I would say it is working as intended if the regulators are able to mildly inconvenience you to achieve a greater goal.
Bottle caps are under the top 10 single-use plastic products most often found on European beaches [1], IMHO that’s good enough reason to mandate they be attached to the bottle.
Where will it all end? Somewhere perfectly fine, probably. But still, I wonder about the far limits and edge cases to this logic. If it was in all cases considered preferable to mildly inconvenience you to achieve a greater goal, that sounds like the cumulative effect would cease to be mild and would in fact be a bad thing. Maybe that could be fixed by regulation regulations?
if it would be cheaper to clean beaches we would just do that. if it would be cheaper to put some manners into beachgoers, we would do that. if it would be cheaper to "police" beaches, we would do that too.
regulations also have costs, such as annoyance, inconvenience, enforcement, etc.
we will see how these will turn out culturally. (as in which "external rules" will turn into internal ones.)
Caching the retrieved results for future follow-up page 2 queries is nontrivial. It’s also not clear if it’s worth it, the number of requests going to page 2 are in the lower percentages at best, maybe even <1%.
So what you typically do instead is to just issue a new query and request 20 instead of 10 results, drop the first 10, and voila, there is your page 2.
I do not know if this is how google websearch does it though.
At the same time, the generated electricity also seems insane to me.
We live in a complex with 84 units, each with a solar roof, outputting about 12 kWh per unit per day. Maybe the owner just has a massive house, as they are outputting about 5x as much as our 2024 solar panel models …
It can definitely make a big difference. DC’s latitude is 38 degrees. That’s about the same gap to Miami (25 degrees). Think about shining a flashlight perpendicular to the ground vs at an angle.
Beyond the dynamics of direct irradiance, there’s also weather to consider- if you live in a significantly cloudier area (which might be possible, assuming you live in Canada or Germany/netherlands/etc based off that latitude), that will obviously affect output.
And then there is also things like building-to-building shading, in case you live in a dense area… lots of things can affect this kind of calculation.
Try playing around with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s PVWatts calculator:
The approach in the paper has rough edges, but the metrics are bonkers (double digit percentage POINTS improvement over dual encoders). This paper was written before the LLM craze, and I am not aware of any further developments in that area. I think that this area might be ripe for some break through innovation.
Very good video. The quote that stood out to me was „This is what happens when a country has basically given up on taxing the rich“.
I wonder why this is happening all over the planet. Shouldn’t there at least be some countries that try to remedy this? Why do ALL the countries have given up on taxing the rich, when, just ~100 years ago, we had massive taxation on wealth even in the US?
No. But nearly all larger meetings are online (Hangout, it used to be) and sometimes they're recorded. So IF they've recorded it, presumably they have to preserve it now.
It’s not really taboo, it is being mentioned in, like, the comments on every 2nd post on climate change.
The problem with this line of thinking (and similar ones like „what about China?“) is that it basically absolves you from any responsibility in the matter. After all, there are simply too many people on the planet, what could you possibly do about it?
As other commenters pointed out - the west uses way too many resources compared to their population, and that is a problem.
And it is absolutely possible to have a society that doesn’t drain the planet dry, but not with capitalism :-)
I'm super super low carbon footprint, personally. All ARM-based computers here, just Raspberry PIs and tablets, that can run from a portable solar panel if I want. Very few possessions too. I love coding and freedom so much more that having stuff. And even more so when doing so in the forest, amongst nature.
The carbon impact of PCs is negligible for almost all people, and possessions are only a smaller portion of emissions (with the exception of high embodied carbon things like electric cars).
Important things you can influence for a low carbon footprint are:
- How do you heat and how much? Gas heating is surprisingly bad in the US due to the high amount of methane leakage
- Do you drive a lot in a combustion car, or even worse, fly?
- What kind of food do you eat? As a rough guideline, dairy and meat is pretty bad and beef much worse. Also the stuff that has to be brought in by plane.
Living in nature often makes it harder to have a low carbon lifestyle and the things often associated with "good for nature" like reducing plastic waste and organic products are often worse carbon wise.
Assume you write a bachelor thesis on topic X. Then, move universities (or professors, whatever), and write more or less the same thesis again to get a masters degree.
The problem with that is that it’s academic dishonesty. You’re turning in work for academic credit that you didn’t do. Transfer the self-plagiarism situation to another context, say you self-publish a book and re-use some material from another book you wrote. The fact of self-plagiarism may still exist but in this new context it’s not clear that the harm does (whereas copying another writer’s words is still clearly harmful.)
