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What you really want is somewhere between corn starch and lubricants, like gold bond friction stick.


$2750 USD is 2 days of pay? In what world? That's some parts of the world yearly gross.


$1375/day is $170 per hour or about $300k annually (five days a week, 8 weeks off). Pretty reasonable rate for a senior software developer contract in the US.


Let's not read past the words written on the screen now. No reason to bring Trump into the conversation at all.


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Where in the article is Trump mentioned? The article is about extraditing a person, who could just fly to a USA country that doesn't have a extradition pact, such as Russia or China. Dotcom has been saying pro Russia war things on twitter, which is easy to read. So OPs comment is consistent with the theme of the article.

Equating it to possible Trump Russia connections however has nothing to do with the article.


what a bad stretch. You have no intellectual honesty. Kim has also said Trump things on twitter and we've spent literal billions on fake Russia-Trump in the last few years. And here is someone baselessly pushing Kim-Russia. Anyways, good luck on your weird mission to police any mentioning of Trump. Pretty dumb IMO


I mean you're kind of being a bit silly. I don't think OP is saying we will spontaneously catch on fire and die. I think they are suggesting that vegetation which can only support a certain amount of heat and no water will parish. Also funny enough we can only support a certain amount of heat and no water.

It is pretty apparent that we are going to have water problems in the coming decades. You don't need to be a scientist to put those two together.

I am not saying we can't fix it, I do not hold the same outlook as OP. But we will have problems. Even if you don't believe global warming, there is obvious signs of issues popping up with water, and heat. Mexico, parts of USA, Canada, etc limiting water usage and saying they'll run out if it doesn't rain. That will be a problem.


What part of this article suggested the forest cut down was being replanted?


I have worked in forestry and and have planted 500 trees daily...

And there are laws that replanting must be started within 2/5 years of cutting.

If you look aerial photos of the area in article then you can see that this process is started. Cannot find exact spot but looking around in the village.


According to https://www.riigiteataja.ee/en/eli/ee/510022014001/consolide there are exceptions to that rule and it's 2 years. I only have information available to me, but I do not think this is a hard set rule. What if they were cut down for housing?

https://www.globalforestwatch.org/dashboards/country/EST/ appears to suggest that within the past decade tree loss has doubled. While the population has been flat. So it does suggest that what you are saying is not happening.


Author here. I'm actually sitting in a cafe in a town close to the village this is about right now.

I've visited many of the spots mentioned in this article. I haven't checked all of them, but all the ones I have checked have _no_ manual replanting to date, that I can see. (I'd expect a grid, with trees with those little fences protecting them, etc.)

What I do see is just natural growth of various plant species taking advantage of open ground, a mix of grasses, shrubs, birches, and others. There is no sign, that I have personally seen, of the ground being restored, or of systematic replanting. I write this noting I have not been to every site, so I can't definitely state there's been zero replanting. Some places were so lovely I just don't want to revisit :(

I picked a lot of wild strawberries on one of these plots of land just a couple of weeks ago. It used to be damp soil even in summer, lots of moss, mist commonly held between the trees (there's a photo.) Now it was baking hot with deep trenches from the machines. But hey. Hiding among the undergrowth there were strawberry plants.

_Something_ will grow back. Often in these things the replacement ecosystem is very different.


Where are these grids and fences used, and why?

What you will see in Estonia - forest is cut down and then some kind of plow makes lines in the forest to prepare the ground for planting trees. The trees are planted and in the next few years there will be lots of new growth, bushes and small trees that have grown from seeds or didn't get any sun below the old trees. The newly planted trees are sometimes hidden betwen the bushes and grass etc, but they are there.

Source: I go orienteering and have had to search for checkpoints on these former clearings or have made the mistake of trying to run through them.


> I'd expect a grid, with trees with those little fences protecting them, etc.

That is not how forest replanting works. That is how you do a garden.


> (I'd expect a grid, with trees with those little fences protecting them, etc.)

That says a lot. You have zero experience in forestry :)


Yep, no grids or fences in Estonia, at least not in typical state-managed forests. These just get replanted in furrows or on "turfs" (not sure about the correct English term). Newly planted seedlings can appear really tiny at first, though -- so tiny that even seasoned forestry workers who are later mowing grass around them occasionally fail to spot all the plants in the grass.

Source: have manually planted maybe ~300 000 trees in Estonia over the years, and also done the brush cutting work afterwards. I don't think clear cutting could be avoided entirely (among other things, we're maybe too spoiled as timber consumers for that), but it does feel way too extensive over here (emphasis on the word "feel" here -- as, despite some hands-on experience, my analytical understanding of the forestry ecosystem is very superficial). In place of confier monocultures, a small society like Estonia could maybe place its focus on heavily developing mixed forests instead, for a start. Abrupt forestry policy changes would likely backfire socio-economically (e.g. unemployment rise in rural areas). But those spruce-only or pine-only forests everywhere do look kind of... sad.


