An interesting game, if you can come up with enough good questions. (At least it isn't telling me which digits are right, but in the wrong place).
With a target of 20% accuracy, it won't make much difference, but I think that symmetrical error bounds are appropriate in this case - the factor by which the answer is wrong. so 2 times too big, is as good as 2 times too small.
And in the US, a lot of the subsidies flow towards food that isn't edible without processing - soybeans and field corn as opposed to sweet corn.
Why? Because they've always grown it. So the subsidies encourage them to keep on growing it instead of diversifying into more competitive or higher value crops.
The subsidy is received by way of reduced insurance premiums. While that does make insurance affordable where it mightn't otherwise be, the rate of reduction is the same across all crops, so the insurance is made equally affordable no matter which crop you grow. Thus, for all intents and purposes, we can completely ignore the subsidy and simply focus on the insurance as that is ultimately what you are suggesting is significant. After all, if the subsidies were taken away, all it would really mean that you theoretically couldn't afford insurance anymore and would do without.
But what is significant about insurance? Since no good discussion is complete without a car analogy, let's go there. Say you always drove a truck. By your logic, auto insurance encourages you to keep driving trucks. Which suggests that if you could no longer get auto insurance, you would start driving a bus/van/car/whatever instead. But what makes you think that? If auto insurance disappeared for some reason, why wouldn't you still keep driving trucks as opposed to buses/vans/cars/whatever? There is probably a reason why you started driving trucks in the first place that doesn't go away even if insurance did.
In the case of corn and soybeans, there is a really good reason why they are grown so much: Because that's where the market is. It is what people want to buy. They are the most competitive and highest value crops in the regions they are grown.
> In the case of corn and soybeans, there is a really good reason why they are grown so much: Because that's where the market is. It is what people want to buy. They are the most competitive and highest value crops in the regions they are grown.
Given the fact that they're subsidised, I doubt that they're the most competitive crops. Competitive crops don't need to be subsidised.
Also, if they're so competitive, then why has the demolition of USAID caused them economic harm? A competitive product doesn't rely on a taxpayer subsidised buyer to make their market.
> Given the fact that they're subsidised, I doubt that they're the most competitive crops.
Every crop is subsidized.
> Competitive crops don't need to be subsidised.
Then no crop is competitive, so what is this alternative product that you are picturing? Stones? Who is going to buy those stones?
> then why has the demolition of USAID caused them economic harm?
John Deere's stock price is basically at its highest point ever. What economic harm are you talking about? When they are warning of imminent bankruptcy, then we can talk about there being economic harm. Some people sitting around complaining about something being different isn't real economic harm, just talk. Actions speak louder than words.
A lot of it also gets turned into biofuels or sent to third-world countries as food aid. That could easily be rerouted in a crisis scenario, if domestic food security became an issue.
The corn that gets turned into biofuel isn't edible without further processing into maize derived products, so in a crisis scenario, hope you can still highly process corn.
The subsidies are generally to have spare production capacity, so as to reduce the risk of famine that can occur from the capitalistic incentives of optimising the system for efficiency above resilience.
(Not that the subsidies are always actually the most sensibly set out: but the general idea of subsidizing farming is an important one)
> The subsidies are generally to have spare production capacity
Maybe originally, but not anymore. Exhibit A: See America's waistline and the reason behind it (hint: farm subsidies and SNAP, two sides of the same coin).
The Tom Tom data is interesting, but time taken for 10 km is not really an appropriate metric. In a more densely populated city, journeys are likely to be shorter.
Interesting - I have believed for many years that it was around 17 MPH. I felt that this tallied with my observations - as traffic levels increase, vehicles slow down (increasing total capacity) until it falls to a critical speed (when slowing down reduces capacity) and then it changes to stop/go.
In my experience (on UK roads) this critical speed is around 17 MPH - but it might be a little different elsewhere.
Freeway capacity chokes at the limit giving rise to basically overpacked lanes slumping from metastability; systemic control with ramp meters or I66 (within the Washington D.C. Metro area) style real-time dynamic pricing lets freeways flow properly around peak capacity if properly implemented.
There are roads that regularly suffer from acutely insufficient capacity in many metro areas; specifically, repeatedly at times _the dynamic pricing toll that would discourage enough people from using it to stay uncongested_ would overshadow the price of a rental-with-driver (Uber-style) during off-peak times.
It's not that the people shouldn't get through; it's that most people won't need more than a backpack worth of luggage with them and could thus be packed 3~4 passengers for each driver.
Splitting the toll would be the reason to do so.
Unfortunately only really dynamic congestion tolls would really fix the concept of rush hour traffic jams. And the necessary surveillance system would bring severe mass surveillance/tracking concerns with it at least in central Europe.
I don’t think the surveillance needs to be cameras, a combination of radars (for velocity) and induction loops or the axle-counting rubber hoses (for counting) should do the trick
The problem is less from the full coverage measurements of congestion this scheme would need, and more due to the billing of almost all vehicles on almost all roads which could be used for bypassing major roads when driving congestion-relevant commutes. So main thoroughfares/arteries, pretty much anything you'd visually classify as "highway" (unless it's a dead-end), and Autobahn/Interstate.
Without cameras:
How do you do the billing then? Like, what else other than ALPR or the privacy-basically-equivalent RFID tag/token stuck to the windscreen (and correlated with a camera or similar to catch vehicles with inoperable RFID tags)?
If you'd cover old-built urban cores, you could further punish the driving-in-circles tactic of avoiding multi-story parking garages that hopes to either find a surface spot during their brief empty lifetime, or even to stall until a former passenger has ran an errand and can be picked up again.
You probably have to go quite a long way into answering "is it feasible" type questions, before you can answer "is it cost effective" questions. Maturing a technology will typically take many steps, each with exponentially increased costs. Finding the money for the initial (cheapest) steps may be a lot easier, especially since the pay-off may prove to be higher than expected.
Research is akin to gambling. You cannot predict which bets will pay off, but if you can win on average, it's worth betting as many times as you can afford.
30 years ago, without an SSD, my Pentium box booted to the desktop in 60 seconds — that’s roughly 5 billion CPU cycles at 75 MHz.
Today, with blazing-fast SSDs and CPUs running at 4+ GHz, a typical PC boots in around 10 seconds — that’s 50+ billion cycles per core.
One of my teachers used to say: "In computing, 3 seconds is an eternity."
These days, that’s enough time for 20 billion AVX-512 instructions.
It’s hard to accept that anything not truly compute-intensive needs more than that.
Realistically, we should be able to hit 300 ms latency across the entire UX — and yet we don’t.
It doesn't need to replace conventional charging. But a phone that gained charge when unused might still be useful - being able to make a call later might be better than never.
It would be great if used as an "emergency power source". I see this equivalent to the satellite SOS systems - not useful for daily use but essential in emergencies. You know you can get brief emergency function every x hours.
But for the question asked higher in the thread, it would never be comparable to a "real" battery. This would be a very special purpose battery.
