396 Matching Annotations
  1. Jun 2023
    1. Reportage über Produktion und Nutzung von grünem Wasserstoff in Spanien. Eines der Probleme – abgesehen von den hohen Produktionskosten – ist der Wassermangel im Landesinneren. Das ohnehin knappe Wasser wird im Moment für die Landwirtschaft gebraucht, so dass es fraglich ist, wann Spanien grünen Wasserstoff in andere europäische Länder exportieren kann.

      https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/europa/wasserstoff-spanien-100.html

  2. May 2023
    1. https://www.3x5life.com/collections/frontpage/products/3x5-life-system-with-mini-course

      Cost of items purchased separately on Amazon: - Index cards (total of 6*31+13+12+52=263, so round up to 300 at $0.02 each) = $6.99 - storage box $16.49 - dividers $5.79 - phone sleeve: $2.32 - stainless steel stand: $2.33

      Buying these in bulk for additional profit margin/branding could certainly lower the cost.

      Their retail is $97.79 versus commercially at $33.92. Their actual cost at bulk is probably significantly less and likely closer to $15 all in for the system, so this is a nice little profit.

  3. Mar 2023
    1. Watts, Charles J. The Cost of Production. Muskegon, MI: The Shaw-Walker Company, 1902. http://archive.org/details/costproduction01wattgoog.

      Short book on managing manufacturing costs. Not too much of an advertisement for Shaw-Walker manufactured goods (files, file management, filing cabinets, etc.). Only 64 pages are the primary content and the balance (about half) are advertisements.

      Given the publication date of 1902, this would have preceded the publication of System Magazine which began in 1903. This may have then been a prototype version of an early business magazine, but with a single author, no real editorial, and only one article.

      Presumably it may also have served the marketing interests of Shaw-Walker as a marketing piece as well.


      Tangentially, I'm a bit intrigued by the "Mr. Morse" mentioned on page 109 who is being touted as an in-house consultant for Shaw-Walker.... Is this the same Frank Morse who broke off to form the Browne-Morse Co.? (very likely)

      see: see also: https://hypothes.is/a/Sp8s4sprEe24jitvkjkxzA for a snippet on Frank Morse.

    1. My translation of Niklas Luhmann (1997): Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. S.11: “Bei meiner Aufnahme in die 1969 gegründete Fakultät für Soziologie der Universität Bielefeld fand ich mich konfrontiert mit der Aufforderung, Forschungsprojekte zu benennen, an denen ich arbeite. Mein Projekt lautete: Theorie der Gesellschaft; Laufzeit: 30 Jahre; Kosten: keine.”

      As I began to work at the 1969 founded faculty of sociology of the University of Bielefeld, I was confronted with the request to name research projects I work on. My project was: a theory of society; Duration: 30 years; Costs: none.(1)

  4. Jan 2023
  5. Dec 2022
    1. The polio-vaccine conspiracy theory has had direct consequences: Sixteen countries where polio had been eradicated have in recent months reported outbreaks of the disease – twelve in Africa (Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Sudan, and Togo) and four in Asia (India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen). Yemen has had the largest polio outbreak, with more than 83 cases since April. The WHO calls this "a major epidemic."
    1. f you started in January 2022 the numbers in Brackets if you started January 2023 so look how much difference one year makes particularly under the 1.5 budget it's 00:25:55 just enormous you realize how rapidly each year we choose to fail how much that changes the following year and I think that's a really key message here that because we've left it so late every day of failure makes makes 00:26:09 tomorrow much much harder whichever way you look at this whether it's 1.5 or 2 degrees Centigrade whether it's Sweden the UK the US Australia Japan whatever this is profound 00:26:22 an immediate change in our system in so many respects in way above what governments are ever prepared to talk about and I say I don't particularly like these conclusions but that's what's what comes out of the arithmetic

      !- difference in annual emissions reduction required in just one year is enormous - comparing the actual, required emissions of a climate progressive country (Sweden) - emissions reduction just one year later (in brackets) is enormous

    1. Basic facelift (redecoration)£2,000£3,000£2,500 Basic refurbishment - (incl. new kitchen, painting, new flooring, joinery work, modifying bathroom)£15,000£18,000£16,500 Full refurbishment (incl.all of the above, plus new bathroom, new boiler and radiators, structural work, new electrics, re-plastering)£33,000£48,000£40,500

      Refurb cost

  6. Oct 2022
    1. First and foremost, we need to acknowledge that even though the funding goal has been met–it does not meet the realistic costs of the project. Bluntly speaking, we did not have the confidence to showcase the real goal of ~1.5 million euros (which would be around 10k backers) in a crowdfunding world where “Funded in XY minutes!” is a regular highlight.

