On the explanation for step 1, the author only removes "the" as redundant. But there are more byte ranges that can be removed
The following can be removed as reduntant
"the " (notice the space)
"at"
IN https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-beats-the-heat/ , there is a very interesting quote.
"The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) has also been lauded for its growth in storage, but when put into perspective of load, the gap remains quite large. Comparing all-time peak load and peak storage discharge (non-coincident), ERCOT's battery fleet would have met less than 5% of demand, while CAISO's battery fleet would have met about 16%, more than triple the value in Texas."
Absolute numbers are not the right metric when one of the states doesn't care about efficiency and decides to generate more and more electricity. Then absolute number are huge but percentages of renewal are very low.
The fact that we have an English proficiency Index worth spending more than 10 words on really highlights the bias of the people who organize this data.
When I look at the ranking on p. 4, English does not appear to be very relevant. Switzerland is #31, but Greece #8. Romania is #12 just two places behind Germany #10. Italy is #46, France #49. India #69, China #91, Japan #92, Thailand #106.
The diagrams on p. 13 all have correlation coefficients (r values) between 0.56 and 0.61, which signify only moderate associations. And the causality from language to success behind such associations is very likely even weaker. In other words, people from many countries are good at English because their country is economically advanced (and not the other way round).
I think that on an individual level, it is very desirable to be able to at least read English very well because it opens up so many resources on the Internet. However, when it comes to economic impact, the ranking seems to suggest an extremely tenuous link at best. In addition, foreign language skills are likely to become even less relevant in the future as translation software improves.
This just seems like analyzing something until you’ve turned yourself around. By “extremely relevant” I don’t mean r=1. I just mean it matters.
Imagine doing that same analysis on a report of a country’s metal deposits. I’m sure it would be all over the place. But saying this topic isn’t worth writing ten words about would be silly.
They don't have their own japanese versions for a lot of stuff?
They still use the same software as the west (iOS, Android, Windows, Chrome, ...).
Most of these cornerstones of modern Software maintain Japanese, Chinese and Korean documentation, but there is no way those docs are as good as the English ones.
There are whole stacks of software used in Japan which are not used anywhere else. Sometimes it predates western adoption of similar ideas (like the media phones Japan had years before the iPhone, which to some degree Apple was copying), sometimes it Japan that adopts something western and then forks it. It is a recognized and studied phenomenon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_syndrome
There is some advantage to speaking English as you then get access to two separate development cultures and can pick the best of each for the job. But it is not a hard requirement like it is for the rest of the world. Only a small minority of engineers work on the latest western technology stacks like we do.
The report in question is the "world digital competitiveness ranking". I think it's safe to say that you can't get very high on that list without having very good English skills.
In that way I would say English fluency very much matters for Japan if they want to stay relevant with the rest of the world.
Correlation is not causation, and if you look at most of the graphs correlating English proficiency to outcomes, the correlation coefficient is around 0.55-0.65, which aren't great correlations. Paying closer attention, it seems that a lot of the correlation comes from the fact that the low-English-proficiency countries include some states that are in the process of self-immolation, and the countries that have the highest English proficiency has no one worse off than Greece and Croatia, which are about average on a global scale. The causation probably more goes the other way: the countries that do well on development can afford to have higher English proficiency than those that don't.
>English proficiency remains
a reasonable indicator of a nation's
ability to produce goods and services
that generate economic growth, and it
correlates well to national investment
in helping people achieve their full
potential by providing education,
healthcare and a decent standard of
living.
Meanwhile China's boom in the mid 2010-s (China is 2nd to dead last on this chart, above Japan) still had westerners flock to them. In a few instances, disgustingly so. The language barrier at that level of economy is negligible. A few skilled translators are a rounding error for that gold mine.
I'm more than fine with data for data's sake. I have all sorts of useless trivia and statistics that simply put a smile on my face and have little practical use. But using "how good you are at English as a society" to predict economics seems a bit tonedeaf.
That’s not a bias it’s just reality. Of course English proficiency isn’t perfectly correlated with economics. It’s one factor of many.
People aren’t usually trying to just predict GDP or something. A report like this is useful for a big company deciding where to expand. I’m writing this from Colombia, which has a big call center industry, much of it in English.
