Setting out on a major geo engineering project is a folly or a cynical PR greenwash - maybe both. Anything to avoid change to entrenched interests. We already have a highly viable path to transition to Renewable power while optimizing all sorts of sustainability loops.
I don't understand why worktrees either, but to each their own.
For my purposes, the alternative with just switching branches or if parallelism is needed, full repos and remotes (including local path remotes) is just much more flexible. Clone local, branch it, optionally do anything later: push a branch back to the local repo, push it to a remote, delete local repo done.
The actual code and clean merges is much more significant than worktrees vs full clones
Following neoliberal economic strategy has optimized for profit maxing over basic quality of life, let alone competency of building and operating complex systems. While the US is #1 in the trend, the UK is following pretty closely
That is specifically because the Tories privatised water. Historically, like most places, the vital-to-life water supply and corresponding sewage processing were owned by the public in England and Wales. People hated the idea of this being changed, but Tory doctrine says that absolutely everything should be owned by for-profit companies even though we know that can't work. So, first they forced the publicly owned companies to stop investing and then they privatised the water supply, wrote off all debt owed by the public institutions and handed the new private companies £1.5 billion because hey, if you believe in nonsense, why not?
The result was universally dismal, these private companies "leak" sewage into previously clean waterways, avoid taxes, divert as much money as possible to their off-shore owners, and of course they insist they constantly need higher and higher charges from their captive customer audience, then "oops" the money is used to pay off wealthy investors and none of the urgently needed work gets done.
I hate how the UK sewage system has failed. I agree that a good share of the blame lies with the for profit asset stripping owners. But just blaming 1980s Thatcher privatisation lets the government off the hook. The regulators (Ofwat and the Environment Agency) have watched this happen from the sidelines and failed to apply the law. Every “non exceptional” spill is a criminal offence with potential jail term, including actions of corporate conspiracy. The are 10,000s river and sea spills per year. Where is the punitive action? Why are the perps walking free? This is the soft corruption of the lobby and revolving door appointments (head of a water company one year, boss of the EA the next). Sure the only way to fix it now is (uncompensated) nationalisation, but the regulators have failed to anpply the regulations and are as much to blame.
Regulatory corruption (regulatory capture) is a understood and predicted effect of privatization. It's the class that decided to start and stay on the privatization strategy that also hold the political power to regulate more strongly.
I recall that most Tory voters in the 1980s were "sold" on the idea of privatisation (and had real horror stories in relation to eg phone line installation delays).
One of the ideas was to widen share ownership to the average bloke. Sure - that never happened (although many average pensioners maybe hold Macquarie via an investment fund).
This "class" actually, in general, are very angry about regulatory capture and we blame the class of woke bien pensant "leaders" who back scratch and go in and out of the media, the lobby, the civil service, NGOs and the privatised utilities scratching each others' backs and telling us all we are idiots. [Rory Stewart being their patron saint]
That 10M is a theoretical back of the napkin number. The city would have had to make multiple major infrastructure improvements, including major public transportation improvements, as well as secure major new sources of water for that to occur. To even accommodate the current modern number of people, there had to be fairly aggressive public water conservation regulations and campaigns - which amazingly did keep the water consumption fairly static. But if you were to more than double the residents, it's really not clear where the water would come from.
That infrastructure was still built, just out in the Inland Empire, at a far far higher cost per capita than if LA had stuck to its "theoretical back of the napkin number." (That's how zoning works, it's theoretical back of the napkin numbers that block buildings.)
Densification of existing land use is exceedingly cheap. People use far less water, fewer miles of sewer, fewer vehicle miles, fewer miles of wire and pipe, all while having access to a far greater set of amenities. That's what downzoning took away from everyone.
Yes, but I would hypothesize that in the Inland empire there was a net reduction of water use transforming agricultural acreage to suburban acreage. Water rights drives a lot of california development, anyone suggesting oh just divert water from x to y doesn't understand or is glossing over the massive fights historically and in coming up over water- as climate change has shrunk the historic supply
Do humans without lawns consume that much water? Have you worked on something where this problem came up in some unexpected way? Yes pipes need to be updated if a lot of tall complexes are built, but is total water that much at all?
I asked Claude to do the math, and it claimed reducing alfalfa use (not all use, just alfalfa) by the Colorado river by 1% per 1 million people who move from a place not already supplied by it.
I think when it comes to water a really important mental model everyone needs to have is that a human without a lawn or pool uses really tiny amounts of water at scale directly.
Any tips for how you planned your landscape to work this way? I’m slowly trying to convert mine but have already gotten burned by not matching plants to the right soil or sun exposure level and it’s taking longer to get right than I expected.
I just told the landscaper don't put any pesticides or herbicides and let nature do its thing. My landscaper just takes care of the front lawn, shrubs and the road verge and is cheap enough to pay for the twice month trim and clean up. My yard is a wild jungle where I do basic clean up and pull all the rag weed. I do want to plant a lot of native wild flowers at some point.
