I suppose part of the problem with autolanding a small plane is that they have much less intertia and are much more susceptible to conditions.
Large planes are autolanded in normal conditions with oversight of qualified, capable and backed up operator, in harsh conditions they are not used, as far as I understand.
Autoland systems in small planes are emergency systems to land plane with disabled operator in any conditions generally acceptable for flying in that plane.
HVDC (and even the grid in general) doesn't transmit all that much power. The largest currently existing line - Changji-Guquan UHVDC link in China - transmits 12GW. It's significantly more than what an average long-range link of current grids transmits, yes. But is it a lot?
Looking from consumption side, my home city of ~1 million people has several coal-fired plants, producing 1.5 GW of electricity and about 5GW of heating. Plus an hydropower station producing 6 GW. Most of that is consumed by an aluminium plant, but nonetheless, it's also part of the city. So that's roughly 12GW on a cold winter day (I suppose we do want to make heating cleaner as well), and probably 6 GW in summer. Heat pumps could be used to reduce power consumed by heating, but even the air-source pumps are not cheap, and they don't provide much efficiency gain in the cold. Ground-source pumps are extremely expensive and reqiure heat replenishment or the ground will freeze - such is the balance here.
So, the world's largest link to power just one city, out of tens of them. It quickly gets prohibitively expensive.
The only realictic answer, it seems, is annual-scale storage. I hope that "dirt pile storage" works well enough and succeeds, batteries are just too expensive and material hungry, hydrogen is problematic to store well either and we don't seem to have good enough scalable direct carbon capture to synthesize methane or propane.
While not accepting flaws (serious ones) is a good thing, the problem is that people poisoned by social media do not accept non-maxed-out people. Even aspiration and effort to improve is not enough, one has to be already in the perfect state.
Though maybe you have meant that, that even small imperfections are not acceptable anymore.
For a long time I haven't thought of Switzerland anything more than "expensive mountain Germany", until a couple years ago I've reconnected with an university friend who happens to live there. I've got to know a bit more about CH and lately I see it quite often mentioned here on HN, though that's probably more of my frequency illusion.
From all what I've seen, it feels like Switzerland is a country that pretty much made no serious mistakes in any field. Maybe not perfect, but certainly nothing is clearly wrong.
Thus your comment was also of interest to me. What do you mean by communal paranoia? As in they're (as a whole nation) afraid of falling from their mountain of success and do strive to remain successful? Perhaps not by hard work - it is hard to motivate oneself to apply really hard if everything's good - but by smart and meaningful work?
Or it is everyone's personal paranoia of falling behind the average of the CH society, which is not very keen on social support, as far as I understand, so every person is not complacent?
Also, by tides that lift all boats - you mean social support or some global-scale investiments?
Paranoia as in fear of losing sovereignty. The average Swiss is not a cleverer or more productive person than the average European. However like you said they make outstanding communal decisions because they at their core believe Switzerland must stay strong to stay independent. To the point of paranoia. No one does bunkers like the Swiss. EU does not do bunkers. Or much of anything material for itself these days.
Building bunkers doesn't help well-being, and you did state that wealth difference is also staggering, Albania did a ton of bunkers in their time, didn't really help them much. I'm personally more interested in Swiss economic and social decisions and how they manage to, at least seemingly, do correct decisions on a long timescale wihtout blunders.
A couple months ago in a some post here on HN on, IIRC, something like using personal solar panels to provide power to the grid, I've seen a comment stating that in Switzerland, the bueracracy doesn't churn out regulations and laws, everything is very thoroughly reviewed, thought out, and-re-reviewed again if any objections arise. There was a response to that comment that was along the lines "As, that's the case when the more bueracracy, the better! While they're busy with paperwork, we do practical stuff under the radar."
And, as far as I understand from what I've heard or read about CH, that's not the case here. In US, the opposing parties can fight over issue endlessly to not let an inch of ground to opponent and to gain more for themselves. In Germany, discussions could be deadlocked by rules. In Russia, both things happen, more of former when there is political will from above, more of latter if it's some issue not cared for from above. But in Switzerland, they do actually converge on the real result because that's what they focus on, and the arguing between different viewpoints is not for the sake of itself, but a means to distill the optimal or at least compromise solution. What you've said explains their motivation, that everyone understands that they can't play tug of war endlessly, they have to do real thing. And perhaps that does say that average Swiss may be more clever than average European. Or at least in a more productive state of mind. Or that the Swiss decision-makers are smarter than others - so they are somehow better selected.
