It depends on how far "net zero" you want to go. There are still a lot of people who live in places where the sun doesn't shine much for a good chunk of the year. It also gets dangerously cold. Heating a home uses an enormous amount of electricity. If you still plan on supplementing with natural gas, it's less of a problem. If you want to go all-electric, you are going to have to figure out how to generate a lot of power when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't come out much so people don't freeze to death.

Was a study done showing putting out cones and road flares is effective at alerting motorists that there is a disabled truck?

I honestly don't know if there was or not. However, if there wasn't (and a fair number of regulations aren't based on studies, nor are particularly well thought-out) why would a study need to be done to modify an existing regulation?

Yup. Some others companies fought were ingredients lists ("We'll lose our secret recipes!"), nutrition information and calories ("people can work it out from the ingredients!"), financial disclosures ("Competitors can take advantage"), standardized rates of interest rate comparables ("customers can do the math!").

Anything that exposes the truth, risks, or potential liability or unwanted data gets fought as an existential threat.

Precisely. If you make mistakes like this expensive enough for the police station then the problem solves itself. The real problem is that someone promised the police and the school a magic new technology that would make their schoolyard safer. So far the system probably has zero wins, and one spectacular failure. If the political and economic fallout for the failure is high enough then the school turns off the crappy system, and it encourages other schools to do the same. Potential new buyers for the system disappear and the vendor of the system goes out of business.

And we all win.

Eventually the school might even end up with an effective system that does roughly the same thing, but it will likely be structured in a way that makes it less likely that Doritos wielding young adults get assaulted by the police. It's hard to argue against safer schools. In any system like this false positives are going to be a potential problem. If you make false positives expensive enough, however, then you likely get the outcome that you want.

Before her presidential run, Kamala Harris had a section on her page covering a few scandals she had as attorney general involving covering up a DNA lab's screwups. A week after announcing her run for president, it was scrubbed off her page. The change was buried three pages back in her history, as hundreds of edits had been made in the intervening days.

To this day, no mention of it is on her personal page, nor on her page as attorney general.

This model brings you the glorious Trabant, practically unchanged over it's 25 year lifespan.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

My friend's family had one in Romania. When going up a hill, he passengers would have to get out, as it didn't have enough horsepower to climb anything but a shallow grade. Production numbers were low, and the waitlist stretched for years, as the workers got paid the same if they made 10,000 cars or 50,000 cars per year. They never made any improvements or fixed any bugs because, again, they got paid the same no matter what they produced.

They were easy to work on as they had no features or powered anything, and a strong person could pull the motor out with their bare hands. It was terrible in every other respect. Cramped, uncomfortable, unreliable, underpowered, and handled poorly.

I never watch shorts. I don't want to watch shorts. Every time YoutTube offers me shorts I tell it I don't want to see them. A week later it recommends shorts again.

That's what the second group is. The first group is trying to do work. The second group is trying to amass power for personal benefit.

There's a corollary argument he would later make that as an organization grows, the second group will outnumber the first group. It's not a polemic against government. It's a warning against any organization getting too large.

I think it fits here:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

Taken from: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jerrypournelle.com...

Media decoder ring time:

"Lashed out" = Filed a lawsuit with the European court
"Attacked" = Issued a press release detailing their court case.

Coming soon:

"Murdered" = Made a compelling argument in open court
"Nuked from orbit" = Motion for continuance "Slaughtered" = Won a court motion
"Destroyed" = Favorable court ruling
"Strangled" = Disagreed with loosing a motion

My oldest was born in 1999 and the hospital sent us home with a list of foods that we shouldn't introduce to our children until they were three years old. I remember this because both peanut butter and honey were on the list, and one of my favorite foods is peanut butter and honey sandwiches. I have six kids, and I got in trouble quite a bit over the years because I gave my infants bits of my sandwiches.

What can I say, they liked them...

It's a bit funny to me that I was actually right about that particular call. Most of the times that my wife and I disagreed about something I was definitely the one that was wrong.

Most new parents don't know anything about raising children, and even the worst parents are pretty motivated to do a good job. New mothers, in particular, are desperate for solid advice on what to do with their new child. My wife isn't keen on reading the instructions for any purchase that she makes ever. No matter what it is that she buys I am the one that has to read the instructions and teach her how the thing works. That was true with our children as well. However, she made me read every pamphlet that the hospital sent home with us when our babies were born dozens of times over. If she thought I was interpreting them incorrectly she would wait a bit, cross examine me again, and force me to show references. If one of those pamphlets would have said that the best way to insure that the child grew up healthy and strong would be to murder the father and sprinkle his blood over the baby by the light of a full moon then I probably wouldn't have survived the first full moon after my daughter was born.

Someone in the medical community decided that the best way to protect children was to keep them away from certain allergens, and they put that opinion into the pamphlets that get given out to new parents. I am sure that the people that came up with that strategy meant well, but in they theory was proven incorrect.

Aren't writing skills useful? In my experience, writing, reading and speaking ability are usually tied together.

Just because the police are interested in someone, does not mean their reasons are just. We have lots of stupid laws, there's no reason to help the police enforce drug laws, or (here in texas) abortion laws. There's no reason an APB should be out on some girl trying to flee the state to get an abortion after she got a positive test and some stupid religious fuckwit nurse broke all kinds of laws to report her. Definitely no reason your ring camera should be used to help identify her going to the person who lives across the street from you who offered to drive her to New Mexico, and then that person is tracked by every flock camera between Austin and the border.

Or perhaps you were suspected of being a protestor in No More Kings day, and the ring reported on your whereabouts, We're calling such people domestic terrrorists these days. You personally could never be forced to testify against yourself, but your ring camera could.

And that's just official law enforcement. Flock is a Peter Thiel gamble, part of his ever expanding private global espionage platform. Maybe you told one too many pooh bear jokes on the internet and Xi decided to have you offed. For a price he can know where you are and what your routine is.

The only time you should be giving Ring data to anyone but yourself is if you need to report a crime to your property or the people within. You should be in a position to volunteer it, or at the very least require a court order.

Houston has the most stable housing prices of any city in the US. Houston does not have any zoning restrictions. If housing prices go up, developers tear down strip malls and build apartments. If commercial prices go up, they tear down low density housing or commercial property and build high-density commercial property. That is a functioning market.

People like to rag on Houston as not a nice place to live, but you can, at least, afford to live there.

This is the single dumbest thing I've read on slashdot in 20 years.