How typical of Congress to intentionally set up fights every 2-3 years over completely obvious BS, and summarily shut down the government and scapegoat something else like top-line rates on the "working rich" while playing class warfare politics.
I respectfully disagree. By these arguments, literally every deduction from revenue to calculate taxable income is a "loophole". How far does that go?
What's more absurd than life itself is that you can deduct 100% of a 6000GVWR truck which you financed for 7 years, but my engineers salaries aren't deductible because I'm "building some product" so that's "development".
For all of the reasons you note above, this is why I've almost exclusively dealt with arena-style allocations of fixed-object-sizes when doing ultra low latency work.
Hi, I'm just starting a (long) PhD in computer music languages, and one of my hoped-for projects is improving the GC for the Scheme implementation I work in for soft realtime use. If you (or anyone else) wouldn't mind sharing suggestion on resources for learning about low-latency modern GCs, it would be most appreciated. :-)
You can look at the SGCL garbage collector for C++: https://github.com/pebal/sgcl. It works in a separate thread, is locks-free and never stops the world.
thanks, that's good to know. I'm working through his first GC book right now and plan to order the new edition of the gchandbook when I'm done the other (which I read was a gentler intro to the topic).
Companies are also really good at coming up with values and creating bonus structures that incentivize going against those values. Most companies like to say they value teamwork and collaboration, but also give out individual awards to people who do the most visible work while ignoring the contributions of the 100 other people that made a project succeed. Nothing kills morale faster than giving awards and bonuses to the manager that forced massive overtime to complete a project, and giving the team a pizza party.
Yea I experienced that from the customer side. I purchased a car, the sales person wanted me to submit a survey on how she did. When I got the link for the survey, it was to rate how their department was, and it was attached to their manager. I found out later the employees get $100 per review, but we are not rating them, we are rating the manager, they get no recognition. I'm not going to support systems where the managers get all the credit and the employees get nothing but $100 per customer as an incentive to make the manager look good..
My last job had a bonus structure of “everyone gets $X each year, as a percentage of yearly profit, based on time worked at the company up to a year”. On average my bonus was about $8k - no strings, no requirements. If you started that year, your bonus was prorated.
My current position is merit-based - over the year you have several goals you set with your manager like learning something new and presenting it to the team, attending a trade conference, etc. Yearly bonus is x% of around $15k, and that % is based on how many of those goals you accomplished.
Both systems feel tangible, and the rewards feel like they’re worth it. The former being completely without any requirement was really nice, and also I don’t mind having self-improvement and professional learning goals to work towards for a sizable bonus.
Yup, and in this case a lot of the numbers that went into the math were department wide macro numbers. I could do amazing at my job, the numbers wouldn't change, I could do nothing, the numbers wouldn't change... and it was a mystery/ a core to get a feel for how the math would work out. That opaqueness was an issue too.
Better to just do a low amount of profit sharing - if we all win you win, if we all lose you get nothing; its way less stupid than saying "well you are being dinged for our failure on X thing" when they had no ability to impact it and often times that's not even tied to profitability.
Yeah I worked at a place that did that. Company hits X,Y,Z numbers and everyone got what was equivalent to a paycheck as a bonus. A number that seemed to scale well and people cared about / appreciated.
The times we hit two or three pay checks were great.
That's most of the point of the employee-employer relationship. The company pays a flat rate and tries to maximize output reaping the extra output of over-achievers. In return the employee is relatively insulated from business risk (well except for layoffs to juice the stock price).
If you can be fired at any point then how exactly are you insulated from the business risk? You are only insulated from the upsides such as record profits etc. All the downsides are still there.
Compared to freelancing. If you're an independent contractor you have to market yourself, close deals, manage client relations, and of course do the actual individual contributor work. You have to convert a stream of individually unreliable prospects into a steady income.
There's plenty of firms that run at a loss from time to time but don't immediately cut jobs or pay.