However, that's not all, besides motivation, there's also quality of decisions. USSR was also very motivated for independence, but did not decide well. Though average Soviet citizen wasn't really worried about losing independence indeed.
Returning back to bunkers vs economic well-being - perhaps, economic strive to be strong can't exist without strive for political resilience, one needs specific state of mind to be focused on economical sovereignity, that state of mind goes with political and militaty sovereignity as well. Also exacerbated by that Switzerland is a small country and absolutely not an autarky, so they have to stay significantly ahead in what makes them irreplaceable for the other countries, otherwise they would be prone to external coercion.
Somehow the last sentence of your comment caught me as if there's something wrong with it. I don't thing it's wrong, but I think it should be generalised.
Free market is an approach to negotiation, analogous to ad-hoc model in computer science, as opposed to client-server model - which matches command economy. There are tons of nuances of course regarding incentives, optimal group sizes, resource constraints etc.
Free market is also like evolution - it creates thing that work. Not perfect, not best, they just work. Fitting the situation, not much else (there is always a random chance of something else).
Also there's the, often, I suppose, intentional confusion of terms. The free market of the economic theory is not an unregulated market, it's a market of infinitesimal agents with infinitesimal influence of each individual agent upon the whole market, with no out-of-market mechanisms and not even in-market interaction between agents on the same side.
As a side note, I find it sadly amusing that this reasonable discussion is only possible because it's offtopic to the thread's topic. Had the topic been more attractive to more politically and economically agitated folk, the discussion would be more radicalised, I suppose.
> Also there's the, often, I suppose, intentional confusion of terms. The free market of the economic theory is not an unregulated market, it's a market of infinitesimal agents with infinitesimal influence of each individual agent upon the whole market, with no out-of-market mechanisms and not even in-market interaction between agents on the same side.
Just to expand on this really interesting topic. That's where the common pitfall on planned economy begins. Because to some degree a free market can withstand some amount of regulation; after all, external agents trying to manipulate the market are just that, agents in the market. As long as there are other autonomous agents intervening the market will keep functioning as it was. So the bureaucrat has both the incentive and the justification to expand the intervention. In other words, his economical plan didn't work because it was not intervened enough and just if they intervene in this extra thing it will work for sure. That loop continues until the market is 100% intervened, and at that point it requires such a enormous structure of power and control that makes it difficult to fight it (clientelist networks, repressive states, etc).
Can't say I agree on where the pitfall of planned economy begins.
As I see it, planned economy is strictly not a market, and it is not created as an intervention in the market. It's a rigid resource distribution system without on-the-fly negotiation, typically highly optimised, and without slack and any leeway for its agents. It can be optimal in a limited scope for a limited timespan, but it is rigid and doesn't adapt automatically. These are issues that could be overcome in theory with faster reassesment and distribution adjustment, but there is also practical issue that its agents are, in the end, imperfect people, and they have conflicting incentives. The other side of low slack is low resilience, any unforeseen problem has severe consequences, and it creates destructive incentives for agents.
Janos Kornai has a book "Economics of Shortage" (I haven't read all of that, honestly) that, as far as I understand that, says that lack of openly availible resources in planned economies causes agents to bear a risk of not being able to execute more-important-than-usual orders of their superiors that happen on some special ocassions and thus face severe consequences, in case something in that agent's operations breaks. And due to lack of market, agent cannot fix the issue on-the-fly, only in the next planning cycle. That incentivises agents to not execute their day-to-day roles and hoard any goods they have - in order to exchange them on black market for some other goods and favors wheen need will arise - and it will arise as there will be orders from above and something break and go wrong.
> external agents trying to manipulate the market are just that, agents in the market.
