There are about 300 coal power plants in Europe, so with just 1,500 people they could all be shut down at least temporarily. Meanwhile we get some 'climate marches' with hundreds of thousands of people in attendance.
If Germany's eco-protesters are serious, maybe they should protest the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
From Wikipedia:
> Nord Stream has a total annual capacity of 55 billion m3 (1.9 trillion cu ft) of gas, and the addition of Nord Stream 2 is expected to double this capacity to a total of 110 billion m3 (3.9 trillion cu ft).
CO2 emission of natural gas is 53.12 kg per thousand cubic feet [1], so the additional 2.0 trillion cubic feet of Nord Stream 2 translates to ~106,000,000 tons of CO2 per year. Germany emitted 775,752,190 tons of CO2 in 2016, so it's a significant fraction of Germany's whole emission.
...Alternatively, they could go back twenty years and tell those anti-nuclear activists to shove it, but since time travel is impossible, I'll settle for not building more pipelines in 2021.
You are basically advocating for acts of terrorism that will kill people. There are plenty of places like hospitals that need reliable power or people will die.
Of course, the potential death toll from climate change is infinite, since we will never be able to remove the CO2 from the atmosphere in any meaningful way (we would need to recreate the Carboniferous period or the Azolla event).
And a blockade on manufactured products from China / shut the Suez, make half of it uneconomic. So there must be no exported / offshored pollution. What we can't make economically in Europe with green energy, we don't need / can't have. And EU countries with political majorities who disagree are free to have the ECB uninsure their banks.
The time for half measures and excuses is long past.
There may be issues with Steam's hold of market share (or not), I won’t debate that. But I don’t think it’s comparable at all to the topic at hand. If you want to sell a video game to PC (personal computer, not necessarily Windows) users, there are many options besides Steam and Steam has no special position of privilege on any platform it's available on (Windows, Mac OS, Linux). You could still distribute your game by CD if you wanted to and it would work as well as any game bought on Steam. There are also many other digital games distribution platforms. They may not be as popular as Steam, but Steam has no inherent advantage over them. On a Windows PC, for example, Steam has no advantage over Origin, or GOG Galaxy, or any other.
Its popularity is due to other factors, not some privileged position it occupies. Unlike Google’s or Apple’s app stores which absolutely have a privileged position on their respective platforms.
Steam doesn't own the underlying platforms that they are selling on. This is the biggest issue for me regarding Apple. Even with Android, at least you have some escape hatches, although they are not very user friendly.
Sounds like an unrelated topic designed to get people to not focus on the main Google and apple topic. There are dozens of industries that could be broken up but aren’t. Take D*sney’s near monopoly on comic book/fictional characters/plotlines ect. No one bats an eye about that, why would anyone care about steam? It’s all just entertainment. Google and Apple aren’t just about entertainment as they touch almost every part of life in modern society.
That article doesn't make sense to me, even (or especially) in 2017. It sounds like it's conflating IAP (which doesn't have to go through the Steam store, unlike other platforms) with game purchases, but even that doesn't fully account for it to me.
Where's all the rest of the money supposedly going through?
Trying to dig into the sources of that article a little bit, what makes the most sense to me is that the $4.3 billion number is Steam's cut of the sales. If you go for a 3-4× multiplier, then you're looking at somewhere around half the total PC gaming market going to Steam.
Which kind of feels about right: there are other game stores; Ubisoft and Origin are the ones that cater to AAA publishers as well. Not to mention that things like the Microsoft Store could well cater to the surprisingly large casual game market (one of the sources quotes $5.2 billion for "Browser PC Games", which I think is reflective of how big casual games are). And you can find people who publish and distribute games outside of Steam.
So saying that Steam has a dominant but not overwhelming market feels correct. The numbers I see most bandied about are 50-75%, which look to be estimated from very old data from what I see. I'm sure if any competitor to Steam had reason to believe they were larger than Steam, they'd be trumpeting it as loudly as they could.
How is he defining market share? I find that number hard to believe simply because Steam doesn't have some of the most popular PC games like Warcraft, Fortnite, and League of Legends.
> bans app store operators with dominant market positions from forcing payment systems on content providers and "inappropriately" delaying the review of, or deleting, mobile contents from app markets.
Does steam block or make it hard for people to download the same programs via other means? looks more like a premium platform rather than a gatekeeper.
Steam has competition - Epic Game Store, Windows, or direct distribution. It is a lot more feasible for a consumer to switch between these stores, so there can be an effective market that choses which service to use.
This does not exist for iOS because there's no other stores on the platform, and you cannot "just" switch to another the Play Store.
