Oh no somebody told China about the future. That’s why they sell everyone cheap PV panels, and are now building out the equivalent of the entire UKs existing solar and wind capacity every year. Plus they’re getting faster.
In 20 years time China gonna be entirely powered by renewables while we’re still having this silly argument about what the future is going to look like.
How is coal cheaper and easier than buying and deploying solar panels and batteries. Both of which require basically zero additional infrastructure to deploy.
Last I checked mining and transporting coal required quite a lot of heavy industry equipment to do even vaguely economically.
If coal was cheaper and easier than other sources of energy, then the US would be building more coal power plants. But even with the Trump administration placing its weighty thumb on the scale to try and “save coal”. Coal plants are still being shutdown due to simple economics.
If existing plants can compete with renewables, to hard to understand how adding the cost of building new plants is going to change that.
Yes, many of which are expected to never actually be used. Accidental result of how China does its provence based infra funding.
Right now China is building out more solar and wind per year than than the entire total deployed solar and wind in the entire UK, and they’re only getting fast. Their ability build renewables now vastly outstrips their historical coal buildout and their rising energy demands. They’re well on their way to achieving net zero far faster than anyone thought was possible.
It basically is an iPhone or iPad, but with a keyboard. It’s really only the display that’s gonna consume significantly more power than its iPhone/iPad equivalent.
Yeah, I was thinking about that, and it occurred to me that even the display is probably pretty efficient since it’s not that much bigger than, say, a large iPad pro. It’s just wild to me how little power this thing uses.
The large iPad Pros have the advantage of using OLED displays rather than an LCD. Give the iPad screen an automatic power advantage because all of the light generated by the screen is emitted at the user, unlike an LCD where a substantial chunk of the LCD backlight is absorbed by the LCD layer.
> You are in a great place in your life, if your most significant problem is caused by not liking a stupid meme and a breakfast photo your friends posted on a random Tuesday...
Or you’re in a terrible place in your life, and the small endorphin release from liking stupid memes and breakfast photos is how you try and escape from terrible things that haunt you day-to-day.
There’s nothing inherently deadly about AC nor anything inherently safe about DC. If there’s enough voltage available to drive current through your body, then electricity is deadly regardless of if it’s AC or DC.
In general AC tends to be a little safer than DC, because the voltage is constantly reversing, which means it’s constantly passing through 0V, creating moments where you don’t have current driving through your body and forcing all your muscles to contract. Those 0V crossings create moments where you can let go of whatever is electrocuting you. DC on the other hand has no such 0 crossings, if there’s enough voltage there to drive current through you, then all your muscles will be stuck contracting until either the power is turned off, or until they’re all so fried they’re not physically capable of contracting anymore.
> Chip and pin and NFC transitions took off much quicker outside the US because merchants generally owned more of the chargeback risk than in the US, and therefore were willing to update their POS equipment accordingly.
Not really. The risk of all fraud is initial borne by banks issuing the cards, after all they’re only parties that have an actual financial relationship with the person providing the cash/debt. If something which results in that person cash/debt being stolen, it’s between that person and their bank to figure out who’s liable for the lost money. Chargebacks are just a mechanism for banks to recover some of that lost money, once the liability between the card holder and the bank has been settled.
One of the big reasons why Chip and PIN etc took off outside of the US, is that the US is very accepting of fraud, and charging crazy high interchange rates (up to 10x what they are in Europe) so the cost of fraud is spread over many individuals. Other parts of the world have regulations capping interchange rates, and providing better consumer protection, demanding that banks and payment networks tackle fraud, rather than increase the cost of everything by 1-2% to cover fraud losses.
None of what you’ve mentioned has anything to do with Visa and Mastercard. Visa and Mastercard are just payment networks, their whole business is literally just transporting transaction information from payment terminals to banks and payment processors, plus keeping track of all the numbers (which is pretty important).
Payment networks don’t provide credit or any kind of liquidity whatsoever, that entirely provided by the various financial entities that communicate via the payment network. The reason Visa and Mastercard haven’t been easily replaced is simple network effects, nobody wants to integrate with a payment network where there’s nobody to transact with.
I had no idea visa/mc didn't bear the cost of fraud. I remember Paypal almost getting killed by fraud in the early days, and I always thought of Paypal as basically replicating visa/mc for online purchases. I didn't realize they were doing so much more than visa/mc by assuming fraud risk.
PayPal was a counterparty so if one side didn't pay or there was a dispute then PayPal was stuck in the middle. Visa and MC are just payment networks and have minimal risk. The only risk I think would be criminal liability (handling drug money) or maybe if the bank goes bankrupt before the payment is due to the merchant (but even that might be borne by they merchant - not sure).
