> If you live somewhere that mostly burns coal to make electricity,
Which is almost everywhere in the world. Fossil fuels make up around 80% of energy production.
> But if they start building wind turbines and solar farms, because those are just cheaper and easier -
If they were "just cheaper and easier" they wouldn't need huge clean energy investments and subsidies.
I love solar, but don't let anyone sell you on the fiction that your EV is avoiding fossil fuels at any time in the near future unless you have installed enough solar on your personal residence to charge your car every day.
And if you ask the people who have done that "hey, was it cheap and easy to move your car's energy consumption to renewables?" and they reply "Yes!", please bring their story back here and share with the class.
Just a note on your gun death comment. The chance of dying by a gun in the US is very small. Of those killed by guns in the US, less than 3% are killed by anything resembling an "assault rifle". Over half of all gun deaths are suicides, so even those numbers are inflated if what you want to know is "how worried do I need to be about dying because the 2nd amendment allows assault rifle ownership?"
> You were in a country that really was sealed off from the rest of the world. No internet or social media. All press and TV (one channel) dedicated not for news but solely for the glorification of the Leader. That is the Kim dynasty and the regime.
I couldn't be talking from a more realistic standpoint. I've lived in places where incumbent ISPs don't invest in infrastructure, places where a private organization built out a cable network without any subsidies, places where a municipal provider was subsidized by federal grant money, and places where there was no public or private build outs and so I built my own ISP servicing my rural neighbors.
I'm not saying that municipal broadband is a net loss, but there are no silver bullets. Subsidies are one way that a municipality can "pick a winner", and in so doing, it can assure all of the competition loses. Sometimes that's a net win, sometimes it isn't, your claims to the contrary notwithstanding.
> But that is rarely true for any privatized infrastructure alternative. There is often direct financial relations through taxation anyways, either tax breaks for the company or outright having the municipality foot the bill(see most stadiums)
How would you consider those to be "privatized infrastructure alternatives" then? To me this sounds like further evidence of citizens having fewer alternatives available because their money is being spent on things they may not (or may!) care about.
> Then there is the potential resource usage itself - e.g how much of the land in that city is now dedicate to toll roads that could be free, or in the internet infra case it's often exclusive rights to the poles all of the lines are ran on.
IDK, public rights-of-way don't seem to be the place where big disagreements are found? Passing a local law to allow common access to utility infrastructure seems qualitatively different than establishing a municipal competitor.
> Everybody benefits from infrastructure even if they don't use it directly.
...therefore, by definition, any infrastructure project is to be considered "worth it" and should be welcomed by everyone in the community. To be against government rollout of infrastructure is to be against everybody's best interest, right?
I'm not against government-provided services across-the-board. But apologists for infrastructure spending often seem to make this argument as if it's the last point to be made. The great thing about a private company "overcharging" or "underserving" a community is that citizens aren't forced to be in a relationship with that company for their services. That's not the case for infrastructure spending by the local government. It's much harder to vote with your feet than to vote with your wallet.
The fine line to walk with government spending is to find a way to incentivize competition in the local marketplace, without destroying it in the process. It's not an easy problem to solve.
I've not personally read "Misquoting Jesus", but I've listened to Ehrman on YT a bit. Based on that, and having spoken with a few biblical scholars who have read Ehrman, the general impression I get is that he has a "select is broken"[0] attitude toward the reliability of the Bible.
Much like GCC, and the Linux kernel, and the PostgreSQL query planner, the Bible is a battle-tested historical artifact. There may be a slew of yet-to-be-discovered "edge cases" in its interpretation (and perhaps Ehrman is the man to discover them). But in the main, it's an incredibly reliable witness to history.
So, while I wouldn't want to discourage people from starting their study of Biblical textual criticism with Bart Ehrman, I would definitely discourage them from concluding it with him.
The one who states his case first seems right,
until the other comes and examines him.
Prov. 18:17
I don't tend to reread many books in general. C.S. Lewis and Tolkien's fictional series are probably the only exceptions. However, I do frequently reread books from the Bible, typically the English Standard Version. And yes, I would make the claim that all of these are non-fictional books/letters.
