Today, kindergarten was closed and I had to take much of the day off to take care of my five-year old daughter. We asked Chat GPT to assume the role of a master board game designer and to lead us through the creation of a novel boardgame, with input from us. She came up with the setting - we are unicorns that need to rescue princes and princesses that have been captured in a scary forest full of monsters. Quickly, the LLM proposed a full list of rules and props to make. We then had fun for around two hours drawing various cards and markers.
The game was playable on the first try with only a few minor and very quick rule tweaks from me. Even I felt we went on a stressful quest in the forest. Honestly among the best games for this age group that I have ever played.
I live in a Scandinavian country. Our welfare system is structured such that people are expected to withdraw from the tax pool during the beginning and end of life, and contribute to the pool in between.
Adult immigrants will benefit less from the system than locals over their lifetime, but may end up contributing as much. Adult immigrants with advanced degrees who come to work here for a few years and then move out are penalized quite severely by the tax system, to the point where I think it makes very little sense to do that.
On my locally quite high $80k annual income (STEM PhD, 40yo), my employer pays an additional $36k in taxes and pension. Then I pay $22k in income taxes and 25% VAT on everything I buy.
Why would anyone with an advanced degree from China, India or the U.S. come to work here? Lowering the taxes for a couple of years following immigration, possibly proportionally to level of education, would encourage immigration and would be ethically defensible.
This may be out of date now, but friends in Singapore told me about their system and it sounded like a good idea.
They have a low base tax rate but permanent residents and citizens have to pay ~20% into a fund. They could withdraw from it to buy housing or for a pension. It could also be withdrawn if you leave Singapore.
I did that (moved to a Scandinavian country), and it was an undeniably poor choice from a financial perspective - or rather a chain of poor choices that looked correct at the time. Paying almost 40% of my income that is rather low by global standards (although very high locally), while not planning to have children and never even once going to a doctor - none of this made any sense in the long run. I am the same age as yourself, and given the economic situation early retirement appears to be less and less feasible.
For me it's the question about what's inside my house and what's outside on the street. I'd like to pay more tax at the cost of having less inside my house if I know that the street outside is free of rubbish and crime with a suburban library within working distance, etc, etc, etc.
I want my society to be nice because that's where I live. And it's not about the exact amount I add or withdraw from the communal tax pool.
I work at said company with just a bachelors degree and make (way) more than that. I think its mostly PHD's that are paid shit comparatively to the US, lol. I've heard it's because there's little to no competition. If you have PHD's in certain fields, you can either work at ASML here or do something else unrelated to your PHD.
Both claims can be true (all salaries lower, PhDs paid poorly).
I don't have a PhD, but from what I've heard in the US, PhDs are paid pretty poorly there too, compared to their level of education and the level of work they do compared to, for instance, a software engineer with a Bachelor's.
It's hard to really compare between the countries, but I feel like one should almost x2 an EU salary, to get an US equivalent, in terms of quality of life offered.
6000 a month is huge by EU standards. Most of EU tech workers make way less than that. In Austria you can expect to take home about 3k a month. More is a rare outlier.
Outside of big-tech and FAANGS, pay in EU is super weak compared to US, like orders of magnitude.
It is huge, but still peanuts considering cost of living and prices for housing.
Many people just gave up to the dream of real estate ownership. Rent till the death.
With 6000 monthly how many years they need to save money for down payment for small apartment? Buying a house is not an option at all for working people.
I don't think that's true. America's home ownership hovers around 65% - in Norway it's 80%; Swedeon 65%; Denmark 59%; Iceland 73%. If anything, a higher percentage of Nordic citizens own houses than Americans.
Someone can live with parents and in statistics they will go into "home owners" bucket. Anyway I'm talking about possibility to buy with current salary and current price. If you like statistics - search for house affordability index.
> Someone can live with parents and in statistics they will go into "home owners" bucket
Funnily enough Nordic populations tend to leave home before Americans, so the American figure is even worse than they look.
Don't just tell people to look up figures - cite them here please, and why they should overrule the figures saying as many or more Nordic people own their homes than Americans.
What? That’s faster than track cycling world records! The 200m flying start record is 9.1s which translates to 79km/h. The makers of this device are proposing to let humans run faster than a world record track cyclist!