> a small society like Estonia could maybe place its focus on heavily developing mixed forests instead, for a start

Thinking aloud here, but I like this idea. It could also be signposted: one of the things that "feels" awful is just the constant gaps in forest: forest, clear, forest forest forest, clear, forest, clear. Or walking to areas you know and love and one day they're just gone. There seems no oversight and little protection.

Suppose you entered a region that was labeled: "In the next 10km, you will see managed forestry", at least you'd know it was deliberate, a large specific region designated for this work, rather than just a bunch of spots where someone who owned a plot of land decided to clearfell it and take the cash.

Because the corollary of that is areas that are _not_ managed (and not cut) and where, hopefully, forest would be allowed to grow into century-or-more old genuine wildforest. And you'd see that signposted too. Or you could plan to buy a house in the middle of that kind of land, if you valued it.


"Suppose you entered a region that was labeled: "In the next 10km, you will see managed forestry""

Really like this idea. In reality, though, the Estonian state forest management council seems to put more PR-efforts in showing how they also preserve wilderness, build camping trails etc. They don't seem very confident in showing "actual forestry" to the general public -- but, it is, obviously, also not an easy task these days, especially considering that e.g. clear cutting and usage of harvesters is ethically questionable to many people.

I think for these "In the next 10km, you will see managed forestry" signs, the whole society would need to become more mature at first. As in, foresters should have more acceptance for wilderness preservation, and the general public should have more acceptance for the forest industry.


Yes :) What should I be looking for?

As noted -- I see what appears to be natural regrowth. That expectation (lots of trees with little fences) comes from what I've seen in other places, where I have seen huge areas of clearfelled land with systematic gridded replanting. You are right I am not a forestry expert. I'm only writing what I observe as best as I can.


It would be good to have forestry experience before writing articles.

I guess one day of planting a forest is already a lot of help. Planting apple tree in garden is not forestry.

I wouldn't write an article about how doctors treat cancer wrong if my only experience is my dead grandmother.


You had a chance to educate a genuinely curious fellow human. And you blew it by being overly negative.


He has no forestry experience and many of the things he considers bad are actually additional costs to the landowner to make the forest grow back faster.


I kinda feel like writing about how someone does nothing when they actually do things, you just did not bothered to actually investigate how what you write about works is being overly negative in the first place.


What level of mechanisation is used?

And what level of automation do you think can take this x10 ?


I don't think the point of this is to replace highly critical videos. It's to replace videos like installation instructions which may only be needed by 10% of your users.

Not only that but 250ms is the average reaction time of a human, you don't notice an extra 5 milliseconds.

If a video is required on your website for engagement you probably shouldn't be hosting it on YouTube anyways.


> Not only that but 250ms is the average reaction time of a human, you don't notice an extra 5 milliseconds.

Please stop repeating this sort of thing as a simple fact. Time and latency are difficult things to reason about and simple explanations sound particularly convincing when one lacks an intuitive understanding of the subject.

Perceived latency is not the same thing as "reaction time". What reaction was measured? How? From what stimulus? Your reaction time number does not support your claim that humans can't notice a 5ms difference in lag.

In any case, you are misunderstanding and misrepresenting the comment you replied to.

When you are talking about an organisation like Youtube (size, money, mercenary, malicious, etc.) and discussing metrics like this, individual milliseconds is not an unreasonable unit to use. Consider the volume of the data. Nobody is saying that if something takes 5ms longer to load that no single human being will be capable of waiting for it anymore.

Further, your 250ms is perfectly in the range of the parent comment's order of magnitude of hundreds of milliseconds.


>Not only that but 250ms is the average reaction time of a human, you don't notice an extra 5 milliseconds.

If this is true, then why are online first person shooters noticeably worse when playing with a 250ms ping connection compared to a 5ms ping? 250ms ping is basically unplayable.

If I recall correctly. I stopped playing video games many years ago, because my college’s internet connection didn’t offer low enough latency to be able to play.


Latency is magnitudes more critical when it's something where you have to react.


The difference between 5 ms and 250 ms is a lot more than 5 ms, so there's no contradiction.


Oops, yes I misinterpreted that. I was thinking how can 250ms be the average reaction time when it’s too slow of latency to play a video game, wouldn’t average reaction time have to be lower since people do notice lag at 250ms pings?


Humans can notice and characterise much smaller intervals, down to somewhere around five milliseconds.

We still aren’t capable of reacting faster than about 250. However, if you have latency of 250ms then your total reaction time isn’t 250, it’s 500.