May be because gaming industry is not as important as yet as a the device that is used by almost majority of the world population?
Also no one is forcing anyone to install steam. And steam is not the only way to get games to work as intended on your PC.
Steam is not really big enough in Korea to be on the radar. Single player pc games aren't really that popular, and the dominant ones like LoL or other MMO RPGs have their separate installer/launchers
What about Amazon? Or any other dominant player in any market?
Steam does not come pre-installed on nearly every device unlike Apple's and Googles offering. Future Steam Deck not withstanding, but that will be miniscule player.
They don't prevent any other store from operating. So I don't see how they are comparable to anything Google or Apple does. Windows Store might qualify if they forced themselves on Windows in same way. But certainly Steam is entirely different.
This seems like a disingenuous whataboutism. You are free to not use Steam as a publisher. You can use Epic/GOG or choose to self-host. The biggest advantage of Steam is the convenience of payments, marketing and infrastructure. If that is not an attractive option for you, you can skip it.
This option is not available for iOS at all and is quite limited on Android.
If AI is suitable for 99% of driving, why not use remote drivers for the remaining 1%? (eg. accidents, construction, adverse weather)
You could have a central office in a cheap location of the USA for professional drivers to take control as required. We already do it military for drone strikes...
If this is correct then the most logical decision is to immediately cease all domestic COVID limitations, and expose as much of the vaccinated population as possible to the existing strains.
Australia, New Zealand etc. should open up immediately.
One of the problems of recycling (glass, plastics, etc.) is that each container uses a different type of material, and shape.
We should mandate an international standard size container for food and beverages, so that eg. glass bottles can be reused by multiple brands, just with a different paper logo glued on.
Not sure about the ejaculation point. Especially with zinc, the amounts released from ejaculation are far less than the rda and the same is also true with the other trace minerals present in semen. Even if we account for multiple ejaculations per day, diet contributes much more to any possible mineral imbalances than ejaculation could. You really can't out ejaculate even just a single day worth of zinc rda food intake. At ~3% of the rda per ejaculation that's ~33 ejaculations.
It's about the overall system. If the man has a full sack, his body won't be utilizing its top-notch resources to replenish itself, making sure it is always at-the-ready. Once restocked, the resources devoted to that unique assembly line can be applied to repair and enhance operations.
Having to arm that legion of competitive swimmers is an energetic undertaking of no small measure and no small importance -- quite the opposite, actually. That is why fasting and exercise are effective ways to tamp down one's sexual impulses. Well, avoiding stimulation (visual and otherwise) can also help tame our more primal energies.
[[[ Also, the GP failed to mention exercising and avoiding the consumption of refined oils as other ways to keep the skin less clogged and infected. ]]]
Regardless, semen retention is a way for a man to keep his body burning less quickly through our molecular environment, both internally and externally. The old Taoist texts (IIRC) teach 60 or 80 drops of blood are required to produce a drop of semen, and some significant amount of food to create a drop of blood. Stem the loss and the pipeline backs up, in a good way, so long as the man doesn't become an unbearable ahole, but that's related to self-control via self-evolution of the ego combined with the amount of stimulation they must/choose-to endure.
Does anyone have science on specifically sugar? I find that correlation too (only with lots of cheap candy/bad greasy food), but feels kind of Goop-like bs. what is the mechanism for that to affect bacteria on the face?
I present to you honey. Honey never goes bad, it has anti-fungal and anti-bacterial properties and for this reason is why it also helps with wound healing.
I like raw honey, but I don't think it does much for allergies. However, I can tell you that bee pollen does do something. If you try pollen you have to start very early in the season (like Feb-Mar early) with 1 grain and then increasing the count from there.
Whether honey or bee pollen, if being used for allergies, you should be using product from your local area, not imported from far away and especially not another country with completely different flora.
Anecdotal, but switching the honey I used in my morning oatmeal to a locally-farmed raw variety really did seem to help quite a bit with my seasonal allergies.
A qualifier on that statement is that the seasonal allergies started when I moved 1000 miles to a very different part of the country. It may just have been acclimation, but I don't plan on switching back to the other types of honey to test if the symptoms return.
It's not entirely gone, some years are nothing and some are light. Nothing is ever are terrible as the first few years were, though.
I believe that the authority in sugar is DR. Robert Lustig. He has a great book called Fat Chance, there he explains in details how sugar is a toxin and correlates with a plethora of diseases. Great read from a true hero that saved many obese kids during his practice.