- Jonah: for its description of God's desire to have compassion on a group of people who don't know him, by leaving Jonah with no other option than telling those people about Him.
- Ecclesiastes: For "The Teacher's" many vignettes about how life is a quickly-dissipating vapor, and his pointing to ways to find satisfaction in it.
- Mark: Mark tells the story of Jesus' life and ministry in a no-nonsense, get-to-the-point kind of way.
- Romans: Paul gives a treatise on: the main problem of mankind, the inability of men to live up to any standard of behavior, the source of any confidence that anyone can have that God might be pleased with them, the way the Christian church relates to the people of Israel, and how to live in unity with people with whom you have disagreements.
- 1 John: John never got over the fact that he was loved by Jesus, and this letter is his recapitulation of that same love toward others.
It is and it is. My dad died of a GBM in 2022, 17 months after his diagnosis. If he had had another 19 months, I'd have made him breakfast this morning.
I find it much easier to sympathize with people's desire for additional time with terminally-ill loved ones now.
GBM median survival for humans (according to the article) is 15 months.
If the effect is linear, the boost to survival time in humans would be an additional 19 months. With the death sentence of GBM hanging over your future, an additional year-and-a-half is huge.
I see this claimed all the time, but I don't understand why this is assumed to be the case.
GDP rises and falls with economic progress and innovation. If new LLM startups make a bunch of money, GDP goes up accordingly.
But government spending is primarily geared towards defense, infrastructure, and benefits/entitlements. What makes those costs go up proportionally to GDP? A fighter jet doesn't directly cost more because Amazon rolls out a new Alexa device, does it? America doesn't suddenly grow thousands of miles of new coastline because Google opens a data center in Iowa, right? If Rivian builds 10,000 new EV trucks, how much more interstate highway must be built?
I would expect government spending to ebb and flow as market prices fluctuate, and I get that they might be loosely correlated, but why is spending assumed to be so closely linked that we should expect it to be a function of GDP?
I've got my AI Assistant writing my code, checking in at the gym, running my poker night, and filing my taxes.
(Robot, experience this tragic irony for me!)
</sarcasm>
On a serious note, I agree with you. LLMs, in practice, seem to be both raising the ceiling of what's possible on the high end as well as lowering the floor making it easier for new entrants on the low end. See, for example, Justine Tunney's recent work on making llama run better on CPUs.
I came here to mention Dave Beazley's courses and talks.
In particular, I recently prepped/ran a week-long, in-house training session of Dave's Python-Mastery[1] course at my day job. We had a group of 8 with a mix of junior and senior Software Engineers and while the juniors were generally able to follow along, it really benefited the senior SEs most. It covers the whole language in such depth and detail that you really feel like you've explored every nook and cranny by the time you're done.
(I enjoyed teaching the class so much that I've considered offering my services teaching it on a consulting basis to other orgs. If that interests anyone, feel free to reach out to the email in my profile.)
Doesn't the range of an EV drop as the heating load of the cabin of an EV increases?
And doesn't the heating load of the cabin increase as the air velocity over all of its metal and glass surfaces increases? Isn't the shell of the car essentially a giant heatsink with a 70mph relative wind moving across it?
You currently have an address hierarchy like <AS Number>:<Network Allocation>:<Subnet>:<Host>. That hierarchy is conveniently conveyed in a single 128 bit number. With an alphanumeric address, 128 bits of ASCII would get you `company:office:l` and your net/subnet/host would require more CPU horsepower to compute.
Which is almost everywhere in the world. Fossil fuels make up around 80% of energy production.
> But if they start building wind turbines and solar farms, because those are just cheaper and easier -
If they were "just cheaper and easier" they wouldn't need huge clean energy investments and subsidies.
I love solar, but don't let anyone sell you on the fiction that your EV is avoiding fossil fuels at any time in the near future unless you have installed enough solar on your personal residence to charge your car every day.
And if you ask the people who have done that "hey, was it cheap and easy to move your car's energy consumption to renewables?" and they reply "Yes!", please bring their story back here and share with the class.
https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2023/execut...