YES! I moved to SF from Paris (where I spent my whole life before that) a year ago. I exclusively use lime instead of public transit because of how slow it is! Going from Folsom&8th to Mason&Girard takes 50 minutes! And you spend most of the time stopped! With a lime I can usually get there in 20 to 25 minutes. I would use my own bike that I use to commute to work if you could lock a bike without getting it stolen almost immediately.
Folding bikes are the answer there IMO. You can just bring it into the office. You can get pretty good electric ones too now (probably a requirement for SF).
I can already bring my regular bike in the office. The problem is when you're meeting with friends, going to a restaurant, well anything that's not commuting to work...
Radiators can only be made as long as desirable because there's gravity for the fluid inside to go back down once it condenses. Even seen those copper heat pipes in your PC radiator?
Looks cool, I think you should try to target it towards the elderly. My 99 year old grandpa is capable of using a computer and browsing the web, but struggles whenever he gets out of the "usual flow" (accidentally removes the chrome icon from his taskbar, whenever the crappy web-based email he insists on using over thunderbird moves the add attachment button). I end up having to do teamviewer to show him what I can't explain over the phone. He would very much use an assistant that shows him what to do, especially if he can speak to it.
Hey! Thanks for the suggestion. I visited a lot of old age homes in SF today, but the recurring issue I saw was that most of the people there didn't use laptops, or even phones - so I'm not sure how I would market it to them. Any suggestions?
I mean if your have a 750kw motor for each wheel, then they're probably always spinning when you floor it, so you also have enough torque to fully use your tires for stopping purposes
EDIT: Quick maths show that decelerating at 1g (basically what the best sport tires can do) in a 2000kg car at 300kph requires absorbing ~1500kw, so conveniently two of these motors.
In europe, voting typically happens in one day, where everyone physically goes to their designated voting place and puts papers in a transparent box. You can stay there and wait for the count at the end of the day if you want to. Tom Scott has a very good video about why we don't want electronic/mail voting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI
Well "mail in voting" in Washington state pretty much means you drop off your ballot in a drop box in your neighborhood. Which is pretty much the same thing as putting it in a ballot box.
The description of voting in the Netherlands is that you can see your ballot physically go into a clear box and stay to see that exact box be opened and all ballots tallied.
Dropping a ballot in a box in tour neighborhood helps ensure nothing with regards to the actually ballot count.
Here in NZ when I've been to vote, there are usually a couple of party affiliates at the voting location, doing what one of the parent posts described:
> You can stay there and wait for the count at the end of the day if you want to.
And if you watch the election night news, you'll see footage of multiple people counting the votes from the ballot boxes, again with various people observing to check that nothing dodgy is going on.
Having everyone just put their ballots in a postbox seems like a good way remove public trust from the electoral system, because noone's standing around waiting for the postie to collect the mail, or looking at what happens in the mail truck, or the rest of the mail distribution process.
I'm sure I've seen reports in the US of people burning postboxes around election time. Things like this give more excuses to treat election results as illegitimate, which I believe has been an issue over there.
(Yes, we do also have advanced voting in NZ, but I think they're considered "special votes" and are counted separately .. the elections are largely determined on the day by in-person votes, with the special votes being confirmed some days later)
> I'm sure I've seen reports in the US of people burning postboxes around election time
Yeah that happened once in OR then got re-plastered all over the news dozens of times. I'm sure you can find way more incidents of intimidation, fighting, long lines and other issues for in-person voting. But individual incidents does not mean that there is anything wrong with a system that has worked for decades in multiple states.
In Sweden, mail/early votes get sent through the postal system to the official ballot box for those votes. In 2018, a local election had to be redone because the post delivered votes late. Mail delivery occasionally have packaged delayed or lost, and votes are note immune to this problem. In one case the post also gave the votes to an unauthorized person, through the votes did end up at the right place.
It is a small but distinct difference between mail/early voting and putting the votes directly into the ballot box.
I’m not sure what’s so special in Oregon’s ballot boxes. But, tampering that is detected (don’t need much special to detect a burning box I guess!) is not a complete failure for a system. If any elections were close enough for a box to matter, they could have rerun them.
With proper mail voting you have a way to verify that your mailed in vote is counted.
(AI generated explanation)
How the double-envelope system works
Inner “secrecy” envelope
You mark your ballot, fold it, and slip it into an unmarked inner envelope.
