We shouldn't be doing either of these things. It wasn't a serious problem 20 years ago when kids would bring whatever allergens to lunch. Throwing away peanut foods is an absurd overreaction and misdirection of food-safety resources.
Yes, and my schools were not throwing out sandwiches either. Schools started doing so because it became a serious liability issue with kids weaponizing it for bullying and leading to death. Unless you have a solution for the human condition that will stop people leveraging deadly allergies as a form of torment, then schools will keep doing so.
I literally posted a story where this was happening, did you not read the link I shared? There are multiple other examples in just the past few years, and the thing is that all it takes is one inciting incident to cause massive problems for the school district.
I _promise_ you people with allergies know about this "tactic."
What all you who suggest it fail to empathize with is that it's the only option most of the time. being completely removed from the social scene of eating out is extremely alienating, and eating out is very common especially for young adults.
So you concede, you look up the menu online ahead of time, decide "hey this probably looks safe, I can risk it"
Boom, you accidentally eat something you didn't account for, try not to make a scene in front of your friends and the other patrons, go out to your car take Benadryl and pass out. Night over.
Very sad stuff, but nonetheless I have zero interest in subsidizing your social preferences (either through regulation or litigation costs). Lots of people live good lives without going to restaurants all the time. Have a barbecue or something.
I'd be curious about your thoughts on regulations that solely pertain to providing available information to consumers. For instance, a regulation saying "If any of your recipes in this facility use sesame, mark that on your product" seems both incredibly feasible and incredibly valuable for people trying to determine how to manage their needs (e.g. what to serve at the suggested barbecue)
I can empathize with thinking that trade-offs that incur a high overhead might be super onerous to comply with, but simple information-based laws which just provide consumers with information that businesses already have on hand seems incredibly easy to comply with, no?
For example, in this case a "produced in a facility that handles sesame" label seems like it'd be a huge accommodation win without extremely minimal overhead for businesses.
For what you're describing, it's important to understand how the FDA and the laws are set up. As things are, package labeling is required for consumer packaged foods. The FDA inspects those facilities. That would seem like a good environment for your suggestion.
But there are other food businesses the FDA inspects that aren't subject to the labeling requirements. For example, this could be a local wholesaler, like a producer of pastries that supplies area coffee shops. That wholesaler will have maybe brought a daily box full of muffins to the coffee shop, whose staff then moved them to a display case.
Those situations have no labeling requirements, and no matter how much information is shared by the producer, nor how often, the café staff as a whole can't be trusted to get it all correct. I don't say they "can't be trusted" because that's an unwise procedure—and it is that—I say it because my business may as well be that local pastry producer.
If your reaction is personal outrage at me rather than considering the issue at hand, you are probably too emotionally involved to form a useful opinion.
> The odds that a homemade food stand accidentally gives a stray peanut to a consumer with a deadly allergy are low
The odds per food item consumed are higher for small food businesses that aren't as easily forced into absurd clean-room manufacturing. This analysis makes no sense.
While I really dislike the track of moderation policy on HN over the last 5+ years, I do have a lot of respect for dang being willing to engage in earnest discussion about moderation when prompted.
I came here in 2019, and I personally think, HN is LinkedIn but with anonymous people. Most people I know professionally know my HN handle. At least for me, the idea of HN being a place where people exercise free flowing polarizing ideas is pretty foreign. Everyone here follows a particular framework, but I wouldn't call it monolithic.
I am not exactly sure, how it was 5 years ago, but I have seen some older HN users. They are busy with their family, and they have outdoorsy hobbies now. So, I think you will always see new blood in this place with different ideas and cultural values, while the older users getting more interested in carpentry or sailing their boats.
What are you expecting, a post where you say "you're not allowed to talk about controversial topics"? No, the way this works is that a controversial topic comes up, an interesting conversation ensues, you see something you don't like, and the post gets removed or flagged or you come in with a vague comment like "please do not start flame wars <insert link to HN rules>", "personal attacks are not allowed <link to rules>", etc. Do this enough times and people obviously stop having these discussions. Most of the people I used to enjoy talking with on this site either no longer post here or treat HN as a sort of linkedin, as the ancestor post described.
You are not directly responsible for all of this - there is also a less tolerant culture among commenters, resulting in massively more echo-chamber-ish voting and flagging patterns, as well as a tendency to bother people off-site. I have started using nym accounts because in recent years, people have tried to harass me or my employer over posts that wouldn't have garnered any special attention whatsoever 5-10 years ago. This cultural shift is (I think) partially due to growth, but also partially due to the culture your moderation techniques encourage (intentionally or not). The culture of rigorous open discourse over novel/controversial topics has been almost completely destroyed here, in favor of a culture of facially polite business-friendly chatter (i.e. linkedin).
