Just curious, what would you have liked to see the U.S. do about Hong Kong? Arguably if anyone was gonna do something it should probably be the British being their agreement was broken. I'm sure the British would have U.S. backing them if they wanted to retaliate.
The U.S. started removing the extra trade agreements from Hong Kong (which arguably is a large part of what made Hong Kong what it is today) and sanctioned individuals in the Chinese government [1]. While this seems to be a "weak" response, I'm not sure what else I would like to see short of getting the military involved.
Given that agreement on Hong Kong independance was set to expire relatively soon, is difficult to justify serious intervention from a cost/ benefit perspective.
The original seisure of Hong Kong was an act of gunboat displomacy, and not exactly an exemplar of justice and law. Consider how its seen in donestic politics in China.
This does not mean that I approve of China's activity, just putting things in perspective.
>if anyone was gonna do something it should probably be the British
Except the UK has much bigger issues ATM like dealing with the social, political and economical fallout of Brexit and Covid-19.
To put it mildly, even if they wanted to, it's tough for them to help put out a fire in a far away village when they have a huge dumpster fire in their own back yard to deal with first.
Building relationships with our allies in the area (TPP), State Department diplomacy, etc. to pressure China effectively. I think TPP was dead regardless of who won, but that State is impaired right now.
It is hard to see what the US should do, but I think the west has a moral obligation to do something (even though it is technically an Anglo-sino agreement).
The UK is trying to welcome people from Hong Kong to the UK (passports left over from before the handover) which could hurt them where it actually matters if lucky.
The article talks about the airline focusing on shorter routes and cutting the longer routes that they were losing money on. Even if the airline doesn't go through bankruptcy the long haul routes at the same price will probably no longer be around.
"However, with the scheduled flights gradually resuming, the airline is restructuring its fleet and focusing on short- and medium-range destinations. Europe’s fourth-largest low-cost carrier will likely completely discontinue the long-haul flights that sank the company into debt."
I'm still working through the paper which is fascinating and have only had a chance to glance it over so forgive me if I ask any questions that are answered in the paper.
I see lots of large timeframes of the data (20 years), but nothing about how much data that actually is. I'm not very familiar with this kind of data, but am curious about the software side and how much data was needed, timeframes for processing the data, any special hardware required, etc....
How much data did you start with (gigabytes? terabytes?)?
What does this data actually look like? csv, custom binary format, some open spec maybe?
How much did you end up filtering out for the various reasons in the paper?
Was there anything that surprised you personally while working on this paper? It seems like most of this is confirming existing theory which is great, but curious if you had any new take aways.
Does the team want to continue to pursue this? If so, what do they hope to accomplish or maybe there's some odd data / behavior that you would like to continue to look at?
Software wise, we use a standard pipeline that reduces the data from the space observatory into the standard astronomy format (FITS), provided by the European Space Agency. The output is in the form of events - X-ray photons which landed on a detector at a particular time. This can then be turned into spectra with the standard software, extracting from particular spatial regions. The spectra can be fit with a standard tool in X-ray astronomy (Xspec), but this also relies on spectral models (some standard, some I made for this project). However, a lot of the hard work is in the form of Python code I made for running the pipeline, extracting spectra, collating the spectra, adding them together, fitting them, collating the results and doing fits. There are also some scripts in tcl for controlling Xspec. The plots and things were done with Veusz (which I wrote) and ds9 (a standard astronomy image GUI).
Yes - we analysed a lot of observations to do the calibration work - that's the advantage of a big public archive. After processing it takes several hundred gigabytes. It probably would take a few times more, but I threw away quite a lot of it which we don't use for this analysis (flared time periods and low energies). That doesn't included the input raw datasets, which might be a few TB - I've not checked, as they're on a different system.
The data, as I say above, is in FITS format, which is standard binary table format. The processed data are these event files (lists of photons), spectra (tables of energy vs number of photons), and detector responses (matrices to turn a model spectrum into an observed spectrum). Along the way there are lots of intermediate text and FITS files. I even used HDF5 for part of the code, but that's mainly because it's so easy to use from Python.
How much was filtered? Usually we need to filter around 40% of the time periods for an average observation due to flares caused by soft protons hitting the detector. In this analysis we also threw away a lot of the data at lower energies, as we were only interested in the high energy emission lines, where we can calibrate the detector. I don't know the number there - maybe we threw away 80% of the total events by filtering the low energies. Finally, we also throw away half of the events, to retain those with the best energy resolution (those where a photon hits a single pixel on the detector).
Surprises? For the Perseus cluster, it was nice when I made a map of the motions and ended up with something that looked like the simulations of sloshing. For Coma, I was surprised that the gas in the cluster still has the same velocity as the central galaxies - I would have thought that it should have slowed down - it will be interesting to discuss this further with theorists. I was also surprised by the complexity of the detector on the instrument. It seemed a simple idea when I started, but turned out to be rather tricky.
