The more fingers in the pie, the higher the cost. At least that's my guess. I imagine more expensive labour and tighter regulations also greatly increase costs.
It's not just the cost of labor and associated regulatory costs. I think a lot of the overhead in the US has to do with such projects often being funded by the federal government, yet implemented by state/county/city governments. Each of those wants to get involved and get a slice of the pie, so to speak...
You can't seriously think cities in Europe are all rich enough to be able to afford large infrastructure projects? In Germany at least such projects also involve funding from the state, federal government and possibly the EU, usually those funds make up the majority of the money.
> You can't seriously think cities in Europe are all rich enough to be able to afford large infrastructure projects?
No, I don't think that. But I do think it's likely that the various levels of US government like to stake their claim to more autonomy compared to the various levels of government in Europe (particularly at the local level -- I'm sure the EU and national governments love to "get involved").
Funny thing is, most waste water treatment plants I've seen - the water coming out of the waste treatment plant is cleaner than the water removed from the river for drinking (which is then treated).
Wait until people learn that they air they breathe has likely already been breathed by someone else...
How will you make sure the immune response won't be targeted at the same epitopes of all/most of the 18? That protein is known to have decoy epitopes..
I really hate getting the flu ... I hate feeling terrible for 12-24 hours, I hate missing multiple workouts ... hate hate hate.
However, in recent years I've stopped my (seemingly ineffective) efforts to avoid the flu at all costs and further have started to appreciate the positive effects that getting the flu every 12-18 months might have.
In an otherwise healthy adult, what puts your immune system through it's paces - what gives your immune system a workout - like having the flu ?
What happens to my immune system if I don't give it that thorough workout every year for ... say ... 40 years ? What kind of immune system do I end up with at the other end of avoiding the flu for a large chunk of my life ?
Related to that, what else gets killed every 12 months when my temperature goes up to 102 or 104 for half a day ?
> In an otherwise healthy adult, what puts your immune system through it's paces - what gives your immune system a workout - like having the flu ?
That's not how immune systems work. This isn't just a round of going to the gym. Getting a vaccine also gives your immune system a chance to learn and react, but without the severe degradation of your condition and the significant risk of secondary infection.
> What happens to my immune system if I don't give it that thorough workout every year for ... say ... 40 years ?
First of all, you run less of a risk of getting secondary infection when your immune system is weakened. Secondly, you run a higher risk of transmitting the flu to people who can't be vaccinated (for example, babies or the elderly), putting their lives at risk.
> Related to that, what else gets killed every 12 months when my temperature goes up to 102 or 104 for half a day ?
That's the opposite of how your immune system works. While your system is focussed on fighting off one infection, it's less able to deal with secondary infections. You can end up spreading your system too thin and your health can deteriorate much more rapidly.
> That's not how immune systems work. This isn't just a round of going to the gym. Getting a vaccine also gives your immune system a chance to learn and react, but without the severe degradation of your condition and the significant risk of secondary infection.
Citation please. I'm somewhat skeptical about GP's viewpoint, but equally skeptical that you can so confidently dismiss him, given the number of things we still don't understand about the immune system. For example, doctors still haven't managed to cure any autoimmune illness, even though we've studied them for quite some time.
Full disclosure: I suffer from autoimmune illness, and every time I ask me doctor about my condition, the answer is often 'we still haven't figured it out'. The sheer complexity of all the different immune cell types, cytokine signaling, antibody production, etc. is mind-boggling, and is the product of millions of years of evolutionary arms race.
In particular, vaccines predispose your immune system towards an immediate Th2-type (humoral) response, while acute viral infection prompts first a Th1 (intracellular) response, then a Th2 response during recovery.
A strong Th1 immune response is generally more effective against viral illnesses, so it's possible that if you had a different concurrent viral infection, getting the flu could encourage your body to clear both at the same time.
> you run less of a risk of getting secondary infection when your immune system is weakened
That's true, but you haven't shown that getting the flu weakens your immune system.
> While your system is focussed on fighting off one infection, it's less able to deal with secondary infections.
