maxfan8

I'm curious -- how do banks actually do this, then?

Hydrogen is simple to produce if you have access to water and electricity. Gasoline is much harder to do, though.

Fair! Those seem like reasonable stats for a cool setup.

I’m curious: what kind of latency do you observe on this setup?

Ok, let's agree to disagree, then.

I'll note that I never "pretended that it's not justifiable". I did explicitly say earlier:

> That's a fair position (you seem to be a utilitarian), and probably quite defensible.

I'm disengaging, for now, since it seems like we understand each other's position, and we had a productive, lively discussion.

> If your goal is to actually help people, you should base your arguments on how things are in reality instead of some idealized dream world.

That's a fair position (you seem to be a utilitarian), and probably quite defensible. But, one could argue that patient choice is an important feature for our medical systems to have. I certainly want to be able to refuse medications that my doctor recommends (e.g. opioids) or seek alternate advice/second opinions. My cost-benefit analysis equation is probably not the same as my doctor.

To be clear, I'm not talking about an "idealized dream world", as you put it -- I'm talking about patient autonomy in the real world, even if it means allowing patients to make what seems like a suboptimal decision.

> Your entire argument here seems to require patients to be rational agents.

Yes, my argument does rely on patients being rational agents.

> They aren't.

That may be true, but it's certainly paternalistic (in the formal, definitional sense) to act as if they are not rational agents and withhold information/reduce autonomy. This is a case of pure paternalism (again, in the formal philosophical sense).

Different ethical systems, of course, make different judgements on whether this behavior is moral. It's also up for debate whether this is a desirable feature of the medical system.

One slightly reasonable common argument I hear for reduced medical diagnostics is: “we don’t have the resources; it’d overwhelm the medical system”. While this may be the case for some tests, there are probably a great number of tests that could be scaled to be done yearly on the whole population.

Light only travels at C in a vacuum (so it doesn't actually travel at C in a standard fiber optic cable, it's actually much slower).

That's cool -- I didn't know that! Imo, the more effective and cheaply we can store energy and smooth out supply/demand curves, the more attractive solar and wind becomes.

Perhaps one way of encouraging a "greener" grid is to first encourage the development of cheap energy storage solutions, and then letting the market figure out the best way to utilize such storage (rather than the other way around). Might lead to more efficient/creative green energy solutions.

Hi, Michael! Nice to see you on HN and talking about that PR :).

The anecdotes about the propagation of the mannerisms of Wittgenstein are a gem.

Here’s a particularly nice one about David Foster Wallace:

> James Wallace, who was a graduate student in philosophy in 1959-1962, not only learned philosophy at Cornell but also picked up a gesture of Wittgenstein. The gesture - hitting himself in the back of his head, to indicate what a fool he was was then passed on to his son, David Foster Wallace, who eventually figured out its origin.