Regarding the BART delay, does anyone know if there is a way to help them out? Taking a year (or six months, or even three months) to get some switches is mind-boggling to me. I've seen a similar situation before at a tech company that was resolved over a weekend with a couple phone calls.
Questions
241–250 of 493 posts
Re: Questions
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
This will sound horrible but is it rational? E.g. say you are building a huge hospital and due to the above it will take 4 years longer at 2x the cost so basically you could loose X lives due to hospital not being there and due to increased cost of care.
Yes, it is rational. We should live in a society where the expected human sacrifice of a construction project should be 0. Pure utilitarianism leads to outcomes that are clearly out of step with almost everyone's moral codes. For example you could kill someone and take their organs to save the lives of 4-5 people. Is it rational that we're not allowed to do that? Why do some people get to keep 2 kidneys when there ar…
Do you believe we should make the national speed limit 25? If not, you're accepting that people will die needlessly, and that the value of a human life is not, in fact, infinite.
Re: Questions
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it is rational. We should live in a society where the expected human sacrifice of a construction project should be 0. Pure utilitarianism leads to outcomes that are clearly out of step with almost everyone's moral codes. For example you could kill someone and take their organs to save the lives of 4-5 people. Is it rational that we're not allowed to do that? Why do some people get to keep 2 kidneys when there ar…
Yes, but only up to a point. If all the rules and safety checks inflate the cost and timeline of projects exponentially then barely anything would get built. The question, as always, is: "Where do we draw the line?".
This doesn't seem to be true because things do get built with high safety today.
Re: Questions
#244Can the title of "Questions" be changed to something a bit more useful?
Re: Questions
#245> Will end-user applications ever be truly programmable? If so, how?
People just want things to work. Extreme customization can be valuable, but it often devolves into subtle bugs and inconsistent behavior. People forget about their custom modifications. Developers end up debugging people's custom modifications for every bug report. Having 100% consistent reproducible behavior is usually more valuable.
Re: Questions
#246> Why is US GDP growth so weirdly constant? This is something I noticed too. And it can't be just blamed to "inflation" of the US GDP. Almost any other country I checked does have fluctuations. Goes through booms and bust. China has gone through an exponential rise but slowed down and seems like it broke the pattern recently. The US is the only country so far that has been going decades through a constant rate of cha…
The chart is less smooth if expressed in real terms instead of nominal terms (i.e. in "constant dollars", to account for inflation): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=lpcg
And part of the trend is simply population growth. Per capita trends are slightly less nice: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=lpcR
(Note that different scales are used for the real and nominal figures in the charts above.)
Over a slightly longer period: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=lpdg
The rate of growth is clearly decelerating.
Re: Questions
#247Can the title of "Questions" be changed to something a bit more useful?
What would you suggest?
Re: Questions
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it is rational. We should live in a society where the expected human sacrifice of a construction project should be 0. Pure utilitarianism leads to outcomes that are clearly out of step with almost everyone's moral codes. For example you could kill someone and take their organs to save the lives of 4-5 people. Is it rational that we're not allowed to do that? Why do some people get to keep 2 kidneys when there ar…
Do you believe we should make the national speed limit 25? If not, you're accepting that people will die needlessly, and that the value of a human life is not, in fact, infinite.
Is this the argument you want to plant your stake in the ground on as absurd? Because the modern debate in the tech community is "should people be allowed to operate motor vehicles at all?"
Re: Questions
#249> Why are there so many successful startups in Stockholm? Several reasons. First, you need to recognize that any Sweden-based startup will, when it gets to be known internationally, have a Stockholm-based office. So it's not about a city of 1 million inhabitants, it's a country of 10 million that's the true number here. As an example, I believe Spotify opened their original offices in both Stockholm and Göteborg more…
Good observations! You forgot one major thing. This goes for all of Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The winter is horribly dark and boring. (Unless you're super rich). Therefore most turn inwards, staying indoors, thinking deeply at problems, spending endless afternoons and nights on things. Be it software development, game development, car tuning, car engine work, engineering, knitting or just reading loads of…
Also a hypothesized reason for why canadians are unreasonably well represented in esports.
Re: Questions
#250> The Empire State Building was built in 410 days At least one reason is that we have substantially different safety regulations since we're not accepting of deaths on a project like that. 5 people died on that project. 11 died to build the Golden Gate. Original Bay Bridge? 24. They actually had a rule of thumb at the time: 1 death for every $1M spent on a project[1]. Any metric like that would be absolutely unaccept…
Interestingly the author cites Hong Kong in another question as a city that should be replicated. It's a city where at least 10 (and likely a great deal more#) workers died and 234-600 were injured in the last few years building a bridge of questionable utility to other local cities.
# 10 are confirmed dead on the HK portion, the death toll on the Chinese portion is unknown.
There's little question that lax worker safety and weak labor laws can contribute to faster economic growth, but I'm not sure that's something we should be trying to replicate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong%E2%80%93Zhuhai%E2%80...
http://www.ejinsight.com/20170413-how-many-more-people-have-...