With support for Common Table Expressions (CTE), SQL becomes a Turing complete language. To be honest, it makes me somewhat uncomfortable that a query sent to a DB server could be non-terminating and cause a server thread to enter an infinite loop. On the other hand, the practical difference between a query that contains an infinite loop and one that runs for days is probably negligible.
Sadly wind turbines don’t really scale down like PV panels. The energy produced by PV panels is a linear function of their surface area. For wind turbines, it scales with the square of the blade length.
This is true, but if you already have a battery, getting an extra 200-400w when the sun isn't shining is really useful. (for a UK based house. Not so sure about the USA.)
The cost isn't as good as solar though. a 1kw turbine is expensive.
It's a siren call for us techies, but reality is less pretty than our fantasies of "cheap base load".
I got an offer for a "essentially free" residential turbine including the pylon (8 to 10 meters, the legal limit for a "Kleinwindanlage") in SW Germany - just had to dismantle it and put it on my lawn. And of course pour a huge foundation [2x2m?] and have an accredited electrician do the necessary alterations. Nope. It didn't even produce enough electricity to offset the maintenance costs - no idea how I should offset the costs for moving it, even with the free capex.
And I did the math about 3 years ago: Prices for both PV and batteries dropped a lot since then. For late fall/early spring I would be better off by adding a PV carport (2 cars). I could also finally automate charging my batteries while electricity is cheap during Dec/Jan, might even be worth bumping my existing battery from 28 kWh to 42 kWh.
To be fair: The math might work out in the Northern Germany; but I would not bet on it.
Doesn't the area described by a turbine's motion scale with the square of the blade-length, so given a circular area covered by a turbine, the power will scale linearly with that area?
Yes but you’re not paying for the area the blade covers - you’re paying for the blade. Simplifying (to an extreme) for the sake of illustration - a 20m blade costs twice as much as a 10m one but produces 4 times the energy.
Obviously, cost scales more than linearly with blade length but it’s a bit like big O - the n^2 factor dominates. This is why wind turbines have been getting bigger and bigger. And why the cost of domestic or small-scale wind turbines remains stubbornly high despite the dramatic fall in the average cost per MW seen for wind turbines - as the falls are largely driven by the ability to manufacture larger and larger turbine blades. While falls in costs for solar PV can be seen at every scale.
A lot of Chomsky’s appeal I believe is due to his politics as his universal grammar theories turned out to be an academic dead end.
But his politics centers around the moral failings of the West so I think yes, if he was involved in the sexual exploitation of trafficked children, then this would devalue his criticism of the morality of the Western political system.
> But his politics centers around the moral failings of the West so I think yes, if he was involved in the sexual exploitation of trafficked children, then this would devalue his criticism of the morality of the Western political system.
Why would it devalue his criticism assuming he was right?
Moral arguments for me don’t stand alone like a mathematical proof or scientific findings which can be examined as some sort of platonic form.
Morality arguments are social and contextual. That 2+2 is 4 won’t change and captures some sort of eternal truth while what is deemed moral is constantly changing over time and differs across different societies and social groupings.
So morality arguments require and appeal to a particular shared sense of right and wrong. If Chomsky was guilty of sexually abusing children, then I do not share his moral foundation and so his appeals to morality arguments do not convince me.
It’s not about agreeing or disagreeing with Chomsky on specific points.
It’s about the validity and strength of his arguments. I could continue to agree with Chomsky on some point but now dismissing his argument.
Or if I was undecided about how to judge something in terms of morality, then yes, if Chomsky was proven to have sexually abused trafficked children, I might skip consulting Chomsky on the matter.
To be honest, I don’t know where you’re trying to go with this line. It feels like you think you have some “gotcha” you feel ready to spring and will keep asking these opaque questions until you think you see an opportunity.
Why not just lay out your argument transparently and I can engage?
Or state exactly what it is about my claim that appeals to morality made by immoral people are less convincing than those made by moral people that you disagree with? Forgot about Chomsky - it has nothing specifically to do with him.
