I wonder how much would it cost to build a tunnel as an alternative to the Panama canal to fundamentally resolve the drought issues. 1.8 km is comparable to ~80 km (probably a shorter tunnel will suffice) and dimensions are also similar (at least for the old Panamax).
>the USD doesn't have strength and power because oil sales are denominated in dollars. You have it backwards.
Not quite. The "petrodollar" deal has helped to bootstrap and anchor the USD strength at a somewhat critical moment of history after the gold peg was "temporarily" suspended, which was effectively a default of the US government (second in the 20th century!).
Sure, today trade of oil in USD no longer plays a significant role in supporting its dominance, but it still plays a role. Together with other factors (such as increased weaponization of the USD-led financial system) rise of alternative settlement systems corrodes the network effects on which USD relies. Each blow in isolation may be insignificant, but their accumulation could become critical owning to the extreme non-linearity of the network effects.
For tracking of military ships it's much better to use radar imaging satellites (e.g. see [0]). They can cover a larger area, see ships really well, and almost not affected by weather.
I will not be surprised if China has a constellation of such satellites to track US carriers and it's why Pentagon keeps them relatively far from Iran, since it's likely that China confidentially shares targeting information with them.
>it's literally modeled on the density of cone cells in the human retina
It's related to it, but not "literally modeled" on it. This number is from experiments where people are asked to equalize perceived brightness of two lights with different colors. The results are than averaged out and interpolated using polynomials to create a color model [0].
>The middle for the day, on our time keeping devices, being light outside goes all the way back to the first sundials over 3,000 years ago.
Most of the world is perfectly fine with 12:00 not being synchronized with high noon [0]. And some jurisdictions still semiannually f*k with it further using DST. Generously assuming the current time keeping system will survive for ~6k years (looking at the leap seconds accumulation rate for the last 50 years) we can just shift timezones by one hour.
You clearly do not know how much havoc and complexity leap seconds introduce into various systems. This is why leap seconds are likely to be phased-out [0]. It's effectively an admission that use of leap seconds in the "base" time was a mistake.
>We convert timestamps to and from date+times all the time.
If you do not account for time zones during this conversion, then you are not qualified to implement such conversions.
It's fine to use 86400 seconds for durations (e.g. "this computation will finish in 1d 8h 20m 34s"), but it's absolutely not fine to use it while dealing with datetimes.
Computer systems (most importantly, UNIX) should've been using TAI [0] from the beginning. Human-readable time in turn should be computed from it using periodically updated time zones database which would include offset between TAI and UTC. By eliminating leap seconds we effectively re-invented TAI with a weird offset. While I am in favor of eliminating leap seconds as a hacky way to fix the current mess, it's sad to see that we added yet another quirk to the already complicated system of datetime keeping.
>The article is adamant that "this is not printing money," and then gives very technical explanations that are honestly difficult to untangle.
Because it's BS. In the modern fiat system the most basic form of money printing is expansion of the central bank's balance sheet. It creates the "base money". Sure, technically the government issues debt to "borrow" the new money, but everyone familiar with the system understands the the debt will never be paid out in the classical sense and it will be just re-financed by future expansion of the central bank's balance sheet. So the end effect is the same: new units of the base money enter circulation contributing to inflation.
But there are other forms of "money printing" as well. Every time a bank issues a credit, in a certain sense, it also "prints money". As long as the bank system functions as usual, it's indistinguishable from the printing done by the government+central bank. This is why bank de-regulation can have the same effects as the classical money printing, but with additional risks of potential credit contraction caused by bad loans (though they are minimized by central banks more often than not...).
You assume that the executive branch would willingly follow the court decision. I think it's naive (doubly so for the current administration) and it's more likely that the tariffs will be re-introduced under a different sauce and that refund requests will not be processed using some flimsy excuses.
Hopefully, it will result in finally dropping use of SSNs as "secret" identifying person's identity and instead it will become an opaque ID which is safe to share.
This does not work at scale. Sure, there is plenty of anecdotes how you can successfully play this game as a consumer living in a rural house with electric car, power wall, and rooftop solar, but try to telling about it to someone living in a high-rise apartment or to a heavy industry business. Your preaching will fall on deaf ears.
IIRC there are several utilities in the UK which provide option to price electricity dynamically, but they are not popular because people do not want to play this game. They want reliable supply of electricity for reasonable prices. Trying to mold consumption to satisfy intermittency of generation is nothing more than shifting the externality akin to telling people "you must plant trees to offset CO2 emissions!".
1) Introduce a lot of intermittent generation into energy grid without sufficient amount of storage capacity.
2) Use marginal pricing model which effectively guarantees windfall profits for those sources.
3) Utilization of peaking power plants falls, but you still have to keep them because there is not enough storage capacity.
4) Peaking power plants rise generation costs to offset the lower utilization, further adding to the windfall profits.
5) You need more grid capacity to handle energy transfers from distributed generation sources.
5) ????
6) Act surprised when people loudly complain about electricity bills despite abundant "cheap" generation.
Intermittency of generation is an externality (same as CO2 emissions) and should be priced accordingly. People are willing to pay premium for supply stability, but the current pricing model does no account for that. Trying to change consumption habits (like smart grids, dynamic pricing, etc.) works poorly, especially for such vital resource as electricity.
I think there should be some kind of price penalty for intermittent sources dependent on total ratio of intermittent generation in the mix. At least until grid-scale energy storage technology will be advanced enough to store approximately week of total energy consumption.
I wonder if China has a constellation of similar satellites with the primary function to track the US CVBGs and provide aiming info for their "carrier killer" systems.
There are several factors which contribute to the "rosy" official picture:
- A lot of people participate in the gig economy instead of getting registered as unemployed.
- AI has eroded a lot of employment opportunities for graduates, i.e. people relatively active on social networks.
- Official data can be horribly inaccurate (phone surveys in 2025, seriously?) with grossly outdated models (remember the recent huge revisions?). Political pressure does not help here either.
- The unemployment stats do not account for significant downgrades in salary and working conditions. They will show the same picture for a person with a cushy office job and the same person working 2 jobs in retail from paycheck-to-paycheck.
Because unless you sit on top of a volcano, amount of renewable geothermal energy is minuscule. In most places on Earth it's somewhere around 40 mW/m2 (i.e. accounting for conversion losses you need to capture heat from ~500 m2 to renewably power one LED light bulb!). In other words, in most places geothermal plant acts more like a limited battery powered by hot rock, so unless drilling is extremely cheap, it does not make economic sense compared to other energy sources.
