Maybe I'm way off, but this post reads like AI wrote it, which diminished my interest in reading it. This probably has some bearing on the thesis. To wit: when mediocre analysis is so very cheap, actual human touch, i.e. editing/filtering/writing becomes way more valuable to anyone who cares to read it. Relatedly, reading becomes much more of a chore when I both have to filter for what interests me, and also simultaneously be on guard for whether I am reading the unedited machine written slop. The perceived value of the written word is taking a massive hit and that's frankly terrifying.
All I remember from seeing this as a kid is that, in the final scene, River Phoenix asks the hot government agent for her phone number. The number she gives is a real non-555 number--pretty sure it was 818 area code?. You could call that number and hear a message from the character for many years.
You're gonna love the answer to that. Disney's 1994 family holiday treat, The Santa Clause, starred Tim Allen as a guy who (I'm remembering this as I'm typing it and holy cow) sort of kills Santa Claus by startling him into falling off the roof. He then puts on the Santa suit and becomes the archetype himself. But in that movie, there's an off-hand reference to a phone number: 1-800-SPANK-ME, meant entirely sarcastically. Turns out, either that was already a real number or some enterprising pornographer recognized that there's no such thing as bad publicity, and precocious youngsters who called the line after watching the movie were invited to pay $5/minute for "the hottest phone line in America".
Tossing a few ARG links here, since the heyday of larger games (and especially ones with PTSN connectivity) is old enough some HNs might not have experienced them.
I really enjoyed the original Valve's Portal BBS you could dial into Aperture Science and read on the history. The writers at Valve really wrote some great silly backstory about a shower curtain company developing quantum portals, as some sort of tool to get in and out of showers. I'm not sure that's cannon anymore though.
I think that still is (per Portal 2), but some of the original details aren't – like how Cave Johnson poisons himself, and how much his excellent decision-making was influenced by said poisoning.
It's just words, obviously contradicted by many of Harvard's recent actions, but all I can think is what a fucking lay-up. If only Columbia's administration had half a spine they would have responded similarly.
Probably not, they'll just pump up international student numbers to recoup and basically gut the domestic student experience. There's near infinite demand for American universities overseas even now.
I think you're wrong. I know several bright students that have decided to not go to the US now given the persecution and targeting of international students.
Intl students are not mad. Who is going to pay the US intl student premium, to add the Columbia tag. Intl students are paying for very specific future life paths.
I am nervous about the US right now. So many cases are going to end up at the Supreme Court that is controlled by conservatives. It may not be the lay-up you think it is.
Also what happens if Trump just decides to ignore a court loss as he did with the recent deportation of Kilmar Garcia?
Believing that something is inevitable is the first step towards it becoming inevitable. But there feels like there is a momentum in people, and in society as a whole that only ends one way, and we need to release and explore. I don't know if once society gets the "bug" to tear it all down there's any going back.
I feel like we're destroying our societies and getting into wars out of curiosity, and because we've forgotten how it hurts more than anything else.
> Believing that something is inevitable is the first step towards it becoming inevitable. But there feels like there is a momentum in people, and in society as a whole that only ends one way, and we need to release and explore. I don't know if once society gets the "bug" to tear it all down there's any going back.
> I feel like we're destroying our societies and getting into wars out of curiosity, and because we've forgotten how it hurts more than anything else.
I can sort of theorize that human society does have the ability to cycle that is partially based on human life spans / human memory. It is like a LLM that runs out of context and then starts forgetting what it learned in the earliest part of the context. For humans it is related to our lifespans as we culturally forgot what we have learned, and thus have to relearn it.
That said, I think that periods of peace are punctuated with war. War resets the pressures that build during peace. This is similar to how refactors or rewrites are needed every once in a while as the technical debt builds up as requirements and use cases change over time, especially if no one was paying down the techn debt as you went.
Cultural ouroboros. Eventually we become so distant from our past selves culturally that we identify once normal, helpful, natural things as foreign. I'm seeing this with the new wave of mental illness in my generation.
Or you could find illegal conduct for congress people, have them sued in criminal courts, and then hold elections to elect people (republican or democrat) who will make congress function as it is meant to.
Perhaps someone can provide security services to republican congress people who are threatened with violence if they dont toe the line, so that they are safe enough to stand up to trump. (This is an actual reason given for their cowardice)
The core fundamental problem from my viewpoint in the US political system is unlimited campaign contributions which empowered the ultra wealthy. This means that elections are fought between ultra wealthy people and politicians have to first appeal to the rich people to get them on their sides, rather than the majority of the people.
