Keep in mind that every alternative free library to do something adds cost to the task of selecting a library. Some open source projects (not suggesting any specifically) actually do make life worse for people because they spend time studying it only to find it's not useful.
In my book, spending the time to see whether something is useful (or works) or not, is called "due diligence".
I'm also of the opinion that the time spent raking through libraries that look useful to you to find out if they really are useful to you, more than offsets time you'll spend looking for bugs in your program which were caused by using something which turned out to not do what you thought it did.
It does represent the will of the people. The people aren't voting for change and didn't do so when any of the "draconian" laws were passed, despite it being public knowledge. So this is perfectly what democracy is - popular opinion, not special interests determining the laws. If you're sure your fellow citizens are mostly wrong, then you
should reconsider whether you fit in among them. Maybe other countries have people who value privacy greater. For UK citizens this is easy, just go to a European country.
So you're saying the UK government held a vote asking "Do you want to be surveilled?" and a majority of citizens answered in the affirmative? I can't remember anything like that happening here in the US.
The USA is only number 10 by that measure, so nobody would care if China got to number 9. Go to Singapore or Quatar to find the richest average people, not the USA.
It absolutely, positively hurts local labor - naturalized citizens - etc. Without a doubt.
I agree. But that's not a bad thing. That's the market operating more efficiently. The flipside is that it absolutely, positively helps foreign labor. Or alternatively, the overabundance of US citizens absolutely, positively hurts each other's labor.
What makes naturalized citizens so privileged? Surely they themselves are 2nd class citizens to native born Americans, who are in turn less deserving than descendants of actual American Indians. Drawing the line between "naturalized citizen" and "H1B visa holder" is quite arbitrary. It's still discrimination akin to racism or sexism.
Relevant quotes from recently posted article on Pavel Durov:
"Me myself, I’m not a big fan of the idea of countries"
What if the H1B visas were not for foreigners, but for US people from other states? Would people still be making the same arguments? California companies hiring cheap midwest talent and disadvantaging the rightful locals of their jobs and high salaries.
People are still people, no matter what country they're from. To restrict immigration for work means you're saying some people, through no fault of their own, deserve to earn less money by working in their own country.
Any time you say "I'd hire a local over a foreigner", you're effectively being racist. It might not be their race specifically, but their nationality, the identity of their parents, their wealth (to do their own immigration), etc. This is still discriminating based on something the person has no control over. It's still saying "people similar to me deserve more good things in life than people I can't relate to" or "people in my in-group deserve to be treated better than members of out-groups".
These businesses benefit greatly from our strong economy/infrastructure/judicial system, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect them to favor American workers over foreigners. There's nothing racist about that.
I don't have a problem with a company hiring foreign labor, but I do think there should be strict limitations as long as our unemployment rate is >2-3%.
When will it be acceptable to be a Nazi sympathiser? It's been 80 years now. We know that being a Roman or Viking sympathiser is acceptable 1500 years later. There must be a cutoff time beyond which we think it's not real people anymore.
The Romans did - be the most powerful nation. We often see America compared to them, not as a bad thing, but as a good thing that might fail someday. The cruelty of the Roman circus is seen as a curiosity now, even appearing in children's books, but various Nazi atrocities still aren't. Suffocating Jews somehow isn't funny yet, but releasing hungry lions on slaves is.
He didn't claim lower mortality, nor that they wanted it. We assume living long is important, but some people value their lives less than others, just as some value their possessions less. It's the nature of tribalism to not value your life much. So I wouldn't count high mortality rates as "bad" any more than low possession counts.
You're certainly losing torque with the gearing but that's not a problem. The problem is losing energy. Energy loss can be made arbitrarily small at increasing cost to build the transmission.
Gold is about 20g/cm^3, and although it sounds expensive, there's a lot of gold just sitting in storage. Why not store it underground here instead? This is in contrast to tungsten which has direct commercial value and would be wasted just being stored.
Well, yes. To be fair, if there was like a farm of these devices, it might makes sense to swallow that expense.
I wish gold wasn't so rare! Its such an amazing material, and our economy is not based on precious materials anymore (except the commodity markets or course), so it seems like a really sad thing that we can't have more abundant gold just yet
What advantage does this provide over combining all your weights together into one big one? If you want to limit the tension on the cable, just use more cables.
You shouldn't be so confident that you know the only "sane" way to design such a thing. It's not a field anyone has experience in. These are only guesses.
Well, it does mean your cables and dynamo can be smaller. But then you've got a new problem of coupling the cables to the load at the bottom and somehow storing loads at the top that the cables must reach past/through.
You have a shaft 1km or 1.5km deep. You can afford to stack a lot of weights vertically. Imagine each has a hole running through the middle, where the cable runs, and a mechanism whereby the weight can engage/disengage from the cable. The cable forms a circular loop that passes through all the weights from the top of the shaft to the bottom, then circles around past a large pulley and back to the top, completing the loop.
At the top of the shaft there would be hefty prongs that retract when the weight needs to start dropping, and when the weight returns during a recharge cycle, the prongs reinsert themselves in to the shaft when the weight is lifted back into position.
Most likely each weight would have a "C" cross section with a nearly closed mouth -- just a slot from the edge of the weight to the larger central opening so that the weight can be removed/replaced from the cable if needed.
