Inthenameofmine

At highway speeds aerodynamic drag creates more noise than the motor itself (externally). So an electric car makes little difference there. Reducing speed reduces noise non-linearly. Therefore electric cars make a big difference for noise pollution in slower city streets. Inter-city travel just needs to be reduced, slowed down, and moved to well built electric rail.

For most people in most societies it always was. It just used to be surplus value extraction from the wife for the husband and clan, and later the capitalist employing the husband. With the increase in bargaining power of women in society extraction of surplus value bacame more two-way and the capitalist class was able to extract surplus value directly from the women instead of roundabout through the men. Hence both partners need to work to have the same living standard as before with just one partner working.

I can already see this in the Balkans. Countries which have stronger ties with the US (eg Romania, Kosovo) can easily see developer salaries be 5-20x local average salary. This has contributed to real estate prices getting out of whack for certain areas in the main cities.

Hardware is tricky. Anything hands on really.

For anything abstract I would argue that the people who are able to onboard and form teams and ideas remotely are inherently the best for the job and likely produce a disproportionate percentage of any teams output. In my experience when you remove middle management (as it happens when you go remote), you want to only hire those people adapted to remote and self-directed work.

I would argue that location based and remote teams are fundamentally different companies. Similar to how tech first and tech-second companies are fundamentally different. I can't think of a single tech-second company that was able to move into the tech-first world. Some local companies might be able to morph themselves into remote companies, but as we see today, they will both lose a lot of staff, and even change their product eventually.

That's the supply chain reality of most non-port cities/countries in the world. It's also normal to pay 1.5-3x the original ticker price for what you ship in based on tariffs, fees, shipping, etc. The trick is to pick your location based on a Ben diagram of requirements. Personally I buy almost everything locally direct from producers. Many artisans are so cheap that it's even worth custom ordering certain products. For high tech or industrial goods you could be out of luck though.

The geothermal plant in Basel, Switzerland was AFAIK among the very first production ready plants using fracking. I remember the news of them turning it on and then a series of 2-3.5 Richter earthquakes happening. The city was leveled by earthquakes before so people got scared and immediately turned it off. The tiny damage that happened in the very old housing stock was costlier to the insurances than the geothermal plant itself. It did produce quite a bit of clean electricity though.

> For me as a technology manager, I'm more exhausted than ever. Video meetings are a pain. Because of this, people switch to asynchronous communication methods, which is definively more effective, but lacks even more personality. Text has many more layers of ambiguity. People get more aggressive and lonely. Misunderstandings rise.

IMO That's a cultural and psychological problem similar to when people moved from industrial facilities to service industries, or from waterfall development to agile. People can and have to learn workflows to accomodate that, and they will be happier.

> My job is to be aware of the emotional undercurrents of arguments and technology and physical distance just seems to get in the way of that. Any forms of creativity that happens in a group, like whiteboarding together, just isn't the same.

In my experience online whiteboaridng on tablets is far superior to in-room whiteboarding. Recording, replaying, integration of other tools, etc. It's again a question of consistent workflows.

If you include all known positive and negative feedback loops we're talking about human extinction within a couple decades. Furthermore, most of what the public thinks is the key leverage points of climate change generally turn out to be something else. Ie deforestation for meat production is the dominant human made climate mover, not CO2 from energy use. All other natural feedback loops then end up being force multipliers.

Is that a rhetorical question? Because a person who makes conscious unethical choices is a bad person. Otherwise there would be no metric for "badness" and the word would be meaningless.

I fund it fascinating that in "developed" or "fully western" countries it is the youth that is disregarding the lockdown measures. In Kosovo/Albania it is the precise opposite. An acquaintance of mine in China told me that it is the genX and older generation there too that seems to not understand the gravity. How come this big difference?

That's a very good question. Community cooperatives and municipal banks seem to be doing this, but not the commercial banks. I wonder why.

My opinion isn't really scientific, but I think this has primarily to do with the demographic pyramid in Italy and most of Southern Europe, not much with economic development. Kosovo is a clear example that economic development isn't important for IT development and adoption, it's how much youth you have.

