Agreed. Future carbon capture capabilities are used to justify current emissions.

Thanks for the link. That is certainly a frustrating development, since they had to sell it for a much steeper discount before as the article mentions.

Importantly they tried to enter the market with a $40 purchase price, when the existing competition is mostly free to play.

There might be public displeasure about it, but I think behind the scenes India buying Russia oil is expected and at least to some degree accepted (or possibly even wanted).

The bigger thing is Russia not generating profits from those sales, which I am speculating is not the case at the prices India is buying at. The upside of Russian oil still being available to the world market is keeping the prices lower, something Europe is very much interested in.

I am also from Germany and get payed for donating thrombocytes at my university hospital. The compensation is actually quite substantial imo at (up to) 75€ per session, which can be done every two weeks. The money is however mean to offset the time required, not the thrombocytes donated. So it is correlated to how long it takes.

You get 15€ (?) for up to 15min (if they have to abort very early for some reason or at your first visit where they just draw blood to test), 50€ for up to 1h (which equals to 1 instead of 2 pack of thrombocytes, usually done at your first real donation or if you maybe dont have enough for 2 on this particular day), and 75€ for anything over 1h (which is the norm).

Timewise the hospital is on the outskirts of the city, so most will have to travel a bit, then you have to fill out forms, have a quick talk with the doctor, and finally depending on your parameters it takes anywhere from ~55-70min to extract, during which you are tethered to a machine (which takes out some blood, then seperates out the thrombocytes with a centrifuge, pumps back the rest, and repeat).

One could get philosophical about the topic, but from a practical perspective the money makes a lot of sense imo:

• It costs them a lot of money to investigate new prospects, so you want reliable repeat donors

• Each donation already has other costs associated with it. Like for example the kit used during extraction, the staff handling everything and so on. So even those 75€ are just one more expense among many, and from donation to usage probably vanish in the overall costs.

• For the donor it is quite a substantial time commitment, especially when done regularly every two weeks. Unlike for example full blood donations you’d maybe do twice a year. And you should be reliable and not randomly cancel at the last second, so ideally it also has priority over some other things in your life.

• the small amount of blood that remains inside the machine is sometimes used for other research (if you agree to it, which i do)

From my own experience i can say that i might still do it without, but certainly not at the same frequency. And considering the time and effort required i don’t think anyone could be blamed for doing it less frequently without the incentive. So at least in this case it imo is a fair trade and net positive. Although it does also help that this is a university hospital that directly uses it themselves, rather than a for profit company.

Agreed. The difference is that the prequels were a failure in execution, whereas the sequels failed on a conceptual level.

Kind of late, since i just came around to seeing it. Some thoughts:

• I really liked the visuals and i’m glad i got to see it in the cinema on a really good screen, so more or less the best possible experience. But i agree that the Rook animatronic looked a bit off (i’d have to rewatch it again).

• As someone else already mentioned i also liked the dystopian setting of the first act.

• I liked that they were leaning more into the horror, rather than action genre. But imo unlike the first Alien movie it had a few too many jump scares and overused the xenomorphs. Where the original was able to build tension with what you can’t see, here you had a whole pack of them. And somehow they get mowed down way too easily.

• Agreed that there were too many callbacks and easter eggs, rather than letting the movie stand on its own. Especially the Ripley line was just too obvious and imo breaks the immersion into the movie.

• Not a huge fan of the third act

I never used it myself, but rather than a dedicated alarm clock app, maybe look at tasker?

Looking at their website they actually list your use case as an example of what is possible

wake up with a random song from your music collection

(Third point under “usage examples”)

Fun thought experiment, but yeah there is no way it ever happens. The simplest reason is that as soon as Ukraine manages to restore full control over its own territory, they will race to join Nato and the EU. Both of which would not accept Ukraine while holding russian land.

The issue is that would at best “reset” their reputation to zero. But the state that they’d like to go back to would be similar to “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”, which ofc only works with the existing name. And this line of thinking is what got damaged by the degrading processors (and maybe how they handle it).

But Intel has never been in worse shape. So I think it’s less about Intel considering it and more about if it gets forced on them either by activist investors (I remember seeing an article that Intel prepares to defend against that) or necessity.

I don’t think so. The degrading processors are certainly bad, but in the grand scheme of things won’t move the needle. The reputation loss is probably worse than whatever fine they end up paying (and they will drag it out).

The split would be between design and manufacturing. And it would mean a massive shift, not business as usual.

The design side is probably in better shape and would increase their use of TSMC instead of using the now spun off Intel fabs.

The manufacturing side would have it rough. But we are talking about only one of 3 manufacturers of leading edge chips here (together with tsmc and samsung), not something you “conveniently let go bankrupt”. They’d try to raise more money to finish their new fabs and secure customers (while trying to make up for the lost volume from the design side). But realistically I’d say that similar to Global foundries they would drop out of the expensive leading edge race.

Thanks for sharing your experience, i assume most like me will have little to none.

This is their best chance to escape their coming economic trap. They control so few actual resources beyond labor.

Is that actually the case? I am not sure how many resources china has in their own country (I assume there are a few with it being this vast), but I think they are tackling the resource problem more so with their investments in Africa and other poor countries. And because of the war Russia also has fewer countries to sell to besides China.

I think the true longterm problem is actually with the cheap labour force you mention. As the standard of living rises, so do wages. And more importantly they’ll experience the same demographic shift other developed countries are currently experiencing with an aging population. With the difference that it’ll be worse for them due to the one child polic.

Thank you for giving some perspective on how long basic training roughly takes.

If we are talking months, even should Ukraine speed up the process a bit, then i think it is fair to assume that a few days for travel don’t make a significant difference. Especially should there be other advantages to training in existing facilities.

How long is the typical training of a soldier? You are losing 2-4 days to travel, if you are doing it outside of Ukraine. So if we are taking weeks it might matter, but if it’s months I doubt those few extra days would matter.

So like the Stillsuits in Dune?

I think the satellite based cellular networks like ASTS is currently trying to launch will be ubiquitous.

The tech already seems good, so it’ll happen much sooner than 34, but I imagine by that point it will just be one of those things everyone takes for granted.

I can also see small autonomous drones playing a much larger role with various tasks.

I think in reality I would milk it for personal gain, but in this hypothetical thought experiment I’d also like to imagine putting it into public domain.

Yes we would certainly see a lot of trash, but I’d imagine that it would also lead to a lot of creativity. We really are hampered by the insanely long copyright durations.

Sherlock Holmes for example has been part of general culture for a long time, and yet the last novel only became public domain 2023. Considering how much the world changed between now and 1927 (when it was published) it really doesn’t make sense. And the argument for copyright that invention needs to pay also falls flat, when it extends so long even after the authors death.

That is one aspect of it: if you are 10, then 1 year is 10% of your whole life, more if you consider the first few to not really be conscious. If you are 50 it’s only 2%.

But I think another factor is what stays in our memories vs what gets filtered out. If you are young, you’ll experience lots of “first times”, major changes, and defining moments. As you get older there are more parts of your life that are routine and repetitive. Looking back at a year/a whole life what are the things you can vividly remember?

This is also what imo causes the shift in perception for the covid period. Suddenly a lot of events that usually create memorable experiences didn’t happen. No parties, festivals, meeting new people, or vacations in foreign places. For most of us it will have been a major change initially, but relatively quickly routines setting in.