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It's saying that even just having a garage is a privilege.

Even being able to type in a comment box is a privilege, as is life.

Meanwhile, you're missing the wider point: You don't get to claim "everybody can do this from nothing" if the "nothing" is actually a substantial amount of implicit access to resources.

Nobody (well, few) begrudge that privilege, but you cannot have a reasonable discussion about what led to success by leaving out major factors.


Even the amount of agency you have is a privilege. Hard determinism.

Funnily enough, when the law was passed giving the president the authority to meddle in university governance, Reagan vetoed it. And the left, in congress and the senate, forced it through.

High employment isn't going to be a blocker for much longer.

TIL that Firefox gained native vertical tabs recently!

It's in the General section of Settings.


High-voltage DC is frequently used for undersea transmission. This is necessarily insulated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current


High voltage DC is effective above ground, too. At high enough voltage, it's actually cost effective and has fewer electrical losses than the AC equivalent. China has been doing some cool investments on high voltage DC in the past 15 years or so. We're talking 750 kV and above IIRC.

HVDC is the grid's distant future if the future is mostly solar. Why bother inverting to AC if everything making the power is fundamentally changing over to DC?

Easy: because DC voltage conversion is way harder.

You can't really build a "grid" out of HVDC, because you can't easily convert between what the solar plants produce (a few hundred volts), what the local distribution grid needs (a few thousand volts), and what is needed to get that power across the country (tens of thousands of volts). On the other side you need to convert back down to a city-level distribution grid, down to a street-level distribution grid, and in your home down to whatever your equipment needs.

DC-DC conversion is significantly more expensive, more failure-prone and less efficient than AC-AC conversion. Why bother with a bunch of expensive active electronics when a simple transformer can do the job even better? Besides, who's going to pay to retool the entire country? Just because a solar panel produces DC and your computer needs DC doesn't mean it's viable to use DC for the entire chain.

HVDC is excellent for long-distance transmission lines, especially when power almost always flows in a single direction. Want to hook up a solar plant in the desert to an urban area 1000km away? Use HVDC! Replacing the entire grid grid with it? Probably not the best idea.


This. AC generation is also way easier to reliably engineer at high power than DC.

Remember, early generators from Edison’s company were DC. They caught fire _constantly_. Obviously technology has caught up since then but AC power generation and distribution is simpler engineering overall. Use HVDC where you need it and it is cost effective to do so.


> You had a meeting just yesterday about how it'll take 9 months to staff up a team that can foobar your widgets

Who leaves that meeting and starts searching for a solution in their spam email?


Shame, or its avoidance, is an incentive.

When researchers become shameless cheats science suffers.

The depressing conclusion is that we need to change the incentives to work in a world without shame. This may work to some extent, but the result will certainly be worse than a world in which most researchers try to do the right thing.


You don't need an hour. Fifteen minutes a day will make a very obvious difference. It's like you're trying to put people off!

Additionally, Wasabi bills you for a minimum of 1TB of active storage, which is $6.99/month. For my modest backup needs it is way cheaper to use any service that bills per GB.

https://wasabi.com/pricing/faq


Out of range substring? Some languages throw an error, others return an empty string. You could return a propagating NaS instead. I don't know what you'd use it for.

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