Yeah it all depends from how much you actually use the machine, My old i7 gaming system runs maybe 7 hours a week on average. I drive barely 10k kilometers a year with my old ICE car. Upgrading to a new gaming PC and Tesla would make neither economic or environmental sense.
Yes, that's exactly why I emphasized "daily driver" like 3-4 times in my argument. If you hava a gas guzzling gaming PC that you use rarely because your daily driver is an M1 or ARM tablet, then that inefficient PC doesn't make a difference.
My point was only if these old PCs are daily driven on a daily basis as workhorse machines, then the lack of efficiency becomes an sensible issue.
Similarly I've never bothered to upgrade from my from old i7-2600k gaming build from 2011, and will likely use it for many years to come. Paired with GTX1070, more RAM, and a larger SSD, it still delivers good enough performance for anything I want (and have time) to play, including AAA games from few years ago.
Lumber is widely used in Nordic and other Northern European countries, precisely because they have lots of forests. It's most common in houses, but even apartment locks are being built from wood these days. Fire safety is not much of an issue if you do it right.
Using more wood would make a lot of sense, since it's essentially a long-term carbon sink. Concrete production on the other hand causes massive carbon emissions. After spending some time in a house with lumber from 1800s, I can only admire the quality and craftmanship.
>but even apartment locks are being built from wood these days.
Are the apartments traditional wood-framed or cross-laminated timber? CLT is an entirely different beast that performs more like concrete or heavy timber in fire. I would put them more in the category of composite material.
I think CLT are already popular in parts of Europe, but in NA they are quite rare. They are usually only for very premium apartments or government buildings. Most wooden multi-unit buildings in NA are built the same way as houses and are quite flimsy. Though in the past couple years they tried to mitigate it with heavy stuffing of sound insulation to make everything sound more solid. One major difference is you don't hear footsteps as much. Older wooden buildings are a nightmare if you are sensitive to noise.
Pre-war houses (middle/upper-class ones) in NA are also quite solid. The structural quality difference between pre-war and post-war houses are night and day.
Traditional wood frame, with lumber pressure treated with a fire retardant. They might have some CLT beams, but they're predominantly built out of pressure treated lumber and plywood. They're safe because they have sprinkler systems, building-wide fire alarms and redundant fire-resistant staircases.
Sound generally isn't an issue if you have polite neighbors, but if somebody upstairs is doing jumping jacks you'll definitely hear it.
At least in my country, there are three types of "labor shortages".
1. Pay and/or working conditions suck so much people aren't interested. Think of nurses, various staff (restaurant, cleaning etc) that are often employed through third-party companies that offer you limited hours on weekly basis.
2. Labor limited through artificial constraints on supply. Doctors are a good example of this here - doctors associations successfully lobby to keep medical school student intake low, which means lower supply and better pay for those who make it.
3. Positions that require just too much experience, knowledge or talent to be obtained simply through right education. Think of top senior software engineers for example.
Nope, most people don't borrow a strong sense of identity from their jobs. They just do them so they can afford to eat. With UBI they could actually choose to do something which gives them a sense of purpose and identity. Doesn't even have to be art. Personally I enjoy gardening and growing food much more than my job. With UBI I could fully concentrate on that, instead of wasting my time on stuff I don't enjoy.
In fact it would be much more healthy for call-center workers to spend their time outdoors growing potatoes, instead of sitting indoors just to afford said potatoes. Lots of underpaid jobs like this are inherently unhealthy for humans.
> most people don't borrow a strong sense of identity from their jobs
Part of middle-class striver religion is that recognition for your labor is the only way to have an identity (or a "worth," both metaphorically and literally.) What you are in that worldview is exactly what the people who can pay think you are.
IMO the main problem is the arbitrary way borders were drawn in Africa by colonialists. Too many ethnicities that didn't get along very well suddenly shared a common state, while others were split between many countries. When even much richer and educated areas have problems with multiculturalism of much smaller scale (the Balkans, Spain, Belgium for example), it's not surprising that countries like DR Congo with over 200 languages spoken are basically ungovernable through democratic means. The border situation isn't anywhere near as bad in South America and most of Asia - and even there countries which lack common national identity tend to be less stable than others.
Peaceful coexistence of many cultures within the same society is a nice idea, but in reality it's very hard to do right due to the tribal nature of our specie. Highly successful multicultural countries appear to be an exception, rather than a norm.
> Highly successful multicultural countries appear to be an exception, rather than a norm.
Them why is this "ideal" of multiculturalism so heavily pushed in media and government action?
I personally speak four languages conversationally and from my familiarity, I cannot imagine even these similar cultures agreeing on enough basic values to form a stable society. How could dozens of cultures with different values and worldviews ever form a body of law that respects each tribe's values, customs, and interests?
By the popular conception of "diversity," these arbitrary dividing lines should certainly be a strength and not a weakness. It's telling that "mixing different cultures together" becomes a reason in hindsight that an African country fails , but looking to the future is supposed to be a reason a Western country (or company, etc.) will succeed. It's difficult to see how these claims can both be true.
