What's the round trip efficiency of something like this, and what's the rate of loss to the environment? There's been a couple of these posted in the last few days and I have no feel for these numbers.
This is an article by ourworldindata, who aggregate a bunch of (mostly economic) metrics from countries around the world. It is common for energy use to be reported in that way on a country level. This looks like an explainer for the users of their website on what the terminology means.
It makes perfect sense when you think about who the audience for this data is, economists, planners etc. In those roles, the primary concern is the actual quantity of heat and electricity that the population needs in their homes and workplaces, and you need to be able to back that out to how much raw fuel that requires, or how much transmission capacity you need. You need to know this summary info so you know where the focus needs to be. At moment for instance, they need to know how much gas they need in storage tanks in Europe for this winter, and it's information like this that helps them figure that out.
This looks extremely cool. I'm doing a masters right now and would definitely use it!
My one question though would be how are the notes stored? Is it possible to download them as latex or a markdown file or something? If I have to keep up a membership to return to them that would be unfortunate.
Cool project though, there's definitely a need for something more fluidly interactive in the university notetaking space. Best of luck!
Layoffs seem to be up, but that's a questionable chart if ever I saw one. I doubt they have had representative coverage of the market for that whole period. With those numbers, looks like it's as much a chart of the increase in their data collection on layoffs as it is a chart on layoffs.
Without megaprojects, we'd all probably still be living a subsistance agrarian lifestyle. It's hard to tag specific dollars to a specific public project, they often work as multipliers across the economy.
I think you can technically mitigate some concerns for the people who understand that, but practically it's going to be a very different story. People will believe who/what they believe, and an expert opinion on trustworthiness is unlikely to change that.
I think being in the real world and meeting real people is the only way to create a real, functional society. Allowing people to drift away into their own AI supported worlds would eventually make cooperation very difficult. I think it would just accelerate the tendency we've seen with social media, creating ever more extreme positions and ideologies.
That sounds great on paper, but you would almost definitely get people squeezing around the letter of the law.
I mean, take noise. It seems easy to regulate because you just put a decibel limit on it, but that doesn't take the nature of the sound into account. So, you could have a business making crying baby sounds for dolls putting that out all day. It's really hard to define something like "no overly annoying sounds", and that's just one aspect of this kind of thing.
There needs to be a relaxation of the tight zoning rules we have these days, but trying to define limits on externalities has lots of problems too.
The solution seems to be a Goldilocks zone between popularity and death, too popular and it devolves, too unpopular and it dies. HN manages to keep itself tucked neatly into that zone I think.
Tunnels are also significantly more expensive, which is why they're so rare. With a tunnel, you generally have significant earthworks, possibly a permanent groundwater issue (you may have essentially created a boat that you do not want to float), and you still have to build a bridge capable of carrying whatever traffic the bikes are bypassing. A bicycle bridge is just the bicycle bridge, a relatively light structure, easy to construct and maintain.
It's like that smart home post from a few days ago. The dream is that lights, heating and entertainment automatically turn on and off and adjust throughout the day. The reality is that someone in the house has to become the IT department, troubleshooting issues all the time. The reality is just way more work than the dream.