(I'm italian) Some international pasta brands (e.g. Barilla) have different cooking times depending on the country/market. I moved from Italy to Germany and noticed the +1 minute in many types of pasta, so I always compensate. I find the cooking time precise and useful, I don't get why people want to reinvent the wheel.
When I worked in a restaurant, we would pre-cook the pasta in the morning, store it and then cook the last few minutes when the order came in (this is actually very common also in good restaurants). Barilla/DeCecco sell restaurant targeted packages and they also report the cooking time split with the precooking. Results are basically the same
Behind this there is the wrong assumption that there must be a replacement for all.
For sure there will be gaps filled by other powers, but it's not necessary, we just got used to it.
What do you mean for "behave", there are a lot of usecases that require more than 8GB memory (expecially for developers) and there is no CPU magic that will help you with that.
Interesting, but still I don't think your comment is very relevant to this. Without cows we could have a forest instead of grass, instead of leaving it to rot. So if the number of cows remains constant you benefit from reducing methane emissions.
But that's an issue with where we feed the cows, isn't it?
For instance - cows are raised on many parts of moorlands in the UK, where they eat only the grass growing there. But if you removed the cows, the moors would be exactly as they are now - they cannot support forests or any other kind of vegetation, because they are basically solid rock with an inch of soil on top. I understand that on the "intensive farming" lots where cows are fed corn/hay specifically grown for them that doesn't really apply - but farmers do absolutely raise cows in such places where it makes no difference - even in the absence of cows or sheep you aren't going to have a forest there.
I understand this isn't potentially isn't helpful, but the problem is very nuanced - some cows are fed in such a way that their methane emissions are a net positive. But I'm also sure there are some where the emissions aren't positive at all, yet it's all bundled into the same "meat causes climate destruction" bandwagon.
I think you're underselling moorlands here. Trees can be planted on moors, and other even more carbon-sinking activity too:
"It’s worth remembering that the peatlands of the UK store more carbon than the woodlands of the UK, France and Germany combined!" [0]
If you don't need the sea, I suggest some cheap german city like Leipzig or Dresden.
Another not so common idea is Bulgaria: cheap, very low taxes (flat 10%) and a lot of english speakers (expecially in Sofia). I've been there several times and it's also a very nice place.
How effective would the Swiss military really be? I looked up the last military operation they were in and couldn’t find anything relevant. Looks like they do extraordinary light peacekeeping and such. (Yes, yes, they’re “neutral”. Suppose I assumed they were still deploying with western bloc powers at least for some sort of combat experience training.)
Seems like the military is more for show than anything else at this point. I can’t imagine a populace living some of the most privileged European/western lives possible would have the stomach for its populace taking heavy casualties in any form of conflict.
The terrain is seemingly still their best advantage, but with modern air power this feels more like some sort of historical LARP the Swiss are proud of more than a force that would really achieve anything.
I'm no expert, but I've been reading Brett Deveraux's blog recently, and he argues that armies built from a civilian society frequently outperform expectations through history.
The other thing he argues that people overestimate is the effectiveness of hugely powerful weapons and technology. They generally don't degrade civilian morale enough to get them to surrender, and well prepared defensive positions are incredibly hard to render defenseless, even with modern weapons and seriously destructive bombing.
I don't think that it's necessary at the moment, but these decisions are a risk/reward thing, and I think the Swiss are prepared enough to make the pain of invading Switzerland outweigh the relatively small gain.
As a Swiss - yup, it's just for show & nostalgia. In my opinion, it will take another 20-30 years of wasted money for this charade until the cold-war-era folks start to become a minority; then we can finally dump our armed boy scout camp.
In David Brin's novel Earth part of the backstory is that WW3 is basically everyone else vs Switzerland and everyone nearly loses (the Swiss almost use cobalt salted doomsday bombs).
— It was to be announced at the P/a/r/t/y/ C/o/n/g/r/e/s/s/ Federal Council presser on Monday. As you know, the P/r/e/m/i/e/r/ President loves surprises.
(as far as kleptocrats hiding loot in banks goes, I believe currently the New World, especially states such as Montana, are better tax-havens than we are.)
If there was something better than Spark for distributed processing, we would be using it. The rest of your comment is a straw man argument, assuming everybody uses it for datasets fitting in memory of a single node.
For research, I created experimental RDF storage on top of Parquet and Apache Spark for querying big graphs[1].
It converts the RDF graph in a sort of property graph, where we have a row for each entity and where the columns are the all possible properties.
The trick is to use a columnar format with the proper encoding (in our case Parquet), to solve the problem of having a lot of columns and a huge NULLs space. With this representation we can eliminate costly joins for most of the common queries, but also reduce the size of the necessary ones.
