beat

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331.
by beat 7y ago
I wonder how many other countries are in Poland's boat? That's some tremendous political resistance to overcome. In American politics, the fate of coal miners is ridiculously overrated. The coal industry employs fewer people than
332.
by beat 7y ago
I've said it before and I'll say it again... market forces are accomplishing what regulation and public awareness never accomplished, in terms of reducing greenhouse emissions. I am so glad the market is on our side for once.
333.
by beat 7y ago
That's a lazy, cynical argument. The core of conservatism is "People are awful". What if people aren't awful?
334.
by beat 7y ago
Wrong. The primary cause of population growth now isn't the birth rate, but rather life expectancy. People are living 20+ years longer than before. If you take your argument to its logical conclusion, the #1 most significant thing you
335.
by beat 7y ago
It's not just the industrialized nations. It takes about two generations for a country to drop from a high birth rate to a birth rate of less than two (replacement, more or less). All but a handful of impoverished, war-torn countries i
336.
by beat 7y ago
"Technology" really just means "stuff that didn't exist when I was a kid". The majority of HN grew up with the internet and cell phones, and don't really remember a time without these things.
337.
by beat 7y ago
Also, fewer than half of all HN article link headlines result in a click.
338.
by beat 7y ago
It's not even malware/scams - it's just "Person who wants a mortgage calculator" is "person who is interested in getting a mortgage", which is some seriously high-value data. There's a lot more profit
339.
by beat 7y ago
The original peak oil theory predicted US production only, and it was correct down to the exact year. We did break that peak again, finally - in 2017, after nearly 50 years of aggressive technological improvement in oil discovery/recov
340.
by beat 7y ago
Is internal combustion an "incremental" change from steam engines? That's the kinds of lines we're talking about. In a way, lithium ion batteries are incremental - they're just batteries. But they've enabled mo
341.
by beat 7y ago
No, sounds don't prevent me from tasting food. But certain types of sounds are severe migraine triggers for me, and my migraines are definitely related to synesthesia and sensory issues. Over the past 20 years or so, my migraines evolv
342.
by beat 7y ago
Synesthesia is very hard to explain. It's like explaining color to the blind. I have mild synesthesia myself - I hear flavors. I can say "I hear flavors", but that doesn't help to tell you what different flavors sound li
343.
by beat 7y ago
That thesis is not well supported by the article, and I didn't see it referencing better-quality material. And it grossly overestimates the speed of changes. My father farmed with a mule in the 1950s.
344.
by beat 7y ago
And we can't change crops? Or change methods? I'm not buying that. Humans grow crops everywhere, from equatorial deserts to the arctic circle. And the changes that make a given crop totally unworkable (as opposed to not quite as e
345.
by beat 7y ago
Hunger has become far less of a problem in the 21st century than it has ever been before, at any point in human history. And population growth is leveling off - the global population has quadrupled in the last century, but will probably lev
346.
by beat 7y ago
And where will DNA editing be in 40 years?
347.
by beat 7y ago
How did this crap rate publication in Scientific American? It's really just a Millennial version of "uphill both ways". I'm 53, and the amount of technological change I've seen in my lifeime is astonishing. I can cl
348.
by beat 7y ago
Until we get fuel cells that don't need a platinum catalyst, they're irrelevant. Not enough platinum to scale.
349.
by beat 7y ago
"When the sun isn't shining" shows that you really don't understand the field. Again... ever heard of batteries? There are any number of ways to temporarily store power. Collect wind/solar when the wind blows and th
350.
by beat 7y ago
Solar and wind are more than 3-4% already. Where are you getting your projections?
351.
by beat 7y ago
Yes, electric car manufacturing is still done largely with non-renewable sources. But it's happening nonetheless. Manufacturers like Porsche and Volvo expect to be over 50% EV by 2025. Even for fuel-based cars, plug-in hybrids are beco
352.
by beat 7y ago
As Peter Thiel pointed out, in the idealized frictionless free market of politicians and economists, profits are driven to zero. The market is only profitable when there is friction.
353.
by beat 7y ago
Tesla has more than doubled in size every year since it was founded. It has grown faster than Amazon did. That's not subsidy, because subsidy is bound politically and could not keep up with that sort of growth. No, that's what bei
354.
by beat 7y ago
Ok, you're just wrong on some of this stuff. When I say "renewable", I mean wind and solar for the most part, so keep that in mind. No, renewables don't solve the plastic/pesticides/concrete problem. It's
355.
by beat 7y ago
It seems reasonable to me that the transition to renewables will make energy even cheaper, and absolutely less dependent on international markets (like the little problem that 40% of internationally exchanged oil flows through the Strait of
356.
by beat 7y ago
Mostly nonsense. The improvements we've seen over the past decade have been improvements in manufacturing and other process, not subsidy. It truly is cheaper now, and will get cheaper still. The free market has had the baton for the pa
357.
by beat 7y ago
I find it fascinating that price controls are pretty much the only difference between the US and Japanese models (well, that and price controls eliminate the concept of networks), and the Japanese model costs half what ours does for better
358.
by beat 7y ago
And the thing that's going to save us boiling frogs, if it's not too late already, is the invisible hand of the free market. Fossil fuels are rapidly getting out-priced by renewables, which are getting order-of-magnitude improveme
359.
by beat 7y ago
Because when you look at doctor salaries out of context, you get a misleading answer. I looked it up. The US health care system costs 25% more than Switzerland (the second most expensive in the world). That's not because of doctor sala
360.
by beat 7y ago
Don't look at doctor salaries. Look at per capita costs. And by that measure, the US is far more expensive than Switzerland, the Netherlands, or any other country. It's not that there's something uniquely good about those cou

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