comicjk

49 ms·

481.
by comicjk 10y ago
Invent, sure, but implement on a useful scale, not yet. Even sequestering CO2 right at the source has proved more expensive than anyone wants. Extracting it from the air is worse. Research needs to be funded all-out at this point, but leavi
482.
by comicjk 10y ago
Side note: "bar" as in bar association is not an acronym. It refers to the literal bar or barrier in courtrooms which divides participants from the public. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_(law)
483.
by comicjk 10y ago
A real lottery for a population isn't "a lottery" in that sense either. The lottery business is reliable just like the health insurance business and for the same reason.
484.
by comicjk 10y ago
To be more serious, a Cessna 152 has an 82 kW engine and a wing area of 14.9 m^2. On a sunny day (1 kW/m^2) with 20% efficient panels and a 90% efficient motor, the solar panels would supply 3.2% of that power. So it's not possibl
485.
by comicjk 10y ago
Something that commenters here don't seem aware of is that Saturn's moon Enceladus has liquid water which is similar to Europa's and much cheaper to study. Enceladus sprays its water into space via ice volcanoes - all we have
486.
by comicjk 10y ago
Indexing UBI to a revenue stream is a bad idea because the revenue will tend to swing up and down in sync with economic cycles, making bubbles frothier and recessions worse. Constant spending by contrast acts more like an automatic stabiliz
487.
by comicjk 10y ago
It is not my experience that reviewers are overly critical. The notes I have seen fall into three categories: 1) pointing out the nagging issue that I knew but avoided, 2) misunderstandings, which are annoying but show how the paper is not
488.
by comicjk 10y ago
If there is something worth tearing apart, I would much rather it be torn apart than published. Recognition for my work is not what scientific articles are for, right? When I read a paper that has unaddressed problems, it's a waste of
489.
by comicjk 10y ago
I'd like to point out that a journal is not purely a proxy or even an aggregator - I've gotten more detailed peer review with the bigger journals, because the reviewers are more critical and the editors more selective. I didn&#x27
490.
by comicjk 11y ago
The trouble is, not many families with HHI below $65k know that Harvard, Yale, etc are free for them. Instead they see the enormous sticker price and they hear on the news constantly that college is expensive. The guidance counselors who kn
491.
by comicjk 11y ago
Evacuating the barrel wouldn't do much. It's nice to skip 150m of air resistance, but when you emerge from the barrel, you still have 15 km to go.
492.
by comicjk 11y ago
>He's no orator – as anyone who's read his books knows, he's not really into words, especially long ones – but he has an undeniable talent for commanding a room. Apparently the writer has fallen for the oldest trick in ora
493.
by comicjk 12y ago
If I assert that a man runs, I might mean that he flows under pressure, but you would probably interpret me to mean that he moves quickly on his feet. "An organism evolving" similarly tends toward one particular meaning. When you
494.
by comicjk 12y ago
Check before you comment. The writer is a conservative; his other recent articles include a description of a tea-party utopia ("Teatopia"), an argument that the US should never have pulled out of Iraq, and a critique of NYC making
495.
by comicjk 12y ago
A developed product is protected by copyright, not a patent. Software patents are for ideas, and the vaguer, the more valuable. Developing an idea like one-click ordering takes virtually no added time; all the better if you can wait for som
496.
by comicjk 12y ago
The above argument is not whataboutism. The statement "the US is basically doing a fantastic job of fucking up antibiotics for everyone" is false because no policy change in the US will significantly affect the rate at which resis
497.
by comicjk 12y ago
Stopping a $200,000 theft might easily be worth $10 million, because a successful public theft does a lot more than $200,000 in damage to society. The point is to make the theft unprofitable and thus deter others. Having the thief confronte
498.
by comicjk 13y ago
People who know what they're talking about can get away with using less precise language. They would never conflate "the potential of methane hydrate if it were used on a larger scale" with oil. But this author did. Therefore
499.
by comicjk 13y ago
I did read the article. Your gloss of it makes even less sense than the article itself, since tight oil and fracking have changed the energy market already and methane hydrates have had no effect after forty years. The actual thrust of the
500.
by comicjk 13y ago
Methane hydrates are not oil. This article is amateur nonsense.
501.
by comicjk 13y ago
In my experience, Chinese society is actually much more "American" than Japanese is. Both China and America are fine with doing a half-assed job if it works, and self-assured about effective kludges in a way that Japan is not even
502.
by comicjk 13y ago
Water consumption by agriculture and industry dwarfs that for personal use. Stats for Japan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in_...
503.
by comicjk 13y ago
Have you tried automatic programming? For one heuristic optimization project, I automatically derived arithmetic expressions to match an unknown function, using a wide variety of methods including hill-climbing. Many methods started out mor
504.
by comicjk 13y ago
Note to prospective Vibram users: watch your running surface. I had a good few months with Vibrams until I got a stress fracture in the ball of my left foot. If you are going to be doing long distances on a hard surface, you need to build u
505.
by comicjk 13y ago
Models of NYC traffic show that increasing the number of cabs would not cause a proportional decrease in the number of private cars, and that the congestion would make the average taxi trip take longer, even including the time spent waiting
506.
by comicjk 13y ago
$2k/month is $24,000/year, at which income the IRS does not take nearly as much. According to the IRS calculator, he would be paying $1,628 in income tax. Add in payroll tax and that's $3308 total. So his after-tax income is
507.
by comicjk 13y ago
> what if the AI is perfectly friendly? It still might play us for fools... "Friendly" is a term of art among AI people, at least at Less Wrong, and their meaning of friendly excludes this whole scenario. A friendly AI is one w
508.
by comicjk 13y ago
The losses when transmitting through vacuum are pretty negligible; it's only the last fifteen miles that really cost you.
509.
by comicjk 13y ago
We have; here's an example. A solar panel in geostationary orbit only has a few hours of shadow per year. The incoming power is so much greater than that at the surface (about 4x the best desert) that a solar array in space will have a
510.
by comicjk 13y ago
Yeah, just like anyone is free to keep their sheep off the commons. It's still going to get grazed flat.

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