“English proficiency of a nation doesn’t matter, don’t talk about it much”, which is what you seem to be getting at, is so clearly wrong to me. Maybe it’s the bias of personal experience. Just because it’s not important to you doesn’t mean it’s unimportant in general.
You can talk about it all you want, but the correlation just seems too weak for a statement like the above to track. Nothing in statistics is perfect, but they should at least be reasonable (don't make me bring out the XKCD comic).
And sure. I have bias and didn't do any mass survey. But when you see more and more of your country falling in education ranks, and the people up top trying to appeal more to countries with very poor english skills as opposed to building those facilities domestically. , I'm going to be skeptical that the language of the country matter much in the grand scheme of things.
It seems that IMD is based in Switzerland and Singapore.[0] Singapore and Switzerland hold ranks 1 and 2, respectively, in digital competitiveness.[1] Singapore has a high level of English proficiency.[2]
I don't think the mere fact that an English proficiency Index worth spending more than 10 words on exists shows that the people who organized this data are biased. English proficiency is important in business, science and programming, to name some examples. I think an argument as to why the inclusion of such a metric is biased should be given.
Singapore is de facto part of the Anglosphere, ergo its 'high level of English proficiency'. Singaporeans are effectively bilingual, and English is used at all levels of interaction, from the wet markets and supermarkets, to the public and private schools and universities, to the highest levels of government administration and communication. Can't get more 'Anglo' than that.
It's natural for the citizens of a country that uses English as though it were its native language to be proficient in it.
To add, I've read about Singapore's English proficiency before in their 2020 census report, which notes that 48% of households speak mainly English at home which is definitely very high and clearly shows that Singaporeans speak English.[0]
It's somewhat ridiculous that Singapore is included in the English proficiency index given that is English is one of its four official languages. Not only that, but it's also the privileged official language that all children must use in school. The other official languages are widespread but not universal.
I think it makes sense to include it because not all Singaporeans are literate in English. For example 17% of Chinese Singaporeans were only literate in Chinese according to the 2020 census report.[0] Additionally, Singapore is not even highest on this list; Netherlands and Norway are slightly above it.[1] However, by the same token, the US should probably also be included due to its high level of non English-speaking immigrants.[2] It's worthwhile to note, however, that the EPI does not test a random sample of the population so the usefulness of these results is not certain.[3] This would be even more of an issue in the US were almost all EPI testers would be immigrants, so the results would look much lower than they actually are.
Is that including people who immigrated or only those who grew up there? Your link [0] mentions "residents" throughout, which implies that it's counting Chinese people who moved to Singapore as adults. I've known a decent number of Singaporeans, including many ethnically Chinese Singaporeans I met while working in Beijing, and I've never met a single person who grew up there and can't read English.
If adult immigrants are included, then I strongly agree with the later part of your comment! There's no reason the US shouldn't similarly be included in the list as it has tens of millions of Spanish-speaking residents who immigrated as adults. Canada, Australia and New Zealand should probably be included too, if Singapore is.
I also assumed it was including mainland Chinese immigrants, especially since the rate of Chinese only is so much higher than Malay only and Tamil only. Lots of wealthy Chinese move to Singapore every year. (A bit different from immigration in the US.)
Both Switzerland (9m) and Singapore (6m) are tiny. Even if they are at the top of everything per capita, it isn’t very meaningful given that the scale of China, the USA, and the EU, just dwarfs either countries by far.
A better translation is "Frankish language". The term predates "France" as we know it. Frankish was a Germanic language that was the source of a widely used pidgin throughout western Europe.
It's kind of ironic that we remember the name via the Roman scholars. Rome had fallen and the Holy Roman Empire was very not holy and sure as heck not Roman.
The Franks were mostly Germanic which is why English is considered a Germanic language and why Lingua Franca is a thing and why I can riff on the French (Franks) language being English as a silly joke.
English absorbs vocabulary from wherever and whomever it touches because it abhors a vacuum. I will give you a gold star if you can tell me how many languages I have referenced in that last sentence, and this one.