I found that switching to simply using water for bathing most of my body did wonders. Skin feels clean, rarely if ever is it dry or oily. Took a couple weeks to adjust. everyone is different though, YMMV.
> Latest estimates from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show 89.8% of adults in England are likely to have the antibodies, with the highest percentage of adults testing positive for them estimated to be the age groups 60 to 64, 70 to 74 and 75 to 79 (all 96.8%).
> The lowest percentage was for 16 to 24-year-olds at around 59.7%.
The 92% (91.8% cited) is presumably from this sentence?
> In Wales, 91.8% of adults are estimated to have antibodies in their system
After reading this article, Afghanistan doesn't seem inherently like a war of attrition at all.
"Men fought, men switched sides, men lined up and fought again. War in Afghanistan often seemed like a game of pickup basketball, a contest among friends"
It seems more like renaissance Europe, where armies of Condottiero would parade against eachother, and the smaller or less extravagant side would back down.
This probably didn't suit the USA, who wanted real, bloody war, to justify trillions of dollars of military spending. Just like Vietnam: 'body count'.
"The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war"
- Julian Assange, 2011
Rapid takeover by the Taliban instead of months of dragged out death and destruction is a fair outcome for the country.
>> This probably didn't suit the USA, who wanted real, bloody war, to justify trillions of dollars of military spending. Just like Vietnam: 'body count'.
The role of the US went from hunting and killing Taliban to not allowing them a permanent base from which to launch terror attacks to "nation building" where the military was then building schools and gas stations. The US never wanted a "bloody war". If they did, they could end the Taliban in the span of a few weeks, just like they did ISIS. It wouldn't be a war, it would be a rampage for which many in the US population and politicians wouldn't have the stomach for. Thus, we have "surgical strikes" and operations that go above and beyond protecting civilian casualties.
>> Rapid takeover by the Taliban instead of months of death and destruction is actually the best possible outcome for the country.
I'm not sure how replacing the US military with the Taliban is considered "the best possible outcome for the country."
> If they did, they could end the Taliban in the span of a few weeks, just like they did ISIS. It wouldn't be a war, it would be a rampage...
This whole paragraph seems utterly bizarre.
US did NOT "end" ISIS, certainly not alone. Most of the fighting and dying was done by Shia and Kurdi forces inside Iraq whose lives literally depended on stopping ISIS. US failed in Afghanistan precisely because no such ally existed.
And, what exactly do you mean by "rampage"? There seems to be an awful implication- "if US forces didn't bother about civilian casualties, Taliban could be surely defeated". Which I suppose is true, there can't be any Taliban if there isn't any more afghan.
You're oversimplifying. It took the US a full decade, with countless military intelligence resources, to find and kill their #1 target, OBL. But somehow if we were just more aggressive, all the enemies could have been quickly swept up?
These are soldiers who don't wear uniforms. There is no standing army or targets to "rampage" through, unless you mean entire villages. You're saying if the US had just been less tolerant of civilians, more Taliban would be dead. And what of the relatives of the civilian dead? Now they are your enemy, and the Taliban regrows like a hydra. Keep killing without regard, and now whole tribes side with the Taliban against the clear enemy. Provinces flip, and eventually the whole country is filled with an enemy you created.
The mission changes character once a critical mass of the country supports the other side. Certainly it would not be "nation building", just outright occupation, which works exactly as long as an overwhelming force is present. The conclusion would have been the same in the end.
It took the US a full decade, with countless military intelligence resources, to find and kill their #1 target, OBL.
ObL might have been at "Tora Bora" at some point in 2001. After that, he wasn't even in Afghanistan. How hard could they really have been looking, if they didn't even look in the right country?
> Thus, we have "surgical strikes" and operations that go above and beyond protecting civilian casualties.
While US army is significantly better then Taliban, the surgical strikes killed civilians fairly regularly and wish to protect civilians is not exactly "above and beyond".
> I'm not sure how replacing the US military with the Taliban is considered "the best possible outcome for the country."
I think that OP meant "compare to 2 years long war after which Taliban takes power anyway". That was the estimation as America was leaving - that ANA will be able to hold off for two years. They were not expected to win, but they were not expected to fold that fast.
US advisors were delusional, that seem to be sure now.
I mean, I agree with that logic, theoretically. Theoretically, if you know you will loose in 2 years, it is better to not fight and hope your treatment will be better as result.
But, groups did hold up and fought lost or seemingly lost wars. It is not just that they logically concluded it is all helpless and gave up. That does not seem to be the only or primary factor here.
>> US advisors were delusional, that seem to be sure now.
The numbers the military were giving them were completely inaccurate.