      new tag: pressure to understate the real cost/estimate

    1. When people ask me about my life’s ambitions, I often joke that my goal is to become independently wealthy so that I can afford to get some work done. Mainly that’s about being able to do things without having to explain them first, so that the finished product can be the explanation. I think this will be a major labor saving improvement.
    2. Alas, many things really must be experienced to be understood. We didn’t have much of an experience to deliver to them though — after all, the whole point of all this evangelizing was to get people to give us money to pay for developing the software in the first place!
  7. Sep 2022
    1. However, as an interpreted language, Ruby is slow compared to compiled languages. The general solution adopted by Rubyists was to throw more hardware at the problem. “Hardware is cheaper than salaried engineers,” went the common maxim.
  8. Aug 2022
  9. Jul 2022
    1. We don’t expect National Defence or health care to promote growth: we just accept that territorial integrity and a healthy populace are good things.

      Been making that point about health (especially since, like education, it's a provincial jurisdiction). It's easy to think of perverse incentives if a profit motive dominates education and health. Physicians would want people to remain sick and teachers would prefer it if learners required more assistance.

      Hadn't thought enough about the DND part. Sure gives me pause, given the amounts involved. Or the fact that there's a whole lot of profit made in that domain.

      So, businesspeople are quick to talk about "cost centres". Some of them realize that those matter a whole lot.

  10. May 2022
    1. In 2022, the focus is exploring and envisioning the hyper-response and embarking on this mission. It will involve engaging and energizing people, analysis, planning, and some early actions. The “E” in PLAN E stands for “Earth,” “everyone,” “everything,” and “everywhere.”

      The global, open access Tipping Point Festival can be launched as a zero marginal cost festival (ZMCF) or a netfest for bottom-up, rapid whole system change to synchronize the ordinary citizens of the globe to deal with the hyperthreat.

    2. It orientates around making the threat visible and knowable, to an extent that this inspires automatic configuration and realignment across human tribes

      This can be done through a decentralized, zero marginal cost hyperthreat education campaign relying on crowdsourcing via the internet. Since the threat level has become salient to a sufficient scale, these aware actors can be crowdsourced for a scalable education campaign.

    3. the current global military buildup could represent a situation whereby many nations are entering, unconsciously or perhaps because there seems to be no other option, into a new type of mutually assured destruction (MAD) scenario, or even the Homo sapiens death spiral.

      It sucks enormous material and energy resources whose purpose is to destroy built environments, human lives, nonhuman lives and the built environment .... not very climate friendly! Military spending only sucks up valuable resources required to fight the climate change hyperthreat.

    1. The argument used to propose its use is to avoid the construction of multiple volatile objects. This supposed advantage is not real in virtual machines with efficient garbage collection mechanisms.

      Consider a Sufficiently Smart Compiler/Runtime where a multiply-instanced class has the exact same runtime characteristics as code that has been hand-"tuned" to use a singleton.

  11. Apr 2022
    1. David Fisman. (2021, December 15). HEPA air cleaners in hospital...lets compare cost to ECMO. ECMO course in the US costs around $93,000 CDN; US cost:charge ratio is around 0.2, so let’s say that’s $20,000 CDN. That’s the cost of 50 high end hepa air cleaners! Or you could do 250 CR boxes at around $80 a pop. [Tweet]. @DFisman. https://twitter.com/DFisman/status/1471259305961828355

    1. Michael Bang Petersen. (2021, March 17). This is worsened as costs of #covid19 are not mentally similar to costs of side effects, even if the latter are less risky. People prefer controllable risks to uncontrollabe risks, even if less lethal (https://t.co/kSIcObWYmT). That is why you fear flying but not driving. [2/2] [Tweet]. @M_B_Petersen. https://twitter.com/M_B_Petersen/status/1372103708218159109

  12. Mar 2022
  13. Feb 2022
  14. Jan 2022
  15. Dec 2021
  16. Nov 2021
  17. Oct 2021
  18. Aug 2021
    1. Now consider we want to handle numbers in our known value set: const KNOWN_VALUES = Object.freeze(['a', 'b', 'c', 1, 2, 3]) function isKnownValue(input?: string | number) { return typeof(input) === 'string' && KNOWN_VALUES.includes(input) } Uh oh! This TypeScript compiles without errors, but it's not correct. Where as our original "naive" approach would have worked just fine. Why is that? Where is the breakdown here? It's because TypeScript's type system got in the way of the developer's initial intent. It caused us to change our code from what we intended to what it allowed. It was never the developer's intention to check that input was a string and a known value; the developer simply wanted to check whether input was a known value - but wasn't permitted to do so.
  19. Jul 2021
    1. Leah McElrath 🏳️‍🌈. (2021, July 12). One reason the right-wing outrage machine is focused on attacking Biden’s plan for door-to door outreach isn’t because they actually fear confiscation of guns or Bibles. It’s because they don’t want poor people to have access to life-saving vaccinations. Https://t.co/GnZMmlBfqK [Tweet]. @leahmcelrath. https://twitter.com/leahmcelrath/status/1414660179061264388