Really difficult to comprehend why this is so difficult for people to understand. I recently started sharing a small office on the lake with a friend. I have about 180sf of it to myself. There are boats that cruise by, views are incredible, the environment is fun an inviting -- and I still have my privacy. It's like WFH but 5 feet from the water.
I've been a WFH advocate for 22 years, having spend 20 of those working in my own home. I still refuse to go downtown, but I don't mind going to a place like this. I still work about 70% from my house, and 30% from the office. I work from the office when it suits me.
Perhaps if they weren't trying to shove us into a singular zip code from a radius 50 miles away, distract and annoy us, force us to deal with traffic, not to mention the personal and monetary expense of it all -- I'd be willing to entertain the idea that an office is "better."
There is one thing the companies might not get but i got: I know now how it is to work remote and no i will not go back to the old.
I'm now also willing to accept less money for remote only than before and i also thinking of taking my current money and doing an exit faster if the industry doesn't like that and i will just accept a 'lost' of luxury but i do want to look at nature when i have to work (like your lake side office).
If only the "systems" we were considering were meant to provide limitless and virtually free electricity (nuclear), which is congruence with the "systems" of reducing poverty.
Enough sunlight lands on the Earth every 2 minutes to power humanity for a year [1]. ~500-600GW of solar will be deployed in 2024 globally, and we are accelerating to 1TW deployed annually [2].
Commerical nuclear fission is unviable at this point [3], even at nimble startups [4] [5], but proponents are free to argue in support of it to anyone who will still listen. Renewables and batteries have reached an escape velocity trajectory [6].
This global energy system will eliminate energy poverty in our lifetime, and like bankruptcy, it'll happen slowly, and then all of a sudden.
> Enough sunlight lands on the Earth every 2 minutes to power humanity for a year [1]. ~500-600GW of solar will be deployed in 2024 globally, and we are accelerating to 1TW deployed annually [2].
Enough sunlights lands on earth every two minutes to power humanity if the whole surface of the planet including ocean was fully covered by 100% efficient solar panels. How is this even remotely relevant when we don't have close to the material needed to achieve that coverage and the efficiency of panels is famously extremely low.
The deployment in 2024 is - as usual - expressed in "theoretical max power". Which is nowhere near the actual throughput, and of course orders of magnitude higher than the "when I need it" actually delivery. Again; big numbers don't mean big results; real life scenario matter here, theoretical best is far less relevant.
Additionally, quoting "pv-magazine-usa.com" on this subject must be some kind of silly joke considering that it could as well be named "lobby-webiste-with-a-clear-political-agenda-to-push-for-photovoltaic-and-prove-it-also-cures-cancer.com" and no-one wold bat an eye. Similarly, other HN comment written by yourself usually don't count as "sources" for statements.
https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/77565 is all the land that is needed to reach net zero. Certainly, we don’t need the entire earth covered. Replacing just the ~40 million acres of corn ag in the US used to produce ethanol for vehicles would provide 1.5x annual electrical needs of the country, including all light vehicles assuming they’re EVs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38856518) (solar panels produce roughly 200 times more energy per acre than corn). The thought exercise is to demonstrate how cheap renewables are, their growth trajectory, and to guess how soon this impairs all other non renewable generation sources economically speaking. Clearly, the impairment is coming, as this post demonstrates. We’re simply arguing the time horizon.
The links to my other comments are comments that contain citations supporting the thesis, versus an unnecessary wall of text. No facts I put forth are uncited.
We have enough fissile material to support the planet for 10s of thousands of years, so the nuclear proponents can speak in theoretical maximums and still beat you. You don't have enough raw materials on planet earth to continue making solar panels for the next 10s of 1000s of years, given that you need to replace the panels every 10-20 years (optimistically).
Commercial nuclear fission is completely viable for anyone not allowing it to become unviable with lawsuits. See: China.
Downvote me all you want, but you'll live in poverty when there are no factories in your town because the lights turn off during a snowstorm.