No name or identifying info is on this envelope, so your choices stay anonymous.
Outer declaration envelope
The inner envelope goes inside a larger outer envelope that carries:
– A ballot ID/barcode unique to you.
– A signature line that must match the one on file with your election office.
In many states, a detachable privacy flap or perforated strip hides the signature until election officials open the outer envelope, keeping the ballot secret.
If you wish, you can write a phrase on your ballot. The phrases and their corresponding vote are broadcast (on tv, internet, etc). So if you want to validate that your vote was tallied correctly, write a unique phrase. Or you could pick a random 30 digit number, collisions should be zero-probability, right?
I mean, this would be annoying because people would write slurs and advertisements, and the government would have to broadcast them. But, it seems pretty robust.
I’d suggest the state handle the number issuing, but then they could record who they issues which numbers to, and the winning party could go about rounding up their opposition, etc.
Googling around a bit, it sounds like there are systems that let you verify that your ballot made it, but not necessarily that it was counted correctly. (For this reason, I guess?)
You have to trust that whole system. Maybe you do, I don't know the details of how any of that works.
When I vote in person, I know all the officials there from various parties are just like...looking at the box for the whole day to make sure everything is counted. It's much easier to understand and trust.
Off the top of my head, I can't think of an EU country that does not have some form of advance voting.
Here in Latvia the "election day" is usually (always?) on weekend, but the polling stations are open for some (and different!) part of every weekday leading up. Something like couple hours on monday morning, couple hours on tuesday evening, couple around midday wednesday, etc. In my opinion, it's a great system. You have to have a pretty convoluted schedule for at least one window not to line up for you.
I think they meant "don't have it" as in except in special circumstances, and that form says:
> You may use this form to apply for a postal vote if, due to the circumstances of your work/service or your full-time study in the State, you cannot go to your polling station on polling day.
Which seems to indicate that's only for people who can't go to the polling station, otherwise you do have to go there.
I think that a lot of Ireland's voting practices come from having a small population but a huge diaspora. I imagine the percentage of people living outside Ireland what would be eligible to vote in many other countries is significant enough to effect elections, certainly if they are close.
As someone who spent the first 30 years of my life in Ireland but is now part of that diaspora, it's frustrating but I get it. I don't get to vote, but neither do thousands of plastic paddys who have very little genuine connection to Ireland.
That said, I'm sure they could expand the voting window to a couple of days at least without too much issue.
Italy has mail-in vote only for citizen residing abroad. The rest vote on the election Sunday (and Monday morning in some cases, at least in the past).
You don't have to attribute any name to the transaction, just a voting booth ID and the vote. The actual benefit is just that it is hard to tamper and easy to trace where tampering happened.
But I still prefer the paper vote and I usually a blockchain apathetic.
Anonymous voting means that you can't sell your vote. Like, if I pay you $5 to vote for X, but I can't actually verify that you voted for X and not Y, then I wouldn't bother trying. Or if I'm your boss and I want you to vote for X... etc.
I once visited a fairly large DC in the outskirts of paris (Scaleway DC5) and it was basically dead silent outside. I guess these large DCs are just build with absolutely no concern for noise pollution?
Scaleway DC5 is large by French standards, rather small by US hyperscaler standards. But the main reason is DC5 does not use classic cooling, thus does not have huge dry coolers outside, which definitely helps for noise (it's adiabatic cooling).
Another fact is just the sheer power density of those problematic north virginia datacenters. I'd bet us-east-1 is not an issue (old building and lower power density), but the newer AI ones are. Just take a look at how much AI clusters eat: a single DGX H200 box with 8 GPUs is 10kW. Most facilities provide 10kW for a whole rack, not 8Us. You're looking at 60kW racks, which is a mental power density: a single aisle trivially gets over the MW threshold. You used to feed rooms with megawatts. Heck, DC5 has 24MW of power, that's only 20000 H200 (again, think hyperscaler scale).
Still about cooling, the load profile is even different. DC5 is a general purpose datacenter, where the load is not full blast. Your AI datacenter has the GPU clusters full blast all the time. That's a LOT of power.
I happen to know pretty well the Scaleway infra and visited others of their datacenters. You can stand centimeters from the noise-dampening wall surrounding the dry coolers and not hear a thing; while almost needing noise protection within the wall.
> and even the nuclear decay (due to practical considerations the latter, as well as the atmospheric noise, is not viable except for fairly restricted applications or online distribution services)
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