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👉 Léo Enough of (a tag that I had been using for "thought of the day"). Everything I post here is a "thought" anyways. Also, I quickly gave up on the "daily" aspect of it.
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👉 Léo running an entire data center to mine cryptocurrencies should be an environmental crime. If a rule like that were enforced globally, people would eventually innovate and come up with a "green" bitcoin.
4y, 14w 2 replies ¬
Kacem will be the next crypto
📉 Bill 0 percent interest rates should be an environmental crime. How much excess have we generated as a society due to reckless spending in order to keep asset prices afloat in this global deflationary environment?
4y, 12w reply
👉 Léo Four years into my graduate program and I just find out that inkscape has a "diagram connectors" feature. I've spent so much time designing block diagrams by hand!
4y, 15w reply ¬
👉 Léo I hate how in the US we have to buy medical "insurance". Insurance makes sense for things likes cars and houses, not humans. Cars don't have chronic problems or syndromes. Cars don't have preexisting conditions (you normally get a factory warranty). If a car is beyond repair, you eventually get a new one and move on. I think making something as complex as healthcare fit the shape of insurance is dehumanizing.
4y, 35w 1 reply ¬
James Kirk US is the only developed country to lack access to universal healthcare, right.
4y, 26w reply
👉 Léo People say that capitalism has failed us, but capitalism's goal was never to please us in the first place. We failed to give capitalism the right cost function to optimize for. I think a good way to steer the optimization is to introduce penalties for undesirable behavior. That is, taxes! In the US we tax income, property, and profit. Unsurprisingly, the wealthy have found ways to hide all of those. We should tax wealth directly and carbon, sugar, empty apartments, etc
4y, 36w reply ¬
👉 Léo two thoughts on existential crises. 1. I should feel lucky that I have the luxury of going down existential rabbit holes, contemplating my own existance and purpose; I don't have to worry much about food or shelter. It would be great if everyone could have that privilege. 2. Existential crises are extremely counterproductive given any sort of material goal. Want to go to Mars? Sitting there and contemplating your existence will not take you there.
··· 4y, 40w 5 replies ¬
Zero Edge Although mental fortitude and inner peace will give you the ability to be content and happy regardless of the outcome of a "material goal"..
🗨️ Fui 1. Either that or you are a philosoper, where going down the existential rabbit hole is an art and trade. I'm on that camp.
4y, 40w 2 replies
👉 Léo As an engineer you quickly learn to appreciate how any dynamic system is just a series of energy connections. For example: any driver knows what the brake pedal does; a technician understands how it works, with the caliper pressing the pads against the disc; an engineer, however, understands that deceleration is nothing but a conversion of energy: from kinetic to heat. The car will lose velocity by the same rate as the brakes heat up. Power simply has to go somewhere.
··· 4y, 41w 6 replies ¬
🐵 Max As an engineer I'va always been confused about potential energies though.
😃 Javier This reminds of the tale of the pitcher who got hit by a line drive right on the head and the ball bounced of his head and flew up to the highest seats in the stadium. A physics professor watching exclaimed: "He is going to be fine".
🗨️ Fui > "Power simply has to go somewhere". Politicians take that observation very seriously!
4y, 40w 1 reply
👉 Léo I like the idea of exoskeletons for rehabilitation (e.g. make paraplegic people walk again) but I dislike human enhancement stuff. Why use an exoskeleton to lift 1000 lbs? Just use a remote controlled robot, or a fork lift! Want to run at 60 mph? Use a car! Just imagine if something goes wrong with the control system or the freaking battery connector fails while the user is lifting 1000 lbs above their head.
4y, 41w 2 replies ¬
🗨️ Fui That's a very grounded argument you have there. Never thought it like that before. And it makes much sense once you think about it from a practical point of view. All tech fails at some point. And your scenarios, though focusing on very fringe instances, are entirely within the realm of possibility.
4y, 41w 1 reply
👉 Léo it annoys me that I can at least pretend to intuitively understand springs and dampers (friction) but I don't get why inertia exists. Sure, it's a fundamental law, Newton's 2nd, D'Alembert's principle, varies kinetic energy, etc. No idea why the universe decided to work in that manner. If masses warp space, why does it take force to accelerate mass but not to keep it going?
4y, 42w reply ¬
👉 Léo My native language, Portuguese, has a cool feature that English doesn't have. The word "ai" pronounced ah-ee means "there where you are". It pretty much can only be used in conversation. I like it because, unlike "there", it is completely unambiguous. Another cool feature: days of the week are just numbers. Monday is 2nd, Tuesday is 3rd, ... Friday is 6th.
4y, 42w 5 replies ¬
Rsm Which complicates things for foreigners, figuring out the difference between ai, ali, and la ...
🗨️ Fui You're right about the days of the week being counted from Sunday, the Lord's day. I actually don't like the way we name it precisely because it breaks with a much older tradition of naming them as the old gods. More info here: pt.wikipedia.org/w...
4y, 42w reply
👉 Léo Op-amps (and by extension in-amps) are amazing devices. Recently, when debugging an analog circuit, I noticed that the output of a buffer was measuring half Vdd with the input floating. However, when I tried to measure the voltage at the input I could only read zero. The cool part is the output of the op-amp would also swing to ground when I was reading the input. It turns out the generic op-amp has higher input impedance than my multimeter, which pulled down the input.
4y, 42w reply ¬
👉 Léo I really doubt we will have people on the moon by 2024, as is the current plan. And that's if they don't end up canceling the Artemis program due to coronavirus related budget cuts.
