iguy

57 ms·

541.
by iguy 7y ago
Those are great. One more boring one: you're tired of picking up the wrong laptop, when they all look the same!
542.
by iguy 7y ago
It's certainly easy to find examples of profit trumping safety, if that's what you're after. But GP is correct that the overall balance is much more towards safety today than (say) 100 years ago. It's not really technolo
543.
by iguy 7y ago
Prediction is hard, especially about the future! What's clear is the data about the recent past, and the trends are very good, both for accidental and deliberate death (among other things) on a time-scale of decades to centuries. There
544.
by iguy 7y ago
No doubt you can find contemporary journalists saying "wasteful in this depression!" if you look. And probably others saying "wasteful!" in every decade... how can we tell whether this was the reason? I know stunts with
545.
by iguy 7y ago
Does it matter? I mean is there another way of entering this string which preserves the spaces, or is deleting them just part of the hash function?
546.
by iguy 7y ago
Are any of these details more than speculation? I had the impression that the best information was some not-so-clear pictures which happened to catch it on the surface, plus the admission a few days ago that it is in fact nuclear powered, a
547.
by iguy 7y ago
I believe the name is from a cartoon character, who is made out of balls: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F_hX-QjDQw
548.
by iguy 7y ago
Because education didn't exist for most of the last few thousand years. Wealth did, but I guess it wasn't worth modifying your speech of every day to encode that today isn't the one day a year you happen to encountered a nobl
549.
by iguy 7y ago
Sure, but order 10^3 years is the right time scale to think about linguistic features. People lived in villages and farmed. They speculated about other people's sex lives a lot. Argued about legitimate descendants and inheritance. Coul
550.
by iguy 7y ago
Sometimes multiple things are true, and none are "defeated". It seems beyond obvious that our ancestors 1000 years ago did a lot more gossiping about who was going to marry who, than about anything we'd today describe as raci
551.
by iguy 7y ago
Another way to say that is that farming is 1% of GDP in America now -- so the traditional war aim of capturing lots of farmland with peasants to tax is laughable. Industry is down to 20%; in WWII capturing centers of heavy industry was a bi
552.
by iguy 7y ago
Outsource implies that it was once an in-house operation, but I don't think this was ever true. However, allowing mergers until there are only one or two companies which can make strategically important things means you have painted yo
553.
by iguy 7y ago
Here's the first-principles argument: Most people grow up and learn the language in a family group, which has a mix of ages and of sexes. Saying "he" vs "she" here usually cuts the number of people you could be talk
554.
by iguy 7y ago
It would depend on context, if you ask me. The bank robbery was across the street & half a block down? Completely unremarkable to say "they". The clerk is complaining about sexual harassment, hand on thigh? Avoiding "he&q
555.
by iguy 7y ago
I'm surprised that this misses the distinction made by signalsmith above: the way Shakespeare uses "they" to refer to someone is unremarkable, but what strikes many present-day speakers as an error (even if they fail to expl
556.
by iguy 7y ago
I can't decode what the 1794 usage was. The article describes it as "singular they", used presumably in reference to one of these three authors, but, well, it would help to see the passage in question.
557.
by iguy 7y ago
Well, we kind-of define work as being that done by humans. My laptop does more number-crunching than all the human computers of last century every morning, but we don't count this as work taken away from anyone. Humans find new things
558.
by iguy 7y ago
Absolutely. The fact that this died down with time is the great miracle of 20th century america, but one we're so used to now that we take it for granted. Plentiful factory jobs are one factor behind this (along with rapidly rising liv
559.
by iguy 7y ago
> I would like to do my own robotic assembly now. It's going the other way. Automation increases the return to scale. Your grandparents probably performed a lot of non-robotic assembly: making food and clothes at home was basically
560.
by iguy 7y ago
More than this. If you thought "they took our jobs" was a big rallying cry, wait until it's "they get our UBI". It's possible to resent someone who shows up and works hard. (Harder than you'd like to, beca
561.
by iguy 7y ago
> robots is that you can also stop production instantly if demand goes down. You have much fewer costs when not at full capacity. I think you have this exactly backwards. In a highly automated factory the main cost is capital, i.e. the m
562.
by iguy 7y ago
But the big swing to environmental protection happened right in the middle of the cold war.
563.
by iguy 7y ago
I thought the Bantu expansion was both pretty uniform (until you get right out to the ends) and much more recent than Yamnaya. But that among non-Bantu populations you can find much older separations than among pre-Yamnaya europeans. But no
564.
by iguy 7y ago
It's worth noting that there are two uses of gene here, or at least of "genetic". One of which is roughly DNA that codes for a protein, or controls such, and indeed the causal mechanisms from there to phenotype can be extreme
565.
by iguy 7y ago
Actually, leaving things out of a description of a complex system is the only reason we can ever understand anything!
566.
by iguy 7y ago
It's not called the central dogma of biology for nothing! But seriously, in my understanding it's taught that way to try to rid people of mystical pre-evolutionary notions. Once they have firmly grasped the basics they can move on
567.
by iguy 7y ago
Wait until you see the map of superchargers! This is an odd tangent, though, if you are interested in humanity's ability to do fine metalworking etc. and how this influenced what transport technologies were viable in what year. This is
568.
by iguy 7y ago
> basic thermodynamics shows that ordinary steam engines can't be very efficient No this is not true, see other comments / Carnot cycle. Steam can be extremely efficient. But diesel engines are much simpler and more compact,
569.
by iguy 7y ago
Depedns on your definitions of "good" and "mass". UK railways crossed 500 million people a year sometime before 1880, and as many journeys as the population sometime in the 1840s. That's sounds like a lot of metal w
570.
by iguy 7y ago
> external combustion tends to be very fuel inefficient compared to internal combustion. This is true in general No, that's not true at all. Big power plants stayed with steam for efficiency reasons, and they are pretty close to t

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