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Comment Re: If you're not familiar... (Score 1, Insightful) 337

"Rich" is a relative term here. School teachers aren't going to retire onto their yacht and sail about the world at the age of 50, but they also have a reasonable income and a guaranteed job so long as they don't actually molest the students. Compared to the Times Rich List, they're poor. Compared to half the kids they teach -- particularly the ones this sort of measure is aimed at -- they're rich.

Comment A rather misleading headline (Score 4, Informative) 103

The numbers here are somewhat misleading because solar has such a low capacity factor. 50GW capacity probably equates to something like 10GW of average power output (ie about 10GWYr of output across a year - somewhere around five hours of peak output per day) though calculating the exact figure would require detailed knowledge of where it was all installed.

Submission + - JPMorgan Chase Disables Employee Comments After Return-to-Office Backlash (msn.com)

AsylumWraith writes: From the article:

"JPMorgan Chase shut down comments on an internal webpage announcing the bank’s return-to-office policy after dozens of them criticized the move and at least one suggested that affected employees should unionize, according to people familiar with the matter."

"After the bank announced the policy change, it posted it to an internal company website where it often shares news. Employees are able to post comments that include their first and last names.

Many employees shared concerns such as increased commuting costs, child-care challenges and the impact on work-life balance. One person suggested that they should consider unionizing to fight for a hybrid-work schedule, the people familiar with the matter said."

Submission + - Twitter/X and Musk's 'free speech' hypocrisy (www.cbc.ca)

Baron_Yam writes: Musk's X has suspended a Canadian account for posting an image countering the current political narrative that Canadians want their country to become an American state, on the pretext that it is hate speech.

Comment Re:If it is priced right! (Score 1) 19

It's absolutely the sort of thing I'd buy ... for the right price. ReMarkable has had me interested for a long time, but it runs Android and doesn't have Play, so half the apps I would use it for (ie my book shelf in Play Books) won't work. A Debian-based tablet would be great. The comparable device seems to be the BOOX Go 10.3 - currently retailing for nearly $400, so I guess that's the price point they need to beat.

I'm not clear whether the relaunch includes an upgrade. 4GB RAM is pretty slim for a Linux system these days, even if it is one that can't play video. The 7-year-old 4-core Coretex-A55 at 1.8GHz is likewise probably serviceable but isn't going to set the world on fire.

Comment Re:I don't get it (Score 5, Informative) 128

That's fine for thermoplastics and it's fine so long as you don't care about eg what colour it is. Not all plastics respond to heat by melting (there are quite a wide variety of plastics that undergo polymerisation with heat, so heating them makes them more solid, not less), but the big problem of this kind of direct-use recycling is that it only works if you can first sort the plastic into all the different types and colours. There are only a middle-sized handful of basic plastic types, but there are a dizzying array of small variations for different purposes. If all you care about the material properties is that they can go through a 3D printer and make something that's solid enough when you overengineer it to a degree then that's fine; if you care about cutting every last penny from the cost of producing things and about making things that are "just right" then it's not going to cut it.

You also need to be able to effectively remove all the labels and any residue of foodstuffs etc. That's easy enough to do on a small scale for your household recycling but it's labour intensive; it's quite difficult to do very cheaply and at a large scale. The advantage of the "advanced recycling" process is that it involves a refining step that removes all the contaminants.

Comment Re:Why was ET contact ever a possibility? (Score 1) 32

This is why I explained it in terms of very fundamental limits. An ant is unable to observe the earth at the sort of scale where nuclear weapons become comprehensible. We are able to observe the universe at the sort of scale where a magnetar becomes comprehensible. We are pretty certain that the speed of light is a fundamental limit. We know what effect extreme magnetic fields have on the nature of matter. This is not a "on no it's too big for us to think about" problem.

Comment Re:Why was ET contact ever a possibility? (Score 1) 32

Because something that radiates a power level sufficient to wipe out life on the other side of the galaxy is necessarily so far away that it's not useful. Life would have to be at least thousands of light years away from it to survive, almost no matter what sort of shielding they have.

Of course, it's possible that faster-than-light travel is possible in some way we don't understand. As far as we can tell, it isn't.

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