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Comment Re: Summary (Score 1) 28

"a do no harm oath, just like most other industries"

Like which other industries?

First, an MBA is not an industry. Most likely they are not even industrialists. They are cogs in the machinery,

Second, again, what other industries have a 'do no harm oath'? Doctors claim to subscribe to this, Realtors purport to adhere to an ethical standard that could be confused with the do no harm mantra, Professional engineers have professional responsibilities to do work 'correctly', for lack of a better single word.

Do you think pharmaceutical researchers even bother with pretending to adhere to such an oath? recent experience would seem to deny this. Same for much of the food industry, certainly the financial industry (such so that we need copious law to restrict their behavior), and there are other examples. Even if you exclude sales, which if they followed such oaths would be in a position of serving two masters...

The premise is flawed, and demonstrably false. We wish everyone else treated us so, but in reality we often do not ourselves, out of self-interest. Which is sometimes understandable, and sometimes excusable. But not always.

Comment Re:Unmatched Liquidity (Score 1) 28

Right now the drive to diversify is entirely political.
Ok great you hate Trump, congrats.
The FACT is that there is no serious alternative to the USD as a reserve currency.
The currencies mentioned (euro, yuan) are indeed probably the closest in a basically empty field.
The yuan is controlled by a deeply dishonest tyrannical government that hasn't authentically reported financial information for decades. The EU is an anti democratic talking shop that can't manage to stand up a coast guard, much less manage a monetary policy.

Don't get me wrong, there are major, major issues with how the US handles economics. Inter party vacillations every 4 years. Dishonesty about inflation or economic data when it's politically inconvenient. But to the point of real-world contexts critical to underpin faith in a currency, the US remains economically dominant, more militarily secure than all others, and well supplied with food, water, oil, and raw materials.

Comment Re:Somewhere in Redmond (Score 1) 98

Interspersed with the occasional foray to the back porch, the better to put a few shells through the 12 gauge towards the cross-country skiers averting their eyes from the glare of the basement windows on Thanksgiving Eve... And blissfully somewhat out of range of #6, since Bill is too cheap to buy 00.

Comment Re: Raise the costs even more! (Score 2) 54

You're thinking DRAX which yes, as it stands is definitely not a net-positive. But DRAX is normally excluded as they usually report on 'wind and solar'. If someone in government wants to look good with a pie chart with bigger numbers then yes - DRAX gets put in. But for the energy industry itself, it's reported differently.

Comment Re: Raise the costs even more! (Score 2) 54

It's the reverse. Green electricity is held back from adoption because the price is linked to the price of gas. While ever that link exists, electricity will be unnaturally expensive in comparison to its raw market price.

It's not completely irrational, although arguable (I would be on this point of view for instance) it's now out of date. The idea is to pick the most expensive bid price for the spot market price, not the cheapest, in order to incentivise continued operation of difficult energy sources. Why would you want to? Because in ye olden days 'difficult' were things like the hydro power or nuclear which were great for maintaining base line load and which you wanted to subsidise to keep going.

In today's market, that's completely on its head and renewables are the cheapest. Established nuclear second, granted construction costs of new nuclear make that overall cost higher of course. This is why the government is incentivising pushes towards heat pumps etc. - the more we get off gas, the less reason to maintain this market oddity exists and it can be removed making electricity cheaper again.

This is easier said than done. Much of the UK's housing stock would need improvement before heat pumps are viable. I recently had a survey on my own house for instance, and it came back as non-viable without a lot of improvements around heat loss first. These improvements would be a good thing and are semi-subsidised, but it's still effort. I believe the new build rules have finally, years late but finally, been changed to require standards around heat pumps and solar.

So yep - electricity being expensive in the UK is not due to the renewables or nuclear, it's due to gas. And the reason we still rely on gas so much is inertia plus building standards and upgrades. Hard one to unpick, but got to start somewhere.

Comment Re:It WILL Replace Them (Score 4, Insightful) 45

The illusion of intelligence evaporates if you use these systems for more than a few minutes.

Using AI effectively requires, ironically, advanced thinking skills and abilities. It's not going to make stupid people as smart as smart people, it's going to make smart people smarter and stupid people stupider. If you can't outthink the AI, there's no place for you.

Comment Re:What's the range? (Score 2) 35

The other post linked the study.
As far as I can tell yes, your supposition that there's "averaging" going on is correct. Insofar as I can see (I skimmed it, certainly) they report roughly similar quantities of data from makes and females going into their analysis, but after that it's all lumped together.
Further, while they acknowledge in their analysis that their data is biased toward West, anglophone, rich cultures, I feel like they universalize their conclusions a little too freely.
Really fascinating stuff here, but imo their data is a bit too summarized.

Comment Re:Seems like a magnet for terrorists... (Score 1) 221

Contrary to the scaremongering we hear, the world is not full of terrorists. They exist, don't get me wrong, but the reason we're so afraid of them is that our fear of them is incredibly useful for people who want to control us.

And also, the ones who do exist aren't engineers. So a shooting, or a stabbing, that's pretty easy to figure out how to do. Derailing a train? That's physics. Physics is much harder than pointing a gun and pulling the trigger.

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