Normal range for sea water pH is 7.7-8.2, varying day to day and depending on the time of day, measured in one place: https://web.archive.org/web/20... The min/max range measured across different locations will be greater. It is also worth noting that sea creatures evolved shells back in the Cambrian era, some 500M years ago - when atmospheric CO2 levels were 10-20x higher than they are today. So it seems we need less alarmism and hyperbole and more science.

I thought contrails actually had a cooling effect because they reflect sunlight back out into space, similarly to marine cloud brightening. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

In many countries (UK included), aviation fuel is exempt from the taxes applicable to other transport fuels, e.g. for cars. So how about we just introduce the same taxes at same amounts for aviation fuel? It'll make air travel more expensive, which will in turn make people fly less often. Ring fence the tax collected this way for spending on carbon neutralisation projects (e.g. planting more trees, carbon capture technology development, etc.)

Upvote those who get thereference. :-p

Simple rule of thumb to distinguish machine learning from AI: - If it's written in Python, it's probably ML. - If it's written in Powerpoint, it's probably AI.

They don't get what they pay for. AWS is ludicrously expensive.

I've consistently seen Aurora MySQL performance worse than RDS MySQL on writes, and overall, a carefully tuned (in a way you can't tune RDS or Aurora due to lack of access) MariaDB instance on EC2 will utterly annihilate Aurora and RDS on overall performance, for same instance sizes. Of course, a bare metal setup of the same size (same CPU cores, same RAM amount) will annihilate the EC2 instance on performance and at about half of the TCO over three years, but nobody seems to care about that these days.

"The license plate readers cost $20,000 per patrol car." Pretty sure the total BOM for a device that will reliably do this 24/7 cannot be more than about $200, with maybe a week of developer time to string together some open source software to do this.

Not quite true. When it comes to serious things like cancer survival rates, US turns out to be actually pretty damn good. UK typically gets top marks everywhere except the only imporant thing - outcomes, where it scores close to rock bottom. Also, at least in UK, there is a thriving private medical industry for people who are willing to stump up the cash for private insurance because the state funded single payer health provisions are not what you want to be at the mercy of for a serious illness. Bottom line, just because there are plenty of examples of single payer healthcare systems, it doesn't automatically make them good or better than the alternatives. Ultimately you have to decide which 2 of the 3 you want: - Universality - Quality - Affordability You cannot have all three. People need to wake up to that simple fact.

The thing that this particular teletubby interface update broke is information density. After the update, the new skin in both gmail and calendar quite simply puts less on a screen. On the desktop it is annoying. On the mobile devices with limited screen real estate, it is downright devastating for usage and productivity.

It's as if since the turn of the century, user interfaces have been continuously redesigned to be more and more friendly toward children under 2 - with rounded corners and buttons too big to accidentally swallow. It's as if Fischer Price have been contracted to do user interface designs ever since.

If I'm reading this correctly, the exact same technology also enables faster-than-light communication.

Easy fix, then. Remove the kicking off the app, and everything will carry on as usual only without the spurious legal wrangling.

And a ride hailing company doesn't have fixed rides/routes it fulfills. Freelancer.com IS a main source of income for a non-trivial fraction of it's members.

Who, exactly, is an employer in that case?

Employment fundamentally requires mutuality of obligation. In the context of an Uber driver, if the driver MUST accept the ride they have been assigned under pain of divorce and their employer is paying them regardless of whether there are any fares to pick up, then they are an employee. If they are free to decide whether to work or not at any time, and are free to accept or reject any fare as they please, then clearly there is no mutuality of obligation and thus there is no employment. Otherwise it's a bit like arguing that the plumber you called out to fix a leak in your kitchen is your employee and you now also owe them holiday pay and employer's pension contributions on top of the hourly rate they are charging you.