With aids, we can perceive and notice even smaller intervals. I play a lot of Fortnite Festival, which is the Rock Band-style mode added near the end of the year. This game, unlike any previous game in the genre, has "perfect" judgements for note hits. The window for a perfect judgement is something around 20 or 30ms. The game also gives you an average offset from "dead on" for each song, measured in milliseconds. Since the perfect judgement is immediate feedback, it enables players to perceive when they are just a few milliseconds off and correct for it. I regularly get average offset results of +/- 3ms or better, including plenty of 0ms average offsets (this is of course averaged across all notes in a song, which I am playing on a plastic guitar on Expert difficulty).

I'm nowhere close to the best player either, there's one player who recently got one of the most impressive full combos of the Metallica song One that could ever be done - they hit all notes without mistake, they got 100% perfect judgements, and they got the #1 leaderboard score, meaning that not only did they hit all notes within the 20-30ms "perfect" window, but they also "squeezed" overdrive activations within that window to activate and hit the first note as late as possible, and hit the first note after that overdrive activation would end as early as possible to still get it under the extra 2x score multiplier that overdrive brings.

The game genre also overcomes the relatively huge (in the context) human reaction time by providing you gems to read before the strikeline (or "now bar"), so that you can basically internally correct for your reaction time, similar to how people reading sheet music can perform in lockstep rhythm when everyone is skilled.

It's amazing what different forms of augmentation can do to help paper over the inherent shortcomings in our senses.


A key difference here is that you’re able to anticipate and plan upcoming actions, because you’re familiar with the general structure of music and/or the specific song.

Even the experts couldn’t respond to an unpredictable stimulus in 30ms; instead, they’re choosing between (say) a 330 ms response and a 340 ms one. This is, of course, still crazy impressive.


Rhythm is a completely different beast though because you can anticipate. Most musicians would be more accurate than the average person but wouldn't do any better in a "click the mouse when the screen flashes red" type test.


Minor detail: the Beatmania game series has had "perfect" timing judgements for a long time, that's not exactly new.


“Reaction time” isn’t really a single value: it depends immensely your own attributes (age, experience, level of alertness or fatigue), on what you’re reacting to and how you react to it.

Under certain (admittedly very specific) conditions, people can view an image, categorize it, and indicate the category with eye movements, all within 120ms. Here’s one demonstration:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004269890...


That's a silly comment...

The whole point of things like this is to be believable. How can you guarantee anything from warrenties to insurance if you don't believe advertised promises?


Warranties and insurance don't guarantee anything. Companies that offer those things make their money by denying claims. Insurance companies deny claims when they think they can get away with it all the time.

tldr; there is no such thing as an absolute guarantee


The only thing you can probably get out of a “guarantee” is a piece of paper you can submit as evidence in a court of law. How much you value that depends a lot on what it says and who gave it to you.


Advertised promises come from people with the ethics of P.T. Barnum. Why believe them?


On an individual level, sure, be wary, but on a societal level, that's widely considered to be a bad thing, and something we should punish for. We shouldn't just say, "I expected them to lie", but also hope for that to change


Yeah I have no objection to punishing them, they clearly glossed over the details in their marketing, but they're hardly the first to do it. I'm not surprised that "we'll never raise prices" didn't turn out to be true, that's all I'm saying.


I didn't mean to sound like I was defending it, I apologize for that.


Why stop at 21, why not get 1 supreme court from each state? You could get 2 if you wanted to be spicy and setup a sort of room for them all to debate in. Then after they heard the debates they could vote on the matter and if it passes it gets written into law. A sort of congress...


Increasing the size of the court isn’t a slippery slope to somehow making justices elected by states/districts. It’s not like as soon as you get too many justices it turns into a legislature.

The interesting differences between the legislative and judicial branch is not the number of people (moreover, the Supreme Court is not exactly the entirety of the federal judicial branch).


I was thinking "enough to routinely overrule the current 9 Justices".

Representing individual states, as such, is supposed to be the job of Congressmen. And - with how low-functioning Congress is looking, these days, patterning anything new after them is probably a bad idea.


So Congress is dysfunctional. The Supreme Court is semi-functional, but functioning in a way that you don't like. So you want Congress to vote in a bunch of new people to fix the Supreme Court. Why do you think that will work, instead of be ruined by the usual Congressional dysfunction?

And, if the party in power adds enough Supreme Court justices to routinely overturn the current 9, what makes you think that when the other side is in power, they won't add enough to overturn your 12?

The Supreme Court is not supposed to bend with the wind of every political election. It's by design.


> The Supreme Court is not supposed to bend with the wind of every political election. It’s by design

Funny. Seems like it bent pretty hard in the last election. Why should we only honor the bends to the right?


