That canot happen if the market becomes monopolistic, with every bigtech out there buying every startup worth a penny. The erosion of anti trust in the US created this monstrosity.
Solex got used much longer than post WWII, the engine is very easy to service. I had one when I was 15, and most of my friends did as well. Everyone in the village had either a "solex" or an old "mobilette".
This drives me mad as well. Electric bikes should be limited to 25kph and non throttled in Europe, yet half the bikes I see are both, and drive recklessly.
The other day I was passed by one which kept up with the cars on the main road, which has a speed limit of 80km/h. Most cars don't go full speed there, but will reach at least 60km/h . On it were two young boys without helmets. It's insane.
I don't really get that logic. Cars can do way over 100 yet no one calls for limiting all cars all the time, because some drivers drive reckless.
And if we want to limit cars - you know, the number one thing that actually kills a lot of people directly - then I don't think it helps artificially limiting alternatives like E-Bikes.
The only difference is with enforcing the rules, but there are solutions for that. Police on E-Bikes doing patrolling, mandatory number plates, E-Bike driving licence, .. not that I want all those things, but I much rather have that and not crippled bikes so cars stay the norm.
You are being confused, vehicles by themselves are not limited, their category is.
You can have an electric vehicle that runs at 100kph if you want, but that is not a bike, that is a motorcycle.
The problem here is people having vehicles assimilated as ebikes, but with radically different specs.
I have no problem with these guys driving their vehicles on the car lane, like motorbikes do, but that's not what we're talking about here.
These vehicles are running on the bike lane, drivers are without helmets, they cross pavements, and enjoy all the slow vehicles perks, while being far more dangerous for their surroundings.
Ok, but I am talking about being able to drive in city traffic and keep up with cars and not be a blocker - and then go to the forest with my e-bike where I do mind the other people walking around there and drive adequate. Not possible with current legislation.
I can only drive my E-Bike with my car to the forest (like to many people do), or drive slowly there myself.
In Europe a class 1 ebike can't have a throttle and assist must be limited to 25km/h (it's 32km/h in the US). They can be faster and have a throttle, but then they are more like scooters in terms of licensing and insurance. If you go to most bike shops in Western Europe they will only have class 1 e-bikes. A class 1 bike is generally allowed everywhere a bike is.
While there are a lot of people riding more powerful bikes in Europe illegally, at least some countries are trying to crack down on them. In the US, it seems easier to buy class 2 and 3 e-bikes, and there seems to be a higher proportion of illegal bikes. It's an open secret which "class 1" bikes you can buy and then overclock easily.
So in Europe you mostly have class 1 e-bikes and obviously illegal (as in you can tell just by looking at them), but in the US you have these plus a lot of class 2 and 3 e-bikes, and overclocked class 1 e-bikes. The end result is most mountain bike trails in Europe allow class 1 e-bikes only, but in the US it's impossible to enforce class 1 only, so a lot of regions are trending towards banning all e-bikes from all trails. So be careful about wishing for a more powerful e-bike you can drive in traffic and mountain bike trails.
Define "scale". For any reasonable wait that you're willing to impose on your users, any PoW scheme heavily favors attackers. They have unlimited time and can be scraping even while they're asleep. Your visitors on the other hand don't have that luxury. You might argue that's not the point and it's only to stop dumb scrapers that are effectively ddosing your site, but if it's just dumb scrapers, you could've stopped them less onerous measures like tls or javascript fingerprinting.
It's more or less designed for it, it's SHA256 with a break in the middle for midstate compression to be effective, and the difficulty system is based on a misunderstanding of how bitcoin PoW works ("number of zeros" is never, ever a consideration in bitcoin, it's a match to a floating point target).
sha256(challenge + ascii(nonce)) means that the first compression round of the function can be cached and the second compression round is just the nonce plus the cache. This is the same trick used in Bitcoin mining and would have been avoidable by putting the nonce first, so immediately any non-naive code has to do half the proof of work as the vanilla solver.
> Leveraged funds are the safest way for the average investor to get access to leverage
I... do not agree that leveraged funds are somehow a safest way to access leverage.
Every product including leverage has inherently a non-linear P&L. And from my experience, non sophisticated investors always struggle to grasp the implications of that. It makes returns (on capital) very path dependent, and very nasty during volatile regimes. It breaks the naive assumption of "well I could always hold and wait for the dust to settle".
> unlike margin there is no risk of margin calls
This is a bit of a weird statement. Leverage implies margin, you cannot make it disappear, the funding and associated risk has to come from somewhere, it's just that it is continuously applied, instead of fixed timings.
I do agree that it simplifies planning and reserve management though.
> even Warren Buffet made his biggest early wins on all-in bets.
This is a bit disingenious, note that Buffet did not use leverage...
> This is a bit disingenious, note that Buffet did not use leverage...