    1. Sarah Kliff on Twitter: “Coronavirus vaccines are free—But 9 percent of Americans say they’re not getting one because they are worried about cost. I see this a lot in my reporting: Patients who don’t seek care because they’re become so accustomed to surprise bills that follow. Https://t.co/gu6oDnlvhB” / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved July 2, 2021, from https://twitter.com/sarahkliff/status/1395032095819542528?s=20

  20. Jun 2021
    1. n the past, many organizations connected remote branches and retail locations to the central data center through a hub and spoke WAN model that relied on individual MPLS connections. As a result, all data, workflows, and transactions, including access to cloud services or the internet, required traffic to be backhauled to the data center for processing and redistribution. Compared to an SD-WAN solution, this is extremely cost-inefficient. SD-WAN reduces costs by providing optimized, multi-point connectivity using distributed, private data traffic exchange and control points to give your users secure, local access to the services they need – whether from the network or the cloud – while securing direct access to cloud and internet resources.
    1. "While it takes time to make these changes now, it's a one-time engineering cost that will have lasting impacts, both internally and externally," Sorenson said in an email. "We're in this for the long game, and we know inclusive language is just as much about how we code and what we build as it is about person-to-person interactions."
    1. I'm not sure why MSFT decided to change these codes in the first place. While it might have been a noble goal to follow the IETF standard (though I'm not really familiar with this), the old codes were already out there, and most developers don't benefit by the new codes, nor care about what these codes are called (a code is a code). Just the opposite occurs in fact, since now everyone including MSFT itself has to deal with two codes that represent the same language (and the resulting problems). My own program needs to be fixed to handle this (after a customer contacted me with an issue), others have cited problems on the web (and far more probably haven't publicised theirs), and MSFT itself had to deal with this in their own code. This includes adding both codes to .NET even though they're actually the same language (in 4.0 they distinguished between the two by adding the name "legacy" to the full language name of the older codes), adding special documentation to highlight this situation in MSDN, making "zh-Hans" the parent culture of "zh-CHS" (not sure if it was always this way but it's a highly questionable relationship), and even adding special automated code to newly created "add-in" projects in Visual Studio 2008 (only to later remove this code in Visual Studio 2010, without explanation and therefore causing confusion for developers - long story). In any case, this is not your doing of course, but I don't see how anyone benefits from this change in practice. Only those developers who really care about following the IETF standard would be impacted, and that number is likely very low. For all others, the new codes are just an expensive headache. Again, not blaming you of cours
  21. May 2021
  22. Apr 2021
  23. Mar 2021
  24. Feb 2021
  25. Jan 2021
  26. Nov 2020
    1. IS186-mediated integration of the plasmid into the chromosome or deletion of these accessory genes from an evolved plasmid that remained capable of self-replication conferred greater fitness benefits than SP formation

      Can we say this is because of the combined fitness benefit

      • by avoiding maintenance of a plasmid and
        • lower expression of proteins?

      Especially considering that there is expression of the accessory genes (ex: GFP in fig.2e)-> so the protein level fitness burden still exists, albeit at a lower extent.

      How much of this burden is attributed to keeping a plasmid around?, maybe this could be tested with a low copy pSC101 type plasmid or by deleting all the accessory genes and repeating the evolution experiment to specifically look for the integrants this time

  27. Oct 2020
    1. Handling all these requests costs us considerably: servers, bandwidth and human time spent analyzing traffic patterns and devising methods to limit or block excessive new request patterns. We would much rather use these assets elsewhere, for example improving the software and services needed by W3C and the Web Community.
    1. One of the primary tasks of engineers is to minimize complexity. JSX changes such a fundamental part (syntax and semantics of the language) that the complexity bubbles up to everything it touches. Pretty much every pipeline tool I've had to work with has become far more complex than necessary because of JSX. It affects AST parsers, it affects linters, it affects code coverage, it affects build systems. That tons and tons of additional code that I now need to wade through and mentally parse and ignore whenever I need to debug or want to contribute to a library that adds JSX support.
    1. This is what higher education is currently saying to its long-term casual staff. While universities are underfunded for teaching and expected to compete globally on the basis of research, then the revenue from teaching will be diverted into research. This isn’t a blip, and there won’t be a correction. This is how universities are solving their funding problems with a solution that involves keeping labour costs (and associated overheads like paid sick leave) as low as possible. It’s a business model for bad times, and the only thing that makes it sustainable is not thinking about where the human consequences are being felt.

