Simbio (u/Simbio) - Readit News

Simbio commented on The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory cell.com/one-earth/fullte... · Posted by u/Archelaos

2III7 · a month ago

WDYM personal decisions don't matter? Industrial and agricultural sectors, which both in sum contribute 50% of total greenhouse gas emissions, produce what is in demand from consumers. Another 15% of emissions is from personal vehicles. Changing personal habits is the only way we can ever reach some utopian climate targets. Utopian because old habits die hard.

Simbio · a month ago

Once again, personal decisions on the consumer side doesn't matter here. Unless all consumers cooperate to force a ban on practices that are bad for environment. However that basically means forcing specific decisions on the 1% that control laws and business.

Simbio commented on The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory cell.com/one-earth/fullte... · Posted by u/Archelaos

SJC_Hacker · a month ago

Its a case of prisoner's dilemma. Individuals making the proposed lifestyle changes in order to make a genuine dent in AGW amount to jumping on the tracks in order to stop a freight train.

This is the one issue where I feel some sympathy with the right. I hate "Virtue signaling" about as much as they do. I'm sorry, but if you are going to snap at people over eating beef, while you fly/drive all over the country/world unnecessarily, you are absolute full of shyte.

Simbio · a month ago

Prisoner's dilemma is a bad reference here.

Prisoner's dilemma is about situation when optimal outcome requires cooperation from all participants.

In the situation with climate change, personal decisions of 99% of Earth population do not really matter.

Simbio commented on Every Bitcoin payment 'uses a swimming pool of water' bbc.com/news/technology-6... · Posted by u/dataminer

Simbio · 2 years ago

Current bitcoin price is around 35k USD. This means that mining of one BTC going to cost you up to 35k USD (including the cost of equipment, electricity and everything else like the probability of finding a block). Why so? If the cost of production was higher than market BTC cost then it would be not profitable to mine. If cost is much lower then it's worth to buy a mining rig and start mining.

1 block gives 6.25 BTC for the block and around 0.5 BTC from transactions. 1 block contains 4k transactions.So 35k US/BTC * (6.25 BTC + 0.5 BTC) / 4k transactions ~= 59$ per transaction. That includes all energy spent by all active miners and full cost of equipment.

Not sure if a "swimming pool of water" costs 60$. I guess not.

Simbio commented on Belarus’s Soviet Economy bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

stevesimmons · 6 years ago

I had my second trip to Minsk last week to work with a local IT company.

I was very impressed with the technical skills of the people there. Belarus and Minsk are advanced in many ways (metro with trains every 2 minutes), electric busses (powered by capacitors, not batteries), mobile phone (MTS shop at the airport sells a $9 SIM with unlimited data for a month), Yandex taxis beats Uber, etc, etc.

The main downside I noticed was meals based on meat and potatoes, not many vegetables.

All in all, I now am curious to find out more about Belarus... Need to spend some time learning basic Russian now!

Simbio · 6 years ago

Keep in mind that IT domain is somewhat separated from the rest of all other economics of Belarus. Pay rates in IT-related companies a much higher than in in almost any other domain. On the other side, most of heavy industry, education and medical service are in decline.

Frequency of metro trains is reduced if compared to what there was had few years ago. 2 minute intervals are only on rush hours. Most of other time it's ~7-10m intervals.

Electric buses are used only on single route in the center of the Minsk.

Yandex and Uber in Minsk are joined into single company. So you can't say that Yandex beat Uber :)

> $9 SIM with unlimited data for a month

I suspect that this is not true. AFAIK, there are no real "unlimited" plans. There always a cap on total volume of data.