mircea_popescu: wikipedia loves to compare itself with the various actual encyclopedias it stole most of the material worth reading from, but on a "per line" basis, as if THAT is the fucking point of an encyclopedia, never mind the COMPLETENESS or RELIABILITY parts.

mircea_popescu: today's street urchin is entirely useless -- he's more than happy to spend 30, 50, 150 years if possible siphoning your salary (which he regards as his living wage / god given right) to pay for the britny spears "music" and entirely similar "start-ups", ie, let a lot of you idiots give us your valuable stuff for free maybe we get enough of it to survive our inept whittling it down and still be somehow worth money.

mircea_popescu: average street urchin in 1917 could be hired on the expectation that after 30 years of either being bored stiff or else payingattention at his job he'd finally make a useul worker.

mircea_popescu: but to come back to it : the plague of "handheld devices" did a lot of damage to the marginal socioeconomic utility of a large class of people. they spend all their brainpower correcting quopedoa/wikira/whatever the fuck instead of spending the same undersupplied resorce to keep track of their customers / car direction vector / etcetera.

mircea_popescu: trinque funny thing being that a) it is infinitely better food than anything pizza hut / taco bell / mcd / kfc etc have on tap and b) it's not really a full dollar a kg from what i've seen.

mircea_popescu: incredibly popular with various young office drone males, evidently living alone in a sort of ship hold.

mircea_popescu has seen a lot of "comida por kilo" eateries in latinoamerica.

mircea_popescu: i suppose the next logical step is to you know, "who ordered the this???". make the customer keenly aware you couldn't give less of a shit about 'em and then whine about how you work in the "service industry" ie he HAS TO TIP YOU!!111

mircea_popescu: of course, even getting oysters fit for the table in the first place was already a dubious matter then.

mircea_popescu: incidentally, can you even get a proper (14.) full course meal in teh us anymoar ?

mircea_popescu: possibly, through having had a lot of muricans in the joint over the years.

mircea_popescu: the (very indian) chef of great local place actually came out of kitchen to see these two people who were eating all the stuff i rodered ; but couldn't summon the courage to more than bow from a distance and scurry off. ☟︎

mircea_popescu: uk had three referendums in its entire history, now they want one a year ?

mircea_popescu was never a fan

mircea_popescu: in other shocking developments, /me learned yesterday that some people actually believe serving a l'anglaise (ie, in their bastardized notion, pre-plated items) is an acceptable manner for waitstaff! ☟︎

mircea_popescu: http://trilema.com/2011/de-fapt-de-ce-nu-folositi-voi-linux/#comment-122036 <<< the sad corrolary of existing in public. you get people thanking you in 2017 for your 2011 article recommending ubuntu as a simple "hey, why not linux again ?" stop gap.

mircea_popescu: when one metalworking gets it within 3 A and the other metalworking gets it to the 3 micrometers, you know there's room for some "nobody could have predicted" qualitative jumps.

mircea_popescu: they can make a touch screen, they can make a chamber for o3 reduction.

mircea_popescu: i have nfi, what am i, a carmaker head engineer ?

mircea_popescu: yah but tell it to her daughters you get a reaction quite like yours re turbo hybrids above

mircea_popescu: you got a turbine, which'll burn ~anything but does not spool, you've got a gasoline engine, which will this but not that, there's electric which is most efficient but uses the most volatile of fuels, make something of this!

mircea_popescu: it's not hard to observe, as a theoretical physicist at least, that ~all engines to date are stumbling at a general problem with naive assumptions.

mircea_popescu: anyway. to be perfectly fair and generally speaking sane : the actual technological need driving the modern hybrid craze has ~nothing to do with the declared reasoning (envirobs) and everything to do with the desperate attempts of engineers who noticed they have a pile of ~useful items to arrange them in an optimal configuration.

mircea_popescu: if it had such a tail i dunno of it.

mircea_popescu: asciilifeform iirc a half dozen or somesuch. but taken to faires and so on

mircea_popescu: yes, but in a proper arrangement (electric, gasoline, gas) hybrid, the gas turbine needn't cover all power curves.

mircea_popescu: if i take my cues from dudes working in auto dealers, i might even end up with no bitcoin and a dozen credit cards.

mircea_popescu: and yes, the turbo was originally a ship-and-train tech, in the 20s or w/e.

mircea_popescu: point being that in the modern diesel, a turbine is attached to the carnot engine, much in the manner in which in a modern hybrid, a carnot engine is attached to the electric motor.

mircea_popescu: your computer does not burn a fuel.

mircea_popescu: you ever saw the fucking item ? how is it not a turbine ?

mircea_popescu: the statement was "some kind of turbine under the hood, even if masquerading as a more traditional something or other".

mircea_popescu: ro train engines were that way for a long time too, owing to the peculiar terrain. ☟︎

mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-05-14#1655475 << he has a point though, every redesign cycle the momentum-based store (like they use in eg F1 cars) comes back to the drawing board. turns out having a small heavy well spinning real fast is not really much worse than trying to store energy in batteries. ☝︎

mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-05-14#1655460 << most hybrids have some kind of turbine under the hood, even if masquerading as a more traditional something or other. ☝︎☟︎

mircea_popescu: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-05-14#1655457 << doing a mediocre job of it, too. stem cell research actually yielded various practical results. mostly obscure bone marrow diseases, but hey, it's only obscure until you get it. ☝︎☟︎