Viewing profile — jltsiren

Household waste recycling mostly works if you sort the materials at source. If you have separate bins for glass, metal, and paper+cardboard, all of them can be recycled economicall…

Russia is a country with a strong centralized government capable of enforcing laws whenever it wants. In the absence of effective laws, one of the biggest threats to rich people wo…

The actual Finnish kid who wrote a somewhat successful OS kernel was born in Helsinki, to an upper middle class family with a communist father. He chose to study in the most presti…

I had two main points. First, employers favor applicants from prestigious schools over those from less prestigious schools, because prestigious schools are more selective. That see…

Two points: There are two kinds of engineers in Finland. Some received a more theoretical education at research universities. Most went to more applied institutions that focus more…

That's survivorship bias. If there are truly unique people who never get a chance to do what they would be good at, we don't hear about them. Private sector bureaucrats are no diff…

Incidentally, Finland just took a key step today towards issuing an operating permit for the Onkalo repository. After today, the permit is mostly matter of bureaucracy, and the fin…

Ten weeks more, if you average over workers. You get a smaller difference if you average over working-age people. Germans are more likely to choose a part-time job voluntarily, whi…

This is the norm for the industry. When there is a lot of money to be made, people will chase it by any means they can think of. AI is a special case, as academia isn't usually tha…

But a lack of effort is a good signal for a lack of value. Eleven times out of ten, your initial idea is garbage. If you write it up, or let AI do that for you, the result is garba…

The default VSCode configuration can cause problems in HPC clusters. VSCode likes to crawl the files it can see repeatedly. If you have a few users, it doesn't matter. But with man…

There is a difference between what anyone can do and what everyone can do at the same time. Some people could always choose alternative life paths, but that option was not availabl…

> Why would anyone choose subsistence grain agriculture when literally anything else was available. There was nothing else available. If you were born in an agricultural settlement…

If you are basing your claims on Against the Grain, Scott focuses on early centralized states, which emerged thousands of years after agriculture and towns. Such states were by def…

That's what I meant by "largely stopped existing". With the decline of agriculture, there was a major decline in food production and therefore a major decline in population.

When archaeological evidence shows that people largely stopped farming, it usually means that those people largely stopped existing. Or at least living in that area. Apart from a f…

There is not much difference between the US and Europe in that. In the Nordic countries, children move out earlier, while multi-generational households are more common in Southern …

You could also say that English is an awful language, because the spelling and the pronunciation have diverged too far. But it's the international lingua franca in most contexts, b…

Ireland is not in Schengen, so you were doing an international-to-international transfer. You normally don't have to go through immigration and customs for those, unless there are …

In my experience, the airports could handle the passenger volume, but they lack the people. I've entered the US 25–30 times, and almost every time, there have been long lines and e…

One of the key skills of a professor is asking the right questions. Figuring out something worth working on, and then framing it in an appropriate way and asking questions that all…

Its more about where you want to live. I'm not familiar with the situation in San Francisco. But in Santa Cruz, the cost to own with a 20% down payment is ~50% higher than the rent…

International comparisons are tricky, and you should always check the data definitions carefully. The first metric on that page is household income divided by the square root of ho…

> Because AI doesn't have the factional conflicts or interpersonal issues that humans do. All the factional conflicts are in there, and there are also plenty of reports of people g…

In Finland, the government and the universities negotiate on how funding will be allocated between the fields. STEM fields are generally easy to get in, while places in arts, human…