Is it true that pay transparency laws reduce wages?

Here's the Economist article that makes this claim: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/01/05/pay-transparency-laws-do-not-work-as-advertised

Relevant parts:

>Labour advocates champion pay-transparency laws on the grounds that they will narrow pay disparities. But research suggests that this is achieved not by boosting the wages of lower-paid workers but by curbing the wages of higher-paid ones. A forthcoming paper by economists at the University of Toronto and Princeton University estimates that Canadian salary-disclosure laws implemented between 1996 and 2016 narrowed the gender pay gap of university professors by 20-30%. But there is also evidence that they lower salaries, on average. Another paper by professors at INSEAD, UNC Chapel Hill, Cornell and Columbia University found that a Danish pay-transparency law adopted in 2006 shrank the gender pay gap by 13%, but only because it curbed the wages of male employees. Studies of Britain’s gender-pay-gap law, which was implemented in 2018, have reached similar conclusions.

>[...] the effects of 13 state laws passed between 2004 and 2016 that were designed to protect the right of workers to ask about the salaries of their co-workers. The authors found that the laws were associated with a 2% drop in wages, an outcome which the authors attribute to reduced bargaining power. “Although the idea of pay transparency is to give workers the ability to renegotiate away pay discrepancies, it actually shifts the bargaining power from the workers to the employer,” says Mr Pakzad-Hurson. “So wages are more equal,” explains Ms Cullen, “but they’re also lower.”

Is this viewpoint mainstream, or the article cherry-picks studies that support their claim? Or something in between? If true, do we understand the mechanism of these results?

What kind of toilet or bathroom sistem did the sumerians have back in the day?

Why can't the alternator of an electronic car just charge its own battery while the car is in motion?

What kinds of things can we put in place so that a future random species can understand who we were and what we did better than we understand the dinosaurs? Are we already doing them?

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For Political Science: how do you manage the feeling of endless dread from seeing not very smart people elected into offices that lead to them enacting changes that should not happen?

How has the worldwide move towards western liberalism, dissemination of English, export of American culture, and liberal economics affected each other? Is there a causal relationship between some of these phenomena or do they come as a packaged deal?

for anthropology:

is there a current evolutionary trait that's been selected for in humans?

for any:

how do I explain evolution to a new learner as succinctly as possible?

There’s a mouse that lives inside my car and has started to eat wires how can i remove the sucker fast

A motor when physically turned produces power in the same way as an alternator, so adding an alternater just adds %loss through heat and added weight. Also in a gas car, the engine always runs like a generator to turn the shaft in an alternater. EVs already recapture generated electricity through rolling and braking. But there is still %loss through heat, light, computing power, friction. So you drive up a mountain and then coast down, you won't regain all the power, but you do get some.

As time goes on, better wiring, battery and even an addition of a single cylinder engine can be used to create and store power for the batteries to drive the motor. Innovation takes time, but tomorrow will be better than today. Even in recycling of batteries :)

What caused Renessaince?

Science: is it currently possible to slow the aging process of humans? If not how close do you think we are to making a breakthrough that we could actually achieve longer lasting life?

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Anthro question with spin of PoliSci: given the lack of Ethnographic evidence behind Neurodivergent peoples positive contributions to the clan/tribe/village/community/society, except in indigenous cultures, can the collective self advocacy of neurodivergent people benefit from specific programs that help target hiring and providing mentoring/support to improve the whole socioeconomic health of this group without resorting to stigmatizing and medicalizing their conditions as disabilities? By all means support those who cannot work in the systems built by neurotypicals, as they need to fully resort to disability to survive. But for those who can find meaningful purpose and potential prosperity, support those also?

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With the new indications that several prehistoric cave paintings have written symbols - early written language basically - and the letter Y seems to stand out - are there some legacy language (written or spoken, cultural) elements that are derived from prehistoric times?

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With regards to the concept of prehistoric waves of migration into North America - I'm confused by what that actually means. Does that mean groups/tribes would pulse into North America and somehow displace the people from the previous waves? Did the people from those previous waves largely die out or did they generally mix with the new waves? Is there a generally agreed upon number of major migration waves?

theoretically …What are some different ways we could use hydrogen to answer the WOW signal sent to us in the 1970s?

What exactly are the main points "feminist anthropology" and who should I be reading to learn more about it?

I was talking to my sister in law about gender dynamics in hunter/gatherer societies and she told me that much of the conventional wisdom on this (E.g. Men hunt, women gather) had been debunked by feminist anthropology (her words). This conversation was sparked by an observation that my wife and I made that she is way better at finding static objects around the house while am much better at detecting movement. We conjectured that maybe this is a product of gender specializations dating back to the roles of hunter and gatherer.

Thanks in advance!

This might be a silly question, but how does an Economy actually work, in the deepest sense?

