> In Australia, I spent a bit of time trying to work out how to find which politician voted for what (both at state and federal level), so that when elections come, you can single out the individuals who voted for what legislation.
That's an interesting project - I am guessing it's only targeting federal level, but could also include state level
The first problem I have in my mind is proxy votes, and votes that are made mandatory by the party they belong to - eg. a backbencher would struggle to go against the wishes of their party unless they felt it was worth risking their career over
> "A complete and open record of the proceedings of our parliament" still needs people spend a good chunk of time interpreting and summarising it (e.g. the media, commentators, etc) which means it's a time-consuming hobby or a paid gig.
There is also a genuine case for National security in that - during the Second World War - releasing that information would (IMO) let the enemy know what maintenance was being held back, in bombers.
Wars quickly replace one another, how unfortunate!
Or we have just independently rediscovered why most regimes seek the justification of some external threats to strengthen their power over their population, 1984 style.
Yes, perpetual wars can be used as a tool of domestic control. The benign use is the rally around the flag effect. More harmful is using them as justifications to do anything without oversight. It’s one of the patterns shown by the vast majority of dictatorships and totalitarian governments. One of the aspects of fascism in Umberto Eco’s definition.
The planes in question would have been obsolete by that point, also those planes from WW2 would have already been widely distributed among allied (including Soviet) countries
> Spying on American citizens is a bipartisan point of agreement.
Not an American, but I can totally understand the need of governments to spy on its citizens that it has EVIDENCE of being involved in behaviour or activities that threaten the nation.
For example - if it had evidence that certain citizens were involved in espionage of their country, and they were thus passing on serious information to actors or other states that were intent on using that information to harm the nation, I would most definitely want those citizens to be spied upon.
Such evidence could be:
Engaging in, or communicating with, known extremist organisations or forums known to be frequented by such individuals.
The distinction I suspect is targeted spying vs mass spying. I don’t think anyone is going to get upset about a targeted counter espionage operation, but spying on the public at large with no evidence of suspicion of wrongdoing is another matter.
Strictly speaking - a battery is stored potential energy
A common battery for grid level storage is pumped hydro - that is, use the peak power during the day(s) to push water from the bottom of an elevation to the top, and hold it there - bonus points if it captures water delivered from other solar processes (evaporation -> rain)
> Strictly speaking - a battery is stored potential energy
That's its function, but that does not make any device that stores energy a 'battery'. An electric battery is specifically a battery of electrochemical cells — Franklin invented the term as analogous to an artillery battery (a collection of guns).
Calling every form of stored energy a 'battery' is just dumbing things down for the masses.
There are about 90 billion battery solutions - none of them are very efficient, cheap to manufacture, easy to manufacture/acquire materials for, and long-lasting all at the same time.
Grid-scale sodium batteries are already in production, and there isn’t some kind of magic anti-technology shield which keeps the United States in the 1920s.
When talking about cost, it’s important to remember that solar+batteries are already cheaper and, unlike nuclear, happen on much shorter timescales. I’m not opposed to some nuclear plant starts but those guarantee a couple decades of increased pollution before there’s any chance whatsoever for carbon reduction, whereas solar can come online in a year.
Solar panels, of course, are also very dirty to manufacture. Simply bringing something online quickly is not a measure of overall efficiency.
You’re right, though, that nuclear is ALSO only a part of the solution. One day, it will be a major and necessary component of our grid, but we need to start tackling this carbon problem harder, and like… yesterday.
If a FAANG releases Kafka, REACT, Kubernetes, or any number of projects that they found helpful, and released into open source - there will always be a claim that they do it with some second intention, such as "be seen to be a positive contributor to the community"
But the truth is - so do I - as a humble contributor to a document, test, bug fix, or feature add to a FOSS project - where's the beef?
If only, those FAANGs with hyperscaler and AI business always have a way to plunge those improvements into customer acquisitions for their cloud products, not available on the other vendors.
I think one of the drawbacks of VR birdwatching is that you are served the bird in focus, in frame, almost immediately - there's no search, there's no WTF is making that noise?
Some parts of birdwatching could be Virtual - watching a feeder somewhere (anywhere) waiting for birds to come in and watch what they do - or watching different trees/plants at different points in the year attracting different birds exhibiting different behaviours (eg. I have a love of seeing Tui[NZ] when Taiwanese Cherry or Kowhai are in flower, they gather in the tree at different times of the day when the nectar is at its peak, there are fights for dominance between the birds, there's a racket as they all feast, then boom, as quickly as they arrive they're gone again, off to the next tree)
> Superficially, it seems that embedding a timestamp in the ID can remove the need to track the creation time in a separate database column, providing marginally more efficient database operations. If you need to list things ordered by creation time very often, it’s useful if the primary index gives that behavior, removing the need for another index.
This glares for me - I'm not "listing" by creation time per se; I'm taking advantage of locality - the page of data that a given key's data is in should also contain data of other keys created around the same time.
That locality means that I have less disk calls if I want to get the data for a series of rows that were created around the same time.
The blog post seems to be saying that (worst case) I cannot rely on that aspect.
I think generally you can still rely on that aspect, compared to the alternative of UUIDv1-4. Even the worst cases he mentioned would cause minimal page splitting problems in a database compared to even the best cases with UUIDv1-4. The biggest take away I got from the article is that there is some wiggle room in how things can be implemented in the UUIDv7 spec, and it's important to be aware of the implementations you are using.
That's an interesting project - I am guessing it's only targeting federal level, but could also include state level
The first problem I have in my mind is proxy votes, and votes that are made mandatory by the party they belong to - eg. a backbencher would struggle to go against the wishes of their party unless they felt it was worth risking their career over
> "A complete and open record of the proceedings of our parliament" still needs people spend a good chunk of time interpreting and summarising it (e.g. the media, commentators, etc) which means it's a time-consuming hobby or a paid gig.
https://www.aph.gov.au/parliamentary_business/hansard and (linked from that page) https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Chamber_docume... would likely be good places to start
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