iguy

48 ms·

451.
by iguy 7y ago
They didn't found a city called Havana, that's all.
452.
by iguy 7y ago
That may be an inspiring book, but if you're interested in what's actually known about talent, success, and the limits on our ability to measure and predict such things, then you should look elsewhere. (Ask yourself how well the w
453.
by iguy 7y ago
If we're talking about von Neumann, or even just the math olympiad, then clearly we're not talking about how well the education system serves the 50th percentile. It's possible for a system to be awful for most, and somehow f
454.
by iguy 7y ago
But you assume the alternative is to keep the whole building. If the alternative is to keep nothing, then this is great. (Although some of the examples work better than others, of course.) Much of the feeling of the streets is about the fir
455.
by iguy 7y ago
Maybe. Or maybe the existence of huge monuments is a sign that someone was somehow extracting an awful lot of work from other people. Who presumably didn't do it just for their own amusement. Maybe the builders got paid. But if they di
456.
by iguy 7y ago
They built complete factories for three different technologies, and finally delivered two totally different bomb designs. Which is a sign they were pretty worried about choosing to put all their smart guys on one path, and picking the wrong
457.
by iguy 7y ago
Looks like this is what I was remembering: https://www.pipistrel-aircraft.com/locations/#tab-id-2 https://www.dw.com/en/electric-flight-finds-its-wings-at-slo... They have electric planes, and the
458.
by iguy 7y ago
I thought these were in use at flight schools already. With spare batteries being charged on the ground. Perhaps you can't practice quite everything, but as a cheaper way for people to get some of the hours it sounds great.
459.
by iguy 7y ago
Not just for take-off, but for the possibility of finishing the take-off with one engine failure. That's quite a bit of spare capacity. However I also wonder why, if electric motors are a solution here, there hasn't been a compara
460.
by iguy 7y ago
Sure they are expensive. That's why the coal plants are willing to bid a negative price for their power, to have someone else deal with it. Rather than paying to build another tower. The negative bids aren't coming from suppliers
461.
by iguy 7y ago
"dissipate heat in well ventilated radiators": you've just invented a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower , often the largest building at a power plant.
462.
by iguy 7y ago
No, it's not always valuable. If you get free electricity for an hour, some days of the week, then your giant biofuel plant spends a lot of time sitting idle. It's not obvious that your mostly-idle plant is a better business than
463.
by iguy 7y ago
Those giant cooling towers that are most people's image of a power station are almost exactly this. They are a giant system for dumping heat into the air, usually (but not always) by evaporating water. (The heat being dumped is usually
464.
by iguy 7y ago
Re "ultimately the market" most people would point to 20th C experiments with command economies here. The hope was as you describe, a benevolent leader trying different approaches until one was clearly superior, and avoiding all t
465.
by iguy 7y ago
Interesting thought. Although perhaps the network you build to deliver a million identical papers just looks too different to what you'd need to deliver individual items?
466.
by iguy 7y ago
Sure, I agree that fire rules are written in blood. But not the blood of every single district. Once we've decided, we impose these rules across many cities, millions of buildings. An individual city council is not free to learn the le
467.
by iguy 7y ago
> Question: doesn't there come a point where it is cheaper for Boeing to give up ... and eat the costs of retraining all the pilots I thought that perhaps it was worse than this. If much training is required, then you are admitting
468.
by iguy 7y ago
The BBC article is probably using Asian to mean Chinese (or nearby), while Cupertino's statistics will count Indian (and nearby) in that total too.
469.
by iguy 7y ago
I presume most new translations now target Mandarin, but I wonder whether some older western imports got their names in Cantonese, is this a thing? And likewise for candidate names -- IIRC lots of people moved to BC from HK, but perhaps a m
470.
by iguy 7y ago
Many of these complaints would apply to physical safety too. But we don't just wait for buildings to burn down to teach organizations a lesson about their heating contractors -- we have fire codes, and inspectors with teeth. Is there
471.
by iguy 7y ago
How did their food supply work? Very crudely, my understanding is that places where food meant plowing (i.e. heavy work) almost always had a strong marriage tradition. While places where growing food was light work quite often did not -- ba
472.
by iguy 7y ago
Dense cities are energy-dense, for sure. But in energy used per person, they do very well. Apartments touching others on all sides are efficient to heat. Elevators are much more efficient transport than cars.
473.
by iguy 7y ago
Sure that too. And indeed, re-running WWII to try to solve our inequality problems would be a terrible idea. I just think it's worth trying to understand all the ways in which society and the world were different back then. In part so
474.
by iguy 7y ago
The mid-20th century. For many reasons, which you can emphasise as you see fit: There was massive government involvement -- the wartime economy was not very Adam Smith, starting with the fact that it could draft its labor. This also set the
475.
by iguy 7y ago
Interesting figures. BTW, the terminology is a mess, but I think what you're describing would most clearly be called "district heating", as "central" often just means that your house has one burner in the basement (
476.
by iguy 7y ago
If the museum is unchanged since 1987, then presumably the central heating (and the lightbulbs!) would be much juicier places to go looking for fat to trim.
477.
by iguy 7y ago
Sure! But "only the wealthiest could afford to travel long distances" is over the top. It's not some sample from before the bicycle. These people's parents, or grandparents, were mixed up all over the planet in WWII. It
478.
by iguy 7y ago
These are people born in 1950-1980 or so, I believe.
479.
by iguy 7y ago
And defines this to mean double-first-cousins and closer (perhaps this is standard). Also, as far as I could skim, this is the prevalence today, rather than an estimate of long-run prevalence. They must surely have data on simple first cous
480.
by iguy 7y ago
It's supposed to be mobility, and I think tracking individuals through their tax returns. (This magic data which only Chetty & co have access to.) So I don't think the Mercedes example works. But I agree that it's very un

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