Plenty of European countries have more than one language, only recently got 1 unified language.
You have countries like India that manage to make a cohesive country out of disparate peoples.
That's not to say these aren't contributing factors.
My current 'theory' / observation is that sub Saharan Africa never really had large scale civilisations, I wonder if that colours their conception of what a nation state is.
Eg, if you think in terms of tribes. Perhaps that hinders scaling up to something bigger.
If these peoples have been living and fighting and reproducing successfully for millennia, why do Europeans and Americans think it necessary to get group them into states and force them to form large-scale heterogeneous bodies of law? Does that just make it easier to remove the mineral wealth from the continent?
Or do they need to develop their own concept of the state, or at the risk of sounding imperialistic, do they need to learn the concept of the nation state?
Broadly speaking I would say having structures larger than a tribe is a net benefit. Whatever form that may take.
>Or do they need to develop their own concept of the state, or at the risk of sounding imperialistic, do they need to learn the concept of the nation state?
Western governments need to stop assassinating leaders and toppling democratically elected governments every few years for that to happen. That hasnt stopped and it has a chilling effect, which is the purpose.
Depends on how you define quality. A car that feels nice to sit on and drive may not be the most reliable way to get you from point A to point B consistently. The reliability of many (at least older) Toyota models is impressive, while German reliability has been mostly a myth in the 2000's.
Admissions are easy to do right. Just give anyone with a valid educational background (like college/high school completed) a chance to participate in a strictly observed live exam, which is then graded anonymously. 100% fair, leaves no place for discrimination. This is how many countries do it in Europe and it just works.
But what about economically disadvantaged minority groups? That's easy to fix too. Just give schools in poorer areas lots of extra funding and resources, and their skills should improve, so that they do well in exams without any ridiculous "positive discrimination" based on skin color or ethnicity. As a bonus you also help poor people who may not belong to a disadvantaged ethnic minority, but still suffer from same lack of opportunities.
Of course all this requires money, which the 1% isn't willing to give. But from anyone else's perspective it's plain stupid that the system first fails to give people of poorer background proper education, and then tries to fix this by discriminating based on ethnicity, which only partially correlates with poverty and bad schooling.
We will never have this because neither side wants it:
Schools do not want it because they lose total control over who they accept. Harvard wants to accept the children of the current ruling class knowing that they will become the next one, and in doing so keeping alive the mythos of Harvard as ruling class incubator.
The other side, which we can call the affirmative action supporters, don't want it either because they see it as a racist by proxy system. And also because it turns out that Asians and Indians (and others too) would do exceedingly well with this system.
>"Just give schools in poorer areas lots of extra funding and resources, and their skills should improve, so that they do well in exams without any ridiculous "positive discrimination" based on skin color or ethnicity. As a bonus you also help poor people who may not belong to a disadvantaged ethnic minority, but still suffer from same lack of opportunities."
Many poorer areas already receive extra funding, but their SAT results are still well below those in richer areas with lower school funding. There are many examples of this, and a number of potential causes have been described (including selection bias, rich parents volunteering more, and others). One example of this is the District of Columbia.
What do you put on the exam? Harvard isn't just looking for academic success. They're looking for the next generation of leaders. How do you test for that?
In France, admission to the best higher education institutions, like Ecole Polytechnique, is done through an anonymously-marked written exam with questions about math, physics, etc. Admission is entirely based on how you scored on that exam, with the top N scores guaranteed admission (and the ones below that have to expect some people above to decline for whatever reason, which in the case of Polytechnique is rare, unless they got into something equally prestigious like Ecole Normale Superieure).
This system has produced three Nobel recipients (Becquerel in physics, Tirole and Allais in economics), many famous mathematicians and physicists (Carnot, Cholesky, Chasles, Coriolis, Fresnel, Mandelbrot, Navier, Poisson, Poincare, Thevenin, Lagrange, etc.), three French Presidents (Giscard d'Estaing most recently), many military leaders, astronauts, CEOs, etc. and indeed also Hacker News posterboy Fabrice Bellard (and that's just for one school, Ecole Polytechnique).
Moodle seems to be good enough to cover the needs of vast majority of university courses I've encountered - ones where you read some materials, watch some vids, discuss and write essays. However, I feel that there are better options for ones which benefit from more interactivity, like maths or coding, even if Moodle supports it through plugins.
Why exactly would people change batteries that don't need to be changed? Phones do have battery health indicators, and buying one costs money. There's no logical reason to change one, until they have degraded significantly. The only difference is that now you can change it more easily yourself, rather than having someone else do it for money, which they will happily do regardless of battery health.
When combined with requirement for longer support with updates, this change in legislation will help creating a healthy second-hand market for more devices. Cheap, non-serviceable Android phones that get updates and are used only for a year or two are the real source of waste, we need a proper second-hand marker for those similar to expensive Apple devices.
