Hacker News: sologoub

New comment by sologoub in "Fields where Native Americans farmed a thousand years ago discovered in Michigan"

sologoub — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 15:06:02 +0000

If you try to make a planting bed in any settlement that’s more than say 100 years old on a site that was continuously lived on, you are guaranteed to come across at least some shards of glass, pots, plates, etc. Even if the spot was never explicitly a trash mound. Things break, people usually try to pick them up and put in trash, but (especially in grass) miss pieces. When kids break stuff you often don’t want them picking up sharp objects. Things get stepped on and pressed into soil. Many many reasons to find pottery shards where they seemingly don’t belong.

New comment by sologoub in "Burrito Now, Pay Later"

sologoub — Sun, 11 May 2025 23:34:28 +0000

In general, the availability of credit has been a positive economic factor that helps enable capital expenditures that otherwise would only be available to the wealthiest. Lack of such credit leads to capture of means of production and rent seeking behaviors in economic terms.

However, it’s become more and more clear that not all credit is created equal and what you spend the resulting capital on matters a lot. If one buys a house to live in or equipment to make money with - that’s generally good use of credit, assuming costs do not outweigh the benefits. I can’t think of a situation where buying lunch that one has to finance is a good thing (as different from credit card points harvesting/optimization). The implications of anything similar to payday loans going mainstream feels like a large societal risk.

New comment by sologoub in "Why do transit agencies keep falling for the hydrogen bus myth?"

sologoub — Sat, 15 Mar 2025 18:38:10 +0000

It’s a rather old project (2009), so many articles covering it are defunct. Found some of the info: “The purpose of the Prince Edward Island (PEI) Wind-Hydrogen Village is to use excess wind energy along with hydrogen technologies to offer sustainable energy. Excess electricity produced by wind turbines on the island is being used to power a 300kW uni-polar electrolyzer.

A uni-polar electrolyzer uses alkaline liquids, rather than solid polymer, as its electrolyte. The electrolyzer can produce about 6kg of hydrogen per hour. The hydrogen is then stored as compressed gas in storage tanks that have a total capacity of about 500kg. The hydrogen is then used in the bi-fuel hydrogen/diesel genset to power the village when there is no wind.”

Source: https://martinottaway.com/rhemmen/hydrogen-as-the-ultimate-f...

I guess it’s no fun covering things that just work. News need drama…

New comment by sologoub in "Advanced Civilizations Could Be Indistinguishable from Nature"

sologoub — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 05:53:21 +0000

Those links are so oversimplified to not be useful. The arguments are for an ideological point of view and not a real analysis. Just consider that population growth is stagnating and going into decline. While energy use per capita is likely to increase, it’s not clear at all that things will continue as before even a 100 years from now. Even the AI race is seeing smaller models perform as well or better a year old ones. We are definitely in a fast growth phase of energy use there, but will it continue to grow indefinitely or will we become much more efficient and hit diminishing returns stalling further investment or plateauing energy use? Who knows… On the scale of the next 100 years, humanity can definitely meet its energy needs with nuclear and clean sources if we have the collective will. Will we? Time will tell.

New comment by sologoub in "Advanced Civilizations Could Be Indistinguishable from Nature"

sologoub — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 05:40:40 +0000

These are only finite within Earth. Add even modest solar system travel capabilities and a lot more resources open up. Mining asteroids is just one idea there.

New comment by sologoub in "Advanced Civilizations Could Be Indistinguishable from Nature"

sologoub — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 05:38:47 +0000

If the finite resources here are fossil fuels then the idea is to never use them again. It was a bad idea to continue using these a long time ago and it will still be a bad idea in the future. Sustainable energy production is not about deferring something, it’s about not poisoning where you live. That does not mean giving up on useful technologies. For example, synthetic hydrocarbon fuels can be made in a carbon neutral way, it’s just very expensive today. These would solve for some applications where EVs are not yet practical, etc.

New comment by sologoub in "Advanced Civilizations Could Be Indistinguishable from Nature"

sologoub — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 03:09:14 +0000

The growth is unsustainable argument is very strange to me. We absolutely have the technology to make growth sustainable, but societies choose to go for other things because overall growth and advancement of humanity is not generally a goal at mass individual level.

For example, currently society is busy transitioning to electrified transport. Los Angeles had a vast network of that 80+ years ago (red car light rail system). We also have had nuclear power as an option for a very long time. And yet, red cars were scrapped, rail removed, freeways built, we still burn gas and what not for power, and California has a ban on new nuclear… It’s not that we can’t do all this, it’s that for various reasons we choose not to.

It’s quite human-centric to assume that all other possible civilizations will make the same choices. It seems more likely that there will be as many choices and value systems as there are possible life sustaining planets out there. This doesn’t answer the paradox of course.

New comment by sologoub in "Is population density the reason Americans can't discuss politics?"

sologoub — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 00:35:47 +0000

Agree, the forced two-party system is very limiting and the identity tied to politics is emblematic of modern US. In EU, as I believe in India from the anecdotes in the article, a lot of the identity is tied to the place you are from and the social strata the family occupies. Those are somewhat immutable things (where you were born and what family you are from), so deciding to break off communication with that community is “expensive” socially because there is no other community that will readily accept you as their own. Whereas in US, it’s quite normal to change social circles at will. Density/proximity makes it much more obvious, but the semi-fixed social circles I believe have a lot to do with it. Many US expats report loneliness when moving abroad for similar reasons - it’s hard to find a new inner circle in societies built around other identities.

