rland

14 ms·

91.
by rland 5y ago
I'm not necessarily worried about climate change per se. It will result in hardship for many, for sure. Temperature changes will render some areas uninhabitable, it will cause mass migration, and probably destabilize the world politica
92.
by rland 5y ago
Those people are the essential workers I'm talking about. They are a small portion of the population. Do you notice how during the pandemic, none of them stopped working? How many do you know personally? And how large that group, the
93.
by rland 5y ago
The pandemic made this crystal clear to me. The phrase "essential worker" is pure comedy. If like 80% of the population is not an "essential worker" why the fuck do we need to coerce people to work under the threat of ev
94.
by rland 5y ago
The room includes all buyers and sellers.
95.
by rland 5y ago
America literally did exactly what China is doing now, when it was the upstart and Britain was the industrial powerhouse of the world. Americans stole British IP and built an industrial economy with that technology. All the while implementi
96.
by rland 5y ago
Maybe we should restructure our value system a bit to value writing a book more. The takeaway from this article is "writing books doesn't produce value, so less people should do so." Everyone agrees (or professes to agree) th
97.
by rland 5y ago
I wonder if this could be solved by a sort of collective contract: A university (and its faculty) sign a contract to publish only in open-access journals. But the contract doesn't actually go into effect until it has signatories of n%
98.
by rland 5y ago
If you want power at night, what do you do? If it's cloudier one day than another, what do you do? You need baseline production to flatten the peaks and valleys. If you want to run on solar, you need to provision far more supply of ene
99.
by rland 5y ago
Huh? You'd need to look at billions in profit, not revenue, since insurance does pay out for the cost of care. When you look at that, the margin is actually lower than most industries. It is true that there are a lot of middlemen with
100.
by rland 5y ago
That is interesting, I didn't know that. I thought that doing computation on the GPU sped up encoding for even the high quality presets.
101.
by rland 5y ago
There are two "renewable" sources of power: solar (wind and hydro are there with solar, but their energy potential is smaller and their downsides larger) and nuclear*. Solar makes a lot of energy, but: - you need a lot of land to
102.
by rland 5y ago
The quantity of easily extractable energy available from nuclear fuel dwarfs anything else known. A single nuclear fuel pellet contains the same amount of energy as a ton of coal. 20 tons if all of the energy is extracted. How many tons of
103.
by rland 5y ago
Imho, if we want to move forward as a species into something like the "next level" of civilization, we need to pour trillions of dollars of effort into building a full stack of nuclear energy. University programs, technical school
104.
by rland 5y ago
GPUs have specialized hardware for video transcoding, no? So this actually makes sense. The product was already made (although, perhaps not up to Youtube's standard) by GPU manufacturers.
105.
by rland 5y ago
It's weird. I have developed the same intuition about the economy. My thought process is this: basically, any time dependent system can be modeled with a set of ODEs, no matter how many parts of the system, no matter how many feedback
106.
by rland 5y ago
The Terminator included a graphic 10 minutes of Arnold Schwarz terminating an entire police station full of LAPD. I mean, I'm not sure what Cameron was thinking when he made it but I consider that a political statement no matter how
107.
by rland 5y ago
I worked as a trial consultant for a while and got to sit in trial. This is what struck me the most. The best trial lawyers I know are like actors, entertainers, celebrities -- they have the ability to publicly act towards witnesses and j
108.
by rland 5y ago
The buyer brings the money but the seller brings the house. Tax incidence depends on the elasticity of either buyer vs seller (whether or not it's a seller's market or a buyer's market) I mean yes the literal money is paid ou
109.
by rland 6y ago
Said best by Agent Smith in this classic scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgS1Lwr8gq8
110.
by rland 6y ago
Racism: impossible to truly solve, deeply interpersonal/psychological, completely different for every person, depending on a constantly changing, kaleidoscopic array of individual, social, media, linguistic, and cultural values. Econom
111.
by rland 6y ago
TF2 is exactly the same. It's a great game, tons of people still buying items from the store, just slowly being choked out by developer neglect. I guess they're just printing so much money from the steam store that it's hard
112.
by rland 6y ago
You can either pay someone $20 an hour and give them a sense of responsibility, autonomy, & pride, or you can pay them $10 an hour and just coerce them to do the job. Which do we reward?
113.
by rland 6y ago
It's really interesting to see the world through PG's eyes. Kudos to him, I guess, for actually saying out loud what most of the mega-rich are unwilling to. Everyone who isn't like PG (so, 100% of the population) is finding i
114.
by rland 6y ago
Blender is also an option, it can be scripted and it's possible to get pixel-perfect segmentation masks that way. The downside is obviously that you have to have a suitable number of 3-D scenes pre-built. But I think typically pasting
115.
by rland 6y ago
So basically, if someone gets raped and gets HIV we can just blame them for not fighting back enough? If that is the question, it's based on some abhorrent moral assumptions.
116.
by rland 6y ago
The only thing we have in life is the present moment. So, the only thing we lose in death is the present moment.
117.
by rland 6y ago
I'm a little bit familiar with the robot vacuum cleaner mentioned. This area (in robotics) is called "complete coverage path planning" and has quite a bit of research in it. Getting an efficient path is challenging when you c
118.
by rland 6y ago
Yes, I think you're right. It's useful to have the unique label of "social media" because the scale you mention can't really be replicated offline. A difference in quantity is a difference in kind in this case.
119.
by rland 6y ago
Indeed, that is what I'm saying. Even though I'm a real person, when you read this comment, you do not gain any interiority into my real person. You read my comment in your mind's voice, entirely with your own biases. And t
120.
by rland 6y ago
I think texts/video calls/etc. isn't social media, it's much more like conversation. That's why people (in general) are not nearly as mean or rude on a voice call or a 1-to-1 text chat. When you hear someone's

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