With the added benefit of being able to mount the tracks at an angle, and the added disadvantage of occupying area near the tracks that is occasionally used for maintenance equipment.
And getting approval to widen the right of way, where it’s even physically possible, and issues around flora suppression.
I'm not an expert but I think the SBB is already pretty good at handling this. I think they already run measuring wagons (Oberbaumesswagen) with grond penetrating reader and ultrasonic measurement and use flow sensors to monitor drainage.
I would expect that the solar panels impact the efficiency at least somewhat but apparently not enough to cause real and enough issues for the SBB or perhaps they see ways to improve this in the future.
Yes, worsened inspection is a non-trivial problem. Very high quality sleepers (I wouldn't expect any other kind in Switzerland) mitigate this, but copying such approach in other countries could spell trouble.
Oooo, I get a bit excited about interdisciplinary techno-plant-and-livestock
Another area that might be easier to break in to as far as work goes is labouring for an irrigation business, kinda agricultural plumbing.
You’ve probably seen pivots[1] and side-roll irrigation systems.
This would put you in more direct contact with the farm operators, expose you to a wide range of agricultural crops, and also tie neatly in to your existing CS skill set with regard to agricultural SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), or Industrial Arduino as I like to call it.
Working for seed processes / distributors and fertiliser and pest & weed control industries could also be another foot-in-the-door move.
Please don't comment like this. We ask users not to post generated comments, but we also don't want snarky accusations like this. If a comment seems suspect, you can flag it or email us (hn@ycombinator.com).
> playing with living organisms to augment their capabilities and make them do our bidding
I think the OP was just highlighting that we do this all the time.
I personally feel like cyborg control goes a step beyond selective breeding and it makes me feel icky too. But we need to talk about what the difference is.
What on earth do you mean? That's a basic form of argument, where you demonstrate that the logic of a proposition leads somewhere ridiculous, or leads to a contradiction.
It reminds me of somebody I knew who thought that metaphors are dishonest and should never be used.
Yes, "reductive argument" is fair enough, don't want to be reductionist and dismiss the emergent properties of the thing. (What were we talking about again? The ethics of meddling with nature?)
Posturing and pedantry like this doesn’t change the fact that the nature of exploitation is more important than its mere existence. I’m not sure what you’re trying to achieve with these comments but if it’s to convince me the original argument was made in good faith you should try doing it yourself.
I'm not doing those things, I'm making an epistemological point that I think is important, though it's an old one I picked up from reading Gödel, Escher, Bach in the 80s, but I do quite sincerely think that arguments that rely on reductionism are bad and frequently silly. Yet I also think that reductio ad absurdum is a crucial form of critical thought. Reductionism claims "there are no emergent properties when the parts are assembled", whereas reductio ad absurdum says "there's something that your simple rule doesn't account for", so it really is opposed to reductionism, unless it's carried out by misrepresenting the rule as being foolishly simple when it wasn't simple.
This is admittedly something of a sidetrack from the question of exploitation.
In the argument near the top of the thread, the point made is of course that lots of mundane and innocent things are the product of meddling with nature. I can't make sense of the phrase "exploitation is more important than its mere existence", by "its", do you refer to the existence of exploitation? Was that topic raised? I can't find the context. I don't understand what you're saying, but I'm picking up "when exploitation is bad, it's immoral", which is true by definition. But I suppose the unanswered question is why it's bad exploitation to make a cockroach into a robot.
No, but I also didn't say that. I'd say that some arguments are also interesting instead of right or wrong. Some people just have interesting brains. This thread is very meta.
You aren't answering the question. You are reframing the question so you can give the answer you want, thereby avoiding giving the real answer to the question presented.
either you're still fat, or at 45 you should be long past boasting on the internet about your muscle gains. "SOME of the 8 billion people on Earth aren't adequately described by a system with only four outputs"? See comedian physicist Dara O'Briain saying that comedically:
"""Racism is way better than Astrology - Racism is one of the worst social evils they can imagine. “How dare you do that?” they say. "How dare you ascribe to me personality traits? You don’t even know me, but you tell me that you know me, and you know these things about me, and you say I share these personality traits with this huge group of people, and I don’t know them, you don’t know them, and you say not only do we have the same character traits, but we have some sort of common history and some common destiny, and you make all of these horrible presumptions on the back of what? On the back of a fluke of birth. How dare you do that?
Come on, try commenting something more effortful, interesting, or substantial than "do you really believe <strawman they didn't say>?" or at least, something funnier? We've all got to while away the time until death arguing on the internet forever, at least give it some oomph.
And getting approval to widen the right of way, where it’s even physically possible, and issues around flora suppression.