New comment by sologoub in "Who died and left the US $7B?"

sologoub — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 05:22:30 +0000

Infra in CA is not going so well. Roads as an example are terrible compared to most developed countries. When last years winter storms damaged many roads, the newly paved replacements are not very smooth at all and some have been redone multiple times in the span of a single year. I don’t know what the causes are, but when comparing to EU where they have to account for freezing temps, CA doesn’t seem THAT complicated. Yet EU highways on average are a lot better.

New comment by sologoub in "Who died and left the US $7B?"

sologoub — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 05:15:00 +0000

From your reply you haven’t actually lived in either Europe or Japan. They generally do not have people die on the streets and you enjoy some excellent infrastructure. It would be nothing short of amazing to get half the services or protections people in other developed countries take for granted.

New comment by sologoub in "Who died and left the US $7B?"

sologoub — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 04:39:21 +0000

> Taxes are also money invested, in schooling, infrastructure, etc.

Not presently. Most tax dollars are spent elsewhere and infrastructure/education get less than 7%: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

Even that spending is not effective. Drive California roads and you’ll often see fixes that aren’t much better than the damaged roads they replaced. And let’s not talk about our wonderful train projects…

In theory, this money would make a lot of difference. In practice, it’s heartbreaking.

New comment by sologoub in "The Triple Failure of 2U, EdX, and Axim"

sologoub — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 05:49:50 +0000

The community college system does a good deal here. As an example in California, students can get a great deal of their undergrad lower division work done at a community college for a fraction of even UC or State university cost (which for instate students is already fairly low).

Community colleges are also where folks would normally turn to for casual the classes they wanted to take but didn’t necessarily want the formalities of the full degree. Online delivery of there helped further but vs MOOCs, CC has geographic and residency restrictions for who can actually study there.

New comment by sologoub in "Pushing baby booms to boost economic growth amounts to a Ponzi scheme"

sologoub — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 14:55:12 +0000

> But here’s the thing: Low – or, for that matter high – birth rates are not a problem in and of themselves.

High birthdates are a problem with scarce resources and tend to be associated with poor treatment of women[1]. Low birthrates are an extreme problem because as people age, they need to be taken care of. Even if that old person is very rich through responsible investments in their younger age, that money won’t bring them the proverbial glass of water without another younger person there.

Like with most things in life, balance is important and hard to achieve.Two to three kids per family seems to be ideal, but comes with an extreme life style hit unless you happen to be very well off. There are many irrational worries too that come with being a parent. While not perfect, I’ll take some support over none. „Too much” support is an ethics/ideology question and also has to do with social cohesion and ability of the society to integrate new members into that cohesion.

[1]https://worldpopulationhistory.org/womens-status-and-fertili...

New comment by sologoub in "The upstream cause of the youth mental health crisis is the loss of community"

sologoub — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 16:35:58 +0000

To take this a step further, I’d argue such framings encourage either creation or amplification of risk perceptions in order to sell the remedy (and for political gain), at least in the US. Kids aren’t really allowed much autonomy the way even their parents enjoyed. All interactions are in a sense supervised and structured.

New comment by sologoub in "[dead]"

sologoub — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 00:41:09 +0000

From a scientific perspective, the text is very rich and shows somewhat chronological evolution of beliefs and society systems. Coupled with responses to catastrophic events/influences, like the Babylonian captivity influencing what heaven and hell were understood to be, there’s a lot to study/research. There are many university courses on the subject that are not a religious class.

New comment by sologoub in "Austria to 'Super-Speeders': We're Taking Your Car"

sologoub — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 01:59:00 +0000

I was commenting on freeway style roads. Pedestrians shouldn’t be on an „autobahn”. City streets are a different matter all together.

New comment by sologoub in "Austria to 'Super-Speeders': We're Taking Your Car"

sologoub — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 15:22:27 +0000

Being distracted behind the wheel has a lot of cultural aspects - in US driving is viewed as almost a right, else where it is a hard earned and expensive privilege. People tend to value what they had to work hard for. Of course there will be those who don’t, but increasing the barrier to entry to operating dangerous machinery might be a good thing. Look at licensing approaches around the world and you will see places with higher barriers having a bit more order on the streets.

New comment by sologoub in "Austria to 'Super-Speeders': We're Taking Your Car"

sologoub — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 02:43:45 +0000

A truism, which is not very useful. The strategy of reducing speed to reduce collisions/severity compared to reducing dangerous behavior that leads to collisions is like the failed war on drugs.

I’ve been hit a few times in US and always it’s a distracted driver going fast and not following any rules. Speed limit didn’t slow them one bit. Not even in a school zone. Training, enforcement and more training is in my view a better answer. Not perfect, but better.

New comment by sologoub in "Austria to 'Super-Speeders': We're Taking Your Car"

sologoub — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 02:39:33 +0000

Unless pot holes are fixed, increasing speed limits will just make them more dangerous.

New comment by sologoub in "Austria to 'Super-Speeders': We're Taking Your Car"

sologoub — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 21:51:05 +0000

Speed is not the issue. Weaving in and out, tailgating and other similar behaviors are.

Just came back from Germany and drove on the no speed limit part of the autobahn. It was orderly and I felt perfectly safe with family going equivalent of 120mph. No one cutting you off, unless passing, no sitting in left lane. Getting passed at that speed like you are standing still takes a bit getting used to, but again, it’s very predictable. Did not witness any accidents in 2 weeks of driving. It can be done, just need proper rules, penalties for breaking them that are actually enforced and of course good roads (didn’t see any pot holes either).