Electricity from nuclear is neither limitless nor free. While we would have been much better off (in terms of global warming) if we had not hobbled nuclear power generation decades ago, at this point it's cheaper and faster to build out solar and wind than nuclear.
The part I hate about the math used in this argument, is that really we should be working with a goal of much cheaper energy production, to enable other green technology.
Yeah, if you use standard new construction capacity planning in some cases solar + wind wins.
If you target a much lower average/maximum cost per GW (and higher consumption) nuclear wins.
Things like EVs, electric furnaces for recycling, greener chemical plants and carbon capture mechanisms all become more viable with consistently cheap electricity.
> Yeah, if you use standard new construction capacity planning in some cases solar + wind wins. If you target a much lower average/maximum cost per GW (and higher consumption) nuclear wins.
I'd love to see your sources for this. To the best of my knowledge it isn't even close and solar is several times cheaper that nuclear. They used to be more comparable a decade or two ago, but solar costs have dropped dramatically since then.
Mostly the viability studies in the French reactor program.
It heaviy depends on how you set up the comparison. If you look at most current energy markets and say "how can I make money with these rules" the answer is almost always build a small amount of renewables. If you say, how should a government invest to retire coal power and achieve a low and stable energy cost, then nuclear can be viable (in some places).
Anything French on nuclear is simply suspicious, they have a massive interest in selling it - to then double or treble prices during construction, as seen with Hinckley C.
I've seen several studies, none that reached the conclusion you are putting forward. The closest was one that said a lower, but still high percentage nuclear power in France is optimal for reducing CO2 emissions given the nuclear infrastructure that already exists there.
Do you have any specific studies in mind I may have missed?
Keep in mind that solar and wind alone can't power a single city. You need something to compensate, something like coal/natgas or storage. The amount of storage you need, depends on geography and local weather conditions. If your storage comes short, even a bit, the amount of conventional power stations you need to keep the lights on is exactly the number if power stations you would have to operate if you never had invested into wind or solar in the first place.
This is usually missing in typical cost calculations for solar or wind.
Nuclear needs the same compensation. The high fixed cost low variable cost model lends nuclear power to only run at 100%.
Take the California grid, peak energy usage is 2x minimum. Nuclear plants are insanely costly when ran at 100%. Imagine running at much lower capacity factors. Say the peaking plants run at 50%, that means the cost for consumers would be ¢2.4-4/kWh. [1]
Logically this entails that if we can solve a nuclear grid then we can solve a renewable grid since they impose the very similar constraints on the grid operators.
> To the best of my knowledge it isn't even close and solar is several times cheaper that nuclear.
Only if we build reactors in the modern way rather than like the French did in the 1970s. (The reasons why its so much more expensive are complex, but mostly a regulatory ratchet and an tolerance for risk so low that if applied to the rest of life we'd close down parks as too dangerous)
Ah, you mean back when French wages were much lower?
Nuclear (and construction in general) is a victim of the Baumol Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect , where the cost of something increases over time if it does not see labor productivity improvement, simply because other sectors of the economy do see labor productivity improvement.
Inflation adjusted wages in France increased by 33% from 1991 to 2023. During that time the inflation adjusted cost of nuclear power plant construction has gone from around 1500/kWe to 4000/kWe.
>If you target a much lower average/maximum cost per GW (and higher consumption) nuclear wins.
It loses every way. Its LCOE is 5x higher. The PR campaign to save it was about neither its cost nor the environment but economically buttressing the nuclear military industrial complex.
It's SO much more expensive in fact that it's actually cheaper to use wind/solar to electrolyze hydrogen, store it underground in a salt cavern and burn that to generate electricity.
>Things like EVs
Things like EVs are even less suited to nuclear power because they dont need constant power and can charge while electricity is cheap. Ditto electric heating.
