A President of a significant world power threatening to destroy a civilization is politics in its ultimate form: the power to f** over anyone it wants to.

Any subsequent backtracking/negotiation/etc is also part of politicking.

It's the uncomfortable underbelly of some societal structures.

    > "Trump threatens ‘a whole civilization will die tonight’ ahead of his Iran deadline"

Business energy users aren't protected, so they buy long-term contracts, hedge, or go-under in the event of an unforeseen energy-shortage.

    > "They could export the surplus"

Transmission capacity and interconnectors are usually the bottlenecks.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47675835

Points: 12

# Comments: 1

Torrent software (the clients and the libraries) feel a little out-of-sync with prevailing torrent sizes and bandwidth availability.

I clearly set my ambitions too low and should follow the Swiss model :-)

One of those was attaching electrical probes to each end of a pencil, and applying an electrical current. Graphite conducts extremely well: the pencil "lead" (actually graphite) heats up, glowing a bright orange colour, whilst setting fire to the wooden pencil surrounds. If you snap the graphite "lead", you can touch the two ends together causing a bright electrical arc.

It's a great physics demonstration, and graphite conductivity is the reason pencils aren't used in zero-gravity environments.

In the UK, the horn might be used to "wake up" a driver in front - e.g. the traffic light has gone green, the driver in front isn't paying attention, so the car behind might sound a short honk to alert the driver in front that the light has changed. There's also the annoyed "you cut in front of me" / "you did something dangerous" long blaring honk.

Those are the two main accepted uses of the horn in the UK, so there isn't much honking in UK traffic jams.

    > "our coats were were from white"

The understanding of the original post was "our coats were white because", which implied the purpose of the coats being white, was to allow them to be written on.

The post was edited to read:

    > "our coats were far from white"

The HN user zabzonk's profile description says "Ex C++ programmer and project manager".

It'd be interesting to understand more about their crossover from microbiology into C++ (or vice-versa).

    > notebooks are hard to sterilize

There isn't a library of lab coats which contain notes written on them, for future consultation.

A notepad page is also easier to permanently sterilize (via incineration) than a lab coat.

    > I find it somewhat offensive that I am lying and/or unprofessional about this.

The whole process would raise so many questions.

    > "You can easily misplace a notepad, but its hard to lose your labcoat"

I have a whole bunch of white t-shirts, and wear a white t-shirt pretty much every day. It's never once occurred to me to write an appointment-time, a phone number, or a shopping-list on my t-shirt.

Much commercial dog-food is made with ingredients which aren't fit to be consumed by humans.

    > "I can assure you we did write all over them"

This seems irrational, inexpedient, and inappropriate for anyone delivering any aspect of medical care.

    > "our coats were white because we used to write on them"

Coats weren't white for anyone to write on, and clinical staff didn't routinely write on their clothes.