Visa/MC do carry some risk, but the chain generally goes merchant -> acquiring bank -> ? platform (like Stripe or something) -> Visa/MC. So they care a lot about the people just above them in the chain, and not at all about the rest of them as they won't end up holding the bag.
At least if the failed bank is Japanese, all of it will fall under their deposit insurance program (https://www.dic.go.jp/content/000010138.pdf#page=13), although this is actually a rare guarantee (FDIC and SVB comes to mind).
> Full coverage for deposits for payment and settlement
purposes, bearing no interest, being redeemable on demand, and providing normally required payment and settlement services
their monopolies were formed in a different time, when it might have been thought prudent to drop bad merchants even if they themselves did not bear the risk in order to not get governmental regulation imposed that would be more detrimental than just dropping the merchants.
Not saying that's the case, just given circumstances not sure if risk is needed to explain the result in this case.
I replied downthread but I used "value chain" deliberately -- there are lots of intermediaries of which the card networks are just one link in the chain -- and the statement above is about risk being borne (and value being created for consumers) by the entire value chain that is different and difficult/impossible in a FedNow-style immediate settlement model: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46964968
Mastercard and Visa also use immediate settlement models and basically always have done. The settlement buffer between end parties is created entirely by entities that are all basically banks.
There’s nothing special about Mastercard and Visa rails that prevents you recreating all the functionality that the broader ecosystem provides, without Visa and Mastercard. Hell all of that functionality could be provided by exactly the same companies and banks that provide it for Visa and Mastercard networks.
Because mastercard/visa don't personally bear any risk they are very happy to process refunds and chargebacks in the customer's favor. It's not a perfect system, but it's much better than direct bank debit where the customer has very little recourse. There is also a significant privacy issue. Today my bank can only see the sum total of my credit card purchases but not what I buy and from which vendor. Amex can see what I purchase but knows very little about me otherwise. I like this separation, and I like that it's hard for the government to get a complete picture of my financial affairs. I know credit cards get a lot of hate (here and elsewhere) but as a consumer I think they're exceptionally convenient.
> Because mastercard/visa don't personally bear any risk they are very happy to process refunds and chargebacks in the customer's favor.
That’s not how chargebacks and refunds work. Mastercard and Visa are not involved in the vast majority of disputes at all, it’s entirely handled by the card issuer and card acquirer. Mastercard/Visa only get involved in cases where network party has broken one of the technical rules of the network. For cases of missing or faulty goods etc, Mastercard/Visa do nothing except transport the messages used by bank/merchant to litigate the dispute.
When Mastercard/Visa are forced to step in and make an arbitration decision, they charge a hefty fee (hundreds of dollars) to the losing side to do so. So they have no issue with people raising disputes, it makes them a lot of money.
> Amex can see what I purchase but knows very little about me otherwise. I like this separation, and I like that it's hard for the government to get a complete picture of my financial affairs.
This is naive, all banks and credit card issuers are required by law to perform KYC (Know Your Customer) to ensure they know exactly who they’re transacting with. It’s trivial for the state to buildup a complete image of your financial situation by sending a small number of court orders to banks and financial entities to turn over all their records on you. That’s ignoring the automated tax reporting that banks also have to do.
Because you may already have robust and sensible gRPC infrastructure setup and working, and setting up the correct HTTP infrastructure to take advantage of all the benefits that plain old HTTP provides may not be worth it.
If moving big files around is a major part of the system you’re building, then it’s worth the effort. But if you’re only occasionally moving big files around, then reusing your existing gRPC infrastructure is likely preferable. Keeps your systems nice and uniform, which make it easier to understand later once you’ve forgotten what you originally implemented.
Simplicity makes sense, of course. I just hadn't considered a grpc-only world. But I guess that makes sense in today's Kubernetes/node/python/llm world where grpc is the glue that once was SOAP (or even CORBA).
Still, stateful protocols have a tendency to bite when you scale up. And HTTP is specifically designed to be stateless and you get scalability for free as long as you stick with plain GET requests...
If you happen to be on ASP.NET or Spring Boot its some boilerplate to stand up a plain http and gRPC endpoints side by side but I guess you could be running something more exotic than that.
Not quite in the same league as IS, Al-Qaeda etc etc. Used to be a organisation had to murder and terrorise an entire population, or fly planes into city centres.
Apparently our standards have dropped so low that spray painting a couple of planes and embarrassing the UK military now puts you on par with those other organisations.
In 20 years time China gonna be entirely powered by renewables while we’re still having this silly argument about what the future is going to look like.
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