Your citation doesn't actually support your claim. Latent subclinical infections are real, and it's possible that acute febrile illness can stimulate the immune system to go after other bugs that have been hiding or dormant.
There is some evidence that ongoing viral infections can weaken your bodies defenses against bacterial illnesses and vice versa.
We may not have a complete picture of the immune system but one of these comments is square in the realm of "not science but sounds pretty good" and one at the very least in the ballpark of "conventional science we learn in school". Even if the former turns out to be correct several years from now it won't have been because of the revolutionary new hypothesis first put forth in an HN comment. They've done something we all do where we draw conclusions from our own experience which frequently turns out to be absolutely bullshit. Humans tease out patterns where there are none.
Yes, we do not want the flu. If you want to train your immune system, get the flu shot.
I got the flu 10 months ago as a healthy male in his late 20s, the first major illness I've had since I was 11. 102+ fever for over 5 days and then developed a pneumonia coinfection which knocked me out for another week. It was not just an inconvenience, it scared me being that sick.
The hospital I went to in Philadelphia to get treatment for the pneumonia said they had several young adult patients who were otherwise generally healthy in intensive care due to the bout of flu going around and related complications/coinfections. The flu kills people -- between 3,000 and 50,000 per year in the US [1]. Count yourself lucky that your experience with the flu has been as you described, if it was even the flu at all.
12-24 hours seems more like a "stomach flu" (Gastroenteritis) or a cold (rhinovirus), neither of which is influenza (aka "the flu").
According to the CDC: "Most people who get influenza will recover in several days to less than two weeks, but some people will develop complications as a result of the flu."
As others have covered and explained better than I can, the immune system isn't a muscle that needs an annual workout, especially given the risks of serious complications like pneumonia.
Don't mistake the flu for a cold. A cold is an inconvenience, the flu kills between a few thousand to tens of thousands of people, depending on which strain is currently dominant, every season in the US alone. You don't have to be particularly old or young for it to kill you either, quite a few otherwise perfectly healthy adults also manage to get to be unlucky.
This. DO NOT FUCK WITH THE FLU. Seriously it can be so much worse than you think.
My wife is a surgeon and works with legitimately sick people every day. The result of which is she typically has no sympathy for me when I get sick. As in "Can you please make less noise when you are vomiting. I'm trying to sleep here". No sympathy, except when I got the flu. I've never seen her that worried, because she knew from experience that the flu can kill you.
Parent almost certainly had a cold if it was gone in 24hrs.
Depends on the strain. Some strains affect healthy adults worse than the sick. A fit 20 year old can have worse time than a sickly child or elderly person.
A strong immune system can be a liability. When I was nearly hospitalized with the flu, I was in my late twenties and in the best shape of my life. Which is why I must repeat myself, DO NOT FUCK WITH THE FLU.
Getting your flu shot should give your immune system plenty workout.
It's like sparring at 1/2 power with full pads vs. getting into a full on street fight. Sure, the street fight will give you a slightly more real practice session, but at what cost? There is a lot of collateral damage there.
Yeah, the two times I've gotten a flu shot, it's followed by a few days of congestion and a cough, maybe a slight fever. But it's much better than the time I was down with a fever, lethargy, and light headedness during finals week one year.
You realize that the flu kills lots of elderly people? It's not just about you. A year in which the flu vaccine actually works well enough to break transmission would give a lot of people an extra year of life.
> In an otherwise healthy adult, what puts your immune system through it's paces - what gives your immune system a workout - like having the flu ?
Getting a vaccine is training for the big game. Getting the virus is the big game. Show up to the big game without proper training and you might win, have a few broken ribs, a new face, a limp, or you might just straight up lose.
As someone who currently has a Samsung stove, I can wholeheartedly say I hate the thing. The interface is one of the worst I've seen - touch "buttons" on a stove. It does't work half the time if your hands are the slightest bit wet - which they often are after washing hands. It's incredibly frustrating, and has completely thrown me off about buying any sort of Samsung appliance.
Samsung has such potential, but it's untested things make me wonder about their long-term value.
Touch buttons on the stove (assuming they are like the ones we have at home) mean the stove is just one flat glass pane that is impossible to make dirty.
