throwawayzRUU6f

And it's even worse than that

The 33kWh per kilo of hydrogen - that's the absolute physical limit of green hydrogen production via electrolysis, assuming 100% efficient production, no leaks, no labor, no maintenance, no electricity losses, frictionless transportation and infrastructure that just magically pops up where needed. It's not the case that technology will push the price down - this is the best anyone can ever hope for

Unfortunately, noise pollution is at the very bottom of public agencies' priority list.

Even in Europe, with stricter regulators and less tolerance towards loud and obnoxious behavior, it's way too common to hear tuned motorcycles blasting 110dB engine screeches at 2AM, keeping everyone in the neighborhood awake. In theory it's not allowed, in reality the bikers can do it with impunity any time they please. Drones would at least provide some beneficial service.

imho this is the correct answer. It's also the reason why Apple seemingly can't make up their mind - making the phone thinner, wider, taller, shorter, camera notches, buttons, colors, etc. It's intentional - there must be some easily identifiable way to tell apart those with money and status from the pauper peasants who embarrass themselves with last year phones. BMW plays the same game with the grill on their cars. And the whole fashion industry is basically 100% built on this dynamic.

Just several years ago, Facebook IPO-ed at ~$90B valuation, before sliding all the way down to ~$45B. Facebook was already a giant global corporation with close to a billion active users, nearly all of them from western countries.

AfterPay's valuation puts it at two thirds of mid-2012 Facebook. Up until now, I've never heard of them

it really is much harder to self host than it used to.

90s: ask your ISP for a public IP, register your domain, start Apache and off you go

Nowadays: getting a public IP is iffy. All good domain names are taken. Emails from your self-hosted mail server go straight to spam/junk. Fiddling with TLS certificates is close to mandatory. The moment you start your server, you're bombarded by a flood of gratuitous requests, trying out every known vulnerability under the sun. etc. etc.

Based on my only social contact working in trades, the income follows a bathtub distribution - a lot of people taking below average, and a sizable minority getting upper middle class incomes, with almost nothing in between. This is the reason why we get the contradictory narratives of great fortunes in trades on one hand, and the statistics telling the opposite on the other hand.

Allegedly, the talent pool is really shallow - with a modicum of intelligence, passion and human skills, it's not that hard to make it. But most of the guys who end up studying trades are the bottom of the barrel who would do badly in any endeavor (or so I was told).

Well, it doesn't end with China. Around ~2010, once you scrub off the weasel word hedging, The Economist was predicting an imminent Eurozone breakup. It didn't predict the entirely predictable austerity recessions of 2012-2015. They were fairly bullish on Abenomics in Japan. They were very bullish on the future of BRICS around ~2008, out of which Brazil, Russia and South Africa are stagnating ever since.

Then, there's a very important tool in forming editorial slant - omitting reporting on inconvenient facts. Italy and Spain, the putatively sluggish laggards strangled by overly strict labor protection laws, have somehow overtaken the allegedly dynamic UK in labor productivity. Ireland, the purported economic wonder, have a household disposable income (a fairly good metric of material standards of living), lower than Italy and much lower than France. We keep hearing about the importance of education, competitiveness, R&D and ease of doing business, yet somehow Finland, which tops the rankings, is in year 14 of it's economic stagnation. Have you heard any of this from The Economist?

Because those better yields are there for a reason. That reason isn't lack of intermediaries, it's high inherent risks.

Economy has a risk-free rate of return, that of 1-year treasuries, at 0.05% currently. Anything above that involves risk. A rate of return of 7%/year means there's 7%-0.05% chance of the instrument being worthless after one year, ~14% chance of it losing half its value, ~28% chance of it losing a quarter of it's value, etc. There's no free lunch, and there's no financial arbitrage

This. 5-year-old state of the art is today's incubator open source, and a commodity 2 years from now. There's no reason to think autonomous driving will be an exception.

There's a large and perhaps unsolvable problem of the state of the art solutions that doesn't get nearly as much attention as it should - even if the car can safely handle 99% or 99.9% of the situations, the algorithms are not really able to detect if they're in the last 0.1%. The car will slam into stationary trucks, suddenly brake for no reason, consider the tollbooth to be a bus - all with utmost confidence it's doing the right thing.

In other words - the value of proposition of autonomous driving would be completely fine if the car gives up on unarguably difficult situations and alerts the driver to take over. As of now, however, the car will boldly do something stupid and dangerous.

I believe something like the following would create an uncheatable system, and therefore will obviously never be implemented:

Does a corporation want to sell their products and services in country X? Very well, they must agree to the following regulation. The country X reserves an option to, at any point in time, buy up any subsidiaries or parts of the corporation, for value based on generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). For example, if the accounting profit of Microsoft Germany is $0 over the past decade, the country has an option to purchase Microsoft Germany for its fair GAAP price - $0. After doing this, the country also has an option to reverse the trades the subsidiary has done. So, if Microsoft Germany sold its IP to Microsoft Ireland for the total value of $100, the country X can buy it back for $100. Repeat with Microsoft US, Microsoft UK, etc. The shareholders will be left with their extremely valuable (according to GAAP) Microsoft Ireland and Microsoft Singapore.

Any sufficiently large country with sufficiently motivated government can pull this off. No revolutionary overhaul of the existing tax system is necessary. The regulation is clear and fair. But again, it's never gonna happen.

And the "minor" difference that corporations are taxed on profits, whereas individuals are taxed on revenue

> Power2Gas for seasonal storage is a key part of all plans for decarbonization that I'm aware of

That's my understanding, too; amongst the technocrats and field-experts, power-to-gas is taken very seriously. However, amongst the public and the press, even the pop-science press, it's scarcely ever mentioned. Hydrogen, batteries, biofuels, carbon capture, and even fusion all enjoy vastly more attention. I cannot think of any explanation that wouldn't be cynical or sinister