For me it's as much culture as it is work. In fact I live in the capital city of my country, even though my work has not always been here. I live here because it has world class restaurants, bars, museums, architecture, parks, gyms, a dozen public swimming pools and a million amenities you wouldn't even think of but are fun to do once or twice, like there's dedicated restaurants where you can play jeux de boules.
And most importantly there's a million people here, statistically there's a good chance you run into people who're in the top 5% of whatever their field is in. Whether it's musicians, engineers, athletes, philosophers, there's a good chance you'll run into a lot of interesting ones.
My friend lives in a village and he has 1 pizzeria and 1 italian and 1 chinese restaurant. There's no gym. There's a very basic park with grass and some trees. There's no museums, architecture is all the same. There's no nightlife whatsoever. There's no real amenities, not even a library. There's a few shops with the basics, with very limited opening hours. There's as much nature nearby as there is for me. Tere's also no real way to make friends, and there's a few hundred people to meet at most, statistically most of them aren't very interesting to you (not 'not interesting in general', but 'to you'. It's easier to find 'your tribe' if you can select from a million vs a hundred).
So it's really the 'commute' or I should say proximity to culture, i.e. people, their thoughts and their creations, that sells the city for me, not the proximity to the company I happen to work for, which is sometimes in another city.
I have a season ticket to a theater about an hour away. There are also local concerts/theater out where I live. I see theater when I travel. I actually have decent restaurants out where I live but don't use them much.
I guess I'm also not sure how this running into philosophers and musicians works. Maybe if I were actively involved with a university which I actually am to some degree.
Of course, different people have different preferences.
Rural vs suburban vs urban life will always be a matter of personal preference. There are people who would die of boredom outside of a city, and people who would die of anxiety in a city. Beware of anyone saying there is one "correct" environment to live in.
Totally. I'm not going to go to a gym, not going to go to the pool, I might get some more takeout if it were a 5 minute walk away. But I'm not going to the theater once a week. I've actually lived in Manhattan and it just wouldn't be for me.
Uff Blue Burst, fantastic online game, it's one of those blasts of sheer nostalgia that is almost unbearable, I'd give everything to go back. It's partly the game, and partly my life around the time I was playing the game, a time of constant wonder and exploration and true excitement. There are times every few years that I just put the games' music album on a loop to relive the memories. Though just watching some gameplay is also fantastic with the sound and graphic design.
> partly my life around the time I was playing the game, a time of constant wonder and exploration and true excitement
It's those feelings that I miss the most. Sometimes when I replay old games or rewatch childhood stuff I only end up destroying my memories because it's not as good as I remembered it being.
This is by the way how the defense was treated for decades as well. US resisted the EU from building a formidable army, instead they preferred a vassal state defense, enough to deter others from messing with Europe, not enough for Europe to be independent, and buying almost exclusively from US defense companies propping up US military R&D and financing factories during peacetime.
Now that the US has pivoted to Asia since Obama, they expect the EU to fill the gap they leave behind. But that’s new, the US wanted it exactly like it was pre 2014 or so.
Yes at the pay page there's a 'pay by X' list of options, you choose it.
You then typically have two choices: scan QR with your phone or login to your bank.
I normally open my bank app on my phone which signs in via my face (iPhone), I then press the scan button (first screen), point at my phone at the screen to read the QR code, the transaction pops up on my phone, I press confirm and again it signs via my face. Then you're done.
If you were shopping on the phone it's even simpler of course as the pay button opens up the transaction in your bank app right away, but typically I shop on my laptop after research.
I've had this for almost 20 years by the way in the Netherlands, but now it's pivoted to the EU standard.
Not implausible he hit those numbers, electric car ranges depend on a lot of factors, and he likely had a very small and favorable sample to get him to 258 wh/mile.
Some factors to consider:
1. Winter gets 20-25% less range
2. Poorly inflated tires get 3% less range
3. Driving at 60 mph requires 80% more energy per mile than driving at 20 mph
So if you take it together, test drives around town with proper tires in a Tesla 3 in summer, can get 130% better range than a tesla in winter on a highway with poorly inflated tires.
Most Tesla's average range is something between those two, say 260 wh/mi. But they can get below 200 in good conditions (summer driving at 30km/h). So if you take those good conditions and put a non-aerodynamic mustang body on it, it can do the same as a Tesla in average conditions.
I mean, you're agreeing with what I'm saying. It's implausible to achieve those numbers in an apples to apples comparison. Obviously you can achieve incomparable numbers using different conditions.
Or solar / wind (which mostly anticorrelate) + biomass + storage + interconnectors + smart demand.
The amount of baseload we technically need can be pretty slim.
Take Denmark: fossil powers just 9% of their electricity generation, the majority of it is wind and solar. Wind is strong in evenings/nights, solar during the day.
Then they have biomass (indirect solar) as a form of baseload, more sustainable than coal/gas.
Then there's interconnectors, they're close to Norway which can pump hydro, and Sweden, each day about 25% of the electricity is exchanged between these two countries, and that's a growing figure.