In a way, but Buffet wasn't making those investments exclusively using his own money. Effectively there's a degree of implied leverage when you get a performance reward from investing other people's money.
Its the maintenance and details that kill your NAS.
You will probably rely on it for 10 years at least, so building your NAS means committing to maintaining it in the long term, you have to be sure this is something you will uphold.
Also while setting up your NAS initially is definitely doable, there are a trillion little things to get right and make sure won't bite you later on (scrubble, etc).
All these things compounds if the NAS is not just for you, but your wife, kids, family, etc. Now it becomes your responsibility that all these precious data and photos entrusted to you are 100% safe for the decades to come.
But are these off-the-shelf solutions actually supported for ten years? And since they're usually bought for "easy remote connectivity" and whatnot, that's rather important. Bonus points for updates typically being installed automatically, so people won't even think to check whether it's still updated or not.
I have a NAS made from a 15-year-old computer, with standard parts. It can saturate a gigabit link over WireGuard, so it's good enough for my needs. I installed the latest Linux kernel on it the other day. And it doesn't have random unknown stuff calling home. Since it runs ZFS and scrubs regularly, I'm quite confident the data on it is still in good shape.
I ran a Synology DS418play for 8-9 years. It got OS and security updates throughout that time. I recently replaced it with a TrueNAS setup because I needed a dramatic capacity increase, but otherwise it would still be supported.
Almost all off-the-shelf consumer grade NAS appliances are running unmaintainable OS yocto builds already 2 years out of support, and a list of CVE under active exploitation.
The only really functional OSS NAS exception for small offices is the CephFS builds from https://www.45drives.com , and that is because of included support services. =3
> All these things compounds if the NAS is not just for you, but your wife, kids, family, etc. Now it becomes your responsibility that all these precious data and photos entrusted to you are 100% safe for the decades to come.
A NAS is not a backup? It's hot storage.
I have a NAS but I backup my photos on AWS in S3 Deep Glacier. It costs me less than $1 a month for 500GB of pictures. That's a backup.
From a maintenance perspective, one must not assume a NAS is a backup, but rather a high-bandwidth local/VPN file share.
* maids unplug equipment to vacuum offices (yes, this does really happen.)
* drives fail eventually, bit-rot is a thing, and filesystems evolve over time
* hardware specific features will always become a problem eventually. No one will check a degraded RAID/ZFS setup without service telemetry.
Practical options:
* sshfs + JBOD mount is fine for most home win11/bsd/linux/macOS/iOS/android users, as simple things have less failure modes and less time-cost to repair.
* fault tolerant systems like CephFS are usually too complex for home users. However, https://www.45drives.com offers a support option for small offices.
* ZFS has a lot of tradeoffs, and most people don't use the better key features (auto-snap-shotting and docker/VM deduplication.) In some cases even F2FS will also work fine, and probably last a bit longer with consumer flash drives.
* I agree the IT support issue with distros like TrueNAS or openmediavault becomes a popularity contest over what features are supported long-term.
It is often better to use a generic OpenBSD or Debian OS installation, and run the rclone network share abstractions on PC/Mac clients. Android and iPhone both have sftp clients for auto media backups over router VPN as well..
Lightning always wins every argument, an offsite VPN to remote file-backup is usually wise. =3
> What is indicative of escalating climate catastrophe is indeed the intensity and frequency of those firestorms
I don't think we have the data that proves this theory (which of course doesn't mean that the theory is wrong), because the vast majority of these fires are man-made, not natural disasters.
This year's Fontainebleau wildfires were caused by 1) a deranged person ligthning bushes and drenching them with fuel 2) a simple minded person throwing a cigaret but in bushes during a heat wave...
The huge wildfire in the south some years ago was caused by a similarly simple minded dude that caried his alight barbecue from one place to another on the back of his pickup truck (creating a dozen wildfires in the process along the road).
People have not suddenly become deranged or simple minded.
Two of the large recent fires in the Landes region, including the most recent, have started from poorly maintained, spontaneously igniting cars. Those also have not suddenly started appearing out of nowhere.
The common thread is very dry forests, it just takes a spark for disaster.
You're conceptually wrong about "the theory" and factually about the majority of fires.
The fundamental connection increase of CO2 => increase in mean temperature => increase in frequency of high-energy atmospheric events is entirely obvious and well established.
CO2 traps heat and heat is energy. Firestorms are an immediate consequence of that and accordingly rise in frequency as well.
The idea, such fires would be "preventable, since due to individual human action" is patently absurd even in principle. You cannot easily ignite a forest that isn't dried out.
An easily ignitable forest on the other hand just waits for the first spark, no matter the source. The hotter climate provides more sparks in the form of lightning. At some point, ignition is virtually guaranteed. And that point is reached already.