His criticism of the Western political system was always way too simplicist and why it has immense appeal to college students.
Essentially it can be summed as any Western action must be rationalized as evil, and any anti-west action is therefore good. This is also in line with Christian dualism so the cultural building blocks are already in place.
Then you get Khmer Rouge, Putin, Hezbollah, Iran apologetism or downright support
I doubt you can find any essay or such where he said anti-Western action was good on the sole grounds that it was anti-Western.
It's difficult to summarise so many years of writing in a few sentences but from my own reading, he pointed out
a) many things done by the US lead to death or destruction
b) many of these things are justified in the name of good that doesn't stand up to scrutiny
c) the US government is often hypocritical
d) US citizens are heavily propagandized both for foreign policy and domestic policy
e) as a US citizen, it his duty to try and oppose these actions and since he's not a citizen of Iran, he isn't in a position to do anything about Iran
f) a) through d) explain why he is often seen as an apologist, to use your word, for Iran; he tries to explain, from his point of view, why Iran etc. do the things they do
g) a strong support of freedom of speech and opposition to censorship, including what he regards as private censorship as opposed to merely government censorship.
That doesn't explain why he visited Hezbollah and showed overwhelming support, probably aware of the organization roots and past actions such as kidnapping journalists or killing politicians or its self professed goal of creating a theocracy in Lebanon.
He of course has very complex rationalizing but essentially he assumes the opposite of mainstream western opinion and then tries to build ideological structures upon that.
That creates a very simplified version of reality wrapped in a nice intellectual wrapping
Chomsky had been involved in linguistics and politics since the 60s, which is nearly six decades covering a multitude of events and issues. To simplify his work down to even a paragraph is an impossible task, let alone as you have done as simply saying "anti Western".
For example, during the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, Germany and France were opposed to the invasion, leading to "Freedom Fries" to insult French opposition to the war. The British public was also opposed to the war, although the the Blair government went along with it anyway. Australia had a similar position - public opposition but government went along with it anyway. Canada official refused entry into the Iraq war. Chomsky was also opposed to the Iraq war. Does this mean that France, Germany, Canada and the British and Australian general public are "anti-Western"? Since Chomsky agreed with these countries, does that make him anti-Western or pro-Western? Does it make the US anti-Western since they proceeded with a war despite formal or popular opposition in many Western countries?
I fear you have a certain definition of the "Western" that simply excludes Western opinions that don't fit your understanding.
As to who Chomsky met him; well as part of this Epstein story, Chomsky met with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. In your opinion, does this make him anti-Western?
Indeed, prior to his stroke Chomsky explained that this kind of meeting is why Chomsky associated with Epstein - for the contacts.
I suspect Chomsky is just generally interested in understanding an issues and not bothered by what it's seen as, seemingly to his detriment in this Epstein story.
I am not a fan of Chomsky - the opposite in fact. I was deliberately avoiding judging his actual arguments - to make the point that his own morality undermines his lecturing others on their moral failings.
There is no mention that these drivers were ONLY impaired by weed. But I can’t believe a paper would not look at the confounders. I know quite a few who are not regular smokers but will imbibe after a few beers if it’s being passed around. Also weed is popular with consumers of stimulants. Without knowing the possible confounders, this statistic tells you very little.
The most annoying thing about iPhone Maps for me is the inaccuracy of the direction indicator. I've googled and it doesn't seem to be a universal complaint even though I've experienced this on multiple devices over the years even after following instructions to re-calibrate multiple times. Maybe I've just been unlucky.
It intensely frustrating to use maps for direction finding while walking or cycling when the app is telling you are facing one direction when in fact you are facing another.
Settings - privacy - location services - system services - compass calibration. Make sure it’s enabled. In a bout of paranoia I disabled location for everything I didn’t recognize as necessary and then it took me many months to find out why compass cone behaves funny in mapping apps.
Why would you decide to hold a position strongly based on a minuscule and extremely biased sample set and reject even considering data and studies outside of your immediate experience?