Electricity is cheap mostly when there is more base load than demand; i.e. at night. I don't think you can have that concept if you want to remove base load and just make electricity when the weather lets you.
The problem with the whole nuclear vs. renewables argument is that we don't have the luxury of choosing anymore. We need a huge amount of carbon-free electricity right now, not just to meet current demand but to actively decarbonize our industry.
The only reason we can realistically get to net zero with batteries and renewables is because we export our polution abroad by having China produce everything. And we then ship it back to us using incredibly carbon-intense modes of transportation.
If we had to onshore all that production and actually count it towards our own emissions we'd have no hope of meeting our climate goals with solar panels and wind power.
This argument is clearly bogus. There's a huge set of preposterous ways of generating electricity. No one is going to say we need to do all of them. So why is nuclear not also in that set? You can't just assume it isn't.
If just the nuclear power plant companies had to fully handle their waste products from the get go, there wouldnt be the delusion today that nuclear energy is free or cheap.
If said companies were allowed to operate and dispose of waste in a way that had sane risk numbers (say, less than a hundred million dollars per life) then it could be cheap.
Heck, can literally glass the waste and dump it on the abyssal plane, job done. (You can do the maths on this easily enough, essentially zero life is effected and the radioactivity of the ocean increases negligibly)
There is so much uranium/etc dissolved in sea water already, you can skip the vitrification and just dump nuclear waste straight into the ocean without any problems. Pick a deep spot just to stop people from messing with it.
Nuclear is definitely part of the mix we need, but we can easily do multiple things.
For one thing, it's neither limitless nor free - the limit is the amount of radioactive ore we mine, and the cost is the cost of setting up a plant, running it, mining the ore, purifying it, transporting it,... The cost of nuclear is actually pretty high. I'm not talking about safety except that the cost factors in both passive and active safety mechanisms. And, they take _forever_ to build and bring to operation.
On the other hand, the price of solar (even without subsidy) is already cost competitive with _coal_ leave alone nuclear.[1] But it's intermittent, and batteries like the article are expensive.
So, the question is not either this or that, but what's the right mix...
I'm having a hard time seeing much use for new nuclear power plants at the costs they would realistically have (vs. sales pitch costs you hear from nuclear vendors before they confront reality and fail.)
> are not necessarily aligned with the key problems in nuclear, which are currently construction project management related
I think the hope is that with passive cooling and passive anti-meltdown characteristics, the complexity of the constriction can be reduced. And that has exponential returns for cost structure.
All the passive cooling/passive anti-meltdown reactors of the past struggled operationally because to get there you have to use somewhat exotic coolants with low vapor pressures at high temperatures. Liquid metals, organic fluids, molten salts, etc. all have serious operational challenges and were largely phased out because of them. Water coolant took off after out-performing them. So it's not so easy.
I actually never understood why it has to be immutable (in the context of civil rights). IMO, it's a red herring. Because if it was about free will, then people would still need the right to choose what they want to be — and that needs to be respected if it harms no one. So, genetics or not, that just shouldn't matter?
As I see it, this is to point out that attempts to change sexual orientation are doomed to be unsuccessful - and these are, in most cases, either forced or caused by peer pressure. I personally haven't heard of any case of a person doing a full 180 degrees from gay to straight who would not be motivated by religion.
It is not uncommon in the transgender community when someone transitions they will do a "full 180 switch". And of course this is never motivated by religion.
This was actually one key point in helping me understand and figuring out the biology and genetics behind gender dysphoria and the rest of the LGBT.
Here is a presentation that I gave last summer. Slightly out of date with some details given what has been learned since, but the main aspects are all there. The presentation focus's primarily on explaining the gender dysphoria aspect the second half touches on the rest of the LGBT. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1PdGQlNfY39JX9iPowsBh... Overall it is complex with many possible variants.
Given the sensitive nature I am not rushing to publish, but working on getting it right. Once the key aspects were figured out there is a ton to investigate in this area.
