iguy

39 ms·

331.
by iguy 7y ago
Something like this would be great. And the posted prices ought to include all complications / unexpected weird things -- they have the information (and the volume) to average such costs, you don't. But not trivial to implement co
332.
by iguy 7y ago
I presume they also resize video, so that you download small streams for thumbnails, plus a bigger one for the main view. If it's just two sizes you could do it before uploading, but this would be harder if it's actually 10 differ
333.
by iguy 7y ago
Germany had a few overseas colonies, late in the game. And boy did they resent it. Eastern Europe is not as rich as the west, but is not all that far behind -- Poland has the GDP that the UK had in about 1987 (says google). And of course go
334.
by iguy 7y ago
Here's why this seems unsurprising to me. The switchover from slavery to non-slavery will (if it's not forced from outside) happen around the time when the forces for and against this change are evenly matched. One way to move tha
335.
by iguy 7y ago
Frustrated too, but it's not just a logistical problem, it's a political problem. We have lots of logistical wizards but had to decide to employ them them. Lots of bio-lab wizards too.
336.
by iguy 7y ago
I said early on because in Jan/Feb some people thought it might blow over -- it wasn't 100% obvious that you would be able to sell every mask you could make. Had someone signed a contract for 6 months of full production, they woul
337.
by iguy 7y ago
No opinion on this exact story, but in general there's a bit of a balance to be struck here. Early on in this thing, there were lots of stories about companies reluctant to fully commit (e.g. to manufacturing masks, or to dropping ever
338.
by iguy 7y ago
In Italy about 1% of people die every year, which is roughly consistent with 98 people in a month. If the virus causes one year's worth of extra deaths, these will not be spread out over the whole year, so seeing 350 of them in a month
339.
by iguy 7y ago
The UK has about 1/4 the rate of traffic deaths [1], and possibly even more than that in young people. Although it also has 1/2 the rate of suicides (no idea about age distribution though). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org&
340.
by iguy 7y ago
Right, and plotting the comparison to 1 year's risk seems entirely sensible to me. That seems approximately the right "compared to what?" scale to be using, otherwise almost any numbers multiplied by 300 million end up lookin
341.
by iguy 7y ago
The airline equivalent of the cruise lines would be large foreign carriers, which happen to fly to the US. It would be obvious madness for the US Govt. to give anything at all to Emirates or Ethiopian, for instance. Whereas Delta & frie
342.
by iguy 7y ago
This didn't go so well with the Diamond Princess. Cruise ships seem like terrible sanitary environments at the best of times. Motels on the other hand are great, they have separate rooms each with its own windows & AC, and really s
343.
by iguy 7y ago
It's pretty crazy. They should, of course, feel free to petition the government of Liberia for help.
344.
by iguy 7y ago
I think GP's "fire and move long before the shell lands" meant the gun moves, to avoid counter-battery fire (based on the shell's trajectory). Which is an orthogonal problem to the target moving.
345.
by iguy 7y ago
Right. And everyone understands this when it's the military: If you can't make more missiles at home, then you are a pawn of whoever you buy them from. We ought to have taken a similar line on a lot of medical supplies, especially
346.
by iguy 7y ago
Another facet not mentioned is unemployment. The world of pretty casual factory work (52k hires/year with 14k employees) was one in which (say) a 20% decline in work meant the average guy waited an extra 2.8 weeks before starting the n
347.
by iguy 7y ago
Did the pilots in the 50s lug their own bag of clothes & shaving gear, on those flights with half a dozen stops to Australia? I always imagined this was simply taken care of by the airline, hotel to hotel, even if the pilot looked after
348.
by iguy 7y ago
And air travel by people too poor to have someone else cary the bag.
349.
by iguy 7y ago
That seems like an important distinction to make for observation, I mean if you want to write a paper about what's going on, lumping these things together may be very misleading. It's indeed a bit delicate for governments to make
350.
by iguy 7y ago
A super-interesting book on all this is Jonny Steinberg "A Man of Good Hope". Or at least partly on this, the man in question is a Somali who goes many places, but one of his jobs is to work in such stores. And his inside perspect
351.
by iguy 7y ago
But chairs are made in large runs, 99% of the work is in the factory. So everyone understands that the work of making a prototype is a different thing to the final product. A better engineering example needs to be completely one-off, like b
352.
by iguy 7y ago
I think you are saying that buying or selling shares should be as difficult as immigration? Or only if the buyer and seller are in different countries?
353.
by iguy 7y ago
In the city of Rome, I think many adults did actually die young, in addition to infant mortality. And they were replaced by imports from the countryside. In fact I think no large city was self-sustaining, perhaps until London, c 1800? Havin
354.
by iguy 7y ago
But not just your economy, I'm sure China feels the same way, as will the EU once they see what you raise... I think the recent reductions in the US tax are moves in this direction, which is good. And what else to tax, lots of countrie
355.
by iguy 7y ago
I'm not sure it's so easy. If you own 51% of a company, which owns a slice of a company, which does business in America, does this grant uncle same the right to collect 5% of your profits? Sounds pretty imperial. Here's anoth
356.
by iguy 7y ago
If I understand right, US citizens only owe income tax if what they already paid is less than the US rate. (Edit: "IRS Form 1116. If your income was taxed by a foreign country, you can subtract that tax from your US tax") If somet
357.
by iguy 7y ago
How well would VAT work for services like this? If facebook.fr sells adverts to (say) local realtors, and spends a lot of that on its own people, servers, etc, is VAT collected on the entire sales price? (I'm really asking, I don'
358.
by iguy 7y ago
Oh they absolutely do cut up ships & recycle the steel. You can watch it happen from space! Whether they keep any promises they make about how they handle oil, asbestos, worker safety, of course that's another question.
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by iguy 7y ago
Sure, but there's an industry which does this. Although whether their price would pay for towing it from Ireland to Bangladesh or wherever, I have no idea. Edit: turns out there are more places doing this in Europe than I realised (and
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by iguy 7y ago
The idea of discrete species is just a useful approximation to help us think about things. And it's an extremely useful first cut, imagine how confusing a farm would be if you didn't mentally keep chickens and bulls in different b

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