pbmonster
10d ago
No sarcasm, just a misunderstanding. I assumed we're talking total mitigation costs, you almost certainly were talking about the yearly budget of the project.
I agree, with $10B per year you can design a new airframe, build a few hundred and then fly them around the clock, resulting in a few dozen megatons lifted to the stratosphere per year. That certainly would get some results.
pbmonster
10d ago
Yeah, I don't doubt that it's comparatively cheap.
"Tens of billions" is just... extremely cheap. Since stratospheric seeding involves aircraft development, billions go fast. Both Airbus and Boeing spent between $5B and $10B on their last couple of civilian airframes (and that price just gets you a prototype and a manufacturing line). And since those future stratospheric seeders need to both fly a lot and fly unusually high, I wouldn't expect a civil development budget, I'd expect a military budget - those tend to run 2 orders of magnitude higher (but that gets you a couple hundred airframes and their continued maintenance).
And yes, I consider side effects part of those unknown unknowns.
pbmonster
10d ago
Sulfur dioxide seeding or a sun shade only cost tens of billions.
Do you have a good source for the costs of geo-engineering? Unfortunately, currently the field looks like an absolute shitshow to me. It's at the same time full of taboo and hype, riddled with known/unknown unknowns and (to my knowledge), foundational research is sparse and actually engineering is non-existent.
I'm especially interested in details like the delivery mechanism in stratospheric SO2 seeding. What does the engineering look like? Minor altitude-boosting redesigns of the 737, or is it a from-scratch design of a "U2-cargo"? Do we build 100 or 10 000 new airframes?
Same with marine cloud brightening. Is that 1000 drone boats with a snow-cannon spraying sea water, or 100 000 platforms each carrying a gigantic stack-effect chimney?
pbmonster
11d ago
In South Africa, the richest major African country, 2/3 of women but only 1/3 of men are obese. Strongly indicative of a genetic explanation
The entire thing can also just be explained by culture. Obese women in SA are considered attractive, while obese men are not. Both act accordingly, which is easier in SA because they don't yet eat as much highly processed food as people in the West do (and so they have a little more control over their weight, i.e. just deciding not to get fat is easier there).
pbmonster
27d ago
Very counter intuitive. Do you have more on this?
Naively, you'd assume that much of the left tail has no chance to attend college, and much of the left half little motivation to do so (they didn't enjoy learning in high school, so don't really want to continue their education).
Is there something that filters the right trail just as strongly?
pbmonster
30d ago
Where are the immigrants from?
That's relatively diverse, at least from language, income and a "native trust level" perspective. The largest groups are, in descending order: Italy, Germany, Portugal, France, former Yugoslavia, Albania and Turkey. None of those groups is more than 10%, an together they're below 60% of immigration origin.
Maybe that diversity helps with not forming ghettos. Maybe all these origin countries have higher-trust societies than the most common countries the US gets immigrants from. But my intuition says this isn't the case.
I often feel like people get the system they deserve. That the system is a product of the people, and trying to change a system’s rules on its own can only have marginal effect. We have a low trust, somewhat dysfunctional society.
The interesting question is: how do you change the people, or at least stop them from changing for the worse?
I spend a lot of time in Switzerland, and on paper it should be pretty similar to many US states. Population size and density, GDP per capita, Gini index, cost of living, ect. are all pretty comparable to one of the "nice" US states. Even healthcare is kind of similar (certainly closer to the US than to the EU). Also, they have insane immigration, and have had for decades: 40% of permanent residents over 15 have an immigration background, 35% don't hold citizenship. Walk through a major city, and you'll hear a dozen different languages spoken within minutes. Walk onto a construction site, and none of them will be one of the national languages (OK, you'll probably hear Italian).
And yet, Swiss society is insanely high trust. Bikes unlocked, phones left on empty cafe tables, unaccompanied children move all over town on bikes or public transit. Farm stands have cash sitting in an open box, stores don't have locks on any product, self checkout is 100% unsupervised (and isn't using a digital scale to check what you bought).
The question is: why? How do they run a 1%-2% immigration rate, and instill the honor principle/high trust into everybody that arrives? How do they keep their citizens from defecting, practically ever? Of course, rate of incarceration is extremely low, too.
Or maybe we have to turn the question around: why are Americans choosing to defect so frequently now? Is the gini index not covering real differences in inequality?
pbmonster
1mo ago
What's your level? After 15 years of zero exposure, only extensive ruins of the language remain to me, so I've been listening to innerFrench and I love it. But if your level of understanding is close to fluency, that podcast will feel slow and annoy you with frequent elaborate definitions (in French).
pbmonster
1mo ago
best to avoid all such and fry in animal fats I guess.
Depends on what you worry about, but if its linoleic acid, animal fats are not the silver bullet. Pork fat is around 15% linoleic acid, chicken fat is around 20%.
The entire seed oil discussion is a red herring. Avoiding them only works because you end up eating less processed foods and less fried foods.
The energy in the wind scales as the cube of the wind speed.
This is true in theory, and a decent model for small wind turbines in relatively slow winds.