I.e. it can't really be a closed system - we can't all just be service workers scrubbing each other's backs. So there must be fundamental inputs into the economy. I can only think of mining, agriculture and energy production which inject "value" into the overall economic system from nothing, and the COMPLETE rest of an economic system is just dedicated to transform these three raw ingredients into "quality-of-life".

Am I missing something? Or are there other fundamental inputs into the overall economic system?

By deploying one of few counter measures available: revolutionary optimism.

Gotta have that vision that not only can the world be changed for the better, but also having a vision for how this change can happen.

I'm of the Marxist tenancy so my vision of change is a bit more rough and tumble than the Liberal view of change 😂

This isn't much of a poli Sci question because I would expect very differing answers from political scientists, or at least, I wouldn't know how they would answer it.

But to me, it isn't really endless dread. In the situations that what you are describing does happen, we try to study it, make observations on what's happening, find the cause of the issue, and look for solutions.

In fact, I find that the more I study voter behavior, elections, and political power, the less emotionally attached I become to politics. That doesn't mean I'm apathetic, I still care deeply about my political stance. The point is that when I see something I don't like happening in politics, I don't get angry, I become curious and sometimes, even fascinated.

This feels like a dumb question but how do TVs make yellow light? Since yellow is a primary color and can't be made by any other colors.

First :Crusade does not make only evil but create trade with muslim world. With that we found some Lost greak philosophers. The most important was Platonism and Platon whose was lost for Western world(Western Christianity knew some Philosophers as an aristotle, but some became forgotten. ). In fact, it is the discovery of neoplatonism kick off Renaissance.

Second :between 1150 and 1300 was full blown war between Italian City states and German Emperor. City states won and start not only fighting each others but fight for prestige. With that they funded by Intelligent mens whose have creative minds.

The second Black death of 1348 has literally destroyed 35% of europe's total population. But it also allowed the monopoly of old trading families in Italy to be destroyed, and thus to enrich new families start competing with each other. this allows competition and better life and with that creativity.

The third was the crisis in Christianity due to the Avigion exile. This make Catholic Christianity split in two partsand with this, the Pope was able to compete with himself and sponsor science.Also make Philosophic divide and space for New theological questions. also Catholic Christianity was more liberal to Romano-Greek philosophers ať the time and allowed this.

> how do I explain evolution to a new learner as succinctly as possible?

As in biological evolution? When there's competition for resources in an environment the species that are best able (fit) to compete for those resources and raising offspring within the environment end up spreading their genes more than those that don't. Over a long period of time, this results in what we recognize as evolution.

> is there a current evolutionary trait that's been selected for in humans?

Even the fastest changes in species like humans takes many generations to show itself in a population and even longer to become dominant (Unless the selective pressure is extreme). Saying any certain trait (even obvious ones like lactose tolerance) is too speculative and subject to a rapidly changing environment in a biological context.

RGB pixels light up the the red and the green to make yellow.

That is quite a loaded question. I don't think I can give a valid answer within the limits of a reddit comment, but what I can do is recommend an amazing book called International Communication: Continuity and Change by Daya Kishan Thussu. It doesn't directly answer your question, but it gives you a great background in how all of what you say tie together in the world and what impact it has. It should give you all the knowledge you need to extrapolate your own answer to the question.

What does pressure have to do with boiling

I find it hard to believe - as far as I know this viewpoint is not mainstream. Maybe cherry picked, but more likely the study isn't a very representative or large enough sample. It could also be that these policies in theory should help the labor side, but in practice there are some confounding variables - ex. "well we would pay you more except for this pesky law preventing us, sorry" being used as an excuse, or general disdain for the idea of raising everyone's wages vs. stagnating most employees' wages save a few favorite employees / new hires.

Could also be that a requirement to post salary ranges gives companies better information on what the lowest wage is that prospective employees would truly accept.

I also find it suspect that the article is lumping together a study that focused on pay transparency and university professors, with a different study on a pay disparity law and saying their results suggest similar conclusions. They are different policies, different samples, and different effects - tricky comparison to make.

Was having trouble finding other studies, but here's a good place to dig around: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C38&q=effects+of+pay+transparency+on+wages&btnG=

Economics:

I can't wrap my mind around the following:

Is an economy where money is created on the fly actually sustainable? (I'm thinking both printing more money as well as creating virtual money (perhaps temporarily), when a bank gives out a loan for example).

Treat me like an economics noob!

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It's called having a healthy diet and exercising regularly. People who eat mainly a Mediterranean diet live longer than people with other less healthy diets. There is already a big difference in people who are unhealthy and uncomfortable in their own body by their 60s and people who regularly practice moderate exercise and eat healthy diets who can live comfortable adventurous lives into their 80s and 90s.