Biden said the Afghan army was 400K strong. It was not. It wasn't even close. The most recent figures put the Afghan army conservatively at 170K. Imagine touting a 4:1 advantage and then realizing, it's more like a 1:1 contest.
The Taliban numbers were way off too. The media and politicians were saying they had 50-75K, when in reality their numbers are closer to 100K if not more. Even back in 2018 they were saying they were 85K+.
The military chiefs saying they had trained that many Afghans was also wildly inaccurate. One of my family members was part of the Marines who were tasked with training the Afghans. He said it was nearly impossible to train them because they never took it seriously. They never expected the US to leave them. For many, it was a cushy paycheck that put them on easy street - it was never about defending their country, or having a sense of patriotism or duty. He repeatedly called them "clowns" and after a year, he asked to be reassigned and told his superiors the training was useless and there was no way these men would fight anybody, even with the best equipment and training they provided.
The assessments being made were incredibly off base and not even close to being accurate. The information that should've been coming out of there was the Afghan force was very small, barely trainable, and would never fight the Taliban or any other group regardless of how much you pay them or equip them or train them. Instead, politicians were repeatedly fed a fantasy about how the Afghans had a huge force, were trained by the best and fully capable to defend their country when the draw down or withdrawal happened.
When you talk to people who were over there and ask them what they saw and experienced? None of them are surprised by what happened. When you ask the Joint Chiefs and politicians in Washington? Total confusion and shock.
>> They never expected the US to leave them. For many, it was a cushy paycheck that put them on easy street - it was never about defending their country, or having a sense of patriotism or duty.
To be fair, it's hard to imagine any person with a sense of patriotism or duty accepting to be trained by the invaders of their country to become a kind of native garrison for them.
Although I don't pretend to understand how Afghans saw the war, the US, their allies, or the Taliban, or anything else. It can't have been simple.
All that amounts to evidently delusional US advisors, for years.
And on US side, it resembles corporations in a way. The more optimistic report you give, the more you are rewarded. If you talk about issues, you are sidelined. So people down on hierarchy know there are issues and high on hierarchy get to pretend how good everything is.
On afghan side, it amounts to organization capable people who have choice won't join. You join it to get free meal, to steal a thing or two. You join it if you don't have much perspective otherwise.
Patriotism can't be motivation either, because Afghan would be joining American led army. And expectations that US will be there forever was fairly reasonable too. It is atypical for US to leave I they can have influence.
Right now, our roads are only designed to be human-readable.
But what if machines become the dominant drivers? We need to make the roads machine readable: Road signs redesigned 'QR Code' style, maybe even some kind of wireless broadcast system to communicate traffic light changes.
That’s really expensive on top of the inherent inefficiency of cars: you’re paying a ton of money for something which uses a lot of energy and pollution (yes, even BEVs) to carry slightly over one person on average. Rebuilding the road system won’t change that or make climate change go away, especially since you’d need a lengthy transition period.
What might make sense is limited deployment in areas where the problem can be constrained: dedicated bus routes, truck convoy lanes on an interstate, etc.
For the rest of it we should be focusing on how to get people out of cars since even BEVs pollute far more than buses, rail, bicycles, or walking.
Energy consumption is a factor of distance. "Get people out of cars" in inherently implying removing the fundamental right to freedom of movement and living a better life. Cars have done more to equalize rural populations and give them a quality of life closer to city dwellers than any other modern invention maybe short of publicly funded water and power infrastructure.
I'd highly encourage you to move to the middle of the country and live a 30 minute drive outside of town (because that is all you can afford). You'll quickly realize that super bad evil cars are the means by which a good percentage of the population has access to fresh food, medical care, and other basic needs.
Energy consumption is a factor of both distance and efficiency: this is why trains are so much more efficient than semi-trucks which are more efficient than personal vehicles even if they’re traveling between the same points: steel on steel rails have less friction and the first two have better engine to cargo ratios. My comment was specifically focused on the latter since a huge fraction of vehicle pollution comes from affluent people driving in urban areas, not farmers.
Also note that I’m not disagreeing that mobility is important but that we literally cannot afford to continue polluting the way we have. You tried to make this emotional with the “super bad evil cars” phrasing but it’s a simple engineering question: right now, people have built lifestyles based on low subsidized fossil fuel prices and being allowed to ignore externalities. I’m aware of what that lifestyle is like – and how often it’s not “all you can afford” but “where you can afford to buy the house as big you think you deserve”, too - the latter being far less sympathetic when asking everyone else to subsidize it.
