First, consider the edge case where the sail is acting as a bag when you're sailing downwind. As the boatspeed approaches the true windspeed, the apparent windspeed falls to 0 and the sail will luff. In this specific case, the boat can not go faster than the wind.

Now consider the boat cutting across the wind at a 90 angle. When the boat starts moving, the wind comes 90 degrees off the bow. As the boat increases speed, the apparent wind shifts closer to the bow. Apparent wind is just vector addition of true wind and boat wind. If the boat achieves the same speed as the true wind, then the apparent wind is sqrt(2) ~ 1.4x faster than the true wind. More wind means more power, so with that additional wind, it can go faster. Continuing the example, as the apparent wind increases, it appears closer and closer to the bow. Eventually the sail will stall and produce less lift. This is the point where the boat will go no faster.

The slowest point of sail is directly downwind. In a race, it is often much faster to gybe back and forth rather than ever go directly downwind. When a boat goes directly downwind, their boat speed cancels out the true wind. In the strangest case, if a high performance boat going faster than the speed of wind (say, on a broadreach) goes directly downwind, the apparent wind will appear to be coming head on. They've effectively gone 'into irons', yet they're facing 180 degrees off true wind.

If you ever get the chance, you should see the SailGP boats race. Their sails are almost always hauled fully in, even downwind. The other thing is that they gybe downwind because to go directly downwind would be to stall. In effect, these boats can achieve multiple times the true wind speed, but so long as they aren't pointed directly into, nor directly away from the wind.

This is a variant of the Import Substitution idea. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a great track record. Instead of investment in innovation, sheltered industries tend to become less competitive and increasingly reliant on the shelter granted to them. Indeed, even if innovation occurs, it often becomes very hard to undo the sheltering once it’s no longer needed.

Far better to allow countries with comparative advantage in growing grapes to use their land to make wine compared to investing in hydroponics. The irony of that very example is the vertical farming sector has recently learned this very lesson and is undergoing a market realignment after hopes of improved productivity have been found to be less than expected.

It’s just an enormous shame it’s become grossly unaffordable— on an income adjusted basis, it’s more expensive than the Bay Area. That, and the weather, although the summers are perfect IMO.

Person that does adultering: adulterer Thing that does adultering: adulterant

https://www.wri.org/news/statement-uk-eliminates-coal-power-...

Also, running (rather, jogging) isn’t terrible aerobically taxing, if you can’t keep up a convo, you’re running too hard.

Once you’re used to running, it’s an insanely efficient way to create a calorie deficit. Not the most glamorous exercise, but cheap, easy, requires no significant equipment and most all, incredibly time efficient.

How much is a checkbook? My bank (FRB, RIP :( ) gave me, for free, like 8 years ago, an enormous box of checks that I have hardly made a dent in.

Domestic postage is like $0.69, envelopes are, what, couple bucks for a box of 50? Amortized over a couple years, you aren’t looking at more than a dollar or two/month.

Either send a bunch of post dated checks at once or set a calendar reminder to send a new one each month. Either way, I don’t really see a market here

The issue in California is not the price of insurance, it's availability because of extremely myopic ballot initiatives that are entirely political in nature. Should insurance be fairly priced, then the market can force people out of uninsurable areas and into areas with far less chance to burn.

Couple concerns:

- I loath to believe in silver bullets. The executive branch seems to believe that investing in AI (note: the order, despite the extensive definitions, leaves Artificial Intelligence undefined) is the solution to US global leadership, clean energy, national defense and better jobs. Rarely if ever is one policy a panacea for so many objectives.

- I am skeptical of government "picking the winners". Markets do best when competitive forces reward innovation. By enforcing an industrial policy on a nascent industry, the executive may just as well be stifling innovation from unlikely firms.

- I am always worried about inducing a _subsidy race_ whereby countries race to subsidize firms to gain a competitive advantage. Other countries do the same, leading to a glut of stimulus with little advantage to any country.

- Finally, government bureaucracy moves slowly (some say that's the point). What happens if a breakthrough innovation in AI radically changes our needs for the type, size or other characteristic of these data centers? Worse still, what happens if we hit another AI winter? Are we left with an enormous pork barrel project? It's hard to envision the federal government industrial policy perfectly capturing future market needs, especially in such a fast moving industry as tech.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2LCTSD4k9bNDn6i8DzLv9r?si=D...

On the other hand, the difference between a dialect and a language is an army and a navy, neither of which Canada has much of.

The best projections we have say our population will likely inflect downwards by the end of this century. In other words, we probably won’t even reach overpopulation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_gr...

I think I might need to have one today.

- The PE guys prove bowlings alleys aren't dead, and inject a ton of money and interest and arrest the decline, leading to a growth in the sport

- The PE guys don't arrest the decline, but end up injecting a ton of money renovating these locations, they eventually sell them at a loss to enthusiasts who now can keep these places running for a lot longer.

Either way, it's a win.

Pretty tired of the trope _PE == bad_. I wish HN could develop a more nuanced discussion of these ideas. Sometimes it's a wonderful thing to get someone else to prove viability.