Increased pageviews, yet many users also hate constant outrage and leave the platform entirely. It is not obvious that a platform with civil, high-quality discussion would lose in the marketplace (not obvious it would win either, though).
I wonder if gliders that are powered by electric motors only during takeoff and landing could be a solution here. It's not like we get very annoyed by eagles soaring in the sky.
What about a buried rail gun, as a less explosive version of the columbiad in Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon? You'd step on to a circular platform, get slowly lowered into the barrel, then shot into the sky, where the wings would open :)
Sure greed/profit motive, but it is accepted by the general public because it is local direct benefit (less crop failure) vs diffuse harm to a large area.
It is not necessary, but if society was good at assigning a price to the relative merits of informational resources vs physical goods it would result in a more efficient economy.
Yes, science and art will progress, but if there is no economy attached, then they will be dominated by people who don't have to make a living. Unless we fund the whole thing publicly. That would work, but in other contexts we believe the market is more efficient.
These kinds of techniques are often claimed to be effective against flash floods, which makes sense since they slow down water transfer to rivers. Does anyone know any studies about how effective it could be against seriously heavy precipitation of the scale of Harvey or South Asia floods right now? In other words, how well does the approach scale?
Civil engineering has pretty well quantified the rate at which water is absorbed by certain soils, accounting for groundcover, trees, pavement, local detainment, etc. Berlin's sponge mission is baiscially distributed detainment, working to offset hardscaping (driveways and roofing). In other words, it's a well known and very predictable science, but we (we being US land development industry) has not cared. HOWEVER rain at the scale of Harvey cannot practically be planned for beyond "don't build on land that's lower than average"
Well, that's partly true. A lot of the flooding is due to the fact that the entirety of Texas doesn't care about hydrology, and all that water is ending up downstream, in Houston.
There'd still be flooding, and it would still be bad, but a certain degree of flooding was avoidable.
The other thought, I imagine, is that they felt the probability was low that they would see a flood of this scale even within their lifetime; that ended up being a poor bet. Even so, flood insurance is also cheaper when the perceived likelihood of a flood is low.
As you almost certainly know, the city controls permissions for every building.
A city that gives planning permission for a development that is probably going to be destroyed with loss of life in the next hundred years is not serving people well.
Eh it is wholly true. Distributed detention schemes still have a finite volume of containment, and once the detention zones are saturated, those areas behave equally to pavement for each additional unit of water. 50 inches of water across the majority of Texas with severe storm surge cannot be practically prepared for beyond insurance, evacuation, and/or a boat. To say “it was avoidable” is a strong and expensive assertion requires some hard backup. Heres an introduction to runoff coefficient (disclaimer! exciting stuff!). Everything is based on a “design storm” with a specified duration and intensity, where those two variables lead to a sigmoid curve (as i recall) for runoff, or the greater the intensity and longer the duration, the less water that gets detained. http://www.brighthubengineering.com/hydraulics-civil-enginee...
I remember a demonstration from my childhood where water is released into 2 similar models. One model is dry, one model is wet. The water quickly overtakes the dry model and splashes on the other side (as in a flash flood). On the wet model, water takes longer to make it to the other side. Sort of how a wet sponge is far more absorbent than a dry sponge.
I know I didn't really answer your question, but these models were made to represent fields and swamps. So yes, I believe there are lots of studies on large scale effects.
I don't know of any studies but I would imagine a lot of variables come into play.
Soil Type & how deep of soil effects how much water the ground can soak up & how fast the water will run. All would be slower runoff than concrete.
Also the slope of the land would make a difference.
These are just the obvious ones. Bottlenecks, whether created on purpose or not would have a huge impact. Where I live we have large snowfall in the winter which creates ice jams & flash flooding in the spring.
Every inch of rain absorbed makes a rather dramatic difference. Because, floods are moving a lot of water but they also contain a lot of water which is time shifted over a longer period of time.
Think of it like a building being evacuated though a stairwell. Being say 10 vs 11 floors can make a significant difference in average wait time. Except average weight time is equivalent to the height of flood waters.
True, but from the car manufacturer's point of view, all of their customers buy new cars, so comparing what is low-range or high-range to other new cars makes sense.
The author does not articulate his critique very well beyond claiming that the VC get disproportionate return compared to land and labor. A much better critique is Jaron Lanier's Who Owns the Future. There he argues that the problem is when companies create monopolies that shrink the overall economy (Instagram vs Kodak, Facebook vs publishing in general). The startup then provides the public with free services but at the same time it decreases employment opportunity. The whole machinery works as long as some other sector of the economy grows, but that is unlikely to be the case forever. Somehow there would need to be economic growth, not just lowered cost.
This seems closely related to PG's essay Black Swan farming:
"there is probably at most one company in each YC batch that will have a significant effect on our returns, and the rest are just a cost of doing business"
It seems that for the publishers as well, rather than betting big on a few predicted winners, they could bet small on a large number of authors with big potential in the best case.
Is it actually feasible to 3d print a realistic rhino horn from synthesized keratin? Googling keratin 3d printing mostly turns up Pembient itself. One would suspect that keratin printing would have plenty of more humble applications (synthetic hair, nails, biomimetic prosthetics).