Sometimes the world is cruel and someone does everything the can to be healthy and fit into old age but they are robbed of that experience by tragic events and/or disease. Life's not fair.

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Is there any difference between TAKING the garbage out and PUTTING the garbage out? To me, taking the garbage out always meant taking from inside the house and putting it in the big can outside. Then putting the garbage out means putting it out in the street for the garbagefolk to take away.

Is there any difference between ‘taking’ and ‘putting’, really?

i wouldnt say so, and to explain it to you simply i would give you this example: if you have 10 slices of pizza to divide among 10 people, the value of each slice would be one slice per person. if instead for some reason, there are now only 5 slices, each slice now has double the value it had before. conversely, if there were 20 slices instead of 10, the value of each slice would be lesser because there are more slices for everyone. the amount of slices creates the value of each slice, and in the same way the amount of money creates the value for money, and if everyone creates as much money as they wish, there would eventually be so much of money that it would lose most, if not all of it’s value. the scarcity of supply of money is what basically gives it its value

Yes, it does. A direct comparison between the Government of Canada and the Government of Ontario shows the impact of a sunshine list exclusively in the latter. This creates an institutional disincentive from crossing that threshold, which severely limits career progress and I suppose also saves some money. The problem is that legislating the threshold is that it can't flex to accommodate inflation, new collective agreements, or specialization.

The other commenter is correct that R+G = Y when it comes to TV and light in general.

Yellow is only a primary color when it comes to painting (which reflects / absorbs different wavelengths of light). The primary colors of light themselves are red, blue, and green.

Yellow is a primary color in the subtractive system. This is the ones that paint and printing use where the ink or paint subtracts some of the white light. TVs and monitors used the additive system where the three primary colors are Red, Green and Blue. You mix Red and Green to get yellow.

Some people believe that we are facing the end of globalization as we know it today. And I personally fear that it is very real. China will soon collapse. The one child policy and many other wrong decisions will slowly but surely result in a collapse, whatever that may look like, of China.

The time of happy globalism and economic growth will soon be over and it will no longer be as it is today. Many major economic and political changes will be forced upon us. And I don't have the feeling that our current politicians are prepared for it and will make the right decisions, they are far too incompetent and corrupt for that!

Do you also think that we are facing big changes that will not be very positive? And that globalism as we know it today will be over in a few decades?

Thats at least my view of the next decades. The world will not end, but things will be different and not as easy as it is today.

Try placing a baited mouse trap on the ground inside one of the front tires overnight? Idk might work, might not

I wil definitely try anything i can to get it out hahah thanks

Liquids always give off a little bit of gas, generating what's called vapor pressure. As you increase the temperature, the vapor pressure also increases. When it reaches the pressure of the atmosphere around the liquid, boiling starts to happen: the liquid can turn into a gas not just at the surface but also in the liquid itself, creating bubbles. And if you try to increase its temperature any more, you will find that you can't. It will just boil harder.

So because boiling happens when vapor pressure matches the external pressure, liquids boil at different temperatures if there are different pressures acting on it. Under high pressure, it will boil at a higher temperature; that's the principle behind a pressure cooker for example. At low pressure, it will boil at a lower temperature.

It depends on how fast money is created versus how fast the growth in goods and services is. If goods and services grow faster than the money supply grows, then prices decline over time. This is really painful to people who have borrowed money and have to do more work to pay it off. If the money supply grows at the same rate that goods and services grow then prices are stable. If the money supply grows faster, we have inflation which we are currently experiencing. If the FED can rein the US money supply growth back to levels closer to the growth in goods and services, then it can go on indefinitely.

As far as i know, stone will be the answer. Like the pyramids of gizeh and such stuff. Everything else will be destroyed by weathering. The pyramids will exist for many hundreds of thousand, even millions of years. Basically almost everything we build today will be destroyed pretty fast. We build in a very cheap and efficient way and nothing will last very long. Like if we would abandoned New York, there wouldnt be much left of it in 10.000 years. I believe even in 1.000 years it will be gone. Stone monuments like the people built in the past will exist for a very long time.

Oh, and satellites in the right orbit, where it takes ages for them to come closer to earth, if they manage to get to space again. Or if aliens want to visit us.

I probably forgot something but those are my answers.

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Oh okay. I'll probably have to read further but I think I get it now, thanks

I’m an archaeologist so I’m best suited to give you a succinct definition for feminist archaeology, but it essentially is looking at the any people who were previously overlooked when examining past human behavior. Doesn’t necessarily have to be women, it can be how children appear in the record, or any other group that was typically not cared about by early archaeologists who were very focused on “Man the Hunter” and chalked everything else up to “oh and women gathered things, but have you seen these men?!?”