We're planning to pursue this further. We have new deep observations of two other nearby clusters. The aim is study "feedback" by active galactic nuclei - active black holes affecting their surroundings - in the centre of these clusters. They should be disturbing the gas/plasma and we hope to measure that, as that hasn't been done before. There are also some things we could do to improve the calibration technique if we have time. For example, we could also use photons which land on multiple pixels.
This is misleading to most people. The US census counts the suburbs as urban. I don't believe most people referring to urban areas are referring to people in the suburbs.
"To qualify as an urban area, the territory identified according to criteria must encompass at least 2,500 people, at least 1,500 of which reside outside institutional group quarters."
As I tell people, together with my two neighbors I live in the middle of about 100 acres on a road with no sidewalks. This counts as urban as far as the census is concerned.
The US is big. That the above is urban makes sense in the context that I'm only about a 15 minute drive from a small city and am only about an hour drive from a large city. There are lots of places in the US that are 100+ miles from the nearest Walmart.
Lots to read over, but this stuck out to me so far.
"gross emissions of biogenic methane in a calendar year are 10% less than 2017 emissions by the calendar year beginning on 1 January 2030; and are at least 24% to 47% less than 2017 emissions by the calendar year beginning on 1 January 2050 and for each subsequent calendar year"
"no remedy or relief is available for failure to meet the 2050 target or an emissions budget, and the 2050 target and emissions budgets are not enforceable in a court of law, except that if the 2050 target or an emissions budget is not met, a court may make a declaration to that effect, together with an award of costs"
Unless they plan to ban the consumption of meat, the biogenic methane cap seems like it would result in more emissions. If Kiwis don't grow their own beef, they will just have it shipped from abroad. Same consumption pattern, no global change in gross biogenic methane, but now there is the added emissions of shipping the beef across an ocean.
Also, I can scarcely think of a more Orwellian idea than that Kiwis may soon be required to hold a (scarce) methane permit in order to raise livestock on their own land. Your sow had a litter, ey? Hope your permits are in order!
There are other approaches to livestock methane reduction being actively investigated (and I’d suggest more promising than perennial unicorns such as carbon sequestration).
I think corn feed is more of a US thing due to the over abundance of subsidised corn production (I’m amazed at how much of the human and animal food chain in the US is corn derived).
In Australia and NZ, it’s mainly grass/hay.
There is a third option, which you have not considered - tariffs on non-conforming importers.
> Also, I can scarcely think of a more Orwellian idea than that Kiwis may soon be required to hold a (scarce) methane permit in order to raise livestock on their own land. Your sow had a litter, ey? Hope your permits are in order!
Canada operates this exact way with dairy licenses, and last time I dropped by, it wasn't an Orwellian nightmare. It's got a bit of a cronyism problem, but I've yet to see a country that doesn't.
The US census counts the suburbs as urban. I don't believe most people referring to "city-folk" are referring to people in the suburbs.
"To qualify as an urban area, the territory identified according to criteria must encompass at least 2,500 people, at least 1,500 of which reside outside institutional group quarters."
I use a Thinkpad t480s (last years model). This laptop has done a great job "getting out my way". It has one of the best keyboards on any laptop I have used. It runs ubuntu great out of the box. 14in screen happens to be be a very nice size for me. I have the touchscreen model which has been nice for testing mobile sites. The screen could be a little brighter / more vibrant, but I do prefer the matte display for when I setup outside when the weather is nice. A brighter glossy version is available if you prefer that.
It has great port selection:
- 2 usb-c ports (1 thunderbolt)
- 2 usb-b
- 1 hdmi port
- 1 ethernet port
- 1 sd card reader
Overall I'd say it's a very good well rounded laptop that I don't have any major complaints about.
I am using the same device and it's also a clear recommendation from my side. Another plus to add is the support: When I called the support because I had these vertical stripes showing up in the panel from time to time, they sent a replacement mainboard and a technician who replaced it at my place in about an hour. I was 0 days without the device which is quite valuable if you are using it professionally, I'd say... This sort of support does of course not only apply to this exact model but I think it is constrained to the T and X series.
Did a lot of research on my last purchase and it came down to a Thinkpad T480s or Thinkpad Carbon X1 and I ended up going with the Carbon because it's so much lighter and thinner while still having an i7, 16 GB of RAM and SSD.
And I bought it from Costco which was a great price and doubled the factory warranty for free, gives free tech support for a year and a ridiculous 90 day return policy.
I disagree. I have had a T480 for some time, the 1440p one. I regret getting th is screen and wish I had gone for the 1080p. While I hear HiDPI may work OK for displays that are scaled up in integer ratios, I basically expect that fractional scaling is never really going to work that well unless all the software you use written in the latest frameworks. (Based on experiences with Arch, Debian 10, Fedora 31 beta)
I was pretty happy using an HP x360 UHD display on Fedora. It also drove two 4K external displays.
What makes the different is wayland. Fractural scaling is working fine. However, we also were using Airtame for over-the-air desktop mirroring, which supports x.org only. Thus, I needed to switch sometimes, which caused „WTF is not working again?!? Oh forgot to switch x.org session back to wayland.“.
No seriously, if you need HiDPI and could omit proprietary nvidia drivers, give wayland a serious try.