I think I understand the constraints you are operating under, and this outcome is a not-unreasonable compromise given those constraints, but it is not the one I would have picked. We already have linkedin for this. HN used to serve a different (and arguably more socially useful) function, and it still could, in theory.
When you make a categorical claim like "X type of discussion is ruthlessly suppressed" on HN, I think it's reasonable to ask for links to where this ruthless suppression is showing up.
You've given an abstract answer, but what would be helpful to me as the alleged-ruthless-suppressor are specific examples. If the phenomenon is as significant as you say, links ought to be easy to come by.
And on the flipside to dang's question, do you have any links to some threads from the good old days you're describing? It'd be interesting to read through them.
The guidelines are (I assume intentionally) vague enough that moderation can selectively object to basically anything, claim it's on the basis of tone/personal attack/flamewar risk/etc, link to the guidelines with no further explanation, and call it a day.
I read OP's post as a change from an absolutism to pragmatism. Absolutists on any matter are at risk of behaving like paladins* or tyrants. The change I imagined from it was from "Any speech is good regardless of consequences." to "Yeah, sometimes there are better (such as, less hurtful, or more productive) ways speak, and encouraging that is sometimes helpful."
* A paladin attitude: "Anything which supports my view is Right; any fallout from trying to enforce my view is Good; anything that doesn't support my view is Wrong; anyone who is against my view is my rightful enemy upon whom any harm is Righteous."
"Free speech" is not the notion of "say whatever you want regardless of if it's helpful"; it's "don't prevent people from saying things that are subjectively unhelpful".
Free speech "pragmatism" is essentially completely meaningless - if the belief isn't extremely hard-line, it rapidly degenerates to something that has zero moral consequence.
Take the fourier transform of a clipped signal - it will have high frequency components.
In general, the more pointy edges you introduce to a waveform, the more high frequency artifacts you get.
This aspect of pontryagin duality (narrow in one domain means wide in the other) is also what underlies the heisenberg uncertainty principle. If you "hard clip" a photon's position (with a slit) you get a lot of frequency domain (momentum) noise, leading to a spread-out beam.
Take a sine wave below your system's Nyquist frequency. Chop off the top. Take the continuous Fourier transform. You will notice that there are now frequency components above the Nyquist limit of your system. Those will now be aliased down to lower frequencies.
One trick for doing nonlinear waveshaping without introducing too much aliasing is to perform the wave shaping at a higher sample rate than the rest of your system and then downsampling with a low pass filter. Thankfully, the high frequency components introduced by nonlinearity tend to decrease in magnitude reasonably quickly.
The article seems to blame "the bankers" for not investing in nuclear fusion, while completely ignoring the fact that most of the cost of new nuclear construction is from regulatory changes that happened in the last 50 years.
Those exist for a reason, care to say why they aren’t necessary before dismissing them outright? Surely you agree some amount of regulation is necessary?
Any set of nuclear regulations that aren't just a copy of France's nuclear regulations are probably too restrictive. France gets 3/4 of their electricity from nuclear without any major incidents.
(Obviously this is overly simplistic, there is a set of natural disasters that France isn't subject to that other countries are, so France is just a starting point. But every addition should be justified by answer the question "What about our circumstances makes us different from France here?")
LCOE is unrelated to systems costs of large decarbonized grid because it leaves out the costs of long-term backup, increased transmission, overcapacity needed to fill the night batteries, and more.
You've made two arguments here, all are necessary and some are necessary. There's a record of anti-nuclear sentiment being stoked by fossil fuel industry[0]
His point is that even if the reactor is free, it’s not competitive because of everything required to convert the heat to electricity makes it more expensive. That part has nothing to do with regulation.
Those events killed orders of magnitude less people than coal plants do every year, from normal operation. Fukushima, in particular, only had one death attributable to radiation.
Fission is the only operational technology that can replace fossil fuels for base load. Grid storage for solar and wind is just so under-developed and difficult to scale. We have to stop emitting CO2 ASAP, we can't wait for tech that may or may not work. Ruling out fission because of these demonstrably small risks is wildly irrational, when the alternative is total global social and ecological collapse.
Humans tend to judge unfamiliar but small risks as being much larger - think of how there are annual panics about razor blades/fentanyl/whatever in Halloween candy, but not the cars that kill over 70 children each Halloween on average. This same tendency is exactly why there is so much irrational fear around nuclear.
Base load on the producer side is an outdated term. It simply came into existence because the most inflexible plants used to be the cheapest, that is not the case anymore. You can talk about base demand, but that can be fulfilled using any source.
Or as Wikipedia puts it:
> The base load (also baseload) is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time, for example, one week. This demand can be met by unvarying power plants, dispatchable generation, or by a collection of smaller intermittent energy sources, depending on which approach has the best mix of cost, availability and reliability in any particular market.
> This same tendency is exactly why there is so much irrational fear around nuclear.
