icegreentea2

gisterendiscuss

I don't think Bret (the author of ACOUP) omits drought - he leads his section on plausible theories with "period of drying and consistent crop failures". While Bret dismisses the out to in migration/invasion theory, he does support the idea of intra-region migration/warfare (perhaps induced by drought/crop failures).

icegreentea2

eergisterendiscuss

Unclear how China will react to orbital/near-orbital launches that track near/over China in a hot war situation.

If I were China, I'd probably be backdoor signalling that they would consider these launches to be potential nuclear strikes to try to get them off the table.

icegreentea2

7 dagen geledendiscuss

The paper is an analysis performed on a larger dataset. No one created or ran a 15 year study on egg consumption. Someone ran a 15 year study that included dietary survey questions that happened to include eggs, and then someone other group mined the dataset for this analysis.

This particular study (AHS-2) was initially funded by the NIH (and has continued with NIH and mixed funding): https://publichealth.llu.edu/adventist-health-studies/videos...

icegreentea2

7 dagen geledendiscuss

This map which combines population density and time zones makes some of the decisions more clear I think - https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/7vvlgz/contiguous_...

The reality is that a lot of counties/areas in one state are significantly more economically integrated (or drawn to, or dependent) to areas in other states. This can result in border regions swapping time zones.

For example, the 4 Michigan states you highlighted - given the reality of UP, those areas probably interact with Wisconsin probably even more than the rest of the UP. You see similar population clusterings on the WA/MT and OR/ID borders.

icegreentea2

7 dagen geledendiscuss

JWST has 4 different instruments on it. While they all share the same focusing mirrors, but otherwise are 4 different measurement devices.

For the red dot observations, I believe this things have been measured by at least 3 of the 4 devices on board - NIRCam (near infrared camera, has very limited spectral capabilities through its filter wheel), NIRSpec (near infrared spectrograph) and MIRI (mid infrared instrument).

I cannot pretend to have the actual expertise, but it does seem vanishingly unlikely that all 3 instruments could create consistent artefacts in the same location.

icegreentea2

8 dagen geledendiscuss

From a rational standpoint, I don't understand how investors could feel betrayed by a pivot that involves creating two ovens to eventually allow the founder to capture 10% of the market. Functionally, I can't imagine a single investor actually caring about these details. They don't care about the number of buttons, or if it can do wedding cakes, or whatever. They care that the founder and team demonstrates competence in their decision making and execution.

If a founder is able to spin and control both the loss of a major potential customer, and the low customer satisfaction rate (weak follow up from pilots) to the investors, I simply cannot imagine that doing 2 product lines is that much of a big deal.

More personally, I'd feel that if it truly were a coldly rational decision, the founder would feel confident in defending his choices (at least against any initial suggestions to the contrary) without resorting to anger.

icegreentea2

8 dagen geledendiscuss

I like this part:

The founder gets angry. He promised the VCs 10% of Spain’s oven market. The entire market. “We can’t sacrifice any of them.”

It’s not just greed. The 5 million was raised with the entire market on the slide. The founder isn’t choosing between right and wrong: he’s choosing which promise to break.

I wonder what the author had in mind when he wrote "which promise to break". Is the founder thinking about his promises to the VCs? Or thinking between the VC and customers?

I think this is the most human moment of the entire story. Everything else is pretty standard tropes (and just like everyone in this chain, these tropes ring very very true). They're almost systemic issues.

But this is a moment where the one person who is supposed to actually have agency (the founder!) actually has a choice. I don't want to nitpick the technicalities of the choice (it seems pretty straightforward to me that getting to 10% of total market would more than justify multiple product lines), but the psychology here.

Why is the founder uncomfortable breaking promises to investors, but more comfortable selling a garbage product? Is he just hopeful?

icegreentea2

9 dagen geledendiscuss

OP is talking about Canada's supply management system in place in some areas (including eggs). Supply management is a government system that basically puts all large scale production of these items under both a quota system (farmers need to get/buy a license/quota), and fixed pricing to the farmer.

It is a form of farming subsidy that was specifically structured to avoid passing money through the government, and structured to control price volatility.

This is separate from the commercial market concentration in Canada, which is definitely real. To a degree, this is just the reality of being a smaller market. The depth and breathe of the American economy is definitely at play here.

If you compare Canadian super market consolidation vs Germany or UK (for example), you find a much more similar situation.

icegreentea2

19 dagen geledendiscuss

Didn't find the full study, but what I'm pretty sure is a preprint is here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.05.25326994v...

One thing to note and I guess might be a bit of the puzzle is that the data clearly indicates that trans-gendered men have lower upper and lower body strength compared to cis-men, while the opposite scenario (transwomen compared to cisgender women) appears much less conclusive.

The trans-women vs cis-gender strength effects are heavily influenced by a single study. There are only 7 studies for upper body strength, 5 of which lean towards showing greater trans-women strength, 1 that leans towards reduced, and 1 (Alvares 2025) which clearly indicates reduced strength. Similarly for lower body strength there are only 4 studies with a similar pattern (once again, the Alvares 2025 producing the clearest TW weaker than CW effect).

The Alvares 2025 study compares amateur volleyball players. There are 7 trans women in that study versus 8 cis-gender women. Average hours per week of activity (or volleyball? Unclear, I'm working off the meta-review's summary table) is 4 for TW and 14 for CW. Average age is 30 (28-33) for TW and 26 (22-29) for CW.

