing, producing the same effect for a much, much larger group of people than would have been involved in the intentional study? This seems to be a fairly gaping hole in the definition of humane. It reminds me of people who see an accident and don’t help because they might be held liable for the accident and they don’t want to get involved.
It's absolutely inhumane to expose pregnant women to chemicals unless you are highly certain that they are safe. Clearly it would be better if we tested aspartame exposure on a smaller population and detected this effect. I'm saying that if our confidence of it's safety is high enough to expose pregnant humans to the chemical in scientific studies our confidence of it's safety should be high enough to exposure it to the wider population.
Realistically though, that isn’t what happens, right? It’s not like if you release a chemical into the wild, that no pregnant woman will consume it. They will. Not studying the effects prior to release values the few individuals over the many in society, just because then the people who would do the study aren’t directly responsible for the negative effects. It’s kind of slimy IMO.
Prohibiting new chemicals outright would be fine, but that is pretty far from where we are today.
I usually take a laissez-faire attitude towards vice, but I am strongly against sports betting because of it's inevitable impact on sport. I love the idea of the extreme meritocracy of sports and view this as threat to it's integrity.
The writers claim of `the extreme meritocracy of sports`is pretty amazing. Considering all the research into 'Everyone in Baseball is born in August' to the constant drum of doping scandal. Or people moving whole families, or rich buying second houses (near sky slopes) to pump their kids past the poorer competition, etc.
It's pretty crazy for anyone to imagine sports as 'meritocracy' when exact birth-day, parents wealth, school district/ college wealth, etc, clearly is a HUGE driver of sports outcome (1/4 ? 1/2 ? ). And that is not tying in genetics, or cheating, or more.
Scrape any 'meritocracy', and you'll find it a) by humans, b) in a culture, and underlying unfairness of the cultures still has a heavy impact.
I know someone who was able to send his children to medical school in a foreign country, when they weren't accepted into schools in our country. He was able to pay ~$500,000 in tuition, plus all the living expenses, etc.
Now they have graduated and are (by all accounts very fine, even superb) doctors. My kids will always earn a fraction of what they do. Hard to argue that wealth doesn't create opportunities.
Oh and by the way, my father is a doctor, so you could argue that his wealth enabled my brother to make it into medical school (7 years of undergrad, multiple years of applying before being successful) in the first place.
Totally agree, and I think it's odd that we went from it being illegal in most places in the US to bring able to do it instantly on our phones, anywhere and we all are just letting it happen not seeming to even care as a society
