bell-cot

6 ms·

91.
by bell-cot 1mo ago
> For the context: Comparing that German airport "attack" by Russia to the 9/11 attack by Mr. bin Laden - would you say that all gold reserves should have been moved out of the USA back in 2001?
92.
by bell-cot 1mo ago
Nuclear power, as actually implemented in most human societies, is obviously not so great. If it was, we'd have far more of it. And while the combination of natural disasters & war with nuclear power is great for pushing people&#x
93.
by bell-cot 1mo ago
America has a worse problem only in that America is still (Lord knows how) viewed as the default global superpower - so things going wrong in far-away places are somehow our problem. So America can walk away from this. Vs. Israel can&#
94.
by bell-cot 1mo ago
Meh. A few clicks, and you can read the author's previous JPost editorials on the topic. Briefly put, he knows how to tell JPost's audience what they want to hear. Which starts with "Fixing this hellish quagmire that we (Isra
95.
by bell-cot 1mo ago
For the Inner Party of an Orwellian plutocracy, this sounds just about perfect. Poor, powerless masses, with Big Brother on their telescreen...er, I mean engagement-maximizing social media on their smartphone, as their only meaningful rela
96.
by bell-cot 1mo ago
You can listen to voters with stone age tech. The problem with US politicians is with caring about the voters.
97.
by bell-cot 1mo ago
So maybe the slop-is-good-enough AI-prompting jobs all go to Elbonian teenagers? Perhaps American college enrollment in on the brink of a 10X implosion.
98.
by bell-cot 1mo ago
> Fix the economics of ... Yes...but sadly a cure for cancer seems far more likely. Any real fix would run against far too many entrenched interests.
99.
by bell-cot 1mo ago
One wonders how much push-back businesses might get, if they said "don't bother putting any post-2020 college on your resume, we've switched to proctored pencil-and-paper tests of whether you know more than how to prompt an A
100.
by bell-cot 1mo ago
In a world long accustomed to "append only" files, use cases would be relatively few. Vs. the folks creating and testing filesystems would have to do a whole lot of work to add that feature. Followed by the folks doing higher-lev
101.
by bell-cot 1mo ago
> ... pre-allocating a large enough header space to hold ... Isn't the point of compression is to eliminate such wastes of space?
102.
by bell-cot 1mo ago
Not to nibble at your point, but 16 is 10000 in base 2. 1111 is 15.
103.
by bell-cot 1mo ago
That "rebuild" in the headline raises the immediate question of "where?". Last I heard, the situation upstream threatened another such flood. And what if other river systems in Nepal are also dangerous?
104.
by bell-cot 1mo ago
Not to cast a shadow over this effort, but it sounds like rural Alaska could use some well-planned gov't programs to reduce the basic cost of living for everyone. Is anyone here familiar, to comment?
105.
by bell-cot 1mo ago
The general public doesn't care about utopian-measuring contests between different groups of zealots. They want cheap electricity on demand, safety, and a sense of control. Solar does a pretty good job of offering that. Nuclear? No
106.
by bell-cot 1mo ago
Short-term, subduction zones are deep , maximizing the difficulty for malicious actors trying to get their hands on the waste. The subduction itself is more a marketing feature, for folks who oppose putting the waste anywhere on the surfa
107.
by bell-cot 1mo ago
Nuclear power's biggest problem is that it attracted, even back in the 1940's, a figurative army of techno-utopians - whose pie-in-the-sky promises of electric power too cheap meter, flying cars, and better-than-Santa's-slei
108.
by bell-cot 1mo ago
Could you tell us why the politicians - who are the only ones who have the power to amend the Constitution - would be interested in doing that?
109.
by bell-cot 1mo ago
Maybe? But if (1) it's a few solar masses, and (2) the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud exists - "from 2,000 to 200,000 AU" - then the black hole could send a lot of planetesimals flying off
110.
by bell-cot 1mo ago
If you just glance at a topographic map of Mars - say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PIA02820.jpg - it's really obvious that the insides must have some massive deviations from "nice" spherical symm
111.
by bell-cot 1mo ago
Yep. But, in most senses , trading algorithms don't need to interact with humans, or human society. Is the world around the "thought experiment" AI CEO dehumanized enough that that's also the case for it? If not, I&#x
112.
by bell-cot 1mo ago
"Hell is other people" -Jean-Paul Sartre, 1944 82 years later, Hell is having to use all the apps & sites - "sorry, no real human customer service available!" - just to live.
113.
by bell-cot 1mo ago
The article is about Quantum Mechanics. A view from the other end - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_space
114.
by bell-cot 1mo ago
> ... nowhere near as sanitary as the meat packing plant I wrote some software for. It's good that that plant is so well-run. But America doesn't lack for less well-run large meatpacking plants. Remember Boar's Head? -
115.
by bell-cot 1mo ago
In spite of "terrorist" being this generation's pejorative term for "100% evil, no moral can apply", the so-called terrorists do have moral standards (in effect), and rather reliably follow some laws (generally unwr
116.
by bell-cot 1mo ago
I'd phrase that as "you always want to minimize your dependency on a naval base within easy striking range of a potential enemy". And point out how the Royal Navy moved from Malta to Alexandria a couple years before WWII s
117.
by bell-cot 2mo ago
Yes - I took the grandparent comment's "descr to a non-physicist" as "describe to someone who really isn't into math or hard sciences". Those folks will hear "million trillion" as "a really Real
118.
by bell-cot 2mo ago
Given the wretched incompetence, basic dysfunction, and fast churn in elected British leaders and their governments (in the parliamentary sense) in recent decades, I'm thinking something more radical is needed. Find some way to fill th
119.
by bell-cot 2mo ago
I'm not in the music biz - but how 'bout impersonators and tribute acts?
120.
by bell-cot 2mo ago
"A really interesting and cool thing for astronomers to talk about...but you might want to pray that not one of 'em ever comes within a million trillion miles of the Earth."

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