mapt

31 ms·

481.
by mapt 1y ago
Most of the "Ghost Cities" that you read about ten years ago are now normal cities full of people. The Chinese innovation was building the cities before you moved people there, "opening" the city empty and then watching
482.
by mapt 1y ago
Russia has been selling large amounts of long-term sovereign bonds, going into debt, at an annualized interest rate in the mid 20%'s (!). While under a looming demographic crisis featuring very large numbers of elderly pensioners bein
483.
by mapt 1y ago
California contracting in particular is built not of penurious individual corruption, but of systemic corruption. The lowest bid must win, and nobody has the political capital to establish a bidding system that works, so dramatic systemati
484.
by mapt 1y ago
The two outstanding things we get out of copper are thermal conductivity and electrical conductivity. If it converts, we get those properties in a mechanically strong material.
485.
by mapt 1y ago
In terms of social demographic equality, I'm explicitly not saying that it was equal, just "more equal". The differences between a white minimum wage worker and a black minimum wage worker in the 60's were significant,
486.
by mapt 1y ago
Read the article. The highest speed limit for Virginia is 70mph. Their bill gives judges the option of offering this for people who drive >100mph, as an alternative to license recovation. The DC bill gives people whose license the judges
487.
by mapt 1y ago
This would be a "man bites dog is news" thing; The pretense is that of course Democrats were in favor, but this time even a few Republicans relented and joined the vote.
488.
by mapt 1y ago
NOT to create an economically equal nation. Just a nation with as much economic inequality as the 60's, or even the 90's. A type of society in living memory, which is today beyond the imagination of policymakers.
489.
by mapt 1y ago
We absolutely need industrial scale farming, even if we take 40 million acres of suburban lawns and convert 10 million to active garden rows (there are many constraints on spacing, I'm dealing with this right now). Because 10 million
490.
by mapt 1y ago
There's a question about his actual goals in government. He's an ambitious person. And AI enables a degree of surveillance state that we find it difficult to even begin to imagine. All the logistical difficulties of something like
491.
by mapt 1y ago
Being an Olympic gymnast or marathon runner or boxer is not, broadly speaking, healthy. These pursuits require you to make sacrifices that push your body to extremes, to its physical limits, and not only you are selected for a very particu
492.
by mapt 1y ago
The production of concentrated nitrogen compounds from thin air is useful enough that we'll almost certainly keep doing it en masse in an electric-only future. Mining for phosphorous and potassium fertilizers, likewise, but situational
493.
by mapt 1y ago
We make corn-derived fuel in order to power the Iowa caucus. Corn farmers could be doing literally anything else, including a whole variety of things that rebuild soil or capture carbon or generate electricity, and it would be equally effec
494.
by mapt 1y ago
> I really didn't expect so much paperclip production growth this quarter! >> How'd you do it? > I don't know the details. ChatGPT did it for me, this thing's amazing. Our bonuses are gonna be huge this yea
495.
by mapt 1y ago
Unless you're in Canada, where they sell everything in plastic bags, and a barrel of oil is a solid chunk of rock at room temperature.
496.
by mapt 1y ago
Enjoy your steel-drum calypso music while you barbecue on your steel-drum smoker.
497.
by mapt 1y ago
You've got probably thousands of years between these two events, which undoubtedly contains a lot of feline history.
498.
by mapt 1y ago
Is there some minimum number of qubits at which some minimum viable quantum-supreme task can theoretically be achieved? What would be required to factor a 1024 bit integer key?
499.
by mapt 1y ago
Your attitude of tolerance is admirable. If you queried a hundred random people who knew this same Russian and were similarly opposed to his politics, do you believe that one hundred of them would share your perspective? Or would a handful
500.
by mapt 1y ago
Disclaimer: I'm trying to help GP understand the way they were being seen, and why that worldview might have arisen, not defending/endorsing that worldview. A bit more than a century back, one branch of my family tree stems from s
501.
by mapt 1y ago
I want you to think about how you would feel in a hypothetical about Chinese people. In this timeline, after a group of Hong Kong democracy activists planted bombs that killed a few hundred low-level people at the annual Chinese Communist P
502.
by mapt 1y ago
Tandas / ROSCAs are useful savings vehicles when it is, for whatever reason, difficult to hold on to money for very long. There's the physical version of this (The local warlord regularly mirks people for their wallets; Or maybe y
503.
by mapt 1y ago
These are two very different systems. It's interesting that they ended up sharing a name in different locales. Usually "Tontine" is used for a retirement plan that people pay into, which distributes the dividends evenly amon
504.
by mapt 1y ago
It's not just a clause. People will claim that this is the only safe way to charge them. Personally, I think we need a cultural-architectural accommodation - we used to have coal chutes, milkman boxes, ice doors. For well-regulated b
505.
by mapt 2y ago
Per yesterday's whistleblower, DOGE is apparently exfiltrating confidential NLRB data en masse while explicitly seeking to leave no logs of them doing so, followed immediately by login attempts to those systems using the same freshly c
506.
by mapt 2y ago
> You can just leave batteries in and it knows when to stop charging. This is true of all modern lithium ion consumer hardware, because if you don't get this part right, the battery explodes and burns down your house the first time.
507.
by mapt 2y ago
When I visited China, the expats told me that recreational drug supplychains were strictly compartmentalized. There was the supply of illicit drugs for Westerners (imported by the sons of Nigerian businessmen, the cliche went), the supply
508.
by mapt 2y ago
Am I, in fact, going to be hit with a $100 tariff on a $2 item ($2+$100=$102) or a $2.40 tariff ($2*1.2=$4.40) ? I am looking for language like "Whichever is greater" in the announcement and I'm not seeing it. Do importers c
509.
by mapt 2y ago
Could you unpack the idea further? There are plenty of things where Temu charges $2.00 and I would be fine paying a 120% tariff on that to bring it to $4.40, because Amazon is charging $8.99 and retailers are selling a seventy pack for $30.
510.
by mapt 2y ago
There's a very large political base, particularly of young people, that is more than ready for leftist politics. It just doesn't get any funding from the millionaires who fund the DNC or the billionaires who fund the GOP. And mon

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