Audiobooks almost never have more than one narrator for cost reasons. The exception is for the most famous books like Dune where they produce really fancy audio versions with lots of narrators.
The Audible version of The Sandman are made like old school radio dramas with a different narrator for every major role and they are absolutely incredible. Must have been very expensive to make.
Yeah, exactly. Go price the equipment it takes to rig out a new upstart plumbing biz (trunk/van, all the hardware, insurance, etc). Startup web businesses is insanely cheap, even with a couple grand on a domain.
I'm sure I've seen video of oranges being harvested mechanically. I'm sure it can be done but probably not economically everywhere especially if the terrain is difficult. For mechanical olive harvesting see: https://ilcircolo.eu/olive-harvesting-by-hand-or-with-machin...
That may be true of modern farms elsewhere but is not the case for historical groves here. They are sometimes spaced appropriately but that's about it. Usually on vehicular-inaccessible mountainside terraces.
I’ve been on hn for almost 10 years, and have been doing mostly frontend development for the whole time. As far as I know I have never seen it mentioned. But then I have no interest in elixir, so I might just not have remembered the name even if I saw it.
This is poorly informed, it’s quite easy to get a visa to Russia. Easier than many other countries, actually. Just follow the laws and use common sense (same rule applies when you are traveler anywhere) and you will be fine. Don't believe me just check YouTube, plenty of bloggers go there - “Sly’s Life” channel, Russia videos. He also goes to Ukraine after before you start calling me or him a shill for Putin or whatever.
I think Bulgarian is considered the easiest Slavic language in terms of grammar because it has a simplified case system similar to how English dropped its cases over time.
You don’t believe the recent economic numbers? I’m not disagreeing with you, just curious about other takes (and generally very skeptical of funny money printer go burrr economic things vs real economy meaning real output).
There has been a lot of discussion on this recently in the blog-o-sphere. All conclusions I've seen so far are that the economy is basically fine and maybe people's expectations have risen (I'm oversimplifying). I'm also quite eager to hear different conclusions, because there is a lot of cognitive dissonance on the economy right now.
There's definitely an aspect of rising expectations (e.g., everyone and their dog having a late-model smartphone). There's also an aspect where some of that is mostly unavoidable (e.g., accessing my HSA now requires a very late-model smartphone -- something I can avoid complying with for now by just finding a better place to transfer my money, but it's a worrying trend -- to achieve the same QoL as in the early 2000s I have mandatory nontrivial overhead).
It's really not just that though. A lot goes into it, but one observation is that the relative increases in wages and prices isn't distributed evenly. Some examples:
- A lot of people are legitimately substantially better off than they would have been a few decades ago. I literally never have to worry about money anymore when thinking about our purchases (for everything but a house with a big yard, which we still can't safely [0] afford without moving). I'm not alone.
- That's not true of everyone, even my next-door neighbors. I know people splitting a studio apartment and still struggling a bit. They have good jobs, and even splitting the apartment their post-tax, post-rent pay is $7.20/hr. That's fine enough I suppose, but they'll literally never be able to save for a home of any quality in the area in their entire lives using only a single income. It'll take them awhile to afford a home anywhere.
- Suppose you have a couple young kids. That places hard bounds on how much money you need to make even for childcare to make sense to get up to two incomes in the first place. I've known plenty of people with PhDs and good jobs who quit to take care of the kids for financial reasons, supporting the household on just the higher-earner's pay.
- A lot of small towns haven't seen the same increase in wages as the rest of the country but have seen the increase in prices. My hometown saw an increase from $10/hr to $20/hr in what a great wage is over the last 25 years. CPI only went up 1.9x in that time, but the same caliber of house went up 3x, and the staples people used to eat (like ground beef) went up more than 3x as well. They're correctly observing that they have less take-home money (because of 3x increased rent), that take-home money doesn't go as far (they can't eat the same foods they could 25yrs ago), and it definitely doesn't go as far if you want to do something like save for a house (it's an extra 4+yrs of post-tax, post-rent income to pay for a house, assuming you could devote all of it to savings instead of groceries and whatnot).
I'm not sure exactly how to quantify who's struggling and why at a macroscopic level, but I guarantee they're real and that it's not just an increase in expectations.
[0] It depends on your relative risk levels, but if you're not convinced the gravy train will last forever and are concerned about locking up all your assets in a depreciating vehicle then you need to be a bit more frugle with your choice of home.
But look at solar adoption across Europe since 2022. It’s going gang busters and now with sodium batteries coming online next year, cheap home energy storage is about to boom as well.
Europe doesn’t want to buy Russian gas, but there is also the very real political reality of what happens if your citizens freeze to death. I will be very surprised if any EU state is reliant on Russian gas by 2035.
When people start talking about battery technology that has not even reached scale as any kind of political solution, you know people have lost the plot.