I don't think that makes the Alvares study useless, but I do feel that it's deeply limited. 4 hours vs 14 hours a week is a pretty big difference in activity level.

icegreentea2

2 maanden geledendiscuss

That's not what the article, or the paper backing it claims.

The paper (https://circulareconomyjournal.org/ojs/JoCE/article/view/250) is about quantifying the environmental impact of material losses that happen in a typical scenario, including a single full recycle (as opposed to reuse).

The paper relies heavily on another paper (https://circulareconomyjournal.org/ojs/JoCE/article/view/250) for estimates of upstream material losses. That paper attempted to quantify production stage losses from raw fiber, into fabric, and then into apparel by surveying factories in Bangladesh for their mass input/outputs for different production stages.

icegreentea2

2 maanden geledendiscuss

In case you missed it, that was a joke. There is infact an Army Corps of Engineers that is responsible for exactly what the comment suggested (amongst a lot of other things).

The Army Corps of Engineers has its prominent civil engineering role because early America did not have a lot of federal resources and was born from war. So when the Federal government decided it wanted to take on large scale civil engineering works, the only ready to go resource at hand were the military engineers. And then afterwards, it's pretty much been inertia.

The Army Corps of Engineers civil works division is basically almost completely staffed by civilians. So there's a convoluted top level organization, but on the ground, it's not like they have soldiers and military engineers building levees.

Congressional Research Service report: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48322

It includes a section about discussions on transferring civil works responsibility out of DoD.

icegreentea2

2 maanden geledendiscuss

Can you clarify? Do you mean that superconducting qubits are unable to perform the "real applications" theoretically, or that superconducting qubits at the scale this foundry could produce will be unable, or that superconducting qubits that will foundry could produce will still be outperformed by classical techniques?

icegreentea2

2 maanden geledendiscuss

Some other interviews/blurbs from the authors (from their Universities):

https://politicalscience.ku.dk/about/news/2026/banal-but-bru...

https://www.hertie-school.org/en/news/detail/content/why-ord...

Two points that the NYT article does not emphasize as much:

* Career pressures can go both ways - "the same career pressure that drives some officers to do the regime’s dirty work drives others to join coups against it. Both are all-in gambles by people with their backs against the wall – one bets on the current regime, the other bets on its replacement."

* Meritocracy and professionalism in itself is not protective - "The Argentine army maintained a remarkably meritocratic promotion system for over a century – through democracies, personalist dictatorships, and military juntas alike" and "The policy implication is sobering: professionalisation alone won’t protect democracy. We need to think carefully about what happens to those who lose in competitive systems and what pathways we offer them."

In other words, there is a structural challenge - how do we treat "losers" in a system that is constantly present, and then there is the authoritarian's take on that challenge. Realistically, this is just highlighting a mechanism, and once someone is actually in a position to take advantage of such a mechanism, there's typically not much you can do to engineer an institutional safeguard within that system.

icegreentea2

2 maanden geledendiscuss

A libertarian society doesn't coddle you, but it still accepts that the state has monopoly of force, and it accepts that the state needs to be fair and predictable.

I think the author's fear would be that we currently live in an informational vortex that threatens to destabilize and consume our democracies and societies, and remove even the possibility of a fair and predictable state.

And I would argue that that is hardly an outlandish fear. It's barely an extrapolation at all.

icegreentea2

2 maanden geledendiscuss

From https://web.mit.edu/16.unified/www/FALL/thermodynamics/notes...

All other things equal, range varies proportionately with efficiency. Ie, if you have 500km range at 50% overall efficiency, then at 65% overall efficiency, you have 650km range.

icegreentea2

2 maanden geledendiscuss

This might be interesting: https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/23490/chapter/6

Thermodynamic efficiency (which is what turbine blades enable) has increased from ~30 to 55% over the last 50-60 years. The book estimates that the practical limit of for thermodynamic efficiency is in the 65-70% range.

icegreentea2

2 maanden geledendiscuss

This is a phys.org "article". They're usually just rehashed press releases, and this one is particularly bad - it's literally just the NASA press release with the last 2 paragraphs chopped off. https://www.nasa.gov/missions/nisar/us-indian-space-mission-...

icegreentea2

2 maanden geledendiscuss

Uhhh... editor/author/LLM was asleep here. There are 4 sentinel-1 sats in orbit, but one of them has been decommissioned because of system failure... as the article itself states.

icegreentea2

2 maanden geledendiscuss

There is a generalized military response in place (CTF-151 via UN). The insurance based scheme tends to work because it's basically dealing with "leakers".

UNCLOS permits any country to intervene in case of piracy. Because piracy attacks the public good of assured, consistent, low cost maritime transit and commerce (which the entire developed world is addicted to), and successful piracy begets piracy, there are a lot of countries with a lot of resources deeply interested with intervening.

icegreentea2

2 maanden geledendiscuss

As other people have noted, Somali piracy is not "new". It's been happening since the 90s (Somali Civil war and failed international interventions). There were, and still are multinational (basically chartered by the UN) naval task forces operating in the area, to deter and interdict pirates. See CTF-151 (https://combinedmaritimeforces.com/ctf-151-counter-piracy/)

These types of actions are not perfect, they cannot stop everything, so you still see successful attacks happen.

And no one wants to try to intervene in Somalia itself. The world tried that in the 90s and got completely burned.

So the answer is that "other countries are not allowing it" in the same way that no country allows murder, and yet it still happens.