Yes, the buttons are kinda retarded and unresponsive, but if you fry something and have droplets of burned oil fly everywhere you just take a cloth with a little detergent and it just wipes off.
No more crusty disgusting matter growing on nooks and crannies of knobs that you have to operate on to get off the damn thing
Touch buttons = circuit board. Horrible idea. What could go wrong so close to excessive heat? Ovens used to last decades, and they still last longer than most other appliances, but now it's the circuit board in the control panel that goes out the most.
My car radio is a giant touch screen. Horrible idea. I would much rather have buttons. I understand they want the buttons to change depending on context, but even then it would be better to have buttons surrounding a screen with the screen changing to show what the buttons do.
IBM used to make cash registers with little LCD panels on the physical buttons. Of course these have probably been replaced with touch screens.
Going on a tangent, if you like to cook you should get a traditional gas burning stove. No fancy UI beats the simplicity pushing and turning knobs. Not to mention the heating control precision. I think that's much more important than fancy knives and other expensive tools of the trade.
You haven't seen precision until you've tried an induction stove. Instant heat, almost no residual temperature (they heat the metal of the pan directly rather than firing radiation / hot air at them) and super easy to clean.
Nope, induction is better on all fronts (control, ease of cleaning, safety). And if you buy a good brand (I currently have Miele, my previous Siemens was great too), touch controls work perfectly.
I have used a lot of induction stoves and I didn't like it very much. I just called a chef friend of mine and he agrees with me as long as you get a decent stove with big burners. Anyway, you should use whatever makes you comfortable at the kitchen. The important thing is to keep cooking and having a good time doing it.
Agreed. I've got an MSc, and the only contact I've ever had was a practically spam message for an Amazon recruiter (who contacted half the province I live in, as near as I can figure).
Every last permission it requests is associated with a reasonable functional requirement. It may never make use of the components it requests permission to (eg: sending and receiving SMS, which many users don't want to do with Messenger) and in newer Android versions, you can grant (or not) permissions on an ad hoc basis. Nothing 'evil' about it.
It's all related to features in the app at least, it's not like they're asking for things they don't need to make all the features work. I might call SMS unnecessary but that's because I don't really want to use it for SMS.
I'm curious - I still haven't seen any details on how these are installed. How are things wired - does the wiring run under the shingles themselves? Also, how does it work with odd sized/shaped roofs - e.g.: something that isn't exactly a multiple of 1/2 a shingle?
There are probably electrified tracks which are screwed down onto the rafters, similar to the way wooden risers* are put down for clay tiles to attach to. The tiles attach using metal clips or nails. SolarCity acquired Zep Solar a while back, who designed quick installation solar mounting systems. I assume they're using that team to design something fully integrated and fast to install. You'll probably just snap the tiles onto the rails after they are screwed (bolted?) down. The tracks would just plug into each other like Christmas lights.
They said they're producing plain tiles without panels inside for edge pieces and north/east/west roof faces.
I expect for the odd sized they would have border shingles that match and are easily cut. Wiring seems like one of the hardest things to get right with these, especially given the environmental conditions!
I'm always baffled by this as well. "Let's make something cool, get money from investors, then figure out how to make money off it!"
In other words, cash in and leave before people find out there actually isn't money in it or cram the service full of advertising and watch the users flock to the next upcoming thing as your service tanks like a flaming dumpster rolling down a San Francisco hill.
Personally if they could've had an Apple accessory that mitigated that (ie, something built-in like Griffin's breaksafe - maybe recess the port so the accessory could be flush), it would've been a coup.
Everyone needs to plug in their laptop; Not every one needs 4 connectivity ports.
I'm a MagSafe fan myself. I remember pre-MagSafe laptops taking a flyer now and again, and being the worse for it.
That said, I can understand why they did it. Laptops are lighter now, so the corresponding damage may be less as well. And I don't know how snugly the TB3 ports fit. Maybe they disconnect more easily than, say, Firewire 400.
I've got a couple of years left in my current laptop. I'm hoping there's a solution that incorporates some type of break-away power connector.