If I turn in the same project for two different courses without flagging it, that's considered a violation of many academic (teaching) integrity codes. Similarly if you hire me to write a bespoke piece of software (with copyright assigned to you) and I re-use code I've delivered to other clients, that could be considered a damaging violation of our contract. You could refer to both of these cases as "self-plagiarism", but that's just a phrase: the actual harm caused by it is very specific to the context it occurs in. (And any punishments/opprobrium we assign to it should be similarly context-dependent.)
There's a difference between a school writing up its own set of conduct rules and plagiarism.
Any two entities can agree to any set of terms they want. If a school says you have to sign a code of conduct to go there, and it prohibits submitting the same work for more than one course, fine. If someone breaks that rule, accuse them of violating the code of conduct.
But that's not plagiarism. "Self-plagiarism" is a contradiction in terms.
I don't like the term either, and what I'm trying to say is that whereas "plagiarism" is always (to some extent) a bad thing - since we should not steal others' work without credit - "self-plagiarism" is only problematic in specific contexts. It would be better not to use such a loaded term.
It's also important to understand that many of the lessons we are taught in school about attribution are deliberately over-emphasized by instructors, in order to impart good citation habits. If frightening students to death about "self-plagiarism" causes them to be unnecessarily forthright in citing their own work, even outside the classroom context, instructors are mostly fine with that.
Let's phrase it differently: how many times do you think one should be allowed to turn in the same piece of work for additional academic credit?
The issue with self plagiarism isn't that you are quoting your own previous work (you are free to do that), it's because you're not tagging it as a citation and thereby passing it off as new.
> how many times do you think one should be allowed to turn in the same piece of work for additional academic credit?
As many as it meets the requirements for.
Heck, I submitted the exact same "tell us about a significant experience in your life" story to every single university I applied for.
And I guarantee the teachers are duplicating lessons or parts of lessons when they teach related classes. Have you ever seen a professor cite, "Me, the first time I taught this class"?
That's just being smart and efficient. I see absolutely nothing wrong with any of these examples.
The avoidance of self-plagiarism isn't some kind of honour code for all aspects of life - it only applies to the specific case of a paper to submit for academic credit. The examples you describe have nothing to do with that, of course.
>As many as it meets the requirements for.
What I'm trying to tell you is that it normally won't meet the requirements a second time. It's usually part of the university's examination regulations that a paper has to be original. Everything else is seen as an attempt of scientific deception that consequently can and will be treated as a violation of regulations.
But I have to admit I'm not sure if that's a universal rule, or just where I'm from. I suspect we might be having some kind of cultural divide at play here. May I ask what part of the world you're in?
Scientific deception? It was a philosophy paper (in my original post). There weren't any scientific claims. I just made a statement in one paper that I had previously made about the same topic in a different paper.
If I had taken two classes that both requested an essay on the symbolism of Plato's cave, I'd be stoked I already had one at the ready. Wouldn't even occur to me that there was some problem with it. But even that isn't what happened in my original post that prompted the question.
I'm in the U.S., and I was pursuing my degree at a university people have heard of in New England (but not the one that probably first comes to mind, especially about this topic lately).
Thank you for the clarification. I suppose that explains it - as an engineer, I was naturally thinking of a pretty different kind of paper. I guess the same standards don't make sense for every field.
It’s not completely wrong though. To be clear, I think basically any role can be meaningful to someone, depending on their views and upbringing.
However, some roles lend themselves more easily to find meaning in them, think e.g. roles with patient contact in health care. Or the gaming/entertainment industry.
As a consequence, the competition on the labor side is much fiercer, and as a consequence of that, pay is lower and the chance for exploitation is higher.
So the GP basically has stated the contraposition of this effect: you get paid more if you do (what most perceive as) less meaningful work.
>>As a consequence, the competition on the labor side is much fiercer, and as a consequence of that, pay is lower and the chance for exploitation is higher.
Well, again - there are these golden jobs that offer both. As an example, if you're good enough as a rendering programmer with video games experience, you can command almost any kind of salary, work wherever you want, and change jobs at a whim - because any games company will pay you your weight in gold to employ you. And (while not a given) the opportunity to work on something meaningful/interesting there is very high.
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