You need to fix this, otherwise you have muted the impact of the majority of people in your democracy.
Perhaps. The Courts and the Legislature have yet to defend their powers, but the crunch point to do so is approaching. When we get past the stage that they have fully capitulated to Trump then it'll get truly ugly.
From a geographic standpoint, the conflict isn’t state vs. state this time around, though, it’s rural vs. urban. Blue cities in red states. Red counties in blue states. Not very conducive to conventional military conflict.
The biggest irony here is that after Roberts, the justices Trump appointed are the conservatives most likely to do the right thing. Gorsuch and Barrett are fine justices (even if they have opposing views to mine), Kavanaugh could be worse. Hopefully he doesn't get to choose another one or we'll get another Alito or Thomas.
I think people are missing one very sympathizable effect of this joint research, that it prevents either country from gaining an offensive edge from dual-use research that could be used for bio-weapons. You could argue that this has the benefit of preventing a bio-weapons arms race.
Vertiginous to think about the layers of unknowns.
Part of the subtext seems to be that constructing these turbines was a greenwashing campaign on Chevron's part. This kind of project helps to bolster the naive impression that these are "energy companies", as one commenter alluded, not just "oil companies". So in a sense these turbines have fulfilled their purpose.
Even more insidiously, the fact that the wind farm is now sitting idle achieves oil companies' secondary goal of making green energy look bad and unreliable. Thus keeping people divided on whether to support other green power initiatives and allowing our reliance on oil to continue. Profits protected.
The idea that Chevron is purposefully building wind farms not to operate them sounds dubious to me at best. My guess is they bungled something up because wind energy isn't their core competency.
Much more likely there is a room at Chevron where someone said "Wait who the fuck was responsible for negotiating that contract?" than "We're going to spend a bunch of money building a windfarm in Casper in order to get some small amount of good publicity, and the purposefully not operate it ?to make wind energy look bad?"
Nuclear energy is green and it’s very reliable. The problem is that people seem to think wind is a good idea, when it’s really a highly visible form of greenwashing.
Let's not downplay the simple fact that wind energy has the lowest levelized cost of electricty and has for over a decade now (in the US and AFAIK on average worldwide, not universally). As an intermittent source it's never going to be a silver bullet, but it's hardly surprising that a power source that's not just cheap but also has a long track record of being _consistently_ cheap gets a lot of usage. And the only other real competition is solar, which would likely have the same issues as wind in the specific case of the original article.
Much as nuclear energy is both green, reliable and safe - it's also hard to imagine it becoming cost-competitive at the scale that wind and solar are. Better regulation might help a bit, but even in places like South Korea where nuclear costs are unusually low and solar/wind costs unusually high they're basically competitive - and I wouldn't be surprised for solar+wind to fall in price there too, once they've slightly more mass in the market.
The focus on wind+solar over nuclear is less due to greenwashing that due to penny-pinching.
$4 billion for 500MW, or $8 per watt. That's 2-4x the cost per watt of solar.
That's not as bad as I expected, and probably looks even better when you factor in the difference in uptime (e.g. including storage into the cost of solar).
By "green" are you referring to the radioactive sludge it produces? ;)
I'm not anti-nuclear energy, but it comes with a host of problems and costs that many nuclear energy supporters tend to gloss right over. Chief among them is that no one wants these facilities in their backyard or anywhere near their backyard. Part of this is just NIMBY-ism, but the other part is a well-warranted fear of an accident or negligence leading to contamination. It's all great until the private equity firms take over.
Sorry, it felt like some kind of a leading "gotcha" question. Why are you wondering about nuclear power in Spain, specifically? And why only from someone living there? Both seem entirely out of context with the discussion thread, which didn't mention Spain before your comment.
If you want details from someone who can do a quick Google search, instead, I offer: It seems like there was a politically led moratorium for several decades, then allowed but regulated into impracticality. Meanwhile the reactors they built have operated well for about 40 years and provide a large portion of the country's annual electrical generation.
>But where does the 1978 year in the title come from?
This seems to come from the fact that although MMWR has been in publication since 1978, 100% of papers they have published on the topic has been in the past 3.5 years.
Not discussed in the article, but I think relevant, is the breakdown of search as a useful tool even on such venerated platforms as eBay, which has become similar to Facebook Marketplace in its vibes-based algorithm. Laser-focused search precision is a losing business model, apparently, and not the way of the future.
