nickjarboe

9 ms·

31.
by nickjarboe 10y ago
Well, most reservoirs have gone from almost empty to near capacity[1] in just this year and the snow pack is well above average. It would be great to recharge some of the ground water used during the drought, but by any reasonable measure t
32.
by nickjarboe 10y ago
Standardized gold and silver coinage (money) was also developed at this time. Another huge change for humanity. Maybe the two ideas are related. See "Debt: The First 5000 years" by David Graeber.
33.
by nickjarboe 10y ago
Just because it is not legal to force servers to share some with the bar backs and the cooks does not mean it is not expected in most places. Not all social customs should be codified in law. Some flexibility in life is good.
34.
by nickjarboe 10y ago
Many cultures and sub-cultures don't believe in tipping for many different reasons. These cultures exist all over the globe and in the US. When tipping is needed to provide a decent wage for a service, people from these 'no tippin
35.
by nickjarboe 10y ago
I would think that volatility would be a shot term play. Give me a stock the just goes up 0.1% every day and I'll borrow to the hilt to buy it.
36.
Tesla Announces Offerings of Common Stock and Convertible Senior Notes(ir.tesla.com)
12 points by nickjarboe 10y ago|1 comments
37.
by nickjarboe 10y ago
It is because oil in a barrel contains many different parts. Refining is mostly just distillation. Chemically changing the product is sometimes done but is much more complicated and expensive. With just distillation, one will get everything
38.
by nickjarboe 10y ago
It would be great to move as a home owner and be able to avoid the 5-6% realtor cost on both ends (10-12% total). This could enable millions of people choose better living arrangements. Unfortunately for people in California, Prop 13 will s
39.
by nickjarboe 10y ago
And then there was Webvan that IPO'ed in Nov, 1999 with a market cap north of $4.8 billion. RIP: 2001.
40.
by nickjarboe 10y ago
Please note this 60% tax is 60% of what one could rent the property for, not 60% of the value. Yearly rents are maybe 5-10% of the value, so a 3% to 6% tax as the word is normally used. Still something, but not nearly extreme as the headlin
41.
Martian Winds Carve Mountains, Move Dust, Raise Dust(jpl.nasa.gov)
2 points by nickjarboe 10y ago|0 comments
42.
Gravitational waves: Going beyond LIGO(arstechnica.com)
3 points by nickjarboe 10y ago|0 comments
43.
by nickjarboe 10y ago
From the abstract of the paper cited, "vehicle-kilometers traveled increases proportionately to roadway lane kilometers for interstate highways and probably slightly less rapidly for other types of roads." Congestion may not decre
44.
by nickjarboe 10y ago
One might consider that if Enclosure did not increase total food production productivity per person, then the peasants would have had to just keep working the land like they did before. I'm not saying the peasants had better lives as i
45.
by nickjarboe 10y ago
And decision was unanimous.
46.
by nickjarboe 10y ago
And we also gave up on incremental and evolutionary improvements on the last great new thing, nuclear technology. The first human-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was on December 2, 1942. Nuclear bomb - July 16, 1945. Hydrogen bo
47.
by nickjarboe 10y ago
I had not considered that conflict. It was in Kashmir and the border was never agreed upon by both sides (as you state). I wouldn't call it an invasion or even really a "war" with the small number of killed at only ~1,000. Ot
48.
by nickjarboe 10y ago
Countries with atomic weapons have never invaded another country with atomic weapons. This is a great improvement over WWI and WWII, although it is hard to know what the long tail risk is of killing almost everybody with a full scale nuclea
49.
by nickjarboe 10y ago
Another rare example is the US where mineral rights are spread over millions of individuals instead of the govenment.
50.
by nickjarboe 10y ago
More like an ore deposit. Could turn it into a mine with some work.
51.
by nickjarboe 10y ago
Rock bands may have been in their prime back then but their fan base has probably yet to reach peak wealth.
52.
by nickjarboe 10y ago
To the first order it is the fact that a liquid only propagates pressure waves while a solid can propagate shear and pressure waves (which propagate a different speeds).
53.
by nickjarboe 10y ago
The key is debt. If your debt is in US dollars and you are forced to pay in US dollars, then you need to have US dollars. If you don't have them, you have to trade what you have (labor, land, beanie babies) with someone who has US doll
54.
by nickjarboe 10y ago
I was thinking that producing the hydrogen feed stock would be most of the energy used in the process. This site [1] states that, using the current global feed stock mix of light carbon and heavy carbon sources, about half the energy used i
55.
by nickjarboe 10y ago
Maybe electricity rates in California should be dropped to increase demand. The state has one of the highest electricity rates in the country [1]. [1] http://www.neo.ne.gov/statshtml/204.htm
56.
by nickjarboe 10y ago
Not sure where you get a pure hydrogen source on this planet without using some energy. I'd like to own such a source. Sort of like owning an oil well.
57.
by nickjarboe 10y ago
Individual DNA analysis is on the way, so hopefully health science can start to study what might best work for you, individually. Maybe for now just weigh the health advise of your genetic ancestors more than some study on millions of peopl
58.
Elon Musk's Statement on His Membership in the Presidential Advisory Forum(twitter.com)
6 points by nickjarboe 10y ago|5 comments
59.
by nickjarboe 10y ago
Well, half of it will. The half life of potassium-40 is ~1.25 billion years. It decays to calcium-40 about 89% of the time and argon-40 11%. When using potassium-40 decay for dating, the usual method is determining the ratio of K-40 to radi
60.
by nickjarboe 10y ago
Since Musk is not making electric cars just for the profits, maybe Tesla will produce replacement batteries with better specs at lower cost. Tesla cars are designed to have battery packs that can be easily replaced contra Apples recent devi

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