I think overall, both men and women did a lot of overlap on tasks. Age probably has to do more with role separation than sex. I think that the “Grandmother Hypothesis” for example could be considered feminist anthropology. It’s hard to take young children hunting, they’re loud. It’s hard for elderly people to hunt, it’s very taxing. That leaves the prime aged men and women available for that task. But meemaw and pawpaw can watch junior while mom and dad hunt. They get something protein rich, and while they’re out doing that, everyone else does some local gathering. Boom, balanced diet for the whole family. The Grandmother Hypothesis is great at explaining why humans, unlike other mammals, live far past their main reproductive years, in my opinion.

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To your first question: probably not. We travel all over the world sharing our genome, so there isn’t really a bottleneck or split that would cause selection for a specific trait to appear.

To your second question: that’s tricky and depends on how scientifically literate they are.

We already did. There’s plastic everywhere and a layer of nuclear fallout surrounding the entire globe. Those will be around long after we are gone.

Where do you see the future relationship with the US and Russia going?

Because I can’t explain “the economy” in an Reddit post entirely I will do my best in a small example/explanation.

You can see this economy as this kind of circle with some smaller circles around it. We have all decided that we will live with a system that gives us a digital or physical piece of paper to pay with. The economy revolves around the value, sustainability and usefulness of that product (money). That is the main circle.

You could see that part of the start of the main circle is raw materials, like for example that of farmers, miners and loggers. Then we need some people to transform the raw material into something. Factory workers, builders who build a house or Cooks. Then we need people to buy the iPhone, buy or invest in the building and go out to eat. The thing is that everyone in that circle pretty much needs something from not only their own profession:( Money and Maybe a house) but also from the other professions, like an iPhone or food, this does of course include the farmer who grew the ingredients for the food or the miner who dug up the gold for the iPhone. So to put it simpel it is a circle build around the needs and demands, but also the money we have chosen to exchange products with

Does that answer it a bit ?

Linguistics: What is the law behind the Ablaut pattern? Is there an onomatopoeic reason behind the Germanic pattern I-O or I-A, which explains that specific order in pair of words such as chit-chat, clip-clap, tic-tac, tip-top, and so on?

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Electric cars don’t have alternators.

In regular internal combustion engine cars, the alternator and the engine work to convert chemical energy from the fuel into potential electric energy for the auxiliary systems. Electric cars already have tons of this potential electric energy just sitting around in their battery arrays.

(BCH Political science) I’m gonna try to give you a useful answer, but I will try to keep it simple and between the lines.

People often forget that culture and politics are incredibly close to each other regarding differences between countries. While western culture (English language, American culture) is more often focused on the democratic system due to the “discovery and rise” of it in Europe, it has certainly not picked up all over the world. While you can have Coca Cola in your country and have a large majority of people speaking English this isn’t often an example of a country that also handles liberal economics or democracy(western liberalism)

Chinese youth for example has had over the last years an obsession with American culture stuff (Wild West etc.) But liberal economics and western liberalism is far from being in China. So while a lot of European countries have taken up that democracy, liberal economics, American culturing, and speaking English it is certainly not an all in one package

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[This paper in Cell (pdf)](https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(22)01530-6.pdf) examines the role of endogenous retroviruses and senescence and was discussed in the latest podcast from "This Week in Virology."

During the podcast, they also discussed other research showing that, in mice, repeated blood transfusion from young mice to elderly mice over extended periods of time produced rejuvenating effects. Thinks like improved strength, thickening of cartilage, etc.

There is a very long way between that research and increased lifespan in humans, but my opinion is that it's worth considering the possibility we'll eventually get there. Or if not lifespan, per se, then better health through the lifespan (health span).

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Thank you for your great answer! That bit about overlap on tasks is basically what I had found in researching it myself (i.e. The roles of hunter and gatherer are not clear cut or mutually exclusive of either gender). I didn't know about the Grandmother Hypothesis but it's fascinating! Thanks for sharing.

Are there any scholars working on this kind of research that you'd recommend I look into?

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I still can't find a list of processes that violate the principle of least resistance

There's a little ambiguity here, so I'll answer as best I can, but it might also be good to refine the question a little bit.

First, "history" started with writing, so "prehistoric" is anytime before writing, which means up until about 6 thousand years ago.

There are languages still spoken today that are that old (eg Egyptian, Sanskrit, Greek, Chinese). So just based on the fact that those spoken languages are practically prehistoric, then that would count as language elements from prehistoric times.

Further, even newer languages like English can trace words back to Indo-European. Looking at Wikipedia, Indo-European goes back 5k years, so I don't think it's a stretch to say that it retained some elements from prehistory.

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It can be, though the context of how the money is created matters.

