This is a fun game, nicely put together! I wished for a button to clear the board while I was playing. I love the menu UI. I think it cleverly parallels the game.
One Sec is a good balance of running interference while not making the device unusable. I installed it at your suggestion and appreciate the brief pause before opening Firefox now. I have to respect the developer's privacy commitment, too. I hesitate to give prying eyes access to my app usage and was glad to see One Sec wasn't going to sell my data to someone who will further seek to command my attention.
Most of the time, the US drivers passing on the right in my region are speeding and driving erratically. I agree that slow drivers in the fast lane are dangerous. Driving in the slow lane like it's the fast lane isn't the solution.
Nicely done! Simply from a game play perspective, I'd suggest making the theme part of the initial round, so that players can focus on revealing words from the start. Also, I'm on Firefox for Android and the boxes that fall away after a correct guess sometimes get stuck at the bottom of the box, making it hard to see what I've cleared.
Sara Walker had a great piece in Noema that I just went back to recently and so have at the ready to recommend, called AI is Life: https://www.noemamag.com/ai-is-life/
In Massachusetts, Lost and Unaccounted for Gas (LAUG) is estimated per mile of pipe, rather than evaluated by regulators or even industry. It is a simple multiplication problem with little bearing on reality. Consumers bear the cost of LAUG while the utilities are guaranteed a 10% profit on their infrastructure expenses. This, along with subsidies for leak prone pipe replacement, leads to needless investment in outmoded fossil fuel infrastructure (i.e., pipe replacement) being prioritized over leak repair.
>In Massachusetts, Lost and Unaccounted for Gas (LAUG) is estimated per mile of pipe, rather than evaluated by regulators or even industry. It is a simple multiplication problem with little bearing on reality
Isn't both ends of a pipe metered? Even if not every pope is metered, at the very least there should be metering at the point of bulk purchase (eg. from a LNG ship) to the end user (gas meter at a home). How hard is it to compare how much is put into the pipe vs how much comes out?
When accurate metering is called for we have the tech to do it just fine to far less than <1% error. This is a classic case where regulation is required. Rational capitalist enterprise is not going to fix this on their own. They don't currently have the right incentives.
To 1% volume, like rotary meters, but not 1% mass. At least not at reasonable cost.
But you are right that regulation is the answer, although personally I think direct leak detection is more realistic than measuring gas flows accurately in a system that's already built around low accuracy metering.
Coriolis flow meters in natural gas have been accurate and pretty inexpensive since the 1990s with accuracies better than 99% on the extreme low end and 99.5% on the high end.
Its easy to say that anything is 'too expensive' when the regulatory bar is set so low that it doesn't exist.
Right, you could put a combustible-gas-safe mass flow sensor on every gas line, high and low pressure, at a cost of roughly 100x current rotary and aperture flow meters, but then metering would become by far the largest cost in gas production.
This thread is in response to a user who commented above:
> Even if not every pope is metered, at the very least there should be metering at the point of bulk purchase (eg. from a LNG ship) to the end user (gas meter at a home).
Meanwhile in California, PG&E underfunded maintenance, perhaps because regulators squeezed too hard? Eventually we had things like the San Bruno gas explosion and wildfires so bad that PG&E went bankrupt.
Finding the optimal amount of regulation seems difficult. It seems like too blunt an instrument. Incentives are no substitute for technical people who want to do what's right.
I’m unconvinced that a change to new management, government-run or not, would automatically get technically competent people hired and give them the decision-making power to do things right. Sure, it might, but it’s hardly guaranteed.
I think a lot of this boils down to the fact that you can make large multiples of the amount you'd make working on this kind of thing by working on something relatively non-productive like finance, consulting, adtech, etc. A large percentage of my engineering class went into one of those. One of the smartest guys I knew there, who studied nuclear engineering, now does healthcare private equity.
The incentives are all messed up. We should do some combination of making these jobs more attractive and making those relatively extractive jobs less attractive.
Thank you for pointing out why it should be a public utility that does the right thing rather then a private company who was willing to burn the state down for profit.
Public utilities can also face perverse incentives, and be run poorly.
Commercial enterprises at least can face some competition! But with infrastructure like last-mile gas pipelines, it's tricky, and the companies end up being local monopolies. Hence the trouble: a monopoly has very different incentives than a company actually competing on the market.
lol. PG&E has had a culture of malfeasance since at least the 60’s - which is why all the records on those buried pipelines and power lines were missing or never recorded at all. Despite it being a regulatory requirement.
It just got worse as they passed more and more of it into investor pockets.
I've just put one in my office and it cost just $150 USD. I plan on using my fitness reimbursement from my insurer to cover the expense. I've used it selectively but recently reorganized my office to make it more accessible. I spent about an hour on it today, alternating between standing and sitting. I find it much easier to stay standing while moving my body. Otherwise, I neglect to focus on my comportment while standing and start to cramp up, similar to sitting with poor posture. Exercise and step count aside, it's worth it to me for that reason. Also, being at a keyboard, my hands are occupied and my watch doesn't always register the additional steps. YMMV, literally.