I tend to think of a market not as a whole economic system at once, but as a subsection of it - in this way that there are essentially multiple categories markets, as in goods market, labor market, etc. In this viewpoint, external agents are often not a part of market. Regulations affe ofct the agents but are not agents themselves. Target financing - the same.
Marketing campaign is out-of-market (as in specifically goods market) manipulation on the consumers by producers to change perceived value of producer's product.
I suspect I could be not terminologically correct there, and the existing terminology here is a bit confusing, again. I'd like to call what I understand as free market "pure market", while the free market is what's commonly understood - an unregulated one. The completely free market, I suppose, tends to not be pure in long term due to positive feedbacks causing some of market's participants to be not-infinitesimal and in the end forming a monopoly or an cartel.
> and at that point it requires such a enormous structure of power and control that makes it difficult to fight it (clientelist networks, repressive states, etc).
Of course, replacement of one massive system with another requires enormous amount of power and control. And planned economy concentrates control and decision-making in one place, instead of it being distributed across all agents, thus obviously the planner would be massive.
I am not an economist in any way, not even education, I was just fascinated by the economic failure of USSR and whether it was avoidable in any way since childhood.
I suppose that rough-edgeness of the RTOSes is mostly due to that mainstream neglect for them - they are specific tools for seasoned professionals whose own edges are dent into shapes well-compatible for existing RTOSes.
I think that not just could, we should have had them.
As far as I understand, neural networks were very hyped in 60s and 70s and when hype bust, they've fallen out of focus. Hardware was not there yet.
Then they were neglected for many years and really pioneer science was apparently only done by Google. Theoretical breakthroughs came in 2010s, after GPT-2 masses attention caught up and we (over)focused on neural networks again. GPT-2 was way below the capabilities of current hardware, we quickly caught up and now we're optimising.
Had it not be the burst of previous hype bubble, the NN wouldn't be essentially forgotten, and we'd have steady stream of optimisations and improvements while using the maximum of currently availible hardware.
Something like voice translation model running locally should have been possible by the end of 1990s. That way we'd have steady increase of LLM capabilities, no hype, and time to adapt and understand how to properly use them with no disruption.
>That's constrained by the Law of Supply and Demand.
Law of supply and demand works in the really free market, when providers are essentially infinitesimal and are not able to exert their will upon consumers. If a single provider is capable of significantly affecting the prices and supply of the whole market, it can bend law of supply and demand.
>Standard Oil gained great profits by reducing the price of kerosene by 70%.
They (I suppose, don't know for sure) had plenty of margin for that, and as price-demand relation is not linear, increase of volume was larger than margin reduction.
That is often not the case, and race to (quality) bottom and shrinkflation happens.
Plenty of cheap stuff is a consequence of companies interested in people's money and, yes, presence of at least nominal competition between providers (i.e. they can be essentially a cartel, mirrioring each other exactly, but each still wants to step into other's money supply and retain its own). Choice for customer is present but also equally nominal.
In deficit economy, economic agents aren't really interested in people's money, and competition is between consumers - who'll bid higher and offer something of real interest to provider. So providers hoard stuff and there are long lines.
Benefit for public is not a boolean, it's a spectrum. Lots of cheap poor stuff readily availible is better than having to compete for stuff, but less good than having choice between cheap poor stuff and more expensive better stuff, for example. For the latter, you need non-nominal competition and providers having to compete whithin the market, not outside of it, and also each individual provider having infinitesimal effect on whole market.
Still there are studies that regular sauna does decrease testosterone production. It's not hard to counter though, ice packs applied to testicles ( not direct ice, ice in a cloth) during sauna are effective for that purpose.
And maybe Finns don't go to sauna when they plan to conceive? Does Finland have a lower rate of unwanted pregnancies?
Finland's fertility rate drove off a cliff in the 60's like in so many other countries. If sauna has an overall effect we wouldn't know as we've nothing to compare with -- going to sauna is rather universal and the tradition is ancient.
Large planes are autolanded in normal conditions with oversight of qualified, capable and backed up operator, in harsh conditions they are not used, as far as I understand.
Autoland systems in small planes are emergency systems to land plane with disabled operator in any conditions generally acceptable for flying in that plane.