jltsiren

7 ms·

91.
by jltsiren 4mo ago
Because there is less competition for jobs and grants. Europe spends more on academic research (as a fraction of GDP) than the US, but there are more people competing for the funding.
92.
by jltsiren 4mo ago
And the foundations of those statistical approaches are built on heuristics and shortcuts. For example, sequencing instruments include base quality strings in the output. Base qualities are estimates how likely the instrument got each seque
93.
by jltsiren 4mo ago
I guess you had more of those people after the revolution. Many combat veterans react to anything resembling gunfire and explosions. And you can add drone noise to that these days.
94.
by jltsiren 4mo ago
The strategic level is the level that matters. In a video game, military forces fight other military forces and the stronger side wins. In the real world, a military force may choose to fight enemy forces, if it believes that's the bes
95.
by jltsiren 4mo ago
That's video game thinking. The effectiveness of a military force is not based on its ability to fight enemy forces, but on its ability to achieve its goals and prevent the enemy from achieving theirs. US military could strike enemy ta
96.
by jltsiren 4mo ago
Poor ventilation is mostly an issue in homes built or renovated in the 1970s, when the oil crisis led to ill-considered efforts to save energy. New homes typically achieve energy efficiency by using heat pumps in the ventilation system.
97.
by jltsiren 4mo ago
If you use memory-mapped files, cached pages count towards the resident set size of your process. If you use ordinary file I/O, they don't. That behavior has amusing consequences in HPC clusters that monitor the memory usage of ea
98.
by jltsiren 4mo ago
Public goods can be contracted out to private entities. And this can be done independently in each region, without having a single central contractor. EU countries privatized their postal services decades ago, because governments are not al
99.
by jltsiren 4mo ago
You often do, if the street has been there for a while. The exact location of underground infrastructure was rarely documented in the past. While the city should have a general idea of what lies under the street, you usually have to dig the
100.
by jltsiren 4mo ago
That would be a trap. It's healthier for a non-profit to have many small funders than a few large ones.
101.
by jltsiren 4mo ago
Larger cities would help more, as the root issues are education and specialization. A city should be large enough to have multiple potential employers to minimize the risk of getting trapped in a bad job. If you are single, a smaller city c
102.
by jltsiren 4mo ago
Roman law recognized various types of legal entities at different points of time. Some of the terms they used include "collegium" and "universitas". And that's were the word "university" comes from. It emp
103.
by jltsiren 4mo ago
Most of the time, when "the EU" is doing something bad, it's actually the national governments wearing a different hat. The Parliament is pretty reasonable on the average, while the national policicians in the Council take ad
104.
by jltsiren 4mo ago
Conscription for wars fought for political purposes is qualitatively different from conscription to defend your country. (But this is a continuum rather than two disjoint categories.) The former happens when the ambitions of the leaders exc
105.
by jltsiren 4mo ago
Businesses are usually planned economies, and supply chain management is literal central planning. Apple failed to predict the demand for Mac Studios. Many other companies in its supply chain likely failed to predict that Apple would come b
106.
by jltsiren 4mo ago
It's just a planned economy failing the way planned economies often do: the central planner failed to predict the demand correctly. Instead of trying to secure additional stock from the market at spot prices, they are simply waiting fo
107.
by jltsiren 4mo ago
The English and the French had different ideas about proper uses of lawn. Both spread widely across Europe.
108.
by jltsiren 4mo ago
European upper class was obsessed with lawns first. Like other forms of decorative gardens, it was primarily a status symbol. The intended message was something like "Look how we can afford this land we don't actually need! And lo
109.
by jltsiren 4mo ago
California is a funny example, because the ocean is cold. If you live close to the coast, the nights are cool even during heat waves. Where I live, air conditioning is less useful than in Finland.
110.
by jltsiren 4mo ago
The average dog is a greater danger to people than the average urban coyote, at least in the US. Mostly because dogs are not afraid of people, and because any moron is allowed to have a dog and train it badly.
111.
by jltsiren 4mo ago
Bear attacks depend on the (sub)species. European brown bears are very shy and much less likely to attack people than wolves. Finnish people traditionally respected bears but were not afraid of them. Historical records mostly tell of two ki
112.
by jltsiren 4mo ago
Grants typically have at most 10 pages of actual content. The rest is mostly compliance with regulations.
113.
by jltsiren 4mo ago
Europe favors comprehensive regulation, with laws or directives dealing with families of related issues. California does regulation in a very American way, with individual bills targeting specific issues. It just does more of that than the
114.
by jltsiren 4mo ago
You should leave Social Security out of the calculations. It's supposed to be a self-funding program that has no impact on budget balance. That accounts for ~$0.5 trillion of the growth since 2020. Another ~$0.5 trillion is from higher
115.
by jltsiren 4mo ago
I like the approach Finland took when it abolished rent control in the 1990s. Basically, you are not allowed to chain fixed-term leases indefinitely. If the actual intent is that the tenant stays until further notice, the lease agreement mu
116.
by jltsiren 4mo ago
The society is built on informal expectations like that. People assume that things will go on as before, and they will start relying on it. They assume that for every thing they rely on, there is a bureaucrat somewhere responsible for makin
117.
by jltsiren 4mo ago
People pay too much attention on what politicians say, and too little on what kind of people those politicians and their allies are. My impression is that Reform and the Greens are the only mainstream parties with an actual opinion on immig
118.
by jltsiren 4mo ago
> My point is simply that these feelings have existed for a long time and the government has generally gone against what the electorate have asked for. The electorate repeatedly asked for those policies by voting the parties that enacted
119.
by jltsiren 4mo ago
One of the bids for the third reactor was for KEPCO's APR-1400. Like the other bids, it was too expensive to make sense without subsidies. China probably fits in the "politically undesirable" category these days.
120.
by jltsiren 4mo ago
Political will is not the actual bottleneck. Finland has given the initial permit for three nuclear reactors in the past 25 years. One was eventually built after massive delays and cost overruns. Another was canceled, because the company ch

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