- You can't be serious. China does invest in renewables, but that is just on top of their ever-increasing fossil fuel consumption.
They are not powering their industries with renewables. If you believe that, I don't know what to tell you.
- While I understand the sentiment, it is important to distinguish between mindless consumption and wanting a better quality of life. Buying all kinds of useless crap (usually items of small value and little utility) should not be conflated with wanting to have better things. Better quality house, appliances, clothes, etc.
It is the latter that is useful and brings peace. People won't get too mad if their neighbors have more stuff as long as their stuff allows them a pretty good quality of life. But problems arise when you cannot buy the better stuff to improve your life and instead the focus is redirected to stupid items.
This is what the article is about, in my opinion. In the end, filling your house with gadgets and gizmos of dubious usefulness/quality does not improve your life substantially. But this is what much of the population has been relegated to, and it has a soul-crushing effect.
- So-called fluid typography and all the fancy “adaptive” layouts are extremely dumb.
Presentation of the content is as important as the content itself. I would argue that it is part of the content. It serves to direct attention and highlight the reading path.
Content isn't just blobs of text and media that follow linearly without hierarchy.
Just because you have the technology doesn't mean you should desperately try to use it. One needs to make a choice about how his content will be laid out and how much space it shall require. Considering tablets and laptops are ubiquitous, it is pointless to optimize for narrow mobile consumption unless it is the most trivial content (just a text scroll, basically). And if that is the case, you have no need for fluid typography.
- Yeah, I know they come pre-charged now. But I can't remember what his problem was back then. Maybe he didn't know, or he fucked up…
From what I understand, self-install should be fine up to a 12m run, but if you let too much gas leak, you may have issues because of low pressure.
At least now you can buy them for relatively cheap. Mine required a swap of the control board on the inside unit, and it was ridiculously expensive (almost as much as buying a new unit). I am not sure why it fried, but probably bad solder from old age (it's about 15 years old at this point).
It's an excellent technology, but the surrounding business feels extremely shady.
- Yes, I entirely agree. Even without being part of a group, women will support you as long as you are winning or at least appear to be winning. But the moment your position becomes precarious, they'll just leave.
There are evolutionary reasons for that: women can't side with someone who won't be able to defend them since they don't have the strength to defend themselves. But nowadays you can't say that because of feminism and identity politics.
That's just how things are, and why I think men should always be careful about the trust they put in women around them. They are much more likely to throw you under the bus than even a man who dislikes you.
- There is no honor among thieves, and there is even less honor in women who often turn out to be legal thieves.
That should be a warning to any man, but of course that's not politically correct to say.
- Yes, in the US I think it's fine; you have a lot more freedom.
In France, access to the gas technically requires a certification that is not available to regular people. You need to be professional and bow to the bureaucracy.
I know somebody who was required to pay the full installation price for a heat pump he installed himself because there was no professional that was willing to charge and launch the installation for the small fee it should require.
This is the hypocrisy and value-destroying behavior of EU collectivist governments. They tout ecological solutions, but you need to pay far more than is reasonable for those modern solutions. Predictably, people chose things that are worse but cheaper, like wood-burning stoves or pellet stoves.
Those things are made artificially expensive for no good reason, and that's because they get built overseas mostly, and this happened because of regulations in the first place. Then they wonder why the EU is losing ground economically…
- But that's just a function of their large population size.
Even if you wanted to, you cannot bring the majority of your population to a high-skill level. That's not surprising, but still it is debatable whether China is producing value in line with their large, highly skilled cohort. They seem to be stuck on the hard problem, relying a lot on the import of foreign-invented technologies. That may change over time; we will see…
- Agreed. For a while, importing stuff “on the cheap” looks like a good deal, but overtime if that makes your own industries weak, you are just losing power.
You can't win by just buying stuff from someone else; it appears that people have a hard time understanding that nowadays.
- You got downvoted, but I share the sentiment. It seems we coasted on hope for better solutions that never really get there and are largely unaffordable for most people.
A heat pump would make a lot more sense if electricity were cheap; alas, we went all in for renewables while ignoring nuclear for political reasons. The result is expensive electricity while still having a dependency on fossil fuel and even importing the renewable tech. That makes no sense in the short run, and I very much doubt it will make any sense eventually.
- Isn't the problem having access to the gas in the end ? They are tightly regulated, and this is why installers can charge a lot of money, I believe. How did you manage to locate a source?