When energy is cheap and you can ignore pollution, you can drive an overpowered vehicle on frequent trips with minimal use of the total cargo capacity. If the cost goes up, those calculations all change: people pay attention to fuel efficiency when buying vehicles and combine / reduce trips, invest in household efficiency, etc. Cost-constrained American rural dwellers and those I’ve met in other countries with higher fuel costs don’t drive a vehicle designed to haul livestock to pick up groceries because it’s overkill.
That extends to things like zoning: the majority of people living in exurbs for financial reasons are doing so because closer in development was low density, often required by code, and significant amounts of land were required to be used for car storage.
Part of climate change mitigation will be reversing those problems, and that kind of thing seems like a more fruitful area for us to be spending time than trying to make high-pollution commuting more appealing.
I've always wondered whether it would be possible to have some kind of compartmentalized bus.
Some kind of compromise between asking people to cram themselves like sardines against a bunch of strangers, while still allowing people to sit next to their family members and friends.
It's convenient to say a desire to not jam up close to strangers implicates its holder in some terrible character flaw of not caring for ones fellow human. But if you really want to get more people on buses it's a desire we'll have to accommodate and contend with.
You're describing a system that is operating beyond capacity. There's no special fix required other than increasing capacity, by adding more buses to existing routes or new routes. There may be political issues with allocating funding or getting authorities to acknowledge/address lack of capacity. But it's not something that requires redesigning the bus.
I work in the area. I would say the static stuff that’s hard is stuff that’s also hard for human drivers, like poor lane markers or ambiguous signage. So I’m not sure that QR codes will help—-just fix the signage.
That makes a lot of sense, on a highway with three lanes, I'm always making sure to not merge to the middle lane, if there is a car on the opposite lane, to name another situation.
The hard question which really has nothing to do with the tech, is what we do if a self driving car kills a person. Made worse if the accident could be avoided by the majority of human drivers.
>The hard question which really has nothing to do with the tech, is what we do if a self driving car kills a person. Made worse if the accident could be avoided by the majority of human drivers.
we have already had exactly such a case - Uber. Even though Uber was totally negligent, nothing happened to them, beside probably some settlement behind the scene. In part they were able to wiggle it by showing a bad dynamic range video (which is completely different from how human eyes see in such situation) there the victim appears as if out of nowhere.
I think that case just sets the pattern that the autonomous vehicles will not be judged according to human driver standard.
So what happens with the human driver (you) if the same accident happens ?
If the Uber case sets the standard, then negligent homicide is a likely charge.
The sentence for that in the US is "A minimum of 4 years in prison and up to a maximum of 8 years in prison" according to this link:
Machine readable roads already exist. They are called train tracks and are already used by autonomous trains. They also allow for far more energy and space efficient transport with better throughput than cars.
Reading signs is the really, really easy part. If your vision system can't read and recognise the signs and signals reliably, it's not even beginning to solve the other problems. Trying to adapt the roads to make this part easier is a terrible return on investment. 99% of what you could do to make roads easier to use for self-driving cars is basic maintenance: making sure the signs, markings, and signals remain clearly visible, which also helps improve the performance of human drivers.
I remember watching a documentary on Discovery in the early 90s where they showed a motorcade of 10 Audis closely following each other using radar and some magnetic markers embedded in the road surface. They could maneuver within inches of one another, stop on a dime etc. I wonder how much embedding such passive markers into the new roads would have cost compared to the amount of money pumped into autonomous driving companies so far.
From anywhere to anywhere is also an unnecessarily lofty goal. Bringing me to the front of a store in a strip mall is nice, but dropping me off at the street is good enough. Even doing enough streets in a city to pickup/dropoff within 1/4 mile would be revolutionary.
We can... but it's not needed at the rate things are going. AI will be able to understand almost everything humans can and it's way cheaper to not have to rebuild things for machines.
No one needs masks anywhere, except perhaps those currently symptomatic and needing to travel in public to access treatment.
Children certainly don't:
"Distancing, hybrid models, classroom barriers, HEPA filters, and, most notably, requiring student masking were each found to not have a statistically significant benefit"
Its possible that the lack of regular human contact and connection (including not being able to see people's faces) is having seriously negative cognitive and development impacts on children; https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2031
We need people power - shutting down coal plants by blockading entry of personnel and deliveries, and disabling equipment.
It took just 5 people to shut down this power plant in Germany: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/04/no-regre...
Saving 26,000 tonnes of CO2.
There are about 300 coal power plants in Europe, so with just 1,500 people they could all be shut down at least temporarily. Meanwhile we get some 'climate marches' with hundreds of thousands of people in attendance.