Nailing down exactly what money is is a good starting point. Most economists define money by its functions:

• Money is a medium of exchange - you can buy things with it instead of bartering.
• Money is a store of value - you can earn money today and buy something with it tomorrow or next year.
• Money is a unit of account - you can use it to express the price of goods, and thus allow accounting.
• Money is a standard of deferred payment - you can use money to express the idea that someone owes you X money by Y date, rather than needing all aspects of the transaction to happen concurrently.

Keeping the monetary economy stable is broadly the process supporting those functions.

The management of the money supply primarily impacts the role of money as a store of value (though that in turn has implications on the other roles).
Importantly, money need not be a perfect store of value - and no currency ever has been. But it does need to be relatively stable.
If money is created without regards to managing this, it can cause inflation. If money is removed from the money supply without attention to this, it can cause deflation.

Specific forms of money creation, however, can have different degrees of impact. The example you gave - a loan has a diminished impact because the money is created in pair with a debt to be paid: in effect, an equal amount of negative money is created in the form of the debt. There will still be some impact - people value today money more than tomorrow money. This idea is called the "present value of future money," and the difference between the current value of the money and the value of that same money in the future is called the "discount rate." The nuts and bolts can be more complicated, but for the 1000 foot view, you can consider the impact of a loan on the money supply to be more closely related to the discount rate than the raw value of the loan.

This gets at the idea that there are different kinds of money supplies. Economics has terms for these kinds of currency. M0 is actual, hard currency. It's issued by the government only, and it's the most disruptive if produced recklessly. Pointedly, sound government's don't do that: that's why, for example, the Federal Reserve generally addresses the money supply by issuing treasuries rather making additional US dollars.

M1 is fairly close related: it's M0 plus most of what would seem like a normal bank account to most people. M2 also includes money market accounts and similar. Money creation here should still be fairly well controlled.

M3 & M4 starts working in terms of sovereign debt and commercial paper. This tends to be what we're talking about when people panic about "The Fed is creating money!1!!1!." But all of this supply is created in terms of debt obligations. Like your loan example, the impact is diminished by the negative value of the debt.

You’re welcome! Glad I could provide some insight. This isn’t my specific expertise, so unfortunately I can’t really rattle off a bunch of good sources for you, but I gave this one a cursory glance and it seems to cover a lot of it, including those early “man the hunter” parts. Hawkes 2003

Why would it not be sustainable though?

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Awesome, thanks! And from UofU no less haha (I work at Utah State, the redheaded stepchild of Utah schools (as a redhead, I am allowed to say that lol)).

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Railway and motorway embankments. Serious earth moving projects will be the last things to disappear.

Do we know, or is it possible, that we artificially selected humans to be hairless to psychologically distance ourselves from animals?

We kill them en masse for food, religions draw distinct divisions, we see ourselves as superior.

Are there other things that we may have artificially selected for?

Why are there multiple languages at *all*? I would think there's only one, or a few, convenient and effective ways to communicate information via flapping meat(so to speak). Why, then, are there so many languages that oft times are not very compatible with eachother?

Is it possible that dolphins communicate as type of underwater internet and that Is one reason we can’t communicate, as we are trying to speak to individuals rather than the whole? Sound travels much farther underwater.

If time is the fourth dimension, is it possible that all of time flashed into existence beginning to end in a zero time instant and everything is written?

If not, what did Einstein mean when he said time is an illusion?

Makes sense tbh. Statistically there are more men working extra hours than women, given the time that the latter need to dedicate to pregnancy/post-labor. So average salary gap numbers will reflect both actual cases of discrimination and also performance/dedication-based differences. Corporate HR departments cannot magically disentangle the two of those from their multiple business units (as extra hours / overall dedication are not necesarilly easily tracked), so they need to make broad adjustments. Given a fixed personel budget, its easier to lower average salaries to comply with policy

Question for all 4:

How does the connectivity and rapid exchange of ideas online impact linguistic continuity and evolution of social interaction, and what are foreseeable socioeconomic impacts in regards to relatable marketing in the future?

It would help to narrow down this question quite a bit more. For instance, what do you mean by "economy" or even "value"? An economy in the broadest sense is just a grouping of interdependent entities (people) all trying to do things they want/need to do. Sometimes goals overlap and individuals form larger groups (institutions) to better achieve those goals. Forming a School, a State, a body to oversee a Currency... these are all results of some form of collective decision making (note: NOT necessarily democratic either!). These institutions serve some better than others. Entities and people try to achieve goals the best they can within and around them. As such, "how" the economy functions is directly related the the institutions (policy) in place.

So an economy in a political system where people look out for themselves will look different from one where corporate interests come first or one where more public or collectivists interests are the behavioral norms.

There will always be some kind of "economy" as long as people are interdependent in their goals.

If you want a more academic and in-depth overview specific to western economy and how we got here, "Institutional Economics" by John R Commons is incredibly cohesive. There are also more modern books on the topic.

