Viewing profile — thworp

A toy example: NeoCloud Inc builds a new datacenter full of the new H800 GPUs. It rents out a rack of them for $10/minute while paying $6/minute for electricity, interest, loan rep…

You simply cannot compare the experience of being conquered in a pre-modern society to being conquered by the PRC. Premodern States simply couldn't afford the level of oppression a…

Look for a broad-strokes summary of environmental laws in China [0]. Note the following paragraph: > The standards detailed in the action plan focus on several harmful substances, …

The situation in China is actually even worse. There are environmental regulations, but enforcement is easily evaded through bribes or CCP connections. Every so often there is a di…

Imo OLED has completely eclipsed CRT by now. I don't know enough to say where CRTs could be today if they had gotten the development $ that went into other tech. But to be as good …

A big issue with fingerprint-only devices is water. If your finger, the reader or both are sufficiently wet, most readers just don't work. Most touchscreens also don't work too wel…

Actual support from the people was not wanted or needed by these regimes. They were content with having support by their party lapdogs, the kinds of people with no skills or person…

Where structural bricks are used, they are generally hollow with air cavities of varying sizes. Those types of bricks are very good insulators, pretty much the best insulation we h…

> The sino-vietnamese was a ridiculous mistake for the socialist project, that I agree with. But this wasn't an imperial war. Fair enough, but then you can't claim that the US invo…

There is Tibet, which had declared independence in 1913 and then decisively split itself from China by expelling all Chinese in 1945. The PRC conquered them because they were part …

Which imperial power? If the US is an imperial power for defending their local dictator, how is PRC not one for doing likewise? Is it because the Communist empires loudly screamed …

I think you went into stable genius territory yourself in the second half. > I'd guess Ukraine falls within months at most. Even if the US stops all deliveries -- which is far from…

In the long term, yes. In the medium term, companies and people liquidating their assets and paying capital gains tax actually gives the state a windfall.

You look out the window and see rain. I see light drizzle. A journalist writes about meeting a subject of his article in a "raging autumn storm".

> especially on unrealised gains. Right, absolutely brilliant idea. You live prudently, save some money every month and invest it (stocks, bonds, whatever). Due to factors entirely…

How could they make sure that the CRISPR payload survives replication?

On the move 20% picaridin repellent works well to almost completely prevent bites. It's also slightly more long-lasting than DEET and doesn't destroy plastics. It will still need r…

I take it you have never spent any time outside where there's lots of them. If you go out without protection, they'll mercilessly sting every bit of exposed skin. Depending on your…

The business model is essentially the same as credit cards, but with "fees" instead of interest payments. That is to say, Klarna takes a commission from merchants and the rest of t…

It's much better to buy Puts (limited downside). The problem with buying them now is that you're way too late. By now the premiums are quite high, even for huge declines. If you bo…

> but I disagree that the progress has been tremendous. There really is no argument that it hasn't. If we take a year between 1950 and 1970 as a baseline, there was a significant r…

There has been tremendous progress in terms of available calories, malnutrition and deaths to starvation globally [0]. I'd say opaque indices and relative measures are now gaining …

It's not just the OS itself, where some of the slowness can at least be explained by the silo-ed nature of development and the large amount of moving parts. But even when MS gives …

We do have the technology to build HVDC cables from Iceland to Britain / Norway and we can expect the loss of this grid-to-grid interconnect to be In the current situation Europe w…

> Hell, there are companies and families who supported the third Reich openly. > They were rich before world war 2, they were rich after and they are still rich today. Yes, these f…