Byzantine Constantinople, I think, and the Fatimid Empire along the Mediterranean coast to the east. I could have said "Anatolia", but I didn't care to (to be Frank).
True, but this underestimates Japanese's prominence.
Japanese (and Korean) fluency is fairly important in much of ASEAN (for example, Vietnam and Thailand), as much of their leadership, rising executives, and rising academics tend to study abroad in Japan.
In Germany and Austria, for example, a lot of graduate level STEM university programs are taught in English, even when everyone in the room is perfectly capable of speaking German, just because the literature is English.
I'm not Vietnamese, but my SO is Vietnamese and used to do medical research in Japan as part of that ASEAN-Japan pipeline (and it's the same model in South Korea and Taiwan).
There are two types of ASEAN students:
1. "Students" - guest workers brought under the "Trainee" program who in reality are temporary guest workers cleaning toilets, gutting fish, manually harvesting strawberries, or working in hostess bars. They are treated similar to how Nepali and Bangladeshi migrant labor would be in UAE because these trainee workers in Japan lack legal support and often in debt to a broker in the home country.
2. Actual Students - brought as part of Japan's soft power diplomacy in ASEAN. They will study in a mix of Japanese and English or full Japanese (depending on the university). They will also be housed in dorms for international students. These students end up becoming civil servants, professors, and potentially business leaders.
Most junior and mid-level professors and medical leadership at top medical universities in Vietnam like UMP tend to be alums of these programs in Japan and SK.
This seems to be a joke. China has 70% of the world global research share on advanced aircraft engines Seriously? Maybe in writing papers . But that does not translate to actual product.
China has 50% of electronic warfare and 45% of radar? In what planet?
Any test to see if a lot of what is going on in other countries is not published?
Do you notice anything? The records keep falling ever summer. The battery discharge per day went up by 100% in the last year.
I do not see any bending of the curve.
California is the perfect example of building enough batteries can solve the duck curve problem.
Even in Texas, with the government actively against renewables and batteries, you see record been set for battery storage all the time
https://www.gridstatus.io/records/ercot?record=Maximum%20Pow...
Texas quadruple the battery storage in the last year.
Difference between California and Texas. California is about 3 years ahead of Texas. When the economics are so much cheaper, battery power is build .
I notice the wrong focus: how much such storage cost vs how much it will been able to run? My slowly discharged home battery have a declared loos of 5% in ~3 years and I discharge only 10%/day normally. My car SOH (NMC though), if true from ODB state 10% loss over ~2 years. Compared to some friends I can esteem 2.3 years of useful life for NMC, 8 years for LFP if MODERATELY used (80-20% 3 time a week), for grid storage the useful life might be 1-3 year.
Secondary consider the battery production capacity: actually we do not recycle batteries except few experiments, too expensive to be done on scale, that still recycle only a part of lithium, most efficient recover let's say 80% from a new battery.
What do you expect in 10 years?
VS
what you expect if we re-build on scale modern small buildings where p.v. at a significant slice of latitude it's roughly 50% of total consumption in pure self-consumption? What if a modern home who consume in hot summer ~30kWh/day consume from the grid ~5kWh/day like a home with no A/C and in cold winter consume ~40kWh/day, ~30 from the grid instead of 90-100kWh of a classic one (data ranged from homes in Sweden to Spain)? Because you know the most we get so far was from consuming much less to do much more, where we are far better than generating more from renewables in improvements rate terms. You can't "improve" classic buildings, you can only rebuild them and we haven't enough natural resources to rebuild cities not counting it's practically impossible for mere impact of such megaproject on existing human life.
The reality is that only a spread society of small stuff can evolve, and in a changing world we need to been able to evolve. That's the resilience WEF talk, denying it at the same time.
No.
Let's say I have $100 million. Every year, for 50 years, I get a $2 million loan against only $2 million of my asset. The loans keep rotating and keep going.
At the end of 50 years, I die. When I die, the assets go to my estate AND (and this is important) my assets base value is rebased to current values.
My heirs sell some assets to pay off the loans. BUT the assets have been rebased to current value, so there is no tax due (since sell value is the same as base value).
Let me repeat.
My estate pays NO TAXES at all since the assets were rebased.