A mix of all of the above. Sometimes areas were uninhabited when new people arrived, sometimes they displaced older groups, sometimes they mixed. Sometimes it was a combination where there was some mixing and some displacement. There is a lot of debate about how many waves there were.

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One reason is simply that languages change over time, especially with relation to its culture. Meaning as a groups culture changes so does their language. In general languages having a notable change takes a few hundred years so it is a slow process.

So even if you want to assume there was a “first” language (which I don’t think is correct), over the thousands of years of human migration, our cultures have changed very drastically from one another and so do our languages.

Is it possible to have a recession without job loss?

Is humour a good test for an AI's Sentience

If you look at the economy narrowly as purely making stuff then economics typically frames this within factors of production. These are land, labour, capital and possibly technology or entrepreneurship depending on how you define these terms. Land can contain the natural resources of the earth for simplicity's sake. These are the inputs as you describe.

But this is only really a part of the picture when considering what makes an economy where you get more into subjective value and coordination. The other comment is a rather good one.

It sounds to me like a case of companies saying "now that everyone can see your wages, if we give you a big raise, we have to give everyone after you the same amount." Whereas before, they could even it out by giving a few people big raises, and the rest got smaller ones.

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Regenerative braking basically is doing that.

The probelm is the laws of thermodynamics. To successfully charge the battery using the kinetic energy of the car would make an EV doing that into a perpetual motion machine of the first kind. You’d be converting KE back to PE, to use to convert back to KE, etc ad infinitum.

In reality, you actually could “trickle charge” the battery using an alternator or something similar to draw a small amount of the energy, but due to the thermal efficiency of such a device not being 100%, as well as inefficiencies (energy losses) in the batteries, controller, motor, and wheel bearings, you end up losing energy compared to just using it to drive the car.

Say you feed 500W into this alternator, which is 99.9% efficient (that in itself would be amazing). Your controller is 99.9% efficient. Your battery’s charge acceptance is 99.9% efficient. The battery discharge is also 99.9% efficient. Of that 500W in, your battery is able to put 498W of it back into the drivetrain again — which would be remarkably efficient — but there’s an obvious problem…you’ve lost 2W to inefficiency. You could’ve just not drawn that 500W, and had 500W going through the drivetrain to start with.

Taking the car out of the picture, it’s trying to charge a battery by having it drive a motor to drive a generator to charge the battery powering the system. The end result is less energy coming back i to the battery than if you’d just used the energy in the battery without running it through anything.

Even more simply it’s like trying to charge a battery with itself.

Regenerative braking works to convert the KE to PE at a time when you’d be wasting that KE anyway — brakes work by converting KE to heat, which is lost forever. Compared to that, all the inefficiency of the system in trying to recover some of that KE is still a massive improvement.

How do I get the most of being a 1099?

An alternator is something that you spin and out comes electricity. It takes effort/work to spin the alternator directly proportional to the amount of electricity you get out. Let's say some theoretical car where everything in the car was perfectly efficient had a motor and an alternator (electric cars don't actually need an alternator). The motor outputs 10kW of power to keep your car cruising at 50MPH (overcoming wind resistance and rolling resistance of the tyres). You switch on the alternator, it draws 1kW of power from the motor, which you then feed back to the battery. So the motor now draws 11kW and you charge the battery at 1kW. That 1kW hasn't gained you anything, the system is equivalent to running the motor at 10kW. In reality because of inefficiencies, this would waste a load of energy.

Oh that’s so interesting. So basically there’s just a limit to the amount of historical knowledge (like geologic timescales) that can be learned. At least within the limits of human intelligence

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Humor is a good test that a language model is able to create subtle and intricate links between words and concepts - but it doesn't directly link to sentience. Something like GPT-3 could probably be adapted to write decent jokes, it's an incredible language model that at first can appear sentient. However it's not sentient because it's just a model where an input maps to a deterministic output. There's no continuous loop of input-learning-adaptation-output that comes with a sentient being. The learning process was a one shot process until the model is updated.

Linguistics: how did certain words become universal ?

I never understood why financial numbers the government legislates rarely account for inflation. $100K ten years ago is worth at least 20% more than $100K today.

Question about building cheap fully auto-pilot [capable] EVs...

How much would it cost to build an EV that is designed like a fully-enclosed golf cart, maxes out at 60mph, and equipped with auto-pilot [upgradeable cruise-assist] technology?

How much weight could be reduced from consumer EVs if they were constructed in the aforementioned way, and how could the weight reduction impact the vehicles potential range?

What ways could the wealthy be taxed in an unavoidable way, higher capital gains tax if it is the primary income?