Particularly given McConnell's... Interpretations... Of how his obligated duties were fulfilled in regards to the timeliness of actions taken to ensure that such seats were filled.


did it though?


Are you asking if it did bend to the right? You’re asking if an additional conservative vote shift in a hairline composition shifted the balance? Would you be asking the same if it was a 6-3 liberal majority?

This courts been in power for 8 years and has overturned 3 major ways that the government operates:

1. Roe v Wade overturned so that the government is back in charge of reproductive rights decisions instead of leaving it as a deeply personal decision for a family to make on their own. There’s pretty clearly a lack of any evidence that late term abortions are a cavalier thing. When it gets that late it’s not a change of mind thing 99.999% of the time.

2. Brady and similar decisions basically removing congress’ and states’ abilities to regulate guns

3. Chevron doctrine overturned so unless congress writes impossible laws the courts get to arbitrarily define ambiguities even though it was delegated to the executive to create justifiable well researched exposition of those ambiguities.

Basically, this court has already delivered 3 major decisions shifting American politics in pretty drastic ways in the 8 years. This is certainly not a liberal or status quo court.

And the court itself has serious perception issues of accepting gifts and bribes (and significantly reducing the definition of what counts as corruption in the first place, which is well outside their mandate considering these are actually laws congress passed). They’re badly in need of cultural reform as is congress and in both scenarios adjusting the number of representatives and the number of justices is called for to relieve the pressure that’s been building.


Don’t forget that they legalized bribery as well. Just so long as the payment is made after the fact it’s considered a “gratuity”. This court is making drastic long reaches changed and overthrowing precedent whenever convenient.

https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-public-corruption-b...

> The high court’s 6-3 opinion along ideological lines found the law criminalizes bribes given before an official act, not rewards handed out after.

> “Some gratuities can be problematic. Others are commonplace and might be innocuous,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote. The lines aren’t always clear, especially since many state and local officials have other jobs, he said.

> The high court sided with James Snyder, a Republican who was convicted of taking $13,000 from a trucking company after prosecutors said he steered about $1 million worth of city contracts to the company.


none of that seems politically left or right though


Roe v Wade and gun control are pretty classical cultural war stuff from the 60s and 70s. I’m not sure where you’re getting it but the left being pro choice and the right being pro life are classical left/right distinctions in America since at least Roe v Wade or shortly thereafter. Similarly, gun control also became a classical left/right distinction once the left decided that gun ownership was a public safety problem and the right decided that personal gun ownership is enshrined in the Constitution.

Can you clarify how these aren’t left/right distinctions?


it removed restrictions on abortion, allowing local parties to decide for themselves, it seems constitutional but not partisan, RvW was also an abortion ban don’t forget


By what reasoning is RvW an abortion ban? It was a ban on abortion bans but that’s very different. The only restrictions Dobbs removed were those impeding bans. If you listened to the debate, Trump said pretty clearly he’s against late term abortions and if the right takes power next year a federal ban superseding local parties seems inevitable. So you have to jump through a lot of mental hoops to pretend like Dobbs was anything other than a step on the road to a full federal ban on abortions (first it’ll start at something like 16-24 weeks and gradually be shifted earlier and earlier and you’ll claim “well technically they didn’t ban abortions altogether”).

As for constitutional but not partisan, it was a 6-3 decision along ideological lines. And famously the criticism from the left of Roe v Wade was that it found protection in the wrong parts of the constitution - that it was based on privacy and physician rights instead of women’s rights. So you’d have to be willfully trying to deceive to paint this as a non-partisan issue.


You act as if this is the first time that expanding the court has been discussed.

Congress has yet to do this because it will never pass - at least unless one party gets a filibuster-proof majority in the senate or the filibuster is removed.


>The Supreme Court is not supposed to bend with the wind of every political election. It's by design.

The design that can and has been undermined and bent on partisan lines, because of a dedicated campaign to achieve this very goal?


> The Supreme Court is not supposed to bend with the wind of every political election. It's by design.

Looking at a few Supreme Court's rulings, say -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._Anderson

- I'd be inclined to say that the Supreme Court's design is to bend the results of every political election to suit their own wishes.


> And if your bank owns the home rather than you, falling prices screw you over because you owe far more to the bank than you could make by selling.

So like what 99% of homes? If you rent you don't own it, if you own a condo you don't own it, if you own a house outright you are probably close to 1%.

Most of Barcelona is rent/condos. There is not a ton of 250m2 mansions in downtown Barcelona.


How so? What about if the government pays 50% and the tenant pays 50%? Where exactly is this line drawn?


In this specific instance, city government bought out entire hotels, reducing room inventory.


Yep, that would be artificial inflation too.


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