lyschoening's comments

lyschoening | 3 years ago | on: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

It's one thing to use a medium that is being abused by malicious actors; it's another to be on a medium that suffers constant drama fostered by an owner and CEO who spends his days vocalizing an imprecise understanding of civil rights and his contempt for his customers.

lyschoening | 3 years ago | on: Why high speed rail hasn’t caught on

Negativity aside, the article makes fair arguments against setting expectations for rail speed too high. The thing is, trains do not have to be faster than 300kph/185mph to compete with planes.

Modern trains are infinitely more comfortable than modern planes, so they do not need to match planes in travel times. A modern train features silent travel, ample leg room, unpressurized air and no seat belts. Reliability is key and that does require infrastructure investment.

Rail infrastructure will always require subsidies but the costs do not have to be astronomical. Meanwhile, the cost of air traffic emissions are carried by society, which can't go on much longer.

lyschoening | 4 years ago | on: An utterly crushing day for Big Oil

The more accurate scenario is one where they drop everything and rapidly switched to synthetic fuels and chemicals from solar, which initially would be prohibitively expensive. Would they do that, they wouldn't sell anything as they would bankrupt their customers, lest they ate some of the costs themselves until their customers had time to adjust. That scenario, while still being hyperbolic, is in essence what we need to see. Big Oil needs to shrink; their prices need to cover the cost to society, their products need to be used less and they need to spend a whole lot of money on cleaning up their mess.

lyschoening | 5 years ago | on: Norwegian experts say blood clots were caused by the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine

Who is to say that other vaccines don't have the same side-effect? That could especially be assumed of the other viral vector vaccines, so Johnson & Johnson, Sputnik and CanSino, none of which have received much scrutiny so far.

Even if the mRNA vaccines are safe, we depend on J&J and AZ doses for our reopening plans in Europe. We can expect economic damage from any wait for alternative vaccine doses.

lyschoening | 5 years ago | on: Nuclear technology’s role in the world’s energy supply is shrinking

Other than the oft-mentioned risks of nuclear, it is (1) not as cheap as you think and (2) not straightforward to maintain in a warming environment.

1. Nuclear power is far more expensive than renewables, due to the high costs for construction and dismantling. This does not dismiss your argument, because running a nuclear power plant is fairly cheap. The costs therefore speak towards keeping nuclear power plants running as long as they remain safe.

2. Existing nuclear power plants use huge quantities of fresh water for cooling. The required water quantity and temperature make nuclear power plants prone to droughts, which can cause shutdowns, and to flooding events, which can shut down or damage the plant. Both droughts and floods are increasing in frequency due to climate change. This speaks towards closing down power plants that are particularly vulnerable. In any case, grid operators need to be able to mitigate nuclear power plant outages. The cost of nuclear power is even less attractive when overcapacity is needed to accommodate potential outages.

lyschoening | 5 years ago | on: An upcoming story about Coinbase

You can provide the reason for your decision. If you routinely evaluate driving tests, you will have based your decision on factors that you have applied without bias.

And if you feel so inclined, you can express your understanding to that person who feels that they have been wronged because of their background. Chances are they have been right far more often than they have been wrong and it's very stressful having to deal with an ever-present potential for unprovoked adversity.

It should be a very small burden on you to acknowledge their situation.

To return to the topic, Coinbase doesn't lose a breath acknowledging their Black employees who did file complaints. If they had any sympathy for these employees — which they should have even if they were not wronged for being Black — why didn't they express it in the statement?

lyschoening | 7 years ago | on: GDPR: Don't Panic

The law says that the fines should be "effective, proportionate and dissuasive". That gives companies ample room to challenge a fine that is way out of proportion to the damages caused to their users.

lyschoening | 8 years ago | on: EU agrees on total ban of bee-harming pesticides

The "Genetic Literacy Project" is funded by a right-wing religious foundation that mixes religion and science to advance theological opinions.

If you open the original Guardian article, you have to look no further than the third paragraph to read why the EU concluded that the previous ban was not enough.

lyschoening | 8 years ago | on: Rejoiner: Unified GraphQL schema from gRPC microservices

Can't comment on the gateway, gRPC for Python is definitely half-baked though. gRPC is great; the tooling is not. Google seems to only be updating whatever parts of gRPC they use internally. Everything else is practically unusable. While that is fair from Google's standpoint, it really hurts adoption.
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