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Useful, extractable energy comes from a temperature differential, not just temperature itself. Once your system is at temperature equilibrium, you cant extract energy anymore and must shed that temperature as heat


This still relies on a heat differential, as described in the Details section of your linked article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermophotovoltaic_energy_conv...

This argument assumes that you only need to radiate away the energy that the solar actively turns into electricity, but you also need to dissipate all the excess heat that wasn’t converted. The solar bolometric flux at the earth is 1300 w/m2, or 2600 for 2 sq m. That works out to an efficiency of ~20% for your home solar, and your assumed value of 750 w yields an efficiency of ~30%, which is reasonable for space-rated solar. But assuming an overall albedo of ~5% that means that you were only accounting for a third of the total energy that needs to be radiated.

Put another way, 2 sq m intercepts 2600 w of solar power but only radiates ~1700 w at 350 k, which means it needs to be run at a higher temperature of nearly 125 celsius to achieve equilibrium.


Thats not how big-O notation works. You don’t know what proportionality constants are being hidden by the notation so you cant make any assertions about absolute runtimes

It is true that big-O notation does not necessarily tell you anything about the actual runtime, but if the hidden constant appears suspiciously large, one should double-check whether something else is going on.

In most places in the US (california being a notable exception) taxes are reassessed regularly based on market conditions. In some areas this can result in the property taxes rising to an appreciable fraction of the mortgage rate - or in the GPs case, what the mortgage would have been, if they hadnt paid it off already.


> Happiness simply comes from other things in life than 'my castle my kingdom'. I know its a typical US mindset (and far from US only) to have a house on your own, but its still an emotion

This is a frustratingly uninformed take. You are comparing apples to oranges by equating your decision-making process with that of someone in the US. The drive to own a house in the US is not just mediated by “emotion” - the calculus is fundamentally different than in many nordic countries. For instance, very few places in the US have rent control, which means that renting represents substantial risk of either experiencing a large increase in cost, or being forced to move at irregular intervals. On the other end of the spectrum, the US is one of the only places that offers 30 year mortgages, which means that (taxes and repairs aside) buying a home on credit still offers a high level of predictable cost over the long term. Also, at least historically, there are very many places in the US for which housing is very affordable, given that the USs overall population density is so much lower than the average European country.

This is of course not to suggest that buying is always a good call - but it is often a logical and financially sound one.

https://bopoolen.nu/en/laws-regulations/


I would genuinely like to understand this perspective. Ads or paying for premium is how the underlying business makes money. The UX might suck but you have a choice - you can just not watch YouTube. The approach you describe (which i understand is a popular one) is equivalent to justifying robbing a store because their prices are too high.


The approach is the equivalent of avoiding the end of aisles so that you don't even look at the products that companies are paying to the store to promote.


Except in this case the only way the store makes money is either by you paying an entrance fee or by you looking at the products. You are being delivered a service (whose delivery costs money) while actively circumventing the mechanism the store employs to be compensated for that service.


YouTube is the content, not the box.

You might like the content, but you don’t pay for a shit box anyways.


It’s not a robbery if noone is getting robbed. That’s a very bad analogy really.


You are using a service without paying for the service by actively circumventing the payment mechanism. Is that not stealing?


Is it okay if I go the bathroom or get another beer while the commercials play? If so, why?


Thats like saying the grocery store is ok with me eating some of the grapes while I shop so they must be ok with me walking out without paying for my groceries.

I’m not trying to be obtuse here. I really want to understand some sort of reasonable moral justification for actively avoiding paying for a service that you are using / circumventing the mechanism by which the business makes money.


> circumventing the mechanism by which the business makes money

This is generally of no interest to consumers.


A slightly stronger (and more relevant) statement is that the number of mutually nearly orthogonal vectors you can simultaneously pack into an N dimensional space is exponential in N. Here “mutually nearly orthogonal” can be formally defined as: choose some threshold epsilon>0 - the set S of unit vectors is nearly mutually orthogonal if the maximum of the pairwise dot products of between all members if S is less than epsilon. The statement of the exponential growth of the size of this set with N is (amazingly) independent of the value of epsilon (although the rate of growth does obviously depend on that value).

This is pretty unintuitive for us 3D beings.


That would also be an incorrect phrasing. This entire thread is a good illustration of the difficulty of speaking precisely about probabilistic concepts.

(The number of successes has zero uncertainty. If you flip a coin 10 times and get 5 heads, there is no uncertainty on the number of heads. In general, for any statistical model the uncertainty is only with respect to an underlying model parameter - in this example, while your number of successes is perfectly known, it can be used to infer a probability of success, p, of 0.5, and there is uncertainty associated with that inferred probability.)


> How much of a chance do you think we have of meaningfully changing a government, if they can guess with 80% degree accuracy how everyone voted, based on their chats and social networks

This doesnt really detract from your overall point, but you may be underestimating how easy it already is for the government to tell how you will vote, without use of networking information. Just knowing someone’s educational level and zip code is enough to guess their voting preferences to a high degree of accuracy (the latter component being the reason why gerrymandering is so effective).


Unfortunately I’m in the same boat. What appears especially telling is:

> tVNS applied for 30 min daily over 7 consecutive days increased VO2peak by 1.04 mL/kg/min (*95% CI: .34–1.73*; P = .005), compared with no change after sham stimulation (−0.54 mL/kg/min; *95% CI: −1.52 to .45*)

(emphasis mine) The 95% CIs for the case and control groups overlap. Seems borderline irresponsible to have a the abstract reporting a significant result.


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