Unless you’re afraid your conclusion might be challenged? Wouldn’t it be interesting either way? Either to find out that your children are typical or to find out that you and they are special in some way?
I understand many people are not interested in or curious about science, but don’t understand people who are both disinterested but also strongly hold particular positions on scientific questions.
It's also just common sense. Everyone agrees that traits like height is heritable, but somehow whatever goes on inside the brain is not? The null hypothesis here is that it is heritable, and I see no proof whatsoever against that hypothesis. My personal experience raising my own kids and observing countless others confirms common sense. Your own child is not one data point, it's a million small data points, things you notice in what they're like as a baby, and how they develop over time. Only someone without kids would boil this down to a "single data point". I also deny that I have do anything to prove heritability, how about you prove the opposite? It's a conclusion that is so obvious to the impartial mind that to be confused about it is a sign of extreme ideological indoctrination. To deny heritability of personality and intelligence is to deny evolution itself.
No-one is denying heritability here. The only question is where the heritability figure lies, and how reliable are the estimates that have been put forward in the past.
I don't see how anyone's "personal experience" could be a valid methodology for deciding whether the heritability of IQ is 30% or 80%.
As for the "extreme ideological indoctrination" slander, it'd be great if you could just withdraw it.
I agree. A child is a million small datapoints. My son established a strong personality early on that defied our attempts to modify it. Meanwhile he was raised in a relaxed environment that certainly provided no environmental explanation for his fixations.
I was raised with five siblings, yet only I got into fights at school, and made my mother cry on a regular basis. Each of my sibs is similar and each of us is strikingly different, too.
Centuries of success with empirical based science is a direct rejection of the approach of trusting "just common sense".
> Only someone without kids would boil this down to a "single data point".
Why are you personalizing this? I have a family and have observed children grow from emergence from the womb and I grew in a much larger family. I'm not sure what the relevance is to the points being discussed. This seems like argument by anecdotal fallacy.
> I also deny that I have do anything to prove heritability, how about you prove the opposite?
I didn't ask you to prove anything. I asked you why you have no interest in looking at a scientific question beyond "I trust my own observations and my conclusion"?
And this question seemingly misses the point - it not a binary question about whether traits are inherited or not but about the degree of the role of inheritance. The author of the piece emphasizes this point extensively.
The salient point of the too-long article was about flaws in a seminal paper on this subject where the author Bouchard presented carefully collected data for identical twins - showing remarkably low variance suggesting a high degree of inheritance. But he hid the data he had collected for non-identical twins, which would have provided us with a basis for judging the significance of the findings regarding identical twins.
> It's a conclusion that is so obvious to the impartial mind that to be confused about it is a sign of extreme ideological indoctrination.
Can we just discuss the science and statistics here?
I don't understand why you are challenging me here?
Isn't your question exactly that addressed by the (admittedly too long) article? That the graph Paul Graham presented proving the dominance of inheritance wasn't based on any science or data?
There are many studies of twins that try to determine if genes influence intelligence.
Some look at twins who are raised together. One [1] concludes that "MZ (identical) twins differ on average by 6 IQ points, while DZ (fraternal) twins differ on average by 10 IQ points".
Yes? I mentioned them because the article was about a bunch of studies? I was asking the poster why you would not be interested in the validity of such studies and just decide that "common sense" was enough to make a decision?
The question was asked with genuine curiosity as this forum is mostly filled with people who appreciate science and empiricism. And I was hoping there could be a reasonable discussion.
But I'm out. An interesting discussion should be possible here purely based on data and statistics but clearly - from the downvotes - that I've stepped into some toxic American identity politic minefield.
I learned quite a time ago that it's risky to raise certain scientific subjects with USAians including my US relatives: biological evolution, the science of climate change, renewable energy or justifications for gun control - without the conversation getting emotional and heated. But I still find it weird.
It’s just Bayesian thinking. Too much open mindedness to scientific papers can have you frequently changing your beliefs based on some recent scientific paper that came out, or even worse based on a recent college graduate journalist’s summary of a recent scientific paper from some random university..
