There was this rumor that Polish Governmental Agency for Strategic Reserves panic sold PPE reserves at the start of epidemic, because you cant hand out no bid contracts with full storage! Turned out not to be true https://orka2.sejm.gov.pl/INT9.nsf/klucz/ATTBZ6EY5/%24FILE/i... old PPE from 2006 was expiring in 2020 so was sold in late 2019 (but supposedly still before anyone knew about Covid) when it still had some value. Ironically it was sold for cents on the dollar just to be re-bought later in 2020 at full price or even more.
The article states that the PPE expired. There's also the cost of storage and distribution.
Note that the US NIOSH labs tested out expired N95s and found them to work as well as new ones in terms of filtering capability - the main issue was strap damage.
That's a funny way to read the article. What it really says is that VW saw a big market in China, which is now dominated by local companies, so they're not gonna overproduce cars by building another factory. Also the free money river known as subsidies is drying out in the EU so people won't be buying that many EVs. And tesla/byd might be cheaper, but I wouldn't call them any better. That's a personal opinion of course.
It's not just reading the article, it's observing what is going on here in EU.
VW group never sold "that many EVs" because their pricing is utterly uncompetitive. They've been selling cars like ID.4 for starting price that's more than 10.000eur over price of a Tesla.
I'm not a programmer, and when I write a program it's imperative that it's structured right and works predictably, because I have to answer for the numbers it produces. So LLMs have basically no use for me on that front.
I don't trust any LLM to summarize articles for me as it will be biased (one way or another) and it will miss the nuance of the language/tone of the article, if not outright make mistakes. That's another one off the table.
Although I don't use them much for this, I've found 2 things they're good at:
-Coming up with "ideas" I wouldn't come up with
-Summarizing hundreds (or thousands) of documents from a non-standard format (ie human readable reports, legal documents) that regular expressions wouldn't work with, and putting them into something like a table. But still, that's only when I care about searching or discovering info/patterns, not when I need a fully accurate "parser".
I'm really surprised on how useless LLMs turned out to be for my daily life to be honest. So far at least.
How do you ask an LLM to come up with good ideas? Everytime I try to use ChatGPT for idea generation, the results are subpar, but maybe it's me / my prompts.
I usually will give a bullet list of ideas I already had and ask the LLM to add N more to the list, most of them will be garbage, but there might be 1 that I hadn't thought of, and I'll sort of recursively add that to the list, and continue that until I get what I need.
Doing a meta-analysis on something easily quantifiable is sketchy enough, doing a meta-analysis on something as vague and hard to measure as "cognitive intelligence" is.. well, it's sociology's territory. Not to say it isn't of value, many discoveries were made on a lot less methodologically strict grounds and this kind of "conversation" does create the stimulus for further, more specific research, but you ought to read this more like a an investigative journalistic piece with a lot of opinion rather than hard science.
That's because these are generally valid arguments. The phrase "the dose makes the poison" did not just occur in someone's head for no reason.
There's a couple things to note about "forever chemicals":
They're around "forever" because they are extremely unreactive.
The concentrations the public is concerned about are ridiculous.
With such small concentrations, huge timescales for the cause-effect chain to take place and countless confounding factors in between it's basically impossible to make the bold claims the general public makes.
That being said:
Workers are exposed to much higher concentrations and they should have been protected from it.
New chemicals shouldn't be used as widely as they do by simply assuming they're safe.
There are uses (like cosmetics etc) were no risk is really warranted so they should be more restricted with what they use.
At the end of the day though, when you ban something you need to really understand and take into consideration what kind of damage you'll do to people by banning a substance and all the products that depend on it vs. what kind of damage the substance will do. You can't pretend that you can just ban a whole class of really important compounds without any societal side effects.
And that's coming from someone who's really concerned about dangerous chemicals. If you know chemistry, and look around you, you can tell there's a lot more dangerous issues than PFAS that aren't being tackled and nobody seems to care about.
Primarily how nobody seems to check what's really included in tons of "cheap" (in terms of manufacturing, not always of price) imported cosmetics, personal hygiene products and parapharmaceuticals.
People are buying protein powders and supplements of unknown producers, raw materials and manufacturing methods by the kilos, plastic cooking utensils from the internet and boil/oven bake them with their food, buy sketchy adhesives for their PVC water pipes, and then complain about some 1ppt concentration of inert chemicals in their drinking water. I understand how the public is easily swayed on things that are technical, and I am happy with people being aware of potential dangers, but the focus is really misplaced on something that looks new, scary, unsolvable and interesting instead of tackling the old, boring but important and serious issues we come across every day.
What dose of any substance is harmful instead of harmless? Is this a philosophical question or a practical one? If it's a practical one, we don't know, because if there are any effects they're too weak to infer with certainty. Unlike for example those of benzene in your sunscreen or acne products, or flame retardants in your furniture.
Concrete is 15% cement and 85% stone. Just crushed, homogenous, predictable and structurally sound stone.
You can't reinforce stone like you can reinforce concrete, and you can't pour stone. Stone will not replace concrete.
As soon as the energy crisis ends, concrete prices will fall again. The requirements for stone to be used structurally are high, and I don't think production could ever match the demand that replacing concrete would create, or if it did, it would be a whole lot more expensive.
You can compensate higher variability by building thicker walls than you would build with reinforced concrete (and it still may end up cheaper but it needs to be calculated).
> You can't reinforce stone
Not every structure needs to be reinforced. Stone walls should be fine (at least in places with low seismic activity) and for floor slabs one can continue using reinforced concrete.