> You're conceptually wrong about "the theory" and factually about the majority of fires.
Well then prove me wrong...
The BDIFF publishes data of close to 30 years of wildfires reports.
If you plot the number of wildfire occurrences per year, you will see a decreasing curve up to 2010, then a constant rise onward, forming a U shape. I don't think you will find any correlation with global warming data there.
If you plot a pie chart of investigated wildfire causes, you will see the top cause being "criminal" at 35% of investigated occurrences, followed by "Involontary individual" (the simple minded guy with his cigaret but) at 25%, and "Involontary work" at 15%.
Now let me repeat again, I'm not saying that CC does not play a role in this story (not sure why I bother since it does not seem like people really try to understand the comments anymore), what I'm saying is that data does not really exhibit any obvious correlation between the two, and would suggest that even if CC is a factor, then other factors would seem to have a much greater impact.
Said impacting factors are not hard to find btw, and top is: investments in prevention and detection (which positively correlates with French BDIFF data FYI), and addition of stoppers and lay-lines in man made forests (yes, because the majority of French forests are not natural but man shaped as huge lumps of uninterrupted tree)
Ah, would the world not be full of so many simple-minded people, we'd all be free!
[edited out things that were badly worded]
Wildfires being incited by arsonists don't contradict climate effects, neither would an increase in arson.
But it's important to point out arson instead of ignoring it, even more so when the situation is dangerous. Agreed.
It's just also important to do research on the environment that sustains our lives, no matter how many know-it-alls tell you that the sweet fountain of fossil fuels will enlighten us forever, no matter how wasteful and corrupt we are in distributing its yield.
What is with this snark? Why do we assume that everyone who says anything even slightly challenging to the narrative directly blaming climate change, is aligned with pro-fossil fuel interests?
Instead, why not, for example, show the model of what would have happened to the fire if the current weather in the region had been a couple of degrees cooler? (I mean, it's not as if we can even do a ceteris paribus comparison to the stats on wildfires from pre-industrial times; there is way too much ceteris to paribize.)
I am not capable to assess the direct effect of CC on the probability of this disaster.
I question what is the value or helpfulness of continuing to doubt scientifically proven facts. The summer heatwaves and other natural disasters have increased enough in my lifetime to witness it, but even if that wasn't the case,
I consider dismissing widely accepted scientific results using words like "simple-minded" as pretty much the definition of snark.
As a reflection on my original comment (I depend on fossil fuels myself, like we all do):
Of course, shortening the reasoning enough, attributing any weather event to climate change, or even the climate alone, is impossible. I don't like beligerent simplifications myself. But that's why the quoted sentence in the original comment is about frequency, not just this particular wildfire season. At least that's what I thought.
The mechanisms of the short-term disruption of the Earth's climate due to greenhouse gas emissions and habitat destruction are more and more well-understood, as far as I know, though.
All reports that I read have phrasing that states the problems of climate attribution carefully, often including a paragraph about the importance of wildfires for the natural cycle.
In my opinion, claiming that not dedicating the problems of climate attribution at least 3 paragraphs in every report on a natural disaster that mentions climate change, is short-sighted (to use a different word).
In statistics, you can always play devil's advocate.
If Europe would be covered in ice in 50 years, there would probably still be someone claiming "see, there's no such thing as global warming!"
I explicitly mentioned arson as relevant to balance my point, but my patience ran out at some point. It is important.
And climate change is at least as important.
I don't read attempts at attributing natural disasters to climate change as "direct" or "simple-minded". I think the science has surpassed this point about 50 yrs ago.
Have a nice day. I tried to edit out snark and hate it every time I get into such a discussion at all. But I also am at least irritated by climate-denialism (or feel a tendency towards it).
It's a terrible word, there should be a better one, but I don't think "climate science skeptics" cuts it...
I get into such discussions too often because I see us depending on fossil fuels, for the foreseeable future. As well as on water, housing, food, etc.
Related: Dust Bowl, a good, recent enough example of man-made large changes causing (albeit local) climate change. If I'm not mistaken. Fascinating topic.
> I question what is the value or helpfulness of continuing to doubt scientifically proven facts.
And I question why you believe that anyone here did doubt them.
> I consider dismissing widely accepted scientific results using words like "simple-minded" as pretty much the definition of snark.... In what world is calling climate attribution "simple-minded" not snark?
That is not what happened. The term "simple-minded" was not used to describe "scientific results" of any kind, nor the underlying scientific theory, nor any scientist involved. It was used to describe someone who carelessly started the fire.
Might I add that the possibility of the country going up in flames is magnified by the climate change that allows everything to be so dry and volatile, regardless of the cause of the fires that occurred.
- Also for physical resources, you want geographical diversification, and America is far enough that to be orthogonal to e.g. European conflicts
reply