> unfortunately KQL doesn't seem to have INSERT, UPDATE etc.
(Disclaimer: I'm an engineer at Microsoft, and I use Kusto basically every day)
This seems to me to be a deliberate design choice. Microsoft doesn't want engineers mutating the databases by hand. There are mechanisms to do that (mostly outside of Kusto, and usually to resolve privacy incidents), but the common case of querying is not supposed to allow for arbitrary changes to the database.
Looking at the Colonial era is looking at slavery ~300 years before it peaked just before the Civil War. Therefore, the numbers you give for the Colonial times don't have anything to do with the conversation.
Yes, this user grotesquely underrepresented the scale of chattel slavery in America at the peak of the American slave economy. The original commenter is still completely wrong if you look at the 1860 census.
The first user made a wild, incorrect guess, and the rest of this subthread shows just how badly that can spoil discussion quality on a forum like this. Fortunately, someone linked an earlier discussion up at the top.
Well, that's where you're wrong (with respect to housing in the USA).
Municipal zoning laws mean that houses are not getting built. Apartment growth is not keeping up either. Nor is condo growth. In the places with jobs, there is no available housing.
This lack of housing is what is keeping houses at top dollar in spite of the mortgage rate tripling over the span of a year.
It's due to the Universal Postal Union, which is a UN agreement that governs the costs and subsidies associated with international shipping.
The link below explains it well, but the gist is that China was rated to be a "poor" nation, whereas the USA was rated to be a "rich" nation. This rating essentially means that the USA is subsidizing packages shipped from China to the USA.
Trump (in a rare moment of not being an idiot) threatened to withdraw from the agreement over the subsidies. He didn't, but the agreement did get amended, and packages from China will start becoming less subsidized (more expensive) by 2025.
> I'm frequently asked where people can get such a ridiculously large amount of pi. Be warned that 50 million digits of pi takes up 50 megabytes. This can take up to 4 hours to download with a 28.8k modem!
I love the old internet. Users gave a shit about other users.
> Fortunately it was a granite countertop and not quartz.
Granites are primarily composed of feldspar and quartz, which are both primarily composed of silica. Silica is the thing that causes silicosis, and when that granite was cut it was clouds of silica dust that covered your home.
You were no more safe in that granite dust than you would have been in quartz dust.
Not sure I agree/understand, but it seems like if I’m inhaling 2x the poison over the same amount of time, that has exactly 2x the impact/risk on your health.
This isn’t the same as something like a virus, where it’s more binary.
To be clear, I’m not arguing to prove I’m right (because I’m certainly not an expert and am open to being wrong), I’m trying to understand more about how particle inhalation can have varying risks (or not) based on density.
TFA article says the stuff gets in your lungs and stays there. Are you trying to figure out whether you should wear protection for x% silica containing materials? Seems like a fool's errand.
Not at all, I actually wear a mask when just sweeping the garage. :) I certainly think there should be regulation requiring masks in industries like this — and I will definitely wear a mask the next time I’m around any sort of countertop dust.
I’m mostly just curious about the science, and whether/why it is more binary than I’m understanding, vs. just taking some random HN strangers’ words.
Silica particles won't disolve in water, it's like breathing broken glass, and that's the main problem not limited to silica, but breathing ANY particle that harms your organs.
Lots of things don’t dissolve in water but are still effectively contained by water. That said, I wonder what happens to the water being used for this purpose. If it isn’t treated/disposed of somehow, I could see it evaporating and allowing the dust to become airborne again. If this is in a permanent shop environment, it might explain the apparent lack of effectiveness of this solution.
In point of fact, alcohol causes more deaths per year than all other drugs combined:
CDC [0]: Alcohol causes over 140,000 deaths per year according to data between 2015 and 2019
CDC [1]: All other drugs caused 100,000 deaths in the twelve month ending in April 2021
There's a lot of arguments to be made as to why (different legal status, different cultural norms around use, etc.) but the fact is that, currently, alcohol use is more lethal than all other drug use combined.
The number of people dying from jumping off the empire state building is orders of magnitude less than the ones you quoted... that doesn't mean you have good odds of surviving the jump or that it's a good idea to build a jumping ramp.
An adaptation of the "narcissist's prayer" for climate change deniers:
---
Climate Change isn't happening
And if it is, it isn't that bad.
And if it is, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not our fault.
And if it is, we didn't mean it.
And if we did, you should have stopped it.
---
Your comment is on line 3.
> we need to allow ourselves to conceive of such things as human civilization continuing on without much fuss.
There is a large difference between "conceiving of possibilities" and burying our heads in the sand. Climate Change is not a new phenomenon, we've known about it for 50 years (and the oil companies have known for longer). We have decades of research telling us that climate change will drive extreme weather. We have decades of research predicting the effects it will have on human civilization.
None of this is new info. The "alternate possibilities" have been considered and disproved a long time ago. We know, without ambiguity, what's happening.
My meta point is that the moral urgency of the discussion has reached such a fever pitch that if, hypothetically, you were wrong about something -
perhaps that the effects will be different than your expectations, perhaps that human ingenuity will overcome the challenges, perhaps that some other, bigger problem will rear it’s head
- you have no mechanism left to tell. If that sounds like the narcissists prayer to you then so be it.
We absolutely should acknowledge the causes of our infrastructure uptime differences and evaluate if it's actually worth it to match the uptime of a place that doesn't have the same challenges.
Like, sure, if we wanted to we could massively build our electrical infrastructure to absolutely never go down. Hurricanes, tornadoes, massive hail, earthquakes, whatever. We can build so much redundancy and extreme engineering tolerances. It might cost us $1+/kWh though. Is it worth it? No? So then there's some dollar amount where we'll allow some downtime and failures for cost savings.
So what if the power in my house goes down a few minutes a year. I'd much rather pay a lot less for a few minutes of downtime than pay a lot more just so...the lights don't go out for a few minutes every now and then?
I’d also point out that Germany has its share of wild weather, including floods and storms. And yet they keep their grid up a lot more reliably than the US.
Germany has some floods, but nothing like a hurricane or tornado. I only spent 2 years in Germany, but even a typical summer thunderstorm in the NE US seemed worse than in Germany.
If Japan had 1.2 minutes of outages a year would you say Germany had shit infrastructure? No because 12 minutes is great and not really worth improving on.
2 hours per year without power per year is probably fine. A year is a long time.
(Disclaimer: I'm an engineer at Microsoft, and I use Kusto basically every day)
This seems to me to be a deliberate design choice. Microsoft doesn't want engineers mutating the databases by hand. There are mechanisms to do that (mostly outside of Kusto, and usually to resolve privacy incidents), but the common case of querying is not supposed to allow for arbitrary changes to the database.