You seem to be arguing that the same principles of government should apply at every scale. I don't think that can work. Should the small town consider purchasing a couple B2 bombers? Should the national government decide if my road needs to be repaved?
The plan we are discussing is a plan for national scale governance, and since your example is not on a national scale, the plan would not apply. If the isolated town wishes to enact their own laws to regulate Walmart, they may do so.
The locals may govern themselves locally. National leaders govern on a national scale.
Don’t be so cavalier in shrugging off the person you’re responding to. This kind of national scale governance is equatable to “centralized planning” governance. You have to consider it from the local economy perspective, otherwise you’ll be perpetuating inequality in many parts that you don’t see.
A town is more open to competition, anytime a third player can open up a store with relatively small investment. Meanwhile to take on a dominant player like Amazon is extremely hard.
I believe the line is drawn at ‘large-scale winner-takes-all players’. It doesn’t necessarily have to be fair but it is supposed to benefit the entire economy. As long as there’s a relative balance between the economical power of competitors no measures are required.
Except that the specific example everyone sites is Amazon, and Amazon isn't even in the double digits of all retail in the US [0]. WalMart on the other hand is 8.9% of all retail [1] -- nearly double what Amazon captures. Neither one is that much of the total market. Online is also a surprisingly small portion of total retail still, esp. when you start looking at the magnitude of the numbers.
Just to get this out of the way, I’m not saying it’s a good measure but I think it’s trying to tackle a real problem.
Regarding the ecommerce market share I’d like to know the current numbers and the trend over the years. One should not wait for 99% to start taking measures, all competitors will be dead by then.
Regarding the physical stores Amazon isn’t really trying to capture it as the barrier to entry is much lower than online and margins are low anyway.
> A town is more open to competition, anytime a third player can open up a store with relatively small investment. Meanwhile to take on a dominant player like Amazon is extremely hard.
You think it's easier to open a physical store to compete with Walmart than to spin up an ecommerce site to compete with Amazon?
A physical store, at a minimum, has built in advertising based on location. Budget in local advertising and people will shop there if prices, service, location, and the products are good. I couldnt even imagine how a new online store would be able to start competing with Amazon. There are existing webstores that over the years have lost a lot of business to amazon (Newegg, Sweetwater, B&H Photo, etc). Even local stores are losing business to amazon.
For sure. There are so many more parameters to physical store. Proximity is a HUGE one. Quality of service. Specific items that they stock. These kinds of things allow smaller stores to exist in my small town even while there is a huge supermarket nearby.
On the other hand, I do not use ANY one-stop site for online shopping outside of Amazon.
How is a Walmart easier... Amazon style disruption was the only way Walmart could ever be challenged, precisely because Amazon’s logistics are easier. These kinds of brick and mortar decisions at the town level have like 10 year consequences at a minimum, if not more.
It’s extremely difficult to project forward 10 years in tech.
Sibling comments make a point on how a physical store is easier to bring to market.
> It’s extremely difficult to project forward 10 years in tech.
I think this is a common misconception. Tech giants rise mostly because they create new markets. Since their beginnings nobody beat Microsoft on operating systems, nobody beat Google in search, nobody beat Facebook on social network market share.
The point would be that once you're dominant in a market it's very hard to be moved away and it takes more than a decade. I find it hard to believe a 1T dollar company can be outcompeted during less than a few decades.
Also as the tech/online market matures things naturally tend to slow down.
> I think this is a common misconception. Tech giants rise mostly because they create new markets. Since their beginnings nobody beat Microsoft on operating systems, nobody beat Google in search, nobody beat Facebook on social network market share.
Isn't this just another way of saying survivor bias? They are big because they survived and out-competed the competition, no? There were and are other operating systems, other search engines, other social networks. And sometimes even having the same things said about them... Think MySpace before Facebook. Until they got conquered.
These giants are huge because the internet -- to some approximation -- has no geographic boundaries. It's much easier to consolidate and hold power when you don't have to literally expand to every corner of the world where people physically live to capture them. Amazon and Facebook can acquire entire towns with nothing but a few more servers in the rack.
I agree that the internet is a more liquid and prone to winner-takes-all market. That’s why regulators tend to apply different rules.
I’m not sure if MySpace could be considered a giant at the time. Sure, it had popularity and market share, but it was not spraying billions around buying up competition or consolidating its business (Instagram, Whatsapp).
So Facebook didn’t take down any giants, instead it won a fair market competition. That was my point.
The 2-10 year is the "official" indicator. The other inversions were signs that the 2-10 year was going to invert.
The 2-10 year is the actual news. When the 3-month / 10-year starts to invert, its basically inevitable that the 2-10 year indicator will trip eventually.
The 2-10 year invert doesn't happen instantaneously. It slowly moves into place. Yeah, we could see the signs for months.
The U.S. started removing the extra trade agreements from Hong Kong (which arguably is a large part of what made Hong Kong what it is today) and sanctioned individuals in the Chinese government [1]. While this seems to be a "weak" response, I'm not sure what else I would like to see short of getting the military involved.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_Autonomy_Act