Taking one look at just the cost required for the network, even outside of the cost of any generation at all, you realize this is an insane and slapping a few solar panels down is far from a solution.
And also lets not ignore that places that have done a lot of the 'lets just build renewable and hope for the best' have very high energy prices. And maybe possible maybe sodium batteries might show up will not solve these issues.
I calculated the costs of covering the needs of Germany for a 2 days low production event (as it happened between 6-9 december) and you would need about a trillion dollar.
That's for something that cannot even garantee you more than 48h of runtime for half the country's needs.
You would need at least 4 times that to be safe.
Even if batteries price are divided by 2 (very unlikely, there are large fixed costs) you would need trillions of dollar for a single country.
That's just not happening any time soon and even in 30 years time, I doubt it will be that prevalent of a solution.
I did a conservative calculation if you started around 2000 in Germany and went full nuclear like France did. Not using any fancy new nuclear or anything. Literally just mass production of standard nuclear plants. Plus all the updates of the grid, including domestic fuel enrichment and 'waste' storage. Plus all the investment necessary to great a fully modern grid to electrify the economy.
We are talking in the order of 500 billion Euro and this is very conservative assumption on nuclear construction cost. Much worse cost then what France actually achieved in their build-out. Also much of that is actually the grid, grids are really expensive it turns out. But building nuclear in central location next to places where there used to be coal plants, makes grid cost much cheaper because most of the grid is already there perfectly positioned to feed the population clusters. And that accounts for actually increasing overall production of energy, not decreasing as Germany is actually doing.
On the other-hand for the renewable path that Germany is going since 2000, just the grid alone is going to cost more then 500 billion euro, some estimation suggest that 2000-2045 total gird investment requirement is above significantly above that. Sadly today where everything is in this different private organization, this information is all over the place and 'semi'-private organization doing different parts of the infrastructure.
In total, between all the renewables, the grid and the storage, we are talking 1.5 trillion euro and that still includes gas peakers. If you want to go beyond and really go all in, it would be even more then that, as you suggest.
Turns out, if you plan includes trying to gather solar energy in Greece and Spain (or even Egypt), transporting it to Germany and then storing it into batteries there, well yeah, that's going to be expensive. And the solar panels you import from China aren't the expensive part.
France did the exact right think in the 70/80s build reliable long term energy generation, sadly since the 90s the newer generation of French politicians done literally anything they can to handle the situation as a badly and as incompetently as possible but that's a different story.
One thing that is really important to understand is that power is not something that is uniformely needed everywhere at the same level.
Traditionally, power plants were created close to where industries needed them. Renewables require specific conditions to be viable and those factors are not necesseraly what allows industries to thrive, so you need a lot of additional infrastructure to make it possible.
Turns out this infrastructure is extremely coslty and very hard to make reliable. So, even if you have infinite money, that's a massive challenge in itself. But now Europe does not have that much money, the massive debt burdens being a large evidence of this. Yet we are asked to pay more for this future, in the name of climate change, even though most of the factors contributing to this is already happening overseas, largely out of the control of European regulations. So what is the point exactly ?
In the long run, it just ends up making everyone more dependent on external powers while weakening the position of the countries that believe in that "solution".
Nuclear constructions costs are largely overblown, because of the massive bureaucracy/over-regulation, thanks to Germany in no small part. If China can manage to build twice as fast at half the cost, we are doing something wrong for sure.
But the conversation is dominated by ideologues, that have an sadist like fetish. As if weakening your position will ever make your competition/enemies take pity on you and allows you to dictate the terms of the converstion, because people are supposed to be nice, right ?
Even with perfect implementation, there is no way to make renewables work to allow industries to thrive, and now we are going to pay the price of those poor political choices.
With all the money in the world, it was already a discutable choice, but now it is just replacing depence on fossil fuel with depence on overseas manufacturing (most of it in China). Funny thing is that China is not that stupid, and we are selling them the knowledge/skillset to become dominant on the cheap.
I just can't fathom what was going on in the mind of the decision makers 20 years ago, but now it seems they are just insane. There is no way it will work in 15 years, yet we needed that power generation yesterday.
In the process of trying to make climate change better, we have done the reverse. Now people are burning more wood, and I feel like we might go back to coal if electricity doesn't become cheaper (for residential heat). Gas is hopeless, even if the depency on Russia wasn't that strong.
Electric cars are very nice but if it turns out to be more expensive to run them than just using foreign oil it's not going to happen.
I'm just rambling at this point but it feels like there was a large anti-nuclear sentiment by people who are dominated by irrational fears and they have dominated our politics for the worse. It's really not usefull to fear a nuclear meltdown if you end up making your people poorer overtime. Why would you fear something with such a low probability of problems if you end up having to become dependent on foreing power that has no such quaslm.
France had the right path but then leftist ideologues took power and Germany's sabotaging did the rest. In theory we are not at war but in practice, there is very much an economical/ideological battleground going on and we are losing it.
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