manfredo

33 ms·

271.
by manfredo 6y ago
Great, now come back to me with a plan to plant the trees required to offset carbon emissions. This is going to be challenging, because you'll need to reforest an area roughly the size of the continental United States to reduce atmosph
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by manfredo 6y ago
A town in Pennsylvania was rendered uninhabitable due to a coal mine fire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania There are also plenty of cities that remain populated despite immense pollution, because
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by manfredo 6y ago
Bury nuclear waste underground in an area with no aquifer. The scenarios where this results in contamination are borderline hyperbole, usually entailing the loss of all records of the waste's locations due to some sort of societal coll
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by manfredo 6y ago
Nuclear is much cheaper when built at scale. Often 3-5x cheaper. Most of the plants built during the nuclear boom in the 1960s and 1970s were built at a cost of ~$2.5 billion per gigawatt of capacity. Note that this capacity is put out 24&#
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by manfredo 6y ago
As per the article, Republicans support nuclear at a substantially higher rate than Democrats: > A 2019 Gallup poll [1] found that 65 percent of Republicans strongly favored nuclear energy but only 42 percent of Democrats did so. 1. ht
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by manfredo 6y ago
The military and other rescue service have been evacuating casualties since the 1950s on helicopters. What advantage does this provide over a helicopter? These electric craft have tiny lifting capacity, only 1 or 2 people, as well as much s
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by manfredo 6y ago
An incident at or near hover is close to the ground, and so has much better chances of survival. The issue with multiple rotors is that if one rotor fails the craft immediately pitches over and crashes. The Chinook solves this because the t
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by manfredo 6y ago
Helicopters are "stuck" because they've largely settled into an optimal configuration over the 70 years if experience designing helicopters. Some of the first helicopters had multiple rotors [1], but those were abandoned for
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by manfredo 6y ago
Aren't flying cars called, "helicopters"? Perhaps a bit too snide, but helicopters can take off and land vertically and can carry roughly as many people as most passenger vehicles. And they're mature technology that has
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by manfredo 6y ago
Yes, and my point is that the mechanisms to prevent battery degradation can often end up masking the degradation. This isn't nefarious, it's the byproduct of good state if charge management.
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by manfredo 6y ago
In many games it does make sense to update th GUI on every frame. E.g. if you have a minimap you will need to update that every frame during which the player is moving. Updating every frame also solves the issue of the GUI updates not being
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by manfredo 6y ago
Alternatively, it could be used a state of charge tracking mechanism that conceals battery degradation. Say the battery has 100KWh, but the remaining energy gauge reads zero after 80KWh are expended. You could be degraded to 90KWh but you w
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by manfredo 6y ago
> What MSFT did would be equivalent to Apple forcing everyone to use its apps and not allow any competing apps. Did I read this right? My understanding was that Microsoft was penalized for bundling Windows with IE. Windows never forbade
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by manfredo 6y ago
Is there a reason why app developers don't just make customers buy DLC and loot boxes from outside the app store? E.g. if a customer wants to buy a skin in Fortnite they just can't do it on the app store they need to go through th
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by manfredo 6y ago
What exactly do you mean data collecting is bad and should be outlawed? Should banks no longer report financial transactions over $3,000? Should purchases of schedule II drugs no longer be recorded? Again, I'm not sure if you understan
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by manfredo 6y ago
Palantir doesn't collect any data. Palantir builds software tools to browse and analyze data. The government already has that data, and that data stays with the government not Palantir.
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by manfredo 6y ago
Existing energy storage options other than batteries are either geographically limited, or not feasible. I explain the issues with natural gas storage in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24253317 You ca
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by manfredo 6y ago
> You might change your mind on that after a bit of reflection; it doesn't make sense. We produce a bunch of things that are going to be hazardous forever - I always point to lead when nuclear comes up. This is actually a particular
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by manfredo 6y ago
> How about showing me a sound final (100k yr) storage for nuclear waste, built and ready, before you operate any more nuclear reactors? Bury it in bedrock with no aquifer. The only scenarios where this results in waste being exposed are
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by manfredo 6y ago
Apparently each of these structures stores 20 MWh of energy. By comparison, the US consumes 11.5 TWh of electricity daily. To reach the 12 hours of storage estimated to be necessary to reach 80% renewable generation we'd need 287,500 o
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by manfredo 6y ago
Yes, the capacity is increasing. But there's still a massive disconnect between the amount of battery storage required to make renewables usable and the capacity that exists. The link I posted already factors in increasing demand, but
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by manfredo 6y ago
> Batteries are catching up. Are they? The US consumes 11.5TWh of electricity daily. It's estimated that it needs 3 weeks if storage to get to 100% carbon free [1]. By comparison global battery production in 2019 was 300GWh [2]. Eve
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by manfredo 6y ago
And how did you aim the reticule against your opponents in this checkered paper game? Gameplay ran in realtime? I'm sure you mean to say that you created a pen and paper game that had shooting as an element, but backed by some kind of
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by manfredo 6y ago
I'm less leery about steam since they have competition: Origin, Epic Games Store, GoG, Microsoft play store, and just releasing the game yourself (plenty of studios actually do this, spiderweb software, paradox, to name a couple). Appl
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by manfredo 6y ago
There's undoubtedly an appeal to exercising one's own imagination. But any text based interface locks off a huge amount of options for interaction. You'll never have a racing Game, a shooter, a flight simulator, any kind of v
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by manfredo 6y ago
Right, text is the lowest bandwidth form of communicating imagination. And to make up for that low bandwidth users have to exercise their own imagination. It's like storing actual vertices of a sphere, vs. having the client execute c
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by manfredo 6y ago
Text is absolutely not the highest bandwidth medium for imagination. Think about what a textured polygon can convey about a character in just one glance: color, clothing, dimensions, facial expression, posture. It'd take paragraphs to
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by manfredo 6y ago
Alternatively, humans will also do things that the military doesn't want them to do: like loot, rape, and kill non-combats. Not every war is WWII where military leaders actively directs troops to commit atrocities. More often than no
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by manfredo 6y ago
Taxis are subject to the medallion system where municipalities deliberately limit the number of taxis that can operate. This certainly increases prices for consumers. If Uber and Lyft aren't profitable the they run the possibility of g
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by manfredo 6y ago
Right, except now instead of having the option of taxis and ride share companies she can only use taxis which have artificially inflated prices due to constricted supply.

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