"People would move more instead of being locked in to a low effective property tax." - this just means that older and retired people would get kicked out of stable living situations, driven by property tax assessments which are often driven by real estate market boom/bust cycles. And housing prices would be just as high as with prop 13.
The bad part about prop 13, is that it never should have applied to anything other than primary residences of people. Having it apply to rental & commercial properties is what warps the market.
Cities should be cutting their police budgets - most small towns have nearly 50% of the budgets tied up in police. All while there has been a multi-decade decrease in crime.
Old people seem to be surviving just fine in areas where property tax is based on current market value? It sucks to move, but luckily they have an extremely valuable property to sell
Young people seem to be surviving just fine in areas where the market value is lower. Sucks to not live in the heart of the city but luckily they have their entire lives ahead of them to accumulate the wealth required.
I don't understand why you think old people would have to move. They have the ability to access the equity in their home at any time through HELOCs or mortgages. If they own a house that shoots up 1M in value, they have just had a massive windfall that they can access through financing to pay the taxes associated with that windfall.
> batteries are the fastest response power. gas is high maintenance, & bad capex as an intermittent source.
Batteries have a limited capacity and have a higher investment cost. Gas is the standard option for fast response. Pumped-storage hydro has by far the highest capex and has a heavy environment impact.
It's baffling how people show up in this sort of discussions arguing that standard tried-and-true strategies somehow don't work. Quite odd.
Batteries and solar have been beating lifetime cost of fast response gas turbines for five years or more. Now with uncontrolled fossil fuel cost spikes the operating costs of gas are highly variable compared to the pretty much flat investment and operating cost on battery + solar. if one were comparing battery plus renewables for full seasonal offsets are tighter, but the costs are so much lower, you can provision more and plan to dump power in the summer (or maybe not as this last long hot fossil fueled climate change summer will drive new demand for a/c)
At the rate Taiwan's superpower ally is declining, China just needs a little patience and a beneficent long term strategy & Taiwan will decide to switch ally's from self interest
Switch allies, to whom? The PRC? Do you realize PRC (Mainland China) and Taiwan are in a civil war? Taiwan switching allies to the PRC literally means admitting defeat.
Recall that Taiwan only exists because during the Chinese civil war, the United States provided the KMT with billions of dollars of military and financial aid. The KMT lost the mainland to the CCP (supported by the Soviets) and fled to Taiwan. The U.S. provided $4 billion dollars of aid, worth approximately $50 billion today.
The PRC would have retaken Taiwan decades ago if not for the U.S. guaranteeing Taiwan.
So continue in this line of reasoning - what happens as a currency strapped US turns inward and is more globally eschewed while making more common outright projections of regional power in the hemisphere of the Americas (while showing logistical failures in demonstrating cross globe power projection). Meanwhile China climbs the semi-fab ladder and Intel and even TSMC (re)builds its fabs in the US. KMT seems to maintain an intentionally ambiguous one-China policy. What are possible outcomes in the new state of geopolitics?
It's not changing the goalposts to recognize that the deterrents to China just stepping in to Taiwan are being undermined by US actions (some nothing to do with Taiwan). The value of Taiwan to the US as a counter to China's advancement seems in the latter stages of it's practical utility.
To answer your question perhaps one way could be for China to put forward a long term map to recognize the KMT as a party and unify as one China may years in the future. I would guess it would take a generation or even two to pass before that might happen and China would have to make the case that the people of Taiwan would be better off with the mainland rather than independent of it.
A pull request is a communication to the project. AI or no AI, a poorly communicated request is a burden. IMHO AI prs are fine as long as the submitter has done the work to refine that communication to make it easy to read and assess.
A large submission without a breakdown or explanation, or a pass to minimize the code change is junk. The operator can literally ask the ai to compose it better, refactor in to smaller PRs, or do it themself. The annoyance is to have to communicate and enforce expectations to drive by submitters. In the end every project has to figure out what they accept. If, at a glance the PR is drive by junk being thrown over the wall, a response of this doesn't meet our pr submission standards delete, or try again, to me is not overly burdensome.
Of course it can fail, just like the AI circular investment moves can fail just like the Soviet Union failed. Too much decisive power in too few hands, disconnected from reality, disconnected from competition, disconnected from outside community criticism. It fails open loop. A lot of money can temporarily buffer the failure, but already we see world wide inflation and interest rate increases from the open loop decisions of the most powerful class.
I don't have a sufficient understanding of how North Korea operates to assess that - too much my information about North Korea is propogandistic sound bites. I do know they have had famines in decades past, and don't think they have them now, so that suggests their economic/industrial strategies are a least passing a minimum threshold of being connected to reality.
Look at Silicon Valley Bank that was also "too big to fail" and when it did the taxpayer had to bail it out. If something is too big to fail, it's too big, the regulator should have stepped in earlier to chop it up.
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