Viewing profile — jmopp

But when you succeed in the game, then what? Yes, the real world is full of endless trials and never a payout. But the entire point is that there is no point. The fun is in the jou…

It's kind of like how the north star for a programmer is to automate themselves out of the job. A good manager will bring the best out of their reports, which leads to making good …

It's not the kidnappers trying to contact the family in this case. It's the clinic administrator who doesn't know why their doctor hasn't shown up for a week

On the one hand, I agree with you. On the other hand, the false positives (and the fallout from it) might outweigh the negatives: imagine a volunteer doctor who disappears in West …

The trick is not to do it at the embassy, but to take a two-week holiday and do it in South Africa.

I always thought fusion was easier than fission, since all* you really need is water and electricity — the problem being that it's currently impossible to get more energy than what…

Fun fact: the descendants of Moctezuma still live today as Spanish nobility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_of_Moctezuma_de_Tultengo

The bicycles that were made from wood and iron gave an extremely stiff ride and were called boneshakers.

The Amish view of technology is a bit more nuanced than "modern technology bad". Generally, technology needs to have a legitimate purpose for the community in order to be adopted. …

As someone who uses curl and postman regularly, both tools have their places: I've found curl most useful for quick ad-hoc requests, or if I need to figure out why my service is no…

Since we're in the realm of fiction, Harold is a Helion employee and has first dibs on their container-sized fusion reactor.

Yep, any kid who obsesses about the periodic table of elements can figure out how to collect radioactive isotopes and attempt to build a simple nuclear reactor. Most don't, because…

Presumably you would have built up a pension in your previous country, which you can draw from. That would satisfy the requirement for an independent source of income. When Britain…

I don't know, slumlords charging an exorbitant rent for a shack is a thing.

This. In poorer parts of the world, you might have an extra mouth to feed for the first 15-20 years, but once your child finishes school and finds work they're contributing to your…

I did wonder why the podcasts I listened to on Spotify had ads in them which were clearly targeted to my region.

I do wonder if the window for observing it empirically has passed. Pretty much everywhere in the world has access to artificial light — even if it is in a cheap, low-tech form like…

I don't know. Sports cars are notorious money sinks. The person who took the bus might be more financially prudent.

Peter Thiel might have been a libertarian in 2009, but he's not a libertarian anymore. He's jumped fully onto the nationalist conservative train. https://reason.com/2020/08/02/wait…

That's the slippery slope people who want to take away rights exploit. Sure, you can believe women shouldn't vote. You can even go around telling people you believe women shouldn't…

From the Zen of Python: There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.

If we're at the point where power producers are saving up excess sunny-day energy to sell at other times, then we've solved renewable energy's infamous base-load problem.

> It can't be great to cover so much of nature. You'd be surprised! Solar panels provide shade for local wildlife and improve crop/grazing yields due to the cover moderating the ho…

That doesn't really apply since Ireland has different visa requirements to the UK. As a South African national I can enter Ireland without a visa, whereas I do need one to enter th…