With more east/west interconnectors you could move surplus solar between countries. Import from the east in the morning before your own solar ramps up, export your midday surplus west before theirs peaks, and import from the west in the late afternoon as yours fades.
With interconnectors you can also share rather than independently build peaker capacity. Because a lot of peaker plants only run a small amount of time and therefore much of the cost is in the construction/maintenance, not the fuel.
And of course there's storage, which will take a while to build out but the trendlines are extremely strong. Just a fleet of EVs alone, an average EV has a 60 kWh battery, an average EU household uses 12 kWh per day so an average car holds 5 days worth of power a home uses.
And then finally there's smart demand. An average car is parked for more than 95% of the day, and driven 5% of the time. Further, the average car drives just 40km a day which you can charge in 3 minutes on say a Tesla. Given these numbers (EVs store 5 days of household use, can sit at a charger for 23 hours a day, and can smartly plan the 3 minutes a day of charging it actually needs to do) just programming cars to charge smartly, is a trivial social and technical problem in the coming 10-20 years.
Given this, baseload coal/gas can really be minimised the coming decades. It's not going to go away as a need, but I don't think it requires gas/coal or nuclear long-term going forward.
Lot of the biomass used in Denmark to form baseload power generation is imported.
"The utmost amount (46%) of wood pellets comes from the Baltic countries (Latvia and Estonia) and 30% from the USA, Canada and Russia.6 Estonia and Latvia have steadily been the primary exporters of biomass to Denmark, mainly in the form of wood pellets and wood chips."
No but every region has their own pros and cons. The idea Belgium has no other option than coal gas or nuclear is refuted, and biomass is just one of the reasons.
> "just programming cars to charge smartly, is a trivial social and technical problem in the coming 10-20 years."
One problem I've heard about this idea in the past is that cars and their batteries are expensive, and people won't want to run down the lifetime of their car battery more quickly by also using it as a home battery rather than just for driving.
Obviously this can be solved either by making it so cheap to replace car batteries that nobody cares, or by legislating that people have to use their cars this way. But is either of these solutions easy to happen any time soon?
I don’t think its a long term issue. The cost of battery storage is below 10c per kWh, whereas a peaker plant costs above 20c per kWh and runs 10% of the time.
So if you get paid double the value of your battery the incentives are there for an economic model to work. Today.
And batteries are only getting cheaper, gas is the opposite.
Plus batteries take surplus solar/wind, at these times they have a negative value. Add that and the economics are a no brainer. It’s a matter of time.
What a waste of energy (money/resources)... Scraping and AI-scanning 2 million photos to identify animals in the advertisement pictures? What's the point.
As an exercise a sample of 1000 photos would've been enough. As a database, knowing a listing has a cat in the picture or a funny review doesn't offer any real value.
I wonder what the footprint is of such an exercise.
The pet detection part isn’t the point, that’s just a visible output. The actual goal was to stress test agents + distributed compute on something non-trivial.
I dunno there are literally 100s of millions (billions?) of people who spend more than an hour per day just scrolling through social media feeds.
How much does it cost to send a billion people an hour of video every day? Almost all of the resources tech uses is for pointless or even negative things.
What % of compute/bandwidth do you think is used for "real value"? I would guess it is well below 1%.
But yes our politicians seem entirely unwilling to do anything about colossal expenditures on this "expedition", while all-too-willingly destroying American institutions. It's an insurrection of the elites; Federalist Society finally getting the destruction of the nation their treasonous tattered souls have lusted for. What a horror show they have us strapped in to.
Not only aid, it was a powerful tool for the extension of American soft power around the globe. But I guess we're no longer able to reason in the abstract beyond "helping people is woke."
Right, but Trump has stated he can accept working with the regime without consequence, like in Venezuela, as long as they cooperate on key issues e.g. oil and Israeli security concerns. He couldn’t care less that the regime is killing its own people. Like he couldn’t care less about Israel’s illegal occupation and murder.
To think Trump did this war to save Iranian lives from its own government is hopelessly naive. It was not at all a leading factor.
> Drones have a limited range and limited capacity to inflict damage. Yes, they are effective at hunting infantry, but you can't reach across an ocean and strike the US with "millions of drones".
And most importantly there's a million people here, statistically there's a good chance you run into people who're in the top 5% of whatever their field is in. Whether it's musicians, engineers, athletes, philosophers, there's a good chance you'll run into a lot of interesting ones.
My friend lives in a village and he has 1 pizzeria and 1 italian and 1 chinese restaurant. There's no gym. There's a very basic park with grass and some trees. There's no museums, architecture is all the same. There's no nightlife whatsoever. There's no real amenities, not even a library. There's a few shops with the basics, with very limited opening hours. There's as much nature nearby as there is for me. Tere's also no real way to make friends, and there's a few hundred people to meet at most, statistically most of them aren't very interesting to you (not 'not interesting in general', but 'to you'. It's easier to find 'your tribe' if you can select from a million vs a hundred).
So it's really the 'commute' or I should say proximity to culture, i.e. people, their thoughts and their creations, that sells the city for me, not the proximity to the company I happen to work for, which is sometimes in another city.
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