makomk

45 ms·

421.
by makomk 5y ago
The banks don't take the risk of offering such long-term fixed rates. The US government does through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, effectively subsidising the mortgage market. Other countries don't do this and don't have the sa
422.
by makomk 5y ago
Yeah, if not for this there's a good chance the UK would be part of the Euro and much more closely tied to the EU. I doubt this would've worked out well overall for the country though; there were other European countries which had
423.
by makomk 5y ago
The European energy crisis is mainly one of supply - most of Europe chose to be dependent on Russia for their gas supply despite US warnings that Russia would use that to try and get away with invading neighbouring countries, and now they h
424.
by makomk 5y ago
Yeah, we're pretty close to the point where as much time has passed since pressurized water reactors and boiling water reactors were invented as there was between their invention and the invention of the steam turbine.
425.
by makomk 5y ago
This calculation would make sense if they could keep cases restricted to limited regions and then stamp them out, which seemed to work with earlier variants according to official reports. It hasn't been working with Omicron: the cases
426.
by makomk 5y ago
Yeah, an immune response specific to the Omicron variant would likely be more effective against Omicron for obvious reasons, but it's probably not possible to get one in people with immunity to older variants because their existing imm
427.
by makomk 5y ago
Boosters of the current vaccine are somewhat effective against hospitalization and death, though even that benefit wears off alarmingly quickly. There's not really any justification for vaccinating 5-11 year olds at this point though g
428.
by makomk 5y ago
There are really cheap commodity ICs that can switch HDMI, and they're generally purely analog devices that don't bother trying to reclock the signal. The real reason is that KVMs are specialised devices with a niche market. (Thou
429.
by makomk 5y ago
I'm pretty sure only online cheating detectives pay much attention to unusually low marathon times for older age groups in amateur events, especially if the person doesn't actively seek to promote themself - not because there&#x27
430.
by makomk 5y ago
They had to manually underclock the E-cores to get better efficiency than the P-cores, which isn't surprising; Intel's power management has historically been based around the idea of "race to idle" - running at a high sp
431.
by makomk 5y ago
Governments do know what they needed to do: mostly, they needed the EU to have begun reducing its dependence on Russian natural gas years ago, whilst instead they increased it. (The UK isn't particularly dependendent on fossil fuels fr
432.
by makomk 5y ago
The last politician in charge of German defence procurement failed upwards and is currently the (unelected) President of the European Commission thanks to some clever political wrangling, so odds probably aren't great on that front...
433.
by makomk 5y ago
Pretty sure there's no way of getting from Ukraine to the UK without passing through at least one country (possibly even multiple) which do have centers that it's possible to apply for UK visas in - not since their airspace closed
434.
by makomk 5y ago
As far as I understand it sending aid to Poland to help with the influx of refugees is one of the first things the UK did, and there are even actual UK boots on the ground there assisting them. The media here is just focusing on the issue o
435.
by makomk 5y ago
Not just in the US. There's a very real possiblity that Jeremy Corbin could've been Prime Minister of the UK when this happened, and he's quite openly siding with Putin over this invasion and arguing the UK is actually to bla
436.
by makomk 5y ago
Thinking highly of opponents of the US and spouting off about how smart and savvy they are never seemed to stop Trump from treating them like opponents and using his power against them back when he was president, so I'm not convinced i
437.
by makomk 5y ago
Yikes. If I'm understanding that correctly every chip that came back from MPW-1 was more or less unusable - they were all required to gate access to I/Os behind the same management processor provided by the company organising the
438.
by makomk 5y ago
Analogies like this one are exactly why all these headlines about the super-wealthy are misleading. When people see these astronomical sums they think in terms of actual things they can buy because that's the main thing money represent
439.
by makomk 5y ago
There's an obvious problem with your argument: in order for wages to support the human dignity of workers, those workers must be able to actually buy things with their wages . The sectors that would have trouble increaing wages due to
440.
by makomk 5y ago
Why wouldn't profit margins be rising in a time of scarcity? Fundamentally, prices are how we choose to allocate scarce resources, and if demand outstrips supply prices have to go up until it doesn't - if the companies don't
441.
by makomk 5y ago
Headline on the front page of BBC News right now: "Trudeau vows to freeze anti-mandate protesters' bank accounts" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-60383385 This feels downright dystopian, espec
442.
by makomk 5y ago
The thing is that we really, really want to be able to stop giving the OPV vaccine because - aside from the fact that it requires a bunch of resources and there's always the risk of disruptions to vaccination from civil wars, other pan
443.
by makomk 5y ago
The problem is that although the inactivated vaccine provides good protection against severe polio it doesn't seem to work too well at stopping people from spreading the virus, which is not ideal for an elimination program. Presumably
444.
by makomk 5y ago
Most developed countries have net zero goals that are not consistent with continuing to pump out 20% of current electricity-related CO2 production forevermore. Also, keeping those coal and gas plants operational isn't exactly cheap eit
445.
by makomk 5y ago
I don't think that'd help. There were a bunch of articles about how renewable power wasn't to blame and Texas politicians were lying by blaming it, but if you check the actual details the whole justification for that was that
446.
by makomk 5y ago
Arguably heat pumps would've made this worse, because although they decrease total power usage they increase the rate at which power usage goes up during cold spells, making the ratio of normal power usage to peak worst-case power usag
447.
by makomk 5y ago
No, it's in the fine print of some (though not all) of the media reporting - most of the "wasted" billions that made the news headlines in the UK was from the decrease in the market price of the stockpile: https://
448.
by makomk 5y ago
This is basically the same as the UK proposal which the Register article is talking about - that's also credit card or valid ID, they just chose to focus on the credit card part in the article.
449.
by makomk 5y ago
I'm pretty sure that it was the leader of the opposition who was photographed drinking beers with his colleagues during lockdown, and everyone seems to have bought the claim that was work related and therefore legal. Boris and his coll
450.
by makomk 5y ago
One of those Eastern European states - the Czech Republic - was actually the big European success story everyone in the UK press pointed to as proof that the UK should've been able to do better if we had competent leaders. They ended u

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