mhardcastle

Anecdotally, I've stopped using Google search because of the captcha issue. It's a lot more work than using other search providers now.

I found myself accidentally behind the secured area of this solar installation while driving in the Mojave National Preserve. It is truly bizarre to see up close - the glow that you see around the towers in the photo on the article is quite bright in person.

I wondered when I saw it - is that glow the air turning into plasma? Are otherwise-invisible dust particles reflecting the absurd amount of light hitting them? Is the heat enough for the air to start scattering light?

It's no surprise that it would incinerate birds, in any case.

“However, it is important to note that this does not impact our results,” [lead study author] Liu told National Post."

So an order-of-magnitude difference has no impacts on the result? How can that be?

Why include that capacitor at all if it doesn't matter whether it works?

In most companies, "operations" staff is among their lowest-paid: customer service, cashiers, bank tellers, factory workers, etc. They are used to constant adherence to strict metrics.

Medical care is strange in that the operational staff includes doctors, who will bristle at their expertise and years of schooling culminating into being judged on how many reviews (or appointments) they can churn through.

It's an interesting issue that I sense naturally causes this kind of conflict.

> Separately this is generally not a great idea economically. You do kill inflation in Argentina (replaced with American inflation but that is extremely low and stable by Argentine standards). But you have no control over your monetary policy or your exchange rates. If your economy is export driven to (e.g.) China, you now have to worry about the dollar-yuan rate, which is not under your control.

"generally not a great idea economically" is true, but this specific case is one of the few where it could be a fantastic idea.

Control over one's currency > pegging to or using USD >>>> historic Argentinian monetary policy. If (1) is impossible, then (2) would represent monumental improvement over the status quo.

Social status is positional and follows arms race dynamics. Everyone would have more money and nobody would suffer worse ring-positional-status if everyone spent proportionately less.

Also, there is a deep body of economics and psychology literature describing how individual spending decisions are sometimes suboptimal in predictable ways, particularly that we under-value experiential purchases.

It doesn't contradict general "live and let live" principles to think that cultural emphasis on positional goods is bad, nor that individuals might be better off if they made different consumption choices.

Traffic is a function of how many cars go through a road/intersection per unit time, which is reduced if cars keep shorter following distances, which self-driving cars can do because of faster reaction times.

In the extreme, imagine if a light turns green and all cars in line accelerate at the same time. Intersections would let through a lot more cars.

Or think of freeway speeds where the length of a car is near-negligible. A one-second following distance means almost 60 cars pass a given point in a minute, versus almost 30 cars per minute for a two-second following distance.

People respond to incentives. If you make something harder, people will do less of it.

New barriers include: the actual work of moving money around to and from friends and family and directing trades, counterparty risks in doing so (e.g. sibling dies and leaves money to someone else or takes the money and runs), tax complications, or reputational risk if found to be violating "spirit of the law" that might harm election odds. There are surely more frictions and barriers like these that I'm not capturing.