An odd sense of calm would come over me any time I got my bicycle going over 40 mph. “If I fall now, I’ll bounce twice and then blackness.” I no longer recall my top speed, either 42 or 45. One particular little river valley with very good pavement and clear sight lines.
There is no amount of money you could pay me to run at 52 mph.
No, the article specifically talks about a device where the legs perform work continuously, as in cycling. The device you linked to only lets the legs work during ground contact.
The article states that the capital investment cost of an electrolyzer and pipeline is lower than that of a cable and a substation. But what if you want electricity? If you include a fuel cell and grid connection at the end of the pipeline, is the capital investment cost still lower?
Edit: A fair comparison needs to keep the electrical power input to the grid constant. This means the calculation needs to account for both the losses in conversion to and back from hydrogen, as well as that offshore electrolysis would be able to make use of a greater share of the power during peak wind turbine output.
I want to see the math, not only an opaque claim of lower cost when one set of infrastructure delivers electricity and the other delivers hydrogen.
>If you include a fuel cell and grid connection at the end of the pipeline, is the capital investment cost still lower?
You wouldn't, though. If you are going to convert hydrogen back to electricity, it makes the most sense to do it where that electricity is hardest to obtain by any other method — say, an off-grid research station in the Yukon or something.
Can you elaborate on why? Getting hydrogen to an off-grid research station in the Yukon is both difficult and a very poor business case for large-scale investments in off-shore hydrogen production.
The questions I ask on topics I am familiar with are usually very demanding. On these it is clear that there are limits to its comprehension and reasoning abilities, but nonetheless, I find it very impressive.
Questions I ask on topics I am not familiar with are much further from the limits of its knowledge. I find it to be an amazing tool for quickly getting a structured overview of a new subject, including pros and cons of different alternatives and risks I should be aware of.
I used to share your gut feeling that this is stupid, but I’ve done a lot of calculations on this now and it (dynamic charging, not necessarily inductive) starts making a lot of economic sense on major roads when most traffic is electric. The technology has very high base cost and very low marginal cost per additional user. The cost of stationary charging scales fairly linearly with the number of users, with surprisingly minimal scale benefits.
Pros of dynamic charging:
- Substantially reduced need for large batteries, which reduces vehicle cost and contributes to overall lower cost of electric road transportation;
- Easier logistics planning, no queuing for charging, and reduced downtime for commercial vehicles;
- Cost of public daytime charging on par with private night-time stationary charging;
- Same access to charging for all, at the same time, at the same cost;
- Well adapted to high vehicle utilization (e.g., 24h operation, autonomous trucks and car sharing services);
- Greatly reduced need for high power fast charging, which wears out batteries;
- Greatly reduced need to build out infrastructure for stationary charging, which is not easy to do quickly and at scale;
- Potentially easier to connect to the power grid than static charging of equivalent capacity.
Challenges to overcome include:
- The transition phase from zero to many users;
- The transition phase from zero miles to coverage of most major highways;
- Electromagnetic emissions;
- Not in line with how the public and industry perceives that electric cars and trucks should work;
- Initial funding (requires public sector support, but not subsidies);
- Primarily benefits vehicle owners and transport buyers, not vehicle manufacturers and energy companies.
- Unclear if dynamic charging is cheaper beyond ~2045, due to declining levelized battery costs.
As for the argument that it is better to electrify rail - both should be electrified. Europe and Asia wonder why North America hasn’t electrified its rail network already.
A heavy truck uses in the order of magnitude of 100 kW of continuous power for propulsion at highway speeds. Solar panels on the truck can extend range by around 10%, but increase weight, capital and maintenance cost. When trucks are parked, it’s often dark outside.
Cool app. I am not sure how related this is, but during intense physical exercise, I always start yawning repeatedly. Is this an indication of anything and can I use this app to improve this?
One application of negative weights in a cost graph could be energy consumption for battery electric vehicles. Downhill, regenerative breaking can result in a net increase of battery charge.
The game was playable on the first try with only a few minor and very quick rule tweaks from me. Even I felt we went on a stressful quest in the forest. Honestly among the best games for this age group that I have ever played.
10/10 activity, will try again.