Sorry, but this doesn't explain anything to me. You've traced genetic mutations that cause an array of ailments and conditions spread all over the body, and propose that taking vitamin B will cure them all?...
Sorry if you were looking for a single SNP or something simple. If that was the case this would have been found long ago. Same goes for a b vitamin. Giving vitamin b wont "cure them all". This is complex and happy to discuss over phone / email if you are serious about understanding it.
Attempts to guide sexual orientation, either forced or self-guided, are not as straightforward for bisexual people (pun intended), seeing that the literature in sexology describes some successes that would confuse some less wellread people.
Ho man, do you think that actually is how society works?
The reason religious groups tend to be so anti-gay (and in many prominent cases anti-birth control, anti-prostitution, pro-‘getting married and having kids’), is because those absolutely do directly correlate with increasing population and pro-social control of the population.
At least in an environment where how many soldiers you can field and how well you can direct your population to do what society wants (as compared to what the individuals want) matters. Which is pretty much all of history, with some very rare and historically ephemeral exceptions.
Most of the world still operates this way, and we’ll likely go back to operating this way in a generation or three anyway. It’s pretty fundamental to our biology and at least historic human social dynamics and economics.
Supporting - it’s the wheel. These patterns exist because they are self propagating and work well enough to reproduce faster than they get destroyed, unlike other less common patterns. Additionally, many of these behaviors involve deeply ingrained behaviors that have evolved during humanities entire existence. They may be subverted, redirected, controlled, confused, etc. but they aren’t just going to actually disappear.
I see no evidence that other potential options currently in play are as good or better at reproducing, so eventually, the ‘old’ patterns will win out. Albeit fit to the current context.
I suspect we’re in the equivalent of the pre-Victorian era right now. I suspect the current dynamics will trend towards harems of voluntarily ‘kept’ women (on the lower status side for the women) and ‘in charge’ women in the high status side with staffs of ‘kept’ men, and lots of sexless men/Johns, until it breaks and we rotate again.
Notably, these dynamics have occurred many, many, many times over human history.
The dynamic with Will Smith seems to be an example of the latter, for instance. Most male pro sports players, actors, and businessmen being the former.
Against - birth control is a major change in human reproductive ‘physics’ (similar to nuclear weapons in the ‘physics’ of war).
So maybe something else entirely will emerge. I currently don’t see any clear winners though on that front, not that we aren’t trying. I see a massive shift towards it, actually, as people ‘get what they want’ more effectively in the short term, allowing those able to play the long game better to prosper.
The societal backlash is building though, and in 20-30 years when the current generation of women no longer get the benefits they previously enjoyed (and/or their kids are old enough to vote), we’ll see it. If we aren’t already.
Counter-Against - while we haven’t had any new world wars since inventing the nuke, it’s not like shooting/bombing/invading has stopped, has it? It’s just switched to a different presentation of the same shit.
We are getting more efficient at maximizing the damage and speeding up the iterations though.
In developed capitalist economies children become liability, and not an asset. This is why fertility rates all over the world get rapidly decreased, even in homophobic societies.
I don't think the global fertility rate is in any way impacted by LGBT people not having children, even if it's a factor, it is just minuscule compared to the effects of e.g. better education and living in a post-industrial economy.
And what happens when education stops getting better or is unattainable for a lot of the population, and material wealth stops increasing per capita?
And because labor is so expensive, it’s hard to live/get things done?
Like….. has been increasingly the trend?
We have a ways to go, but population decreases leave a vacuum - and nature abhors a vacuum.
Birth control allows us to resist nature, but at some point someone is going to come up with something that neutralizes its effects (ideological, I’m guessing), and that person/group is going to reproduce to fill the vacuum.
LGBT doesn’t need to materially impact the numbers to be targeted - they just need to be clearly having an easier time while the other groups are ‘working harder’. That is more than sufficient to get demonized/‘other’d’/targeted, etc.
