RockIslandLine

7 ms·

1.
by RockIslandLine 6y ago
Several people have given several reasons, many of which alone are enough to demonstrate awfulness. The biggest reason they are bad is that they don't work. I would happily subscribe to a concierge service that showed me genuinely use
2.
by RockIslandLine 6y ago
"and the CEO talked to the protestors and told them how helpless he himself was, as he was just part of the system with relatively limited ability to change it. I'm not sure I buy that, and not sure the protestors did either, as t
3.
by RockIslandLine 6y ago
Iowa may be an example of how ethanol is done wrong in practice, but I'm not sure your theory is so sound. Make ethanol from sugar cane, not corn. Louisiana should be the center of US ethanol production. Much higher EROEI.
4.
by RockIslandLine 6y ago
"I could imagine corporate-run nuclear plants that have the same incentives as airlines." So how exactly do you enforce that corporate executives and their families must live on site for decades?
5.
by RockIslandLine 6y ago
Why? We've got lots of coal mines with the equipment to move tons of material. Just start stacking cordwood down below.
6.
by RockIslandLine 6y ago
"They don't want their family to starve." We know how to stop that. We don't have to sentence people to subsistence agriculture. When you know better, you do better, and we know better. We can farm in ways that build h
7.
by RockIslandLine 6y ago
Engineering new biomes for fun is different than having to do it every year or you die. What do you do when seasonal heat makes Pakistan and India uninhabitable for large parts of the year? We're not prepared for that kind of migratio
8.
by RockIslandLine 6y ago
Several different issues. Nuclear is necessarily large & centralized energy production, with all of the antidemocratic politics and corrupt economics that comes with that. The insane project duration and nonsense cost overruns for nucl
9.
by RockIslandLine 6y ago
This kind of satire is unnecessary and unhelpful. It costs nothing to say "lab testing" instead of "in vitro". Literally the same number of syllables, zero loss of precision, and immediately understandable to a wider au
10.
by RockIslandLine 6y ago
"legally complex" is different from "impossible". And yes, people who have years worth of expenses saved are clearly better able to accept risk than someone with $10K in an IRA. You're not making persuasive argument
11.
by RockIslandLine 6y ago
"Whether it is bonds, or some other instrument, they all pay interest. That debt exists, is owed, and yet you're saying "Just don't pay that interest"?" I'm saying it's wrong to create federal bonds w
12.
by RockIslandLine 6y ago
"But if you want to put $5-$20K into a friend's business, or a business you know well, the SEC makes it hard unless you're already a millionaire." What do you mean? Individuals are still allowed to sign contracts. So w
13.
by RockIslandLine 6y ago
"Maybe I'm missing something, but where is the for-profit motive for banks to lend, for absolutely no return?" You're definitely missing something, because private lenders are perfectly free to charge interest. ZIRP app
14.
by RockIslandLine 6y ago
That is in fact a fundamental distinction between the Universal Basic Income and the Federal Job Guarantee. One criticism of the UBI is that being unmoored from production makes it extremely inflationary. That requires high levels of tax t
15.
by RockIslandLine 6y ago
"will increase innovation by getting people out of bullshit jobs and enabling entrepreneurs to pay their bills until their companies are profitable." I think that relies on a definition of "innovation" that is not proper
16.
by RockIslandLine 6y ago
"Right now, 8% of Federal Revenue pays just the interest on that debt. If interest rates go up, say in a year or two.. so goes up that payment." Canada has a fiat currency. Thus the Canadian government can set the interest rate o
17.
by RockIslandLine 6y ago
"Millions of people live every day with only a couple of dollars a day." Not in the USA they don't. There is no possible way that an individual could pay for food, clothing, and shelter on that income.
18.
by RockIslandLine 6y ago
"Companies are just collections of people." False. Corporations are golems, not people at all.
19.
by RockIslandLine 6y ago
"I am not able to see how a network of distributed vertical food farms would be less resilient to political disasters than growing everything in California." I fixed it for you. States like Indiana import 90% of their calories.
20.
by RockIslandLine 6y ago
You get all kinds, possibly depending on when the town was established. For many of the Chicago suburbs, there is a defined "business district" where most of the restaurants, bars, barbershops, etc are. This may very well be a c
21.
by RockIslandLine 6y ago
Meh. There's plenty of density for "a strip mall every four blocks". And you can make that structure totally walkable instead of requiring cars. The important thing is not to jack the rent through the roof. Most suburbs do
22.
by RockIslandLine 6y ago
"The other thing to keep in mind is that the 'huge' bonuses usually aren't very large from an income statement point of view; if you bought an extra 0.5% growth (or savings), it was easily worth it." It's hard
23.
by RockIslandLine 6y ago
"Nobody wants to try to turn around a bankrupt company at their old salary (with their old RSU's and options now worthless)." So they quit, and the company goes bankrupt on a different timeline. Why should either society or
24.
by RockIslandLine 6y ago
For certain definitions of "pay", any nation with a fiat currency could certainly place a number into a spreadsheet. Making that number mean anything might take a while.But we could certainly write a permanent bond and put it onto
25.
by RockIslandLine 6y ago
HVDC transmission losses are low, like 5% per 1000 km. So yes, a large, dispersed solar network could create and distribute electricity effectively.
26.
by RockIslandLine 6y ago
Have you posted about this on the gfortran mailing lists? They are generally interested in examples that show where the compiler could be improved.
27.
by RockIslandLine 6y ago
"Even Uber might never be profitable." Uber will never be profitable, they can't pay their labor. What sucks is that their failure will destroy the business model for someone who might have been willing to give it an honest e
28.
by RockIslandLine 6y ago
TPP was a terrible response to the opportunity. Write better treaty text and you get a better result. Killing TPP was the correct result.
29.
by RockIslandLine 6y ago
Optimizing for size versus performance often eliminates optimizations like unrolling loops. At the assembly level, it's sometimes true that a single instruction or smaller sequence of instructions takes more cpu cycles. Analyze the dif
30.
by RockIslandLine 6y ago
Yes, it's not at all clear what remedy would be effective. Some limit on total percentage of searches, similar to the limit in the 1996 Telecommunications Act that no company can own stations reaching more than 35% of the national audi

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