grahamsz @ grahamsz @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

I have no idea, but hiring someone for a job that has a 1 in 20 chance of killing them seems fundamentally immoral - especially given the massive financial imbalance.

It's certainly a good philosophical question though

Thanks for the terminology - that makes it easier!

Only very few people have accomplished climbing one of the 14 peaks “alpine style”.

I'm quite ok with that.

If the rockies were 28k instead of 14k then I still don't think there'd be a situation where we hire poor villagers from the outskirts of Denver to put their lives on the line. I really believe the high peaks are summited expedition-style because the poverty makes that practical, which in turn allows many more people to reach the top

But most mountaineers get by without having to hire people to carry their shit for them. Certainly people here in Colorado use guides from time to time, but i've never heard of anyone using a porter. Maybe i'm ignorant, but it seems like mountaineers only use porters in the himalayas because they are cheap and disposable.

Perhaps if you can't summit a mountain without another human to carry your equipment then it should be ok to not summit that mountain.

Sure - and i'm sure I could find people who'd play a game of russian roulette for $1M but it'd be massively unethical to hire people to do that.

So there's obviously some line - as a society we consider it ethical to hire forestry workers or deep sea fishermen even though they have a significantly higher risk of death that most other professions. I think a 25% death rate is just unethical in the extreme, even Everest is something like 1%.

Also I can understand taking that risk for yourself. Certainly it's way outside my comfort zone, but I'm not going to tell someone else they can't do something dangerous. But how can you go out and hire people to help you knowing there's a 25% chance they'll be giving their lives for you?

I'm in Colorado and pay $49.95 for 1000/1000 (though i'm grandfathered in and i think it's $69.95 for new users). There's another ISP that offers the same at $70, or i can get 1200/35 cable for about $60.

I can get 2500/2500 for $149 and 10000/10000 for $249 (from my municipal provider) or I can get 6000/6000 for $300 (from the cable provider).

Round here it's all government run. The city runs power, water, sewer, phone, internet, trash/recycle/compost.

We've got the second fastest internet in the country (and it's free for low income people), our power gets an American Public Power Diamond rating for reliability, we're (mostly) on track for being 100% renewable power by 2030, the city captures and liquifies the methane from the sewage treatment process and uses it to run the garbage trucks (that say "Powered by You" on them) and our rates for all of that are cheaper than commercial providers.

Amazingly we still run into people who live here, know all that and still believe that the government is incapable of running anything well... it's kind of startling.

Still, that makes a bit more sense for why you have a generator and that then pretty much requires you have a UPS - so i get it.

Totally agree. I think the lack of mixed zoning is fucking weird about this country. When I lived in edinburgh I was upstairs from a bar and an indian restaurant - but where I live now it's almost a mile to get to any kind of retail or dining.

I was also reminded in a recent story about revitalizing downtowns that lots of asian cities have all kinds of stuff inside high-rise buildings. Like you'd got a noodle restaurant that was on the third floor of a random building in hong kong. But the US seems to practically require that they be entirely office space.

Yeah that seems kinda crazy to me too. I've lived in my current house for 8 years and the only time the power has gone out was when a vehicle crashed into one of the distribution boxes by the road. Our power and internet come from the same provider so it was a double whammy for several hours.

But I suppose it depends where you are - i worked at a place that had two independent power feeds from two different cities, massive UPSs to run the datacenter for 10 minutes and then two redundant diesel generators with several months of fuel on site. I still saw that go down twice in my time there.

Sure - but you've got to start somewhere. There are a lot of people who aren't experienced sys admins who are buying raspberry pis or arduinos and they are probably really good candidates for self-hosting some of their services. I was surprised to find my neighbor (who's a PM with a physical security system company) trying to do something with chatGPT, at first I was a little dismissive because i figured she was just typing prompts into the website, but in reality she was having issues with the python bindings and getting her virtual environments straight. If you can get to that point, you can surely self host stuff.

I run git locally for some of my projects and that was trivial to set up - I think anyone who's used github would have comparable skills to self host gogs or gitea.

Certainly it's somewhat expensive, but people spend a lot of cloud hosted services too. I'm sure in my house we're dropping over $100/month on dropbox, chatgpt, google, adobe and probably a half-dozen smaller ones.

I run a bunch of stuff on Docker on my Synology NAS. It's not quite plug and play but at it's best it's quite within the realm of someone who's got some computer skills. At it's worst though it can suck up a lot of time. I enjoy that kind of stuff when it's not mission critical but I used paid cloud services at work for things that I run for free at home - precisely because I don't want to be the one dealing with downtime in an emergency situation.

I suppose, but it seems like dropping COD altogether would be great

It's the same as the pick-up truck argument. It seems insane to me to drive a $60k vehicle so that when you need to move a piece of furniture you can... i can literally rent a pickup for an hour for $20. For the half-dozen times a year that I need to move something it seems ridiculous to own it.

Yeah, you can get electric car chargers where you can set rules something like "Charge whenever power is under 5c/kWh, but try to make sure i've 60% charge by 8am each weekday". Logically you could have a thermostat control AC - we've been playing with that at work because our power goes up at 1pm, so we turn down the thermostat at 12:00 and then turn it up at 1:00 so it shunts some of the cooling a little earlier.

I've never seen a tumble drier that can do it, for some reason mine has WiFi but can't do shit like that. But, yeah I imagine the rule I'd want would be : Dry this anytime in the next 4 hours, and try to spend as little as possible.

Maybe in some places, but that's definitely not true in my city. The intersection i can see from my home office window has a 35mph speed limit and their are accidents there all the time. I haven't seen anyone badly injured, but there was at least one that went up a berm, over a multiuse bike path, through a fence and crashed into a neighbor's house.

I'd totally take my 9 yr old on a 3-4 mile bike ride if we're going somewhere that we can get to on protected bike lanes, but there are lots of places in this city that aren't accessible that way and I'd be much happier in a small city car. I've taken him along a 45 mph road on a few occasions and it's nerve-wracking, legally you aren't allowed to pass a bike until you can give them 3 foot of space but it happens ALL THE TIME and it's a real deterrent to cycling for us.

The 28mph top speed i think is a european classification thing, but yeah that'd be the showstopper for me - not the size or range.

I can see that they are a bit caught in the middle here, but it seems insane that they can leave a package and send a COD bill later. That part is bonkers... doesn't COD stand for Cash on Delivery?

You can definitely achieve more if you can work the supply-side as well. In theory if the smart grid were well executed then it'd be possible for consumers to modulate their heat, charging, tumble dryers etc... to provide more elasticity.

Unfortunately in a lot of places the incentives aren't that high. I don't have that option where I live, but in denver the lowest consumer rate is around 7c and the highest around 17c/kWh. It's hard to invest in new appliances to exploit that difference, but if the off-peak number were 1c then I think you'd see much more take-up of smart car chargers and people delaying when they do laundry.

As a parent, I don't know if I agree. It takes significant effort to get my kid out on a bike as our road system isn't great for them. (My city is actually fairly good, but we still can't, for example, get to his school without needing to ride on the road)

If it could do 45mph and had a 40 mile range then it'd work for nearly all our in-town trips. We have a phev that can only do about 20 miles on battery and at the start of the pandemic we went 9 months without needing to put gas in it. I wouldn't want it as our only vehicle but it'd be pretty viable as our secondary one.

Their Oli concept car is probably even cooler and would likely work better in the US market.

It'll be interesting to see if Americans would ever go for a "City Car". I believe Citreon are bringing the ami to the USA and I'd be tempted to get one a second car - it's certainly well under that pricepoint.