4y, 43w 2 replies ¬
👨🏻‍💻 Moroni Guy is crazy, so I believe him: Elon Musk(2019): "Well, this is gonna sound pretty crazy, but I think we could land on the moon in less than two years. Certainly with an uncrewed vehicle I believe we could land on the moon in two years. So then maybe within a year or two of that we could be sending crew. I would say four years at the outside."..."If it were to take longer to convince NASA and the authorities that we can do it versus just doing it, then we might just do it."
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👉 Léo I am very much in favor of UBI and I am confident it will be adopted in the future. My one fear is it will not be implemented with a strong wealth tax system in place. UBI would still work, but would have the unintended consequence of separating even further the capital owners from the renters / consumers. If we don't like how much influence the 1% have in politics today, imagine if they were 1000x wealthier. Under those optics, UBI is a poweful anti-revolution tool.
4y, 43w 3 replies ¬
🏀 Pr Agreed, I wonder how do you politically accomplish a wealth tax? at some point, the wealthy would rather pay off a few individuals a lot of money to sabotage it (or even just pay a ton of money in disinformation ads) than for it to ever pass. The poor are not united against the wealth of the 1%. You need a much larger portion of the population supporting making billionaires give up their wealth. everyone thinks they could be a billionaire though :/
4y, 43w 2 replies
👉 Léo This is a question that a colleague asked me a couple years ago, and it just keeps coming back to me. If one becomes informed about the damage that our meat consumption is causing on the planet, does it become immoral for one to consume meat? Say, if you watch a couple documentaries on Netflix and continue consuming meat, does that make you a bad person? I don't really have an answer. I think about it every time I eat a burger.
4y, 43w 32 replies ¬
🥝 Mr Driving a car, flying on a plane, buying products that are shipped on boats overseas - all of these are destructive to the environment. Should you stop driving a car? Does it make you a bad person if you fly on a plane? Maybe. Alternately, some people see it as a challenge to do better - electric cars, more efficient planes, in this case... 3D printed or Lab grown meat. Maybe, it's not black and white.
🏛️ Brandon Pittman Instead of just using eating choice cuts, try eating nose to tail. Also, treat meat like it used to be treated--a luxury. Our ability to get meat any time without having to hunt it has screwed up a lot.
Yggqa No, we still need those proteins
Mike V. I don't think it makes you immoral. I just nowadays don't understand *why* anyone eats meat. Once upon a time it made sense - it was tastier, there wasn't much vegetarian food that was any good and we had little/no evidence about the env or health damage. Nowadays? It's *really* easy to be a vegetarian, it's incredibly tasty food *AND* you're doing so, so much good for pretty much everything: environment, your health, animal wellbeing, your weight, etc.
🌜 Milkman Riot Eating meat isn't immoral. We damage the planet in countless ways, humanity is a burden on the planet. If your goal is planet preservation over all, the only real answer is extinction of humans.
🕴️ Matthew Townsend Given that some amount of meat is healthier than none, you'd probanly be fine reducing your consumption by an order of magnitude. What I'd argue would be immoral is continuing to eat meat while eschewing genetically modified vat meat when that becomes available. It's hard to say whether or not cutting consumption now will bring that to market any sooner.
🏒 Lucian Marin I gave up completely on meat since you started this thread. I don't regret it at all. Vegan burgers are tasty too. I still like cheese and it's just as healthy for protein and amino acids intake.
🗿 Jonah I think it's going to be much easier for me to eat less meat when I head off to college and I'm managing my own nutrition. I really want to try vegetarianism, pescatarianism, and veganism, intermittent fasting- I want to experiment and iterate and find what's best for me!
3y, 46w reply
👉 Léo An all-electric future would be great, but it gives me the feeling that we'd be putting all eggs into one basket. Electric energy is not as easy to store as chemical energy. Example: if there were a major power outage and all the vehicles that we need to use to go and fix the outage are electric, we could be in deep trouble.
4y, 44w 2 replies ¬
Zeratul you can generate electricity in many ways. Mechanical generators are the safety in a scenario where you can't recharge from a grid. Also, the supply chain will work to reinforce itself over time in the same way that we don't allow ourselves to run out of petroleum.
4y, 44w 1 reply
👉 Léo I've always been pro legalization of drugs. All drugs! It would reduce crime, mass incarceration, and save a ton of money. Also, people should be allowed to do whatever they want to their own bodies. More recently, I have come to realize that legalizing wouldn't solve the largest problem of all: why people get addicted in the first place. It would just make it easier for people that are addicted to obtain more and more drugs, potentially leading them to an earlier OD.
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🍁 John J. Yeah, I go back 'n' forth on how much the care (or lack thereof) of young minds is at the root of most of society's problems. It isn't valued, as a discipline, yet, but norms seem to change at the human-lifetime scale, so I'm hopeful (today).
🧿 Andrea I think well educated / informed people should be able to do what they want with their bodies... unless you invest in education and build a good "smart" society, you have to do something to help avoid a cf (have we reached 80k covid daily new cases in USA yet?) - Also, what about the cost on society to fix issues when the bodies get sick?
🥝 Mr Some of this is the same as Trump claiming that if we stop testing the COVID cases will go down. There are some Drugs that are NOT safe to produce, sell or use in the open market. There are many drugs that must be prescribed by a doctor because you could overdose and die. You can choose to believe that all recreational drugs are as harmless as weed, but it's not true.
4y, 44w 1 reply