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Comment TFA is not particularly great. (Score 1) 98

1. MEMS clocks with microsecond-per-day accuracy are commercially available and they're getting better.
2. 1 ns drift = 30 cm position accuracy.
3. You still need signals from known positions to triangulate your location.

So while jamming GPS is trivial, the alternative is using other sat networks or building terrestrial radio beacons. Variations on the same problem. Just having accurate, portable clocks does not help.

This article boils down to: UK is working on portable atomic clocks, just like everyone else.

Comment No free market (Score 1) 236

CA dept of insurance regulates this. It sets prices, practices and coverage requirements. It's not really a free market, so the limitations make it impossible to offer insurances that would otherwise be available.

The first approximation of a fix should be to abolish the department, but a better solution might be to create something like a set of standards for coverage verbiage to make it possible to commoditize offerings and make products comparable. All other limitations should probably be removed. A free market gives people the chance to actually discover the cost of insurance and find innovative ways to keep themselves safe. Unfortunately, in the name of protecting people, we severely limit the options that are available and add a lot of overhead costs in regulation. Companies pulling out and state-backed insurances are telltales of broken markets and wasted resources.

Same story in Florida.

Comment It's always been a prison. (Score 1) 199

1. Everyone and everything is indoors. The outside world is literally desert.
2. Government controls your access to adjacent neighborhoods and can divide the "city" into zones arbitrarily cutting off all traffic with a single barrier (that will probably be automated).
3. It's trivial to monitor the entire thing centrally.
4. Your infrastructure cost is now approximately 2x because you're laid out in a line instead of a grid. Wire, plumbing and transport runs between any two random points in the city are now much higher.
5. Wherever the "center" of some activity is, let's say a concert or a Mosque, will now become a hotspot that has A LOT more traffic pressure because everyone will be forming long lines to get there and get out. The longer you make this stupid thing, the more you cause problems for yourself or make different "sections" of the city start to naturally form their own villages and towns, except they will all be of limited size and inefficient.
6. You could dramatically increase efficiency by changing this stupid thing to a ring and increase it again by changing it to a dome, but then it's no longer an easily controllable prison.

Comment Re: please /. stop advertising blockchain-as-curr (Score 1) 181

The comparison was the currency itself.

Even if today's orange is closer to 1982's orange than comparable Apples -- it's still roughly an orange and an Apple. If you stuffed $2,500 into a mattress in 1984 instead of buying an Apple, waited 40 years, pulled it out and went to the Apple store, it would still buy you an average Apple. You'd be a bit worse off in oranges, since they would be pretty much the same oranges, and fewer of them, but not catastrophically.

With Bitcoin, and its reverse-Argentinian levels of speculation, a pizza party today comes at the potential opportunity cost of a Porsche in ten years... or very possibly the reverse. Tempting gamble for some, surely, maybe even a profitable investment of debatable wisdom, but unquestionably a terrible currency.

Comment I wonder what happens (Score 0) 186

I'll admit that I don't know if there's any possibility that this scenario could be true, but based on the treatment of doctors who questioned covid policy (many of whom turned out to have valid concerns) I'd say that finding any evidence against the human-centered climate change consensus is likely to be a career-ending act. Could you get NSF, NOAA or any other government funding and could you get or keep a research fellowship without it?

Climate research makes use of complex physics models that mostly don't get used to predict actual weather (different scales). I have seen that a few of the models can be used to predict weather AND they do happen to be the ones that make more dire climate predictions. I'd like to see a lot more of that kind of ground-truth testing. There seem to be a lot of possible confounding factors and a pretty broad bias against finding for the null hypothesis.

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