As opposed to holding on to a belief that has been reinforced via personal experience countless times until very strong evidence proves otherwise. You end up with a set of beliefs that have a much higher chance of being true this way.
There is rarely proof this or that way. It’s usually evidence, sometimes strong, sometimes weak, and you use your experience and intelligence to decide what is true. Though honestly, if you end up with a process where you change your mind whenever a new scientific paper comes out opposite of what you used to believe, well, I guess you would either have not thought about it much or your thinking is deeply flawed.
The technology of electricity production has advanced since nuclear peaked in the mid 1980s.
We have better/cheaper ways of producing electricity than attaching a heat source to tank of water, boiling the water to produce steam, then forcing the steam through a turbine, capturing the kinetic energy in order to turn the rotor of an alternator. Whether that heat source is coal or nuclear, you're still looking at what is fundamentally a 19th century design - attach a steam engine to an alternator.
Gas turbines remove the boiling water/steam engine part. Wind turbines remove heat from the process completely and solar PV removes the mechanical part.
All 3 technologies are base on mass production - particularly solar PV. And so all have seem massive price decreases which is expected to continue. Meanwhile nuclear gets more and more expensive.
Globally, nuclear peaked about 2 decades in terms of energy production ago, 2.5 decades ago in terms of number of operating turbines, 3 decades ago in terms of share of electricity production and 4 or 5 decades ago in terms of plants under construction.
China strategy is clearly a mix of renewable and nuclear, renewable for bulk and nuclear for baseload.
At the moment, they are quickly building gaz-fired capacity to supplement the renewable during peak demand and when production is low. Their base load is mostly coal. Nuclear will allow them to phase out most of that. They are clearly targeting zero coal and are gaz poor anyway so nuclear allows them to limit their exposure to imports. That's basically France strategy in the 70s except France went all in while China can use renewable for bulk capacity as they produce a ton of the required mineral themselves
The opposition between intermittent and nuclear doesn't exist. Nobody knows how to run a grid purely on intermittent sources.
A lot of the discussion on statistics here don't make sense. China wants to switch off coal and gaz. You are looking at transition numbers focusing on current shares when you should be considering trajectories.
In 2024 alone, it added 360GW of wind and solar and the trajectory for renewables is steepening, not declining so this year's number looks like it will exceed this number - 450GW or more.
Capacity factors are just noise when you're dealing with nearly 2 orders of magnitude of difference in scale. Apply whatever adjustment for capacity factor differences that you like but 100GW of nuclear over 15 years is not going to catch up with 450GW of wind and solar per year.
China has 1,000 GW installed solar and 26 GW of wind which generate 2k TWh/yr. The total installed nuclear in China is a mere 60 GW which generate 450 TWh/yr. Therefore, the capacity factor of solar is 2 TWh/GW and that of nuclear is 4 times higher at 8 TWh/GW.
Calling an 4 times higher capacity factor "noise" is actual noise.
Besides, nuclear provides uninterrupted energy supply, no need for storage or special convenient places for installation. That's why China is building capacity of both types as fast as they can.
Europe is in a colder geographic area with less sunshine and more needs of energy during the cold/rainy days, nuclear is an absolute necessity there.
The scales of rollout are so vastly different, it is just noise.
China will add 450GW or more renewables this year alone.
Even after dividing by 4 this represents more additional energy production capacity in ONE year than their 15 year target for nuclear. This is after your capacity factor adjustment.
Nuclear’s contribution to Chinese electricity production at the end of their 2040 nuclear plan is likely to be below 5%. Even less than nuclear’s current global share of about 9% - down from just under 20% in the mid 1990s.
> In the 12 months to June 2025, wind and solar (2,073 TWh) generated more electricity than all other clean sources (nuclear, hydro and bioenergy) combined (1,936 TWh). Just four years ago, wind and solar generated half as much electricity as other clean sources combined.
So, both types generated approximately the same amount of power and it still isn't enough, one type cannot replace the other, they complement each other, that's why China is building more of each type, they know what they're doing.