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If I understood you correctly: Aside from energy and cold, there's no other input that's really fundamental in the way you thinking. Most processes we consider "labor" consume energy and generate heat, and other than that deciding how to do things or where to source your energy/cold from is only a matter of efficiency. For material goods, you could always (with enormous difficulty/cost) create matter from energy, and arrange it the right way by "spending" some cold/negentropy, but if you want to make steel, mining abundant iron ore is much easier. If not:

Two people can exchange goods and both be better off, and that's the basis of trade.

We create valuable things where there were none (e.g. food, buildings, a concert) or make things more valuable by changing how accessible they are, moving them, changing their form, giving them to people who value them more, getting more information about them, etc. and we do all of this because each person doing it considers it better than not doing it. That's only because they get paid, usually, but that also happens because bosses consider paying workers to be better than not doing it. And so on.

I don't really get what you mean by "injecting value", but aside from food and steel you also value more abstract things like information, law and safety, consistency, personal connections, entertainment, and others. Every time service work happens, some of this kind of value is newly generated.

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I seem to remember reading an encyclopedia about humans from prehistory era with amazing hand-painted paintings - cartoon-ish, anime-ish, or water color ? - depicting hunter-gatherers settlements with beautiful landscape behind it and what not.

Could you recommend me an encyclopedia like that ? I love reading them and the paintings help me to be immersed in the world, much more than realistic pictures can.

Thank you!

If a mountain was over 10-12km tall (in the Stratosphere) would the peak of the mountain never be covered in snow (assuming that if like Everest, this mountain was once fully inside the Troposphere and the accumulated snow on its peak was melted by some completely unrelated event) The idea behind this being the stratosphere begins at 10km above sea level and is said to be free of all weather phenomena. Also the idea that there isn't a mountain that reaches the stratosphere, is that by design/effected by the laws of nature, is their some sort of limiting factor like the structural integrity of the stone upon reaching a certain height?

Would the parts of the mountain above 10km be forever free of snow while the parts below be snowed on?

Would having a massive chunk of rock poking into the stratosphere modify/effect the climate in some way?

Economy/political science: in your opinion, how likely would you say that the globalized system will collapse soon? (As outlined by Peter Zeihan in his new book "The end of the word is just the beginning: mapping the collapse of globalization". His general theory is that the aging population in most of the industrialized world and the increasing hesitancy of the US in participating in global trade & security will lead to the end of globalization as we know it.)

No, because you're competing with the private sector in a lot of these cases. So you need to offer graduates competitive wages because there aren't a lot of people that can credibly consult, propose statutory amendments or regulations, or deliver on multi billion dollar programs over the medium term. These are lawyers, accountants, and others that the government just can't afford anymore. How bad is it? Go watch how the Canadian Parliament is grilling McKinsey specifically for third party outsourcing work previously done by government. Sure there are bureaucratic checks in financial controls , but why name names when the stats for each specific hr category does the same thing.

My response is inherently biased to highly skilled labour located in OECD countries, like the Canadian province of Ontario. Transparency is necessary, but matter only if unions or people can organize to reflect the changing conditions of the market. For all institutions to immediately lock in inflationary labour costs (i.e. give everyone a raise permanently) is silly. But indexing it to inflation is the same end with more steps. But after this long, even if the number on the TV screen says 33,743, the fact that you're not eating as much meat is a pretty clear signal: raises need to index to a poverty rate nearer to 50k (or something, don't castigate me internet).

Ultimately, public service transparency laws are for a really specific type of worker and are a double edged sword. I'm only speaking anecdotally, but it's a conversation I've had dozens of times with public servants on both sides.

This is the process to do it in Canada: https://www.canada.ca/en/privy-council/services/publications/guide-making-federal-acts-regulations.html

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Ya, but it's not given equal between those two sectors. Some jobs are hyper specific, or have clearances, or are just specialized. Wage transparency is also variable, since most industries don't disclose and few jurisdictions require it.

The article is saying on a broad trend. I'm taking one sector out of context and being an internet contrarian.

Just saw a headline that said 50% of customers don't connect their smart appliances. Seems like a massive market inefficiency here. What would be an explanation for this?

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When you look in a window and see both the reflection behind you and whatever is on the other side of the glass, is your brain creating that composite or are there actual photons hitting your eye at the same time?

Or is it like waves with like a overlapping frequency hitting your eye? Why don't the colors blend?

is it possible for sound to travel faster than speed of light

Could ice be vibrated off the street?
My area is in the middle of Winter. An early snow went through typical periods of warming and cooling. Melting and refreezing.

Many of the streets now have hard packed ice with large grooves where tires run. Trying to turn a car can cause quite a bit of bouncing around. Intersections are often ice rinks. Of course, walking across the street is a bit dangerous.

Could a machine of some type cause the ice to vibrate hard enough to break its bond to the street? Perhaps shatter it into pieces for easy removal?

