Going on your Slavic username: as an American who moved to a country without forced-air HVAC, it’s been quite a revelation to discover how backwards forced air really is.

Forced air is pretty necessary for air conditioning (cooling).

For heat, radiant is nicer. But most people don't want to pay to have two completely separate climate control infrastructures in their house.

Heat pumps, they are one piece of infrastructure that work for both heating and cooling as it's a symmetric process.

But you still need to move air for cooling (as opposed to using water for heating), because you can’t cause condensation during cooling without creating damage and health risks.

Hydronic (water transport) heat is great: extremely comfortable and quiet compared to forced hot air.

I fully agree that this was a big miss on the human operators’ part. But it’s a small business and I have repeatedly seen so much worse than this. Vendors charging money to allow customers to connect AI to systems must have a robust story for protecting them from disaster. Everyone involved needs to be working hard to limit the impact of mistakes and surprises.

That “but..” is a big key to the difference between Russia and the US in this conversation. The US has a severe cultural propensity for rule-following and reporting things, but in Russia there’s an interesting mix of people seeing society as a commons, seeing personal responsibility as foremost, seeing laws as guidelines that may or may not correspond to reality, and seeing reporting something as fairly extreme behavior. And this includes people at all levels.

1) Russia is generally very safe, and 2) I agree that the violence amongst children is crazy. It’s a great place to homeschool and free-range and I have not found a way to send children to school in a way that’s acceptable to us.

Larger cities have private schools. There are also embassy-affiliated schools (yes, even today).

In public schools there's this unofficial "letter grade system". Unlike the US, where kids homerooms are mixed around each year on purpose, in Russia a homeroom group sticks together through the entirety of their school career, grades 5-12. Of course some kids will move away, and new kids will join, but the core group remains. Many lifelong friendships are formed this way.

Now - and this part doesn't officially exist, but it certainly does in practice - these groups are not created equal. Let's say there are 3 teachers who are picking up a grade 5 homeroom. They will stick with these kids until they graduate. So, the teacher with the most seniority has their pick of the "best" graduating elementary students. These will be well-behaved and academically strong kids. Their new homeroom will be called 5A. Then the second most senior teacher has their pick. This homeroom will become 5B. And 5C onwards are the "leftovers". And these groups will stick together until they are 12A, B, and C.

If you want a good school experience for a nerdy shy kid - they have to be in "A". Of course, as a newbie who is unfamiliar with the system... your kid will likely be put in "C" ("ve"). And you probably know enough about how Russia works by now to understand how to go about changing that ;)

Russia doesn't have reliablr statistics on anything. It like saying North Korea is safe.

North Korea likely is extremely safe when things like street violence and bullying are concerned. It's only unsafe for dissidents.

And you know, you can also ask people. In software there is a large population that grew up in the ex-USSR. Many of us still regularly visit the old country and talk to friends and family that live there. And we aren't all bots, despite what many seem to believe.

The Third Reich was only unsafe for Jews, Roma, Catholics, Homosexuals and everyone who was against Hitler. Other than that it was extremely safe.

Good morning from Russia, where I moved my large free-range family (from the US) with the topic of free-ranging children very high on the list of reasons why.

My children cross town by themselves to attend classes, it’s normal to see children walking or riding public transport by themselves once they turn about age 7.

There’s crime and bullying — we have always homeschooled successfully and have had negative experiences with classrooms here — but in my opinion it’s not as bad as the places I’ve lived in the US.

And the streets are definitely safer. There are some risks like gopniki enjoying causing random trouble like pepper spraying strangers, but I believe that type of danger is a threat mostly to young adult men and almost certainly not children. Our daughters can safely do what they need to do with appropriate precautions (that do not include staying within single-digit meters of a vigilant adult at all times else CPS!!!).

Russia has higher incarceration rates and higher criminality then EU and USA.

Also, French, German, Swesish, you name it do all the stuff alone. And third, they have less bullying in schools.

The US is 5th, Russia is 33rd.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...

Seems like they dropped after they startes Ukrainian war. They used to be higher then USA in those rates.

Not sure "sending them to be killed by Ukrainians" is better then incarceration. But, probably costs less money.

I’m interested in what may exist for Byzantine notation.

So test it separately.

Yes, the factors to consider include:

- cost of the effort

- probability of success

- trade-offs in the case of success or of failure

- the possibility of only partial success creating an even messier situation than the existing one

Having a way to do the whole thing on a much smaller timescale and budget lets decision makers focus more on those externalities, and also can simplify them. This kind of bit rot is somewhere (often everywhere) in many fast-moving businesses, as a natural consequence of the value tradeoffs we have had up to now. Now there are machines that can speedrun the grunt work of clearing them.

She should have sent it! The first person to disrespect a child is the loser, and shouldn’t be the child’s parent.

I understand your point and have a long list of bitter grievances against Apple, but OS X triggered a large influx of geeks to the Mac world. It was a Unix that just worked, and there were all kinds of important ways that appealed to key tech people.