To me, it's like a bad shoot. How many unarmed, completely innocent black guys would you be able to shoot because a less than qualified officer "thought his apartment was hers" for instance?
I obviously don't know, but I'm betting the black community, at least in my country (USA), wouldn't countenance anywhere even close to 81 black guys getting shot over nothing like that before we'd hear from them.
I had no idea it was 81. That's a level at which it makes me genuinely wonder why there aren't more protests?
There's way too many departments out there being run like frat houses. This is serious work. You got woman problems you can't separate from the job? Get out, or your leadership should be running you out in a well run department.
In all honesty, given the volume of comments, posts and articles that bots can generate in a given time period? I mean it’s gotta be several orders of magnitude higher than what humans can generate.
And then you factor in the fact that even most of the humans are astroturfing..
The percentage of influence campaigns we interact with has just gotta be really high.
But there are so many more fundamental problems with the high altitude Venusian colony idea that you would never get to the "temperature gradients > power" pipeline implementation in any case.
I mean right off the bat, imagine building or navigating anything in hurricane Katrina. Then, since we're talking 50km, imagine winds that would make the forces you're dealing with an order of magnitude more problematic.
Yeah, in terms of knowledge and technology, mankind is just not there yet to be perfectly frank.
Wind speed could be fairly irrelevant to the balloon-city; it will never touch "ground". If you can steer away from vortexes (assuming them to be rare), they simply don't matter as a safety issue. (Staying in a desirable temperature zone could create a need for resisting the wind, but that's not a safety issue.)
OTOH, because wind velocity is highly tied to altitude on Venus, wind farming could be an important source of energy generation (along with chemical generation for emergency demand). Drag a fan at a hotter, lower, higher-pressure altitude, and harvest the electricity. In fact, storing an excess of wind-farm energy as chemical energy could power the occasional need to steer away from vortexes.
If the problem of a chemically-inert package can be solved, floating inhabited stations could be feasible.
I hadn't considered the drag-a-fan approach. It brings to mind an interesting kind of sailing where you've got multiple wind directions to solve for. Never mind that an atmospheric colony wouldn't really have a lot of destinations besides itself. Might as well just be one big flotilla.
I expect that a more boring approach would prevail: solar panels. No need for impossibly tall airships to resist wind shear just so they could get at both sides of the hot/cold setup for operating a sterling engine.
Engineering sense aside, I still wanna know if nature would allow the geothermal approach. Something about the idea that a column of air at rest would settle down into such a disequilibrium that it could be harvested of energy in this way feels wrong to me, but I've been unable to muster the thermodynamics chops to align my head with my gut.
The problem is the reflective sulphuric acid clouds of Venus extend quite high up... and of course those eat most anything unprotected. If the wind sheer wasn't so bad, you could try and build tall chimneys with fans in them.. but probably easier to just drag fans.
I still think the temperature and corrosive atmosphere are a lot worse. Two proposed missions come to mind that don't seem concerned with wind or turbulence:
>The core culprit is that most people in Africa depend on the government, most are employed by it.
Just curious. What nations are you talking about when you say that "most people in Africa depend on the government"?
Only asking because this has not been my experience at all!
In fact I would say that most people in every nation I visited was dependent on themselves, their family and whatever support they could get from their larger clan. Poverty was rampant. Most of the middle class had clawed their way to that height through creating some kind of business. The degree to which these economies were dependent on remittances was alarming in my uneducated view. I would say far less than .5% of the people I interacted with had a government paycheck or even a government benefit coming in.
That said, I've never been to the wealthier nations like South Africa or Morocco or what have you. Maybe it's different in those places?
I realize now that I phrased it wrong, I should have said the largest employers are the government, with very little private companies. At least in my country (Namibia) this is true. Unemployment is high because the youth is waiting for the government to create jobs.
I've never been to Namibia. (Never been to any SADC nations actually). But I can assure you, other nations don't work like Namibia. In a lot of other African nations, government can be the largest employer and still provide jobs for less than a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the people. The rest of the people will be completely on their own. These people scratch and struggle for whatever they can get. It's not at all like Namibia from what you're saying.
That's an outdated take at this point though right?
I mean pretty much everyone, today, (Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, South sudan, etc etc), has settled on Kenya being the answer to all those questions. No one wants to access the sea in the Eritrea direction anymore since everything going on in Kenya is making Kenyan coastal access such a no-brainer. (And all of that was even before the Iran war showed that making your shipping dependent on the Eritrea route, and mideast chokepoints in general, is just, I mean, I'll be diplomatic and call it "ill-considered"). Now, with the newest attachments being considered for the LAPSSET corridor, going through Eritrea is just insanity by comparison.
So even without the geography problem, there is still war is my point. Now, of course, you could argue it's still a geography problem since the proxy-masters are mostly concerned about getting rid of the dam long term. But that's another issue is all I'm saying.
Fortunately, multibillion dollar dams can't spread like COVID.
So there isn't one likely to draw global powers to my neighborhood to pit one group of people against another.
/s
Let's be honest man, there's just little chance at all that this issue affects your average San Fran tech guy. Let's not try to shame people because they don't pay attention to those kinds of issues. If you want people to know something about the issue, put it in your comment.
Chinese can't fight themselves. So I'm pretty sure everyone is in on this one.
One side wants the dam gone.
The other wants the dam generating electricity.
Will be fascinating to see which group of puppet masters wins. It'll tell us a lot about how the global power hierarchies are shaping up in the twenty-first century.
I do feel horrible for the innocent people of Ethiopia, who only wanted lights so their kids could study at night. Instead, they'll get killed. That's what sucks about the activity of global powers in Africa for the past, what? 500 years? Probably longer.
Excuse my ignorance, but what dam? TFA doesn't mention either a dam or the Chinese, in fact it does an analysis of "Ethiopian wars of choice" completely unrelated to either thing.
To be fair to HN, I mean, your comment kind of indicates your own political sensitivity as well right?
I, personally, don't mind political content. I find it interesting. That said, I'm not going to get on fellow HN'ers when they downvote or flag it. That, in and of itself, would be a political act rooted in sensitivities.
If you have reasons, in particular, that posts or comments should not be flagged, I'd personally encourage you to outline them. Then let the chips fall where they may. Getting emotional only decreases the overall quality of the conversation. And, presumably, outlining your own ideas would get whatever viewpoint it is that you wish to push, into the thread.
No I dont think so, Im not being sensitive to anything other than censorship? I believe on total free speech so I think every comment should be visible and I am happy to take offence. I see so many dead comments that are not even rude or offensive, its hard to see why anyone would censor them.
To me, it's like a bad shoot. How many unarmed, completely innocent black guys would you be able to shoot because a less than qualified officer "thought his apartment was hers" for instance?
I obviously don't know, but I'm betting the black community, at least in my country (USA), wouldn't countenance anywhere even close to 81 black guys getting shot over nothing like that before we'd hear from them.
I had no idea it was 81. That's a level at which it makes me genuinely wonder why there aren't more protests?
There's way too many departments out there being run like frat houses. This is serious work. You got woman problems you can't separate from the job? Get out, or your leadership should be running you out in a well run department.
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