Or because you still have to measure the radioactivity of wild game and mushrooms in northern Sweden and Bavaria.
> Although game is considered a delicacy in Bavaria, large amounts of meat are disposed of. Because many wild boars are still contaminated with radioactivity - even 35 years after the Chernobyl reactor accident.
I've seen people make these semantic arguments you're making to confuse the situation around base load. The reality is that you have not offered any alternative, and your post only muddies the waters.
> Base load on the producer side is an outdated term. It simply came into existence because the most inflexible plants used to be the cheapest, that is not the case anymore. You can talk about base demand, but that can be fulfilled using any source.
Oh really? What's this more flexible power? Is it perhaps natural gas? It's interesting how anti-nuclear people always gloss that over.
> Or because you still have to measure the radioactivity of wild game and mushrooms in northern Sweden and Bavaria.
Having to test some mushrooms and game meat is nothing compared to the damage fossil fuels do in their intended use. Rivers and soils in many places have been poisoned by fossil fuel extraction, including from natural gas.
Given your answers, I suspect you have a quite dogmatic view of the world, but we can nonetheless look into research and other sources.
> Much of the resistance towards 100% Renewable Energy (RE) systems in the literature seems to come from the a-priori assumption that an energy system based on solar and wind is impossible since these energy sources are variable. Critics of 100% RE systems like to contrast solar and wind with ’firm’ energy sources like nuclear and fossil fuels (often combined with CCS) that bring their own storage. This is the key point made in some already mentioned reactions, such as those by Clack et al. [225], Trainer [226], Heard et al. [227] Jenkins et al. [228], and Caldeira et al. [275], [276].
> However, while it is true that keeping a system with variable sources stable is more complex, a range of strategies can be employed that are often ignored or underutilized in critical studies: oversizing solar and wind capacities; strengthening interconnections [68], [82], [132], [143], [277], [278]; demand response [279], [172], e.g. smart electric vehicles charging using delayed charging or delivering energy back to the electricity grid via vehicle-to-grid [181], [280]–[282]; storage (battery, compressed air, pumped hydro)[40]–[43], [46], [83], [140], [142], such as stationary batteries; sector coupling [16], [39], [90]–[92], [97], [132], [216], e.g. optimizing the interaction between electricity, heat, transport, and industry; power-to-X [39], [106], [134], [176], e.g. producing hydrogen at moments when there is abundant energy; et cetera. Using all these strategies effectively to mitigate variability is where much of the cutting-edge development of 100% RE scenarios takes place.
> With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive. Variability, especially short term, has many mitigation options, and energy system studies are increasingly capturing these in their 100% RE scenarios.
Or we can take a look at Wikipedia for an even broader view
> 100% renewable energy means getting all energy from renewable resources. The endeavor to use 100% renewable energy for electricity, heating, cooling and transport is motivated by climate change, pollution and other environmental issues, as well as economic and energy security concerns.
> Research into this topic is fairly new, with very few studies published before 2009, but has gained increasing attention in recent years. The majority of studies show that a global transition to 100% renewable energy across all sectors – power, heat, transport and desalination – is feasible and economically viable.[5][6][7][8] A cross-sectoral, holistic approach is seen as an important feature of 100% renewable energy systems and is based on the assumption "that the best solutions can be found only if one focuses on the synergies between the sectors" of the energy system such as electricity, heat, transport or industry.[9]
Use power-to-x, biofuel, or even in emergencies, burn natural gas for the last percentage points for all that I care. The important part is economically solving the energy transition for the vast majority of cases, not being an absolutist.
All these proposed strategies to live with variable storage only work for short term variability, in places close to the equator. In my country, there is an almost 10x difference on solar energy between Summer and Winter. While (domestic) energy usage doubles in the winter.
The only feasable 0 carbon options are to either install an absolutely massive amount of Hydrogen storage and conversion, to give up any hope of self-sufficiency and import all electricity during the winter from places on the other side of the world, or to use Nuclear.
This sounds like nonsense. We're talking about multivariate distributions, and you haven't defined a norm by which ordinal comparisons can be made between sample points.
Norms are for dealing with magnitude not direction (and were brought up by my parent commenter). If you care about direction specify an angle, quadrant, cone or other subregion that allows you to take the limit to infinity which then doesn’t depend on the norm. Note this is the same in the univariate case where we talk about left and right tail if we need to distinguish.
In the end it doesn’t whether we go to infinity in one norm or the other.
Note that I am talking about finite dimensions, so I guess you didn’t mean the L^p norms or \ell^p for integrable functions or sequences but the finite-dimensional p-norms.
This theorem is completely irrelevant - the equivalence relation described by the theorem does not imply an equivalence between ordinal relationships imposed by different choice of norm. Also, "tails" isn't the same as "at infinity".