      This last sentence is so painful...

    1. Weber notes that according to any economic theory that posited man as a rational profit-maximizer, raising the piece-work rate should increase labor productivity. But in fact, in many traditional peasant communities, raising the piece-work rate actually had the opposite effect of lowering labor productivity: at the higher rate, a peasant accustomed to earning two and one-half marks per day found he could earn the same amount by working less, and did so because he valued leisure more than income. The choices of leisure over income, or of the militaristic life of the Spartan hoplite over the wealth of the Athenian trader, or even the ascetic life of the early capitalist entrepreneur over that of a traditional leisured aristocrat, cannot possibly be explained by the impersonal working of material forces,

      Science could learn something from this. Science is too far focused on the idealized positive outcomes that it isn't paying attention to the negative outcomes and using that to better define its outline or overall shape. We need to define a scientific opportunity cost and apply it to the negative side of research to better understand and define what we're searching for.

      Of course, how can we define a new scientific method (or amend/extend it) to better take into account negative results--particularly in an age when so many results aren't even reproducible?

    1. A common complaint about pure-play PaaS products is that they are inexpensive, to begin with, but become incredibly pricey as you scale apps. One of the reasons behind this is that these PaaS products run on someone else's infrastructure, and they often need to pass those costs on to you. App Platform runs on DigitalOcean’s infrastructure, and since we own the infrastructure, we can keep the costs low to optimize costs and resources as you scale. 
  28. Sep 2020
  29. Aug 2020
    1. Guo, L., Boocock, J., Tome, J. M., Chandrasekaran, S., Hilt, E. E., Zhang, Y., Sathe, L., Li, X., Luo, C., Kosuri, S., Shendure, J. A., Arboleda, V. A., Flint, J., Eskin, E., Garner, O. B., Yang, S., Bloom, J. S., Kruglyak, L., & Yin, Y. (2020). Rapid cost-effective viral genome sequencing by V-seq. BioRxiv, 2020.08.15.252510. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.08.15.252510

    1. Sun, W., McCroskery, S., Liu, W.-C., Leist, S. R., Liu, Y., Albrecht, R. A., Slamanig, S., Oliva, J., Amanat, F., Schäfer, A., Dinnon, K. H., Innis, B. L., García-Sastre, A., Krammer, F., Baric, R. S., & Palese, P. (2020). A Newcastle disease virus (NDV) expressing membrane-anchored spike as a cost-effective inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. BioRxiv, 2020.07.30.229120. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.07.30.229120

    1. Vogels, C. B. F., Brackney, D., Wang, J., Kalinich, C. C., Ott, I., Kudo, E., Lu, P., Venkataraman, A., Tokuyama, M., Moore, A. J., Muenker, M. C., Casanovas-Massana, A., Fournier, J., Bermejo, S., Campbell, M., Datta, R., Nelson, A., Team, Y. I. R., Cruz, C. D., … Grubaugh, N. (2020). SalivaDirect: Simple and sensitive molecular diagnostic test for SARS-CoV-2 surveillance. MedRxiv, 2020.08.03.20167791. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.08.03.20167791

  30. Jul 2020
  31. Jun 2020
  32. May 2020
    1. For the past few years, we've run GitLab.com as our free SaaS offering, featuring unlimited public and private repositories, unlimited contributors, and access to key features, like issue tracking, code review, CI, and wikis. None of those things are changing! We're committed to providing an integrated solution that supports the entire software development lifecycle at a price where everyone can contribute. So what's changing? Over time, the usage of GitLab.com has grown significantly to the point where we now have over two million projects hosted on GitLab.com and have seen a 16x increase in CI usage over the last year.
    1. Internal platform groups (those focused on a non-user facing part of our product, like a set of internal APIs) tend to create heavy coordination costs on other groups which depend on platform improvements to deliver valuable features to users. In order to stay efficient, it is important to ensure each group is non-blocking and is able to deliver value to users directly. This is why we avoid internal platform groups.
    1. In general, bucket owners pay for all Amazon S3 storage and data transfer costs associated with their bucket. A bucket owner, however, can configure a bucket to be a Requester Pays bucket. With Requester Pays buckets, the requester instead of the bucket owner pays the cost of the request and the data download from the bucket. The bucket owner always pays the cost of storing data.

