Sounds like a quick legal solution: heat and cooling are now the landlords problem. Sort of like the kitchen.

Oops, in Germany the kitchen is usually the tenants responsibility. Does that mean we should lose our heating privileges instead? (I'm sure some landlords would love that)

You know how laws are made? There's this big building where rational people discuss the options. If they don't get it right, the people can vote them out. Of course stupid laws are occasionally passed, but also it's possible (easy, in fact) to write a reasonable law to say you cannot rent property that is either too hot or too cold.

You realize this was intended as a joke, because a base assumption in that comment was, in a very specific and not that relevant way, incorrect, right? The "oops" and the parenthetical was intended to give it away.

By switching from burning Russian hydrocarbons for heat to heat pumps so you can heat and cool while being more efficient? This isn't a rebuild, it is a moderate adaptation to the actual requirements to live in the Europe of today.

For steam based heat systems there is also cooling options, so that is a fix for those cities with central heat service.

Cooling buildings with air-water heat pumps like you would use to replace an oil or gas furnace doesn't work very well.

Yes, which is why we should stop installing them and use air to air heat pumps instead, which do both.

Bonus - you can throw your bulky, ugly radiators out too!

They are noisy though and many people including me would hate air heating, my airways suffer enough already.

the interior units are very quiet in my experience...

What's wrong with heating air? It was the norm in every house I grew up in...

Yeah, the outdoor units are quite often not quiet. Which matters with houses on small plots very close to each other. For that reason a water-water (earth-water) heat pump would be preferable as that's much more quiet but also much more expensive.

My nose simply doesn't work with it, I get an allergy-like reaction that never stops (non-allergic rhinitis), and my wife has the same issue, and many people I know too.

Rhinitis is not exactly a disease. It's just a matter of your body getting used to it. Most likely it disturbs existing dust. Also - does your house have proper ventilation system? In high co2 environments I get rhinitis too.

It is exactly a group of diseases categorized in the ICD.

Or you could just respect that people tend to know much more about their medical conditions than you will ever know.

It's not my house, it's many different places and many different irritating causes. It's not an issue with dust or high CO2 in my case.

Ah yes the same tone as my parents. I described this delusion at length here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48658494

You’d probably want to look at greater picture - I’d much rather have runny nose than suffocate in co2, catch infections or die from heat.

Billions of people live in air conditioned environments. They don’t seem to complain.

Did you ask them? Not even billions, did you ask at least a few thousand? Nobody complained? I know for a fact many people working in buildings with forced AC complain loudly.

But if you actually did read what I wrote, there was no complaint from me about the cooling part of the AC.

Corporations have money and money attracts lawyers. Some discipline would have been required for the trademark stuff because you have to be very careful about it or lose your job.

Now, did something cause other issues that converted this from formal "don't do that, use the official process" and nothing more? Sounds like something caused this to escalate. It could be toes were stepped on, could be a bad reaction to the warning, or could just be wanting to cut employee numbers in a shortsighted way.

The answer is not that it matters, but as a matter of financial and legal controls they need to know and approve. Do they care? They probably are delighted, but also want to get all the paperwork set up to avoid problems.

The space this comes from is the legal undue influence side where they need to give notice to shareholders about potential conflicts of interest, and it needs to be in the form of having a clear positive audit trail that they have told people to follow a clear policy with no grey area so that any deviation is an accident not willful failure to get people to tell them.

It depends, flowcharts are great for defined processes, but troubleshooting (which vulnerability research mirrors) is not a flowchart or checklist or task list.

The Tom Scott video(https://youtu.be/2tdiKTSdE9Y) did a pretty good summary of the Percy Spencer microwave (a giant commercial oven) and the later parallel development by J. E. Lovelock of a small microwave to reheat small mammals for experiments with cryorevival (replacing lamps and hot paddles).

ATC is hundreds of functions and dozens of responsibilities like checking that the runway is safe to land. "Clear to land" is not just a turn of phrase, it is a check and verify that an aircraft with hundreds of people is relying on.

Air traffic is not a deterministic system, it is squishy and significantly more complicated because it involves humans, complex mechanical systems, and weather floating on top of a sea of limited resources.

Automating just the error prone radio calls would be a massive start.

Those could be sent as short text messages that appear on a screen in the cockpit, for the pilots to acknowledge receipt of with a limit set of responses, and would give ATC a lot more time to focus on their other duties.

So like texting and driving, but in the air? Flying is hard, I don’t think an automated text based system would be safer than what we have now.

Try responding to the strongest possible interpretation of what someone says.

Anyway, this wasn’t my idea, it came from one of the handful of active / recently retired commercial pilots on YouTube.

This is already being done at many major airports through the FAA Data Comm program.

https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/data-communications-data-comm-0

Thanks for linking that, I wasn’t aware it was that far in to development / production.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controller%E2%80%93pilot_data_...

Thanks, appreciate a good rabbit hole.

Just to add to it, you can see a feed of some messages sent between pilots and their operations team: https://acarsdrama.com

Automating various functions seems like a good idea. But it's not going to remove the humans from the loop in the event of a future government shutdown, which is what the original suggestion seemed to be.

So leave the stuff that it suitable for humans to humans and automate everything else.

The general experience from the last 50 years is that reducing the human capacity for error by automation was mostly helpful in air traffic safety.

At the very least, safety mechanisms such as TCAS should be introduced where possible [1], to act as a protection of last resort when humans fail.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_sy...

Also remember that ATC is vital for emergency situations. "Your distress call is important to us, please continue screaming into the void and hopefully a miracle happens.

The bigger comment is that these people are not documented or undocumented. To be either would require due process where such documents could be produced.

There are vastly different scales where the approximation is correct for newton vs general relativity. Perhaps you can define the scales that you are calling relevant so we understand what you mean.

The scale of galaxies? Which the original article is about? I feel like I need to spell out everything, but ok:

The article is about modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND), which is a theory that modifies Newtonian gravitation to fix some observed differences in galaxies' motion, without invoking dark matter. The original commenter then proclaims "haha, MOND cannot be right, because we know that Newtonian gravity is incorrect". Yeah, no shit Sherlock; it is "incorrect" because it is just a limiting case of general relativity. But that's completely besides the whole point of MOND, which tries to "fix" gravity at galactic scales, which is a Newtonian regime even with general relativity. MOND is trying to tweak the Newtonian formula at those extreme distances, and if it works, then maybe it can be worked out to be a limiting case of a "modified general relativity", just as Newtonian gravity is a limiting case of GR. Got it?