TBH, that works as long as your demographic pyramid is healthy. For most of Europe that is not the case. On top of that, return on additional debt has been stagnant since the 90s in OECD countries. There's simply almost no place to put your money in the developed nations. IMO this is the first time since the beginning of the industrial revolution where allocative efficiency has a higher return than investment efficiency.

What’s the support behind this atm? I’ve read about this for some time, and it’s pretty much a no-brainer, but I haven’t seen any politician speak about it yet.

This map seems to be more than lacking. For one it doesn’t seem to take into consideration wet bulb temperatures on the rise, as we have seen now in central and western Europe. It also doesn’t seem to take into account that what really creates issues for economies is high variability, rather than absolute average changes.

I think the soy idea has been debunked for some time now. The main external estrogen source is milk and to some extend meat products.

> but the opportunity cost of figuring out the exact right problem to solve is inaction, and inaction is often worse than making a poorly-informed judgement.

That reminds me a lot of the days when managers did not want to do proper code testing and coverage because without that they could ship more code. Defining the problem upfront and doing rapid iteration not just on the solution but also problem definition is nowadays more important and effective than just shipping.

This assumes that cash or bank money has the same counyerparty risk as a government bond. That is not the case. Negative interest rates essentially signal that everybody is short on the future overall.

It's more like a heart attack. There's plenty of blood, but the circulation to the heart itself (the people, ie demand side) has stopped. The doctor is pumping ever more blood into the patient without fixing the clogging to the heart itself.

Helicopter money which deletes loans (meaning it would not punish people who did not borrow) would be a far better strategy in this case, and lead to both inflation and deleveraging at the same time, something which is impossible with other methods.

> Someone has since pointed out to me that HFT is currently done by bouncing microwaves off the atmosphere.

I would love to read up on this. Is this similar to HARP?

Inoreader is a very good alternative now imo. It lacks the way to share and subscribe to other people's shared articles, but i'd still give it a 9/10.

On that note, it boggles my mind that no startup has simply coppied google reader's features yet.

Or the government automates jobs. In Prishtina, Kosovo about 50 clerk jobs were replaced by a single automated machine which would give you all kinds of documents, certicicates, etc. It cut down waiting time from hours to minutes. Not to mention that it works 24/7 all year. Some people (especially people not used to tech) did not like it, so the municipality put a single clerk next to the machine. Still much better.

That’s more of an economic problem though. If you are further than 20min each way from your work place, monopolists are screwing you on income, cost of living, time, etc.

Furthermore, you can work remotely.

Definitely in Southern Europe. I met some of my best friends in random encounters.

Do you have any links or books on the topic or this specific calculation? Sounds very interesting.

Well demand is a good thing in this case. It implies good economic development. My point was more that market mechanisms don't make sense for public good infrastructure/monopolies.

Building as much (and sustainably) as possible + a land tax to discourage speculation and people not actually living in housing might be a better solution.

That's actually a really good point for housing as public infrastructure. The parallels to roads are very interesting.

Not from the US, but I lived there shortly and was asked to move there and had to decline. To me it's pretty clear that your single biggest problem is your suburbs and car culture. Everything from anti-social behavior, social anxiety snd isolation, depression, obesity, diabetis, divorce, as well as partisan politics stems from it. Subsidizing that mess should be the last thing you should do.

Other countries subsidize rural areas primarily for 3 reasons: 1. Certain political parties have their base in rural areas and want to subsidize their life style. 2. Strategie for making the country more food-independant through farming. 3. Military strategie for having people in remote areas.

Nobody in the world subsidizes non-productive suburban sprawl.

US style lawns definitely don't make economic sense. That stuff only happened because of cheap energy, which in term is artificially cheaper/subsidized due to not including negative externalities. In Europe lawns don;t make sense, Asia neither.

On empty plots, yes it makes no sense. On rooftops with greenhouses it adds the benefit of additional insulation. That alone is already enough to make it worth it.