SeeingRed [he/him]

It’s so frustrating to read anything about IMF loans because most summaries are all euphemistic economic jargon. Then you read past the summary and while the material is still opaque, they’ll have snippets where they explain in plain language what they want.

I assume this is an attempt to re-shore manufacturing, especially if as many of us expect, many countries choose to take the tarrif hit so that they can keep trading in their own currency between eachother.

It’s a strategic bet, bring home some manufacturing while hurting those who defy the empire. It’ll certainly reduce the availability of certain goods in the US as countries choose other markets. This likely would help to encourage some level of reshoring, or at least increase pressure from the ruling class to force more coups of other countries to force them back onto the dollar system.

Whether this will backfire or not will is something that is very hard to predict.

I’m definitely curious about the self cleaning property, and how easily it is to produce (is the process sustainable, toxic, expensive reagents, etc.) That was the biggest issue with a lot of the previous radiative cooling surfaces. If I have time I’ll try to read into it more.

There was a neat video on how to make your own from readily available material, but not from cellulose, but it had issues with being clean and application onto surfaces. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KDRnEm-B3AI&t=1s

You too!

Flow batteries seem very promising, but the chemistry required needs more scale/external funding to be viable.

There were some thermal battery retrofits for coal power plants using carbon and steam that looked interesting in principal, though cost and logistics are not fully solved problems, and the round trip efficiency was rather bad compared to other storage methods.

There were also some molten metal batteries that have been working towards useful scale over the past decade or so. They had cheap and abundant matetial inputs and significantly long charge discharge.

There are many neat options out there. I think researching and building out each as they become viable would help to improve system resiliency and long term viability.

Its a vague statement. Not specific enough to be true or false.

We can be more specific by saying something like, “inventions and ideas will become refined and widespread when they are beneficial, useful, and practical.” Or maybe “necessity is a crucible for refining ideas and inventions.”

Even these are only roughly applicable as a generalization and a statement could only be said to be true when given specific conditions and detailed investigation.

For example, the basics of steam power were understood back in ancient Rome, but they didn’t make any steam engines to convert heat to useful work. Why? Because they didn’t need to. They also likely didn’t have the requisite industry to make and maintain them in any useful capacity. The engine was invented before it was necessary, but it didn’t become widespread until material conditions made it useful.

Even ideas like socialism have existed for a very long time, but the only place we see it kicking off (so far, inshallah) is within the places that need it the most. Was it invented in those places? No. Was it refined through those struggles? Of course it was.

Im curious how each agent differs, or is trained. Seems they had doctor and nurse agents, as well as patient agents. This would be a good way to start partial implementation. It would allow some tasks to be taken over by the in a hybrid format which could allow an even richer training environment.

I could never see the west doing this in a way that would actually improve the quality of service.

One of the issues with LLM AIs that we’ve seen time and again is that it can be extremely confident and perfectly incorrect. I have no doubt they are doing their best to train the AI with the best data, but I hope they are also working to solve some of the underlying issues with LLMs.

This is quite the change. I’m excited to see how it plays out. The one thing that bothers me is that the recommendations of the employee councils are not binding, but it’s far better than not having it at all. Hopefully in practice any company that goes against employee desires will be penalized in some tangible way.

The way I see it is that at least 4% of the workforce will have a say in how the companies are run, and those 4% will be elected by the other 95%. Good law, will probably be popular.

It was always projection. It’s honestly comical how often that is the case.

Truly aspirational!

Hope you have a nice week as well!

From what I’ve seen, the electric cost is actually only a small component, the building, specialized hardware, maintenance and labour make up the majority of the bill for most vertical farming operations.

Further, it’s a matter of how much energy density you need within a given volume compared to the available roof surface. Most plants don’t need full sun, but you might only be able to supply 2-4 times the roof area as internal grow area (when accounting for efficiency losses and the needs of the plants). You would need to provide the majority of the grow area with LED lights anyway. So it might not be worth the resources/labour costs. Though it might be a good supplemental supply of photons.