      Request Pays

  33. Apr 2020
    1. If you are want pups and/or to support us and our artists but can't afford full price, you can back at this special half-price level with reduced shipping ($2), no questions asked. You'll still get the game + stickers, because we want to get cute pups on every table we can this summer.

      It's interesting to observe that

      • 149 backers backed at this half-price level
      • 656 backers backed at the full price

      What I want to know is, did everyone who backed at full price realize there was the option to get the same reward for half the price? Anyway, that's awesome that they're willing to support this project at that level.

  34. Mar 2020
    1. Yes, it’s been deprecated. Why? Because too few people were using it to make it worth the time, money, and energy to maintain. In truth, although I sometimes disagree with the operator changes, I happen to agree with this one. Maintaining ALL of the synonyms takes real time and costs us real money. Supporting this operator also increases the complexity of the code base. By dropping support for it we can free up a bunch of resources that can be used for other, more globally powerful changes.
  35. Jan 2020
  36. Nov 2019
  37. Oct 2019
    1. money

      Whose money? Important to determine whether the student or the institution is the winner here. Are we increasing access to high quality resources? I think the answer is yes, but I think it also bears thinking about.

      Another type of savings to consider: the technical debt that students of all ages incur when they encounter a new technology that may or may not be well supported. If OER is trapped inside proprietary technologies with unique logins, it's worth considering how many of those resources we ask students to grapple with over the course of a degree.

  38. Sep 2019
  39. Aug 2019
    1. Research. As zero-textbook-cost degrees are implemented across the country, research could be conducted to analyze the impact of degree establishment on student access and success, as well as on faculty pedagogical practice. Metrics related to access and success might include credit loads, withdrawal rates, persistence rates, pass rates, and actual cost savings.

      Zero-textbook cost degrees is still a long way off as far as India goes. Our students are now extremely proficient in the use of the internet and open sources. However, compared to open access resources use of standardised textbooks in traditionnal classrooms is definitely better as teachers has a personal connect with the student. This is particularly necessary as students are becoming victims of PUBG and other such addctive games leading to either suicide or other behavioural problems. We do not need a plethora of zombie students in our schools and colleges!

  40. Jul 2019
  41. May 2019
    1. The country’s economy is completely dependent on mining. Many poor families are completely dependent on their children working the mines. That $9/day is hard for a child to reject

      its weird how people are able to exploit these people legally, and if not legally than how have people not made an effort to stop them?

    2. Walt describes how the multibillion-dollar industry, that has made some people outside Africa really really rich, is not known to workers like Lukasa. He just sells his haul to Chinese traders who have seen their profits increase 400% over the last two years.

      I wonder if the people at the top of the company even know that this is going on with there "employees"

  42. Dec 2018
  43. Aug 2018
  44. May 2018
  45. Apr 2018
    1. an effective marginal cost of zero

      This aspect of information goods is oft quoted as a distinguishing feature whose existence supports a radically different approach from previous publishing methods.

      It's true that the marginal cost is dramatically decreased with digital publishing. But there's a big difference between "closer to zero than before" and actually zero. The marginal cost of digital information goods is not actually zero. That people are willing to trade their privacy in exchange for someone else bearing the costs of managing information is one piece of evidence of this.

  46. Jan 2018
    1. “[t]he uncertainty surrounding the Title II regulatory framework for wireless broadband services hinders our ability to meet our customer[s]’ needs, burdens our companies with unnecessary and costly obligations and inhibits our ability to build and operate networks in rural America.”

      I think it's likely that these providers would offer slower connectivity speeds as a foundation for rural areas, but their uncertainty in what is allowed holds them back from the attempt to expand.

    2. The evidence so far strongly suggests that this is the right way to go.

      This statement is underlining the idea that repealing these regulations is necessary for innovation and development of new companies.

    3. if the FCC “suddenly subject[ed] some or all information service providers to telephone regulation, it seriously would chill the growth and development of advanced services.”2

      What are the facts/logic behind this statement? In what way would it "chill" growth and development?

  47. Oct 2017
  48. Oct 2016
  49. May 2016
  50. Apr 2016
  51. Mar 2016
  52. Nov 2015
  53. May 2015
    1. Because most of these studies were randomized controlled trials—the “gold standard” of medical evidence—they tended to have a significant impact on clinical practice, and led to the spread of treatments such as hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women and daily low-dose aspirin to prevent heart attacks and strokes. Nevertheless, the data Ioannidis found were disturbing: of the thirty-four claims that had been subject to replication, forty-one per cent had either been directly contradicted or had their effect sizes significantly downgraded.

      Here is the cost right here!

  54. Apr 2015