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Say for instance you were a morbidly obese person, like 300kg+, lost the weight and got the skin removal surgery but then gained the weight back and then lost the weight and got the skin removal surgery again. Would there ever be a point that you run out of skin or would your body keep producing more skin?

There are many answers to this.

Languages change over time. Even if you started with one language, as people spread out and different communities formed, those dialects would eventually change enough to no longer be mutually intelligible with the original language. And related to your wording, we are indeed using “flapping meat” to communicate, and while it can produce and reproduce sounds with regular characteristics, these sounds are not completely and exactly the same between people or even between utterances. Our perception of what forms a given phoneme can encompass a range of patterns that all “fit” to an archetype for what we expect for that sound. Some sounds have enough characteristics of another sound that we categorize them as being the same one, even if there are actually greater differences in their production than between two other sounds we recognize as distinct.

So languages naturally change over time, and when we produce sounds we are not doing so with perfect fidelity and precision each time. Beyond that, we must remember language is a system of communication that communicates more than just information. A crucial use of language is strengthening social ties between individuals or groups. Groups may actively speak in a certain manner to identify a person as a member of that group, which can be another driver of language change over time. It also means that we don’t necessarily care about how efficient we are when using language, because efficiency frequently isn’t the point. We are complex social creatures, and our ways of engaging in complex social situations are similarly complex, with human language being no exception.

Language evolves, and it does so at a much faster rate than biological evolution since it is driven socioculturally, even though some of the same factors that can drive biological evolution can also be at play (geographic isolation, reproductive isolation, sexual selection even). With this in mind, realize that humans have been speaking, joking, telling stories, and all around using language for hundreds of thousands of years. Populations of humans spread to every corner of the globe and innovated new societies, new ways of living, encountered new environments. Why would they also not use new words, new grammatical structures, as they were confronted with new physical environments and social concepts?

I’m sorry I can’t give you a short answer, because there isn’t one single simple short answer. I also didn’t want to just drop an article about the origins of language, because that is a frequent subject of debate among linguists and anthropologists. But I hope my answer helped. Source: PhD in linguistics.

If a horse can pull fifty times as much mass on water as on land, how much weight could it pull if that mass was floated in the air using a lighter than air vehicle?

Its something, at least. I certainly wasn't expecting a simple answer. It just bugs me, thats all. So many languages, so many chances for misinterpretation, so much effort spent when to my(admittedly non-standard) mind there should be a universal language to ease communication.

Philosophy: I would like for you to please argue the merits against killing the rich until they care about the poor in the modern era while keeping your eye on the rearview mirror of human history and acknowledging that violence is how societies have handled these problems in the past. Convince me the guillotine isn’t the solution to eating caking.

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Amateur (albeit incredibly notorious) theology/anthropology scholar here.

Has it been put forth amongst you professional anthropologists that the stories of Sumerian culture (particularly the Enuma Elish) seem to provide metaphorical corroboration of events that closely mirror what we see in geological record?

I for one am particularly interested in the possibility that the tale of Tiamat's destruction was describing the great cataclysm that ended the Dinosaurs' reign on earth.

The implications are immense from that particular interpretation of the text.

Why am I getting cracks when ball bonding to AlGaAs dies? What is it about this chemistry that is so fragile? I have tried everything!

Why is economic growth so important? If economies just stayed the same size would it be such a bad thing?

Who speaks Egyptian today?

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What would happen if everyjob had a labor union amd collective bargining? Would things be more fair across the board for workers? Would everything in the world become unaffordable? Would it help to combat wealth inequaility or blow up and collapse on itself? Anything else i havent thought of? I apologize for poor spelling and grammer, i can only see half of my keyboard.

The Economist spreading capitalist propaganda? Imagine my shock!

I was quoting from a blog, and almost left that one off the list. It looks like ancient Egyptian evolved to Coptic, which is still spoken by priests, and mixed with Arabic to get Egyptian spoken Arabic.

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Thank you. I was prompted by reading about 20,000 year old cave writing. Here's a link. I'd just never thought about it but it's reasonable to think some aspects have come down from 10s of thousands of years ago. . Thanks!

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/ancient-humans-first-written-words-are-20-000-years-old

Sure it is! Just look at post pandemic. High inflation globally can lead to recession when people with flat earnings decide that they can’t afford to spend that money and decide to save. Families decide that they can’t afford to buy a new car or move into a larger house because their collective salaries are 9% less valuable in the US or 40% less valuable in Turkey. The unemployment rate can actually decrease with people getting jobs who were previously retired because now their retirement or social security isn’t providing them with enough to live on and we could still enter a recession if collectively we feel like we need to save instead of spend.

Mama and papa are the two most universal words. The theory is that those sounds are the easiest for a new mouth to create and that we have given them immediate meaning in our environment.