jltsiren

22 ms·

481.
by jltsiren 1y ago
The Franco-Prussian War demonstrated the opposite a few years later. Prussia was able to use field artillery effectively to support infantry attacks. The overall scale of fighting was similar to the US Civil War, but the war was much shorte
482.
by jltsiren 1y ago
I believe there are two mostly unrelated stories: 1. Many of the construction workers were illegal immigrants. 2. When you are building a factory, you need to send engineers who are already familiar with your technology for various supervis
483.
by jltsiren 1y ago
That goes in cycles. Some generations are more politically active than others, as young people tend to find their own things to do. The late 60s and most of the 70s were politically pretty active, as there were a lot of young people and the
484.
by jltsiren 1y ago
You can pay the market price for power or agree on a fixed-term fixed-price contract. In the latter case, the power company carries the risks. The market is cheaper on the average, especially if you can adjust your demand down when the pric
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by jltsiren 1y ago
24/7. There was enough hydro and nuclear in the grid, and even more in the connected grids in Norway and Sweden. Most of the time, carbon-free power was no more expensive than generic power, which emphasized how meaningless the entire
486.
by jltsiren 1y ago
Buying carbon-free power from the grid was a big thing in Finland (and maybe in wider Europe) around 2010. But companies eventually stopped talking about it, as it's mostly greenwashing with limited real-world impact.
487.
by jltsiren 1y ago
It would have been an ambitious goal in 2010. But the fundamental issue with it is similar to buying offsets. If you are connected to the grid, the power you use is effectively generated by the power plant with the highest marginal costs. T
488.
by jltsiren 1y ago
I'm from Helsinki, where winters are longer and a bit colder than in Chicago, but we get less snow. My main takeaway from that article was that Chicagoans are more willing to tolerate disruptions due to weather. In Finland, people are
489.
by jltsiren 1y ago
Winters in Chicago and Toronto look about the same as in Helsinki. That's mild enough that the colder days are rarely an issue for pedestrians, assuming that they are willing to dress for the weather. The warmer winter days, with tempe
490.
by jltsiren 1y ago
Defined benefit pensions are also invested in the market. It would be better to have Social Security with higher income limits, and with regular adjustments to contributions and retirement ages to ensure that the system is in balance. And s
491.
by jltsiren 1y ago
That would have sent a bunch of unintended messages. By not using formal diplomatic channels, he would have made the statement look less serious. People might have asked if it represents the opinion of the president as an individual rather
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by jltsiren 1y ago
Etiquette, norms, and formal communications are fundamentally about precision. You send only the message you intended, while minimizing the risk of unintended consequences. If your actions have real-world consequences, they are guaranteed t
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by jltsiren 1y ago
Defense is a bit like advertising or finance. It has some aspects of a zero-sum game and a negative-sum game. All the money you invest in it is wasted. But if your enemy/competitor chooses to waste more money, you may be in trouble. Fr
494.
by jltsiren 1y ago
In the system I'm familiar with, votes are counted twice. The first count is done on site, by the same people who staffed the polling station. It's important that the votes are counted and the results are published before those pe
495.
by jltsiren 1y ago
You have a short-term perspective. Republics often last longer than a human lifetime. They should prepare for scenarios that happen once every few centuries. The most important aspect of elections is that the vast majority of losers accept
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by jltsiren 1y ago
> I happen to think the pros aren't worth the cons and that most of the handwringing around mail in ballots and machines are FUD rather than measured concerns. You can't trust the machines. You can't trust the election aut
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by jltsiren 1y ago
In my experience, it's easy to find major philosophical differences between libertarianism and anarchism. For example, you could ask people if they believe that private property is an authoritarian idea.
498.
by jltsiren 1y ago
It's six years in total, excluding time spent outside the US. The status is valid for at most three calendar years, but it can be shorter for fixed-term positions. And you can renew it as long as your total time in the US is less than
499.
by jltsiren 1y ago
Critical thinking is not something that can be taught. It's a family of skills that can be learned through years of practice. Academic degrees usually place a heavy emphasis on practicing the subset of critical thinking skills relevant
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by jltsiren 1y ago
My hypothesis is that bioinformatics favors text files, because open source tools usually start as research code. That means two things. First, the initial developers are rarely software engineers, and they have limited experience developin
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by jltsiren 1y ago
There is no particular reason to assume that recursive self-improvement would be rapid. All the technological revolutions so far have accounted for little more than a 1.5% sustained annual productivity growth. There are always some low-hang
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by jltsiren 1y ago
Or just buying decent bread. The selection of breads in the average American supermarket seems pretty bad compared to what I was used to in Finland.
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by jltsiren 1y ago
"Head city" is just the literal meaning of "capital city". "Maailma", on the other hand, is an old word, and its original meaning was more like "earth and sky". "Ilma" used to mean things li
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by jltsiren 1y ago
The academia is far from being homogeneous. Institutions in the same country are usually similar, but things vary a lot between countries. Science is fundamentally an activity, not a field. You can do scientific research in most fields. Agr
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by jltsiren 1y ago
That sounds expensive and difficult. Science is not a single field with a single set of practices. Regulating it is more like trying to draft a single set of regulations for finance, agriculture, pharma, and software. You can get a glimpse
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by jltsiren 1y ago
That's an American thing. By default, you can fire anyone at any time for no reason. Universities then overcompensate and give extensive protections for tenured faculty. In Europe, it's more common that a professor has roughly the
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by jltsiren 1y ago
It's not about being better or outperforming someone. A doctor is not supposed to be a better nurse. Similarly, engineers in the academic track are taught different things and prepared for different roles than engineers in the vocation
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by jltsiren 1y ago
Those "promises" were meaningless BS. Every European should know that the EU cannot make such promises, because it has no power in those matters. Defense policy is up to the member states, while investments and energy purchases ar
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by jltsiren 1y ago
It was mostly about the perception that people with a bachelor's degree had not learned anything useful yet. There is a lot of variation between countries, but European countries often have a dual-track system in higher education. You
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by jltsiren 1y ago
People often have master's degrees in Europe, because master's has been the primary university degree since the middle ages. Bachelor's degrees only started becoming popular in most European countries with the Bologna Process

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