beat

49 ms·

451.
by beat 7y ago
20 billion is half again higher than the worst predictions for population growth. The world's population is expected to peak around 11B in 2100 or so, with outside high predictions up to 14B. On what basis do you believe the population
452.
by beat 7y ago
I have a hard time thinking of the 20x improvement in Egypt or the 100x improvement in China (or similar gains elsewhere) as "marginal improvements". We're talking orders of magnitude improvements in standard of living over t
453.
by beat 7y ago
Singapore?
454.
by beat 7y ago
That's the bias of privilege talking. Going from $2/day to $8/day may not seem like much to you, but to someone at that level, their income has quadrupled. They might have access to a bicycle to get to a paying job now. Shoes
455.
by beat 7y ago
I expect to see fossil fuel use as a major energy source eradicated within my lifetime. The planet is just fine; it's our own living environment we need to worry about. Earth has survived worse things than mere humans.
456.
by beat 7y ago
Egypt's per capita income grew over 20x from 1965 to 2015. And consider the population increase that happened over the same period. The overall GDP (constant US dollars) grew from $5B to around $335B. Don't give me that "They
457.
by beat 7y ago
As a point of comparison, the global population has almost quadrupled in the previous 80 years. So even in the worst case scenario, population growth is dropping spectacularly.
458.
by beat 7y ago
We can and do manage now, thank you very much. Poverty is decreasing at an incredible rate around the globe; education is increasing at an incredible rate. We've made the world's knowledge available to virtually everyone via in th
459.
by beat 7y ago
Have you read Factfulness ? He is very explicit about what he means with his different levels of income and changes in poverty - using examples of physical situation, not mere money. (Like at what point in the cycle do you own shoes? Can a
460.
by beat 7y ago
Wow. So much wrong.
461.
by beat 7y ago
It's more likely the rate of birth rate decrease will increase, rather than decrease. The countries hitting birth rate decreases over the last 50 years are seeing birth rate drops in a generation that took a century in Europe - and rem
462.
by beat 7y ago
As Hans Rosling pointed out in Factfulness , the birth and literacy rates in Sweden in the 19th century were on par with the poorest of African countries today, resulting in fully 20% of the population becoming refugees in North America to
463.
by beat 7y ago
"Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" Plausible deniability for authority figures is and has always been a thing.
464.
by beat 7y ago
If you read the article, you quickly discover it's not a fair comparison at all, because the headline itself is grossly misleading.
465.
by beat 7y ago
Carnival emits 10x the amount of one specific pollutant . This is a seriously and intentionally misleading headline. Not to diminish the problem, which absolutely should be addressed, but the headline is journalistic malpractice.
466.
by beat 7y ago
I started taking magnesium on advice of a chiropractor, as I was getting a painful calcium deposit. I take a magnesium/calcium deposit, and later added vitamin D. I don't know if it's the root cause, but my mental outlook has
467.
by beat 7y ago
Raising twins pushed me way over to the nature side of nature vs nurture. What works well for one child may be entirely counterproductive for another. That said, one thing this article really gets right is the importance of not letting your
468.
by beat 7y ago
They don't read your email, they scan it. These things are semantically and practically different. Reading, to me, means human comprehension. It's not like some Google employee is going through my messages. Scanning is just robots
469.
by beat 7y ago
There's where the rubber hits the road, for me. Want total privacy? Stay off the internet. Way back in the dark ages of 1996 or so, I went to a very early web security conference. At that point, it wasn't really a profession. It w
470.
by beat 7y ago
Articles like this are why I love the internet. That was a fun (and informative) read!
471.
by beat 7y ago
Net energy yield matters, yes, but assuming a negative net energy (seems reasonable), we could still get the negative from renewable sources. Maybe I read too much science fiction, but I see a day in the future when we deploy autonomous tec
472.
by beat 7y ago
So then what is the cause of the ugliness? Is it inconsistent appearance between components? Or that it's too busy and cluttered, which would probably be true with a monolith as well?
473.
by beat 7y ago
Well, what's your success metric? I'd argue that neither of them would have been able to implement the rich features they have at the speed and scale they've achieved - features that have given them market domination. If pure
474.
by beat 7y ago
We have two "monopoly" problems here... the legal, and the political. Even for companies that are probably not legally monopolies, like Facebook, consumers are very uncomfortable with them, and politicians are leveraging that cons
475.
Building a traditional trucking biz while building robot trucks(techcrunch.com)
1 points by beat 7y ago|0 comments
476.
by beat 7y ago
Eventually. I had to write a test program, as small and neat as possible, that demonstrated the problem on both test and prod systems. Then I got permission to send it to IBM (with my binary, my source code, and my logs). They eventually de
477.
by beat 7y ago
Unknown unknowns. My coding style hasn't really changed in years - frankly, I don't write a lot of code, I do other things. But I often run into situations where I'm irritated at my own bad code from months earlier, when the
478.
by beat 7y ago
That was my thought, too. If you need ACID transactions, use an ACID database. There are rather a lot of them. And then mirror the data out to Cassandra after the fact, if you need it there. Ironically, Cassandra may not be the source of tr
479.
by beat 7y ago
GOTO return(); is the droid you're looking for. :)
480.
by beat 7y ago
I think of myself as an "engineer", but more in the "keep the steam engine from exploding" sense.

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