- I know the electricity situation is pretty bad in Germany, but come on, can't they manage to make an equivalent to the French Linky?
- There is no way to properly make money from fully open protocols. If you do the hard work of research and development, your competitors can just take the work and sell their implementation minus the R&D costs, undercutting you. It's not sustainable.
It's basically what Apple learned during the Macintosh clones era. Churning out countless units of the same stuff isn't that complicated once you have figured out what needs to be copied. Getting the worth-copying state is the hard and expensive part; nobody is going to do it for free.
This can readily be seen in the "free" open-source software world. The vast majority of it is just lower-quality copies of existing software.
- Well, the world has become very superficial. People rarely question how they end up with a specific result, which makes cheating/outsourcing quite a good deal and even profitable for many.
- Yep, I completely agree.
By the same standard, humans would never have started consuming alcohol, and it should be strictly forbidden. But of course we have tried that, and it's not very effective, but for some reason they seem to think it can work with something that is even easier to handle.
- Yeah, nicotine is a mild stimulant; it's really not a big deal, which is why it is mostly tolerated. The bad interpersonal effects actually come from stopping nicotine, which makes people grumpy, but it doesn't last very long.
The problem is that it's a slow burn because it's consumed by smoking, and this is really the most pleasant way to consume it. People don't like the externalities associated with it, and that's pretty much it.
- I understand what you are saying, and I largely agree that it's how the medical system controls things in general, but that's true for pretty much any industry. I wouldn't see too much of a conspiracy in people trying to protect whatever they believe in.
Anyway, I don't think the research can have the effect you think it has. Cannabis will be available in the black market regardless of whatever the research ends up saying. Whoever really wants to try to see if it works better for them than conventional medicine/treatment can definitely do so and choose for themselves if it's worth it.
I have consumed quite a decent amount of cannabis myself and have friends who are regular users (this is how I access it, basically). I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the bad effects of cannabis; they are very real. And the older I get, the more I think that the good part isn't really worth the bad part unless we are talking about some more extreme situations like cancer treatment, tetraplegia, or basically anything where life outcomes are so fucked there is almost no way to make it worse.
It's probably better to avoid it entirely before 25 yo, until the brain is fully stabilized. But that's very much true of alcohol, nicotine, and even most likely caffeine, but they still get used, so whatever, I guess.
- Orthography changes with time in any language. French is the same; there are many weird orthographies that became the norm with various rule changes.
Language is a living thing; it is never set in stone. We just have to adapt to it; there is no other way.
- Agreed. I didn't score too badly (above 50% of native speakers and above 99% of non-native). Many of the words were obscure and extremely contextual. If you are in a particular field with a lot of jargon, you may know countless words, but I don't think it means anything.
Being able to correctly define useful words would be a better test of knowledge. Just because you “know” some words doesn't mean you really understand what they mean.
Bah, it's just a test for “book smart” people to feel good about themselves. One has to feel good about that time investment, I guess.
On a side note, I don't think using too many uncommon words is a good thing. It just obscures the meaning of what you are trying to say unnecessarily. But this is a status marker and a pretty effective way to create tribal boundaries; people love to feel smart without too much effort.
I feel that the education system is deeply flawed and rewards all the wrong things because we refuse to select based on real factors because of political ideology. I think those that are successful become so despite of it, instead of because of it. When you looks at the biographies or people who truly pushed the enveloppe and changed the world, it becomes evident.
We need to ask if the cost of the education system are really worth the rewards. Considering how large that cost has become nowadays, my premilinary anwser would be no. And I feel that the shift to rent seeking economy as well as reduced innovation and iteration speed is deeply linked to that. Most of the recent growth came from IT, a field that was notorious for be full of dropouts. That should tell you something. Now that the field has been innunduated by college graduate, it has shifted to fully extractive behavior.
Any push back against the system is met with suspition because most people feel they should have a shot at making it big, because they are worth it. In practice, it seems that the inequalities never disappear anyway, and people just have to pay more upfront in order to try to prove themselves. In the long run, it mostly end up exactly as it started and society just pay a dear cost for what is basically unproductive behavior.
You behavior remark is quite on the nose, because from my point of view this is exactly how tyrannies are created. If you get rewarded too much for simply being obedient to the autority in place, overtime any other strategy gets pennalised dispropotionally and you end up with a bunch of sycophant you will never push back against the order, no matter how bad the decisions/rules get.