The only real use case I can see for vertical farming is providing fresh produce nearer to urban centres, or if there is an acute shortage of land, otherwise passive greenhouses (with supplemental lighting and heating if needed) are generally a better use of resources. Specialized produce is another use case, but it seems that we need a lot more research to make it a viable option at scale.

A question of where the energy comes from is also important, solar panels in a desert/on roof tops is good, but if they replace a farm field it’s pointless. Wind, nuclear, hydro are good options.

I’m definitely curious to see how the field grows within the context of China and socialism more broadly. Many of the constraints in current implementations are only important when the only consideration is profit.

Edit: read the article, they have some really interesting use cases in their facility beyond what I could imagine.

Depends on how your local roads/side walks/pathways are maintained. If the snow is cleared, e bikes work just fine, but your range will be hurt a bit. A bad headwind will also mean your range goes down a lot (wind seems worse in the winter where I am, but that could be some sort of confirmation bias). The times I’ve biked through Blizzard conditions/extreme wind and cold I was very glad to have the e assist on the bike. Those days are rare though, and the primary consideration in my mind is how well things are maintained the rest of the year.

That being said, a path that hasn’t been cleared in days is basically unusable for any bike. Maybe a fat-tire bike could work, but I don’t have experience with that.

In terms of space, I use my bike all the time so I’ve made space for it in my apartment.

Maybe is should ask, what type of ebike are you looking to get? There is quite a range of types. Mine is basically just a normal bike with a motor assist.

I’ll second the boox line of products. No need to go for the color e ink either for it to be very functional as an android tablet. I’d love to have a color one at some point, but I’m happy enough with the basic one and it’s lasted me quite a while.

If you get one with the pen it is quite nice for note taking as well.

That being said, if you just want to read e books, it’s not the cheapest option.

I really dislike ads, so usually I have them blocked, but not all my devices have it done yet. Usually it’s just capital trying to get me to buy things so I just scroll past, but just over the weekend it was scary how quickly ads relating to Iran’s retaliatiatory action started popping up with the obvious slant you would expect in the west. There seems to be a concerted effort to start beating war drums… This is not including the horrific ads I’ve seen coming from Zionists over the last half year with blatantly genocidal language. I even reported those ads and nothing came of it of course.

I guess to sum up: ads can and are used as political tools to shape ideology. Yet another reason to get everyone you know on an ad blocker.

So 6 years to project start. Then just a few more years for completion. All in we are looking to a decade out for project completion +/- a few years.

Meanwhile, in Canada they can’t even get a timeline or funding for a single line on the most obvious corridor. And the second most obvious corridor has no timelines, and is only a study of feasibility at this time.

Mine haven’t started up yet thankfully, but I expect them to be early this year.

Definitely interesting to see. I’d be curious how this compares to the total wheat trade between the two countries and other trading partners, how that’s changing over time, and why it’s specifically happening now. Is this due to old agreements being unnecessary due to increased domestic production? Is this due to the global market favouring wheat purchases from other countries? Is there just less demand due to some other reason? There is the throwaway line about China being able to source from others, but no indication of who or why.

Obviously this is just Bloomberg so they’re not going to dig into these sorts of things as they only care about the changes in prices for the sake of investors.

🫡

I noticed the odd way that online language learning experts called for CI but rarely talked about how to get there with only side comments on graded content. Especially the ones that profess no formal study or flash card use is needed to gain a foothold. There being a dialectic is probably the best way to think about this. CI seems like it’s good in principle, but it would be useless if you can’t find perfectly targeted content (which is hard to do before having a strong understanding). Incredibly put together post!

I’m still in the early stages for my own journey and am working primarily on gaining the vocab and grammar (reading the hanzi because I was being overly reliant on pinyin). I really need to work more on listening. I tried a tone listening test and failed spectacularly, and I thought I was doing ok.

Anki is great, but it’s usefulness is limited. It’s great for cramming words into the brain in a way that sticks well (hanzi, basic meaning, pronunciation, tone) but it’s terrible at learning context without a lot of other work (sentence mining is apparently good, but similar to CI needs significant prior understanding of the language, and it’s not trivial to undertake the work). I’ve found some really great decks to provide variety to the study, but Ive found having too many decks becomes daunting and stressful.