>The US is an outlier, granted, but mostly for fixable reasons (in particular, over dependence on cars due to poor public transport).
This isn't an obstacle, given electric cars and clean electricity generation. As I said elsewhere, nuclear is the only viable answer. Sadly, it has been demonized, and that needs to be reversed.
ThorCon's efforts in Indonesia will be interesting to watch. I'm not sure I like its current plan of siting the reactors like oil platforms in coastal waters though...
The best approach is underground siting, with no or very little water cooling requirement.
> Nuclear power is, but the environmental movement is actively blocking re-investment, and we're so far behind that it would take decades to jump-start the industry.
That isn't true. With desire and enough money, we could be churning out small modular reactors (SMRs) by the thousands. ThorCon, Nuscale, Terrapower and many others have designs.
In fact, that's my recommendation for the conservatives/populists. Take climate change away as an issue by promoting the only workable plan - a massive shift to nuclear power generation along with "renewables".
Even if global warming isn't an emergency, clean air is a good thing, and so is cheap, plentiful power.
Higher evaporation means more clouds (somewhere) and more rain (somewhere).
Recent studies show increased snowfall in central Antarctica for instance.
It's entirely possible that global warming has lessened the severity of these droughts. One fallacy of climate alarmists is to never admit that global warming has some positive effects, no matter how few.
If in fact global warming has in effect cancelled the next ice age, that is a giant win!
Right, of course we should want single-payer, just like Canada!
Never mind that the average wait time to see a doctor in Canada is almost 20 weeks, and that tens of thousands of Canadians cross the border to the US every year to avoid that wait...
There are tradeoffs with everything. Personally I think people should proactively try to live healthier lives - the medical establishment is about making money, not making you healthier.
The other major side benefit of that is our society might be able to afford the overall cost of healthcare - it's not looking too good at the moment!
I guess Chomsky didn't point out the fact that opioid deaths fell last year for the first time in around 30 years. That actually dovetails with the idea that increased opportunity, low unemployment and improved wages helps.
It doesn't. The only way an ice sheet gains mass under any normal circumstance is new snow falls on top. As more and more snow accumulates over time, the ice sheet grows thicker.
What offsets that is that ice flows under pressure, so the entire sheet has a tendency to head for the ocean. Things are a bit complicated in Antarctica since some of the landscape where the sheet is grounded is below sea level. There are concerns that the seawater is getting warm enough to cause melting there, increasing the flow rate.
If, in fact, ice sheet mass is increasing, that's great in terms of sea level rise. There's no other way to spin it.
> C++ seems very different to me now vs the early 90s.
True, but it's still very far from optimal. For something MUCH closer to optimal, see Rust.
All that said, from a practical standpoint I think Julia is near perfect as both a prototyping and implementation language, with the ability to drop to Rust/C/assembly easily as needed.
High productivity, and C-like performance. That's a sweet spot.
> The thing I never understood that if entropy steadily marches on, and the sun's energy is finite, isn't this all going to end bad anyways?
Ha, well the current estimate is that things should be roughly OK for about another billion years, give or take.
It is interesting to reflect that the run of life on Earth is 3/4 (or so) done, though...
> What will it matter to if we all voluntarily go extinct and add another millennia or two or three to the Earth? It will either overheat in a global warming or face eternal freezing when the sun burns out. Why not enjoy the ride while it lasts and allow others to as well.
We'll be in other star systems long before the Earth is uninhabitable...
> ...yet what is the best thing for the kids? That's a harder thing to know - you can't really compare "not existing" with "living in a world that has a ton of issues".
LOL! I certainly can 'compare "not existing" with "living in a world that has a ton of issues"'.
In the "don't exist" case, there is no possibility of anything good happening.
In the "exist" case, there is a possibility of something good happening.
Easy choice, and that's entirely outside my belief that the human race should continue, thrive, and expand across the stars. Climate change is likely not as severe as the alarmists portray, and is very likely to be solved by market forces. The future is bright!
Oracle is only one player in the Java ecosystem. OpenJDK owns just about everything now, and most organizations are going to get support somewhere besides Oracle. There's been some good recent innovation with Java, and I think it'll continue due to the new accelerated release schedule.
That reminds me, I want to experiment some with AOT compilation and also the new GC plugins.
> I think of Julia and swift as higher-level languages, more domain-specific. Different tools for different problem domains.
Well...my particular interest in these types of languages is primarily in the realm of soft real-time simulation, specifically various kinematic simulations.
Of the three, only Julia is garbage collected, and (unlike some other GC languages) it's fairly easy to not exercise the collector. I'm encouraged that will continue to be the case, since there's an organization using it for robotics, which is implicitly a hard real time use case.
Julia, Swift and Rust are all clearly general purpose languages. Swift is unabashedly general purpose, while Julia and Rust each have a primary niche - math/science and systems, respectively. All three use the excellent LLVM infrastructure.
Aside from determinism (which mainly requires pre-allocating nearly everything), my primary requirements are expressiveness/productivity, readability, and efficient runtime performance.
All three languages produce highly optimized code, and Rust probably has the edge as far as efficiency goes - but it clearly loses on the first two criteria, at least to Julia. If one needs access to machine level functionality in Julia, there's an extremely efficient C FFI, so mixing Rust and Julia (for instance) would be painless if needed.
Actually that link makes no prediction at all about how much sea levels will rise. It merely looks at the impact if the sea level were to rise by the given amounts.
> But the CEO doesn't own the company, the investors do, so why would the CEO be the one to state the goals leaving investors to "take it or leave it"?
Well, one point of the article is that these days 62% of CEO income is equity, so in most cases the CEO is also an "investor".
It does seem to me that creates a conflict of interest, in that a short-term plan to increase share price may not be in the long-term interests of the company. Yet, the CEO will likely not be around for the long haul and benefits more from short-term thinking.
I'm generally not a fan of Warren, but a good bit of this makes sense to me.
I think the most questionable part is: "At least 75% of directors and shareholders would need to approve before a corporation could make any political expenditures". That is just thrown in there with no explanation, and is likely intended to cripple Republicans by not allowing campaign contributions in almost all cases. That is likely the poison pill that will doom this legislation.
> And when I want Julia’s promise of fast loops, I use Numba. If all the effort gone into Julia had instead been spent on fixing remaining warts in Python workflow for science, we wouldn’t even havee this conversation.
Python is rather a mess. Code written in Python can't be sped up without pain/cost, and apparently it will never support concurrency natively. It also suffers from the bane of weakly typed languages, errors at run time instead of compile time.
I think the sweet spot for a language with most of Python's benefits that fixes many of its glaring warts is enormous.
> The blog mentions that Julia is supposed to be a general purpose language, and not a language built specifically for scientific computing. Is that wrong?
No. Julia is a general purpose language that has so far been mainly focused on scientific and mathematical programming.
It's design is probably least friendly to the real-time programming domain (GC based) but it can apparently be used there as well:
I doubt Biden would last as President until Inauguration Day.
Thankfully, all signs are pointing to a DJT victory tomorrow! ;-)