However, if left ‘unchecked’ (in a religious/societal sense), I’d be shocked if LGBTQ didn’t move the population growth rate needle at least 5-10%. Maybe as much as 25% if we count bi/trans/aro/childless by choice/BDSM/poly in the mix - anyone not producing children in the socially ‘right’ way.
Society wide? That is huge.
At least based on all the conservative sex scandals, and wives who suddenly learn their husbands have a side boy toy (or are going to the nearest public park or gay club at 2am), and women I’ve know that suddenly realize they’re actually lesbians when they’re 40.
If you claim it’s not immutable, you enable quacks who torture people thinking they can “convert” them to “straight” and promise parents that they can “““fix””” their kids.
Conversion “““therapy””” does not work, it is torture and has never worked but religious nutjobs keep insisting because they think it’s a choice, or because they like it, or because they think it’s their duty to “fix” people.
This isn't the basis: even if such a thing were a choice there would be no good reason to persecute those who made that choice. Secondly, such things can be immutable or at least very hard to change even if they are not affected by genetics.
There are plenty of ‘good’ reasons to persecute people for making choices like this - like for instance if someone themselves was forced to pretend they weren’t gay, hates themselves and society for it, and is pissed off that someone else might not be forced to do the same.
Or at least that’s what I’ve noticed seems to happen sometimes.
If society feels it’s important that everyone ‘follows the plan’, those folks will be recruited into places of power and give atta-boys every time they make the news, no?
And considering how much (often scary and unfun) work it is to raise kids, and how hard it is to deal with the opposite sex (for both sides), a large portion of the population will happily tell society to go fuck itself and party unless someone like that ‘holds the line’.
Hard for society to grow and be strong when it’s easy to ‘dodge the draft’, as it were.
I think that exaggerates the argument into something brittle and thus weaker. Immutability is sufficient but not required.
The issue isn't whether something can technically be changed or not, the issue is whether it is wrong to coerce people in that direction.
Imagine if tomorrow someone invented magic (de)tanning bed where a few weeks of treatments would permanently change your skin color. Would that new capability suddenly make it acceptable for employers to hire only certain shades?
For that matter, we can talk about things like discrimination on the basis of religion, which has already been mutable for all recorded history.
The basis of the civil rights movement and the LGBT+ community is not, to the best of my understanding, that these characteristics are immutable on the basis of genetics.
In fact, this breakthrough research is the first to link human bisexual behavior to any gene. Which actually should have been the focus of the article.
Yeah, I mean think what you want about trans people but to say acceptance of different sexual orientations is because it's an immutable quality but that gender dysphoria, the well documented medical disorder that has resisted all forms of therapy based treatment and reconditioning -- that causes such constant distress that it drives sufferers to suicide isn't also based on the idea that it's an immutable quality is nuts.
I can't fathom how people believe that subjective tinnitus exists and (at the extremes) causes a constant distress that drives people to suicide despite the fact that all evidence of its existence is self-reported by sufferers but then turn around at gender dysphoria and be like, "seems fake."
If it is meant to describe sexual attractions, and since he is cherrypicking letters he likes in what is actually an unified political movement, and to be facetious, shouldnt it include the most popular sexual attraction type?
The article is literally about bisexual and same sex behavior. So in this case it would not make sense to include heterosexuality, even though that is the most common.
Although immutability is the basis for the LGBT+ political movements, it is known that in some cases sexual orientation fluctuates over time or even flips either way by itself, although there is no known and reliable way to force such changes at will.
They could be construed to advocate for more decentralized power production in order to be less vulnerable to targeted strikes in times of conflict. That doesn't rule out decentralized nuclear power production, though that has its fair share of trade-offs and unknowns. Depending on how one weighs those it might end up implying less nuclear.
Decentralized power generation is something we all need. Too bad so many politicians, especially Gavin Newsom FFS, are deep in the bockets of the utility companies who refuse to invest in it.
