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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • Airplane mechanics are held responsible for their failures, should we throw that out the window and when they forget to tighten down a bolt that drops a plane just say whelp, better luck next time, lets get George some more training and hope he follows the procedures that are in place to prevent that from ever happening again.

    You are joking, but that’s almost exactly what happens. Aircraft investigations are universally conducted on the basis of not assigning blame, but figuring out how to prevent this in the future.

    The point is that airplane mechanics generally do not forget to tighten bolts out of pure evil intent. They are for the most part just ordinary humans who can be expected to behave as such. Therefore when an error occurs it is a failure of the system, not them personally. Replacing them with another human who makes human mistakes doesn’t fix anything.

    In this case we ask the same thing: what happened that caused things to go so wrong on this set, and what can we change to prevent that from happening again? I’m quite certain that putting this person in jail is not the answer to that question.






  • Maybe. On the other hand, changing out your candidate after one debate doesn’t inspire much confidence. And you lose the advantage a sitting president usually has in elections.

    A new candidate might indeed do better, but the DNC is risk averse as hell. I don’t see them having the balls to make a move like this.







  • The problems listed in the article are real. we’ve built a system:

    1. Where a lot of economic growth stems from an increasing supply of (cheap) labour
    2. That relies on people of working age being able to financially support a retiree class.

    Both of these are going to fall apart if the population stops growing. The smaller group of working age people won’t be enough to support the amount of retirees, and without population growth there’s no economic growth.

    It’s sad that economists correctly see all this coming but then conclude that the only solution is “make more babies.” It’s short term thinking almost by definition, because in the limit it’s rather obvious that at some point we will not have the resources to support any more people. And the closer we get to that limit the less each individual person will have (even worse when wealth is not equally distributed).

    Unfortunately I don’t see any economist putting forth a plan that accepts population decline and alters the system to account for it. It wouldn’t be easy but it seems no one is even trying.


  • VW is good at making cars, but bad at software. They’ve had to delay the introduction of new models (Golf, ID.3) because of software issues. Rivian has sort of the opposite problem: their production lines sit still often because of problems in the supply chain.

    Volkswagen has the expertise to solve Rivian’s production and supplier problems, and the cash they will need to survive and develop some cheaper models (the EV market is stagnating right now for a lack of budget options, and Rivian only sells trucks and SUVs). And they’re hoping Rivian software engineers can help them fix their software woes.




  • sushibowl@feddit.nltoScience Memes@mander.xyzTough Trolly Choices
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    24 days ago

    It seems to me that, since the set of real numbers has a total ordering, I could fairly trivially construct some choice function like “the element closest to 0” that will work no matter how many elements you remove, without needing any fancy axioms.

    I don’t know what to do if the set is unordered though.





  • Honestly, I think it may be possible to build entire roads with enough crushed metal elements in the asphalt/concrete and a slight low power charge throughout the entire surface would be able to keep any vehicle battery at a steady charge.

    You might be underestimating how much power a car consumes while driving. For example, a Tesla model 3 has an efficiency of about 130 Wh/km in mild weather at highway speeds. Assuming that on the highway you’ll travel 100 km/h, that means you’ll use 130*100 = 13.000 Wh/h, a constant power draw of 13kW. That’s enough to power perhaps 8-12 houses on average.

    A km of road could have, let’s say, 200 cars on it (4 lanes, 20m per car). That means you’d need to pump about 2.6 megawatts of power into every kilometer of road to keep them all topped up.

    EDIT: fucked up math