It's not useful for large modern turbines (let's say 3 MW and up), since it assumes that higher wind speed automatically results in faster rotor RPM. But since rotor RPM is critically limited by blade tip velocity, a large turbine reaches max RPM in ultra light wind. After that point, power scales linear with wind speed. See this power curve, first example I found
Add to that, that a large turbine reaches nameplate capacity at around 10 m/s wind speed (and goes linear at around 3 m/s, shuts down at around 30 m/s), and it's really not that much of a problem in a modern park.
pbmonster
1mo ago
This is as far as I'm willing to engage on this topic at this time, I might make a top level post in the main thread after Christmas if I get time with more information and sources.
Please do, I look forward to it!
Currently, I'm still bullish on wind. I think there's a reason why the Chinese are installing massive new capacity. Also, I've seen forecasts that global Li-Ion production capacity will be 8 TWh next year, several hundred percent percent above demand. If this is true, the bottom will drop out of the market and grid scale battery storage will suddenly become very feasible.
pbmonster
1mo ago
Yeah, but those are all classic decarbonization measures, right? Yes, those work. But the premise was to use a pollution argument instead.
Unless you want to simply rename "decarbonization" into "reducing pollution" (and people will resist that, a gas turbine just doesn't produce enough black smoke or yellow water), this won't work. It's too easy to reduce visible pollution while keeping carbon emissions exactly the same.
pbmonster
1mo ago
Do you have more about this?
AFAIK, onshore wind in particular is by far the cheapest form of electricity available, most decent locations should be well below $20/MWh today.
Are Sweden's wind parks doing so poorly because those are all first-generation off-shore parks, using experimental turbine foundations and giant turbine prototypes (where scaling effects from mass production have not kicked in yet)? Has Sweden massively overbuilt wind capacity without investing in storage, and now the wind-parks collectively ruin the spot market for each other on windy days?
In theory, onshore wind parks are cheap to built and cheap to run. Wind in Sweden should have a capacity factor >40%, with barely any hours per year where it goes below 10%. In an ideal location like this, wind should even beat solar (in an ideal location) for the next couple of years - and solar is now cheap as dirt.
when fighting pollution is more doable, easier to gather support for, actually fosters innovation and chances of reducing it - will meaningfully help with CO2
I don't think this is true. Can you elaborate on that?
The big CO2 producers in a modern economy (and even in a modern economy with significant heavy industry) are producing CO2 without adding much pollution otherwise. Gas turbines dump clean CO2 exhaust by design, and much of cement and chemical production also runs on natural gas. Coal plants have marched down the learning curve for 100 years, exhaust gas treatment is extensive and effective. The remaining steel mills still running blast furnaces instead of electric arc furnaces also already need to treat their exhaust.
The only semi-low hanging fruit I could think of is further cleaning up the diesels used in transport, construction and agriculture. But again, you can reduce pollution here a bit, but until batteries improve further, those processes will emit exactly as much CO2 as before you've reduced pollution.
And sure, we probably should flat-out ban two-strokes. But I doubt you'd even save 1% of global CO2, even if pollution in certain cities would improve noticeably. And objectively - both from a pollution an greenhouse gas perspective - we probably also should ban any and all large-scale livestock operations. But the effect on meat prices would be absurdly unpopular almost everywhere.
pbmonster
1mo ago
where everyone pools money
there's an algorithm to decide whether it's legitimate and how much money it should pay out
I think we can take out the blockchain and focus on two pretty load-bearing elements of this scheme: you want to automate insurance underwriting and claims adjustment.
Both are possible (and interesting) in idealized conditions (i.e. derivative markets), but completely non-trivial in all real-world insurance markets. This "algorithm" would probably be considered at least weak AGI.
pbmonster
1mo ago
Probably says something about how the world thinks about the health insurance companies.
How the US thinks about health insurance. The rest of the developed world doesn't really feel... anything when you ask them about their insurance provider. Maybe it feels a bit expensive, and - unsurprisingly, since its mandated by law - they always pay your bills.
pbmonster
1mo ago
We just don't do all the river and coastal hauling of manufactured goods like the Europeans do, not sure whether it's because we have better rail shipping or some other reason.
No, it's literally the Jones act. Look at how energy gets into the northeastern US. A huge part is provided by Canada, just because that bypasses the Jones act (and because they have legacy pipelines and transmission lines - and the blue states up there keep killing any new projects of that kind). Which, by the way, makes energy prices kind of a problem for the Northwestern states when the tariffs come.
If we're only talking about braces: Significantly lower risk, less invasive, in theory much easier to reverse - you could just pull teeth out of alignment again if you wanted to, to the locations they where before if you made imprints/photos. In my mind, braces are much closer to resistance training (or daily wearing a weighted vest and ankle weights) than they are to surgery.
And besides the obvious non-cosmetic benefits of aligned teeth (which we're going to ignore as instructed), there's also the mostly-cosmetic benefit of tooth prosthetics and veneers fitting much better/easier onto an aligned set of teeth, allowing them to be thinner, cheaper and being seated more securely on the jaws. Just in case they're needed in old age...
The Migration Period starting 300 AD ultimately resulted in the fall of Rome and a massive decrease of technology on the European continent. A billion people moving away from the equator (after the first wet bulb events), and later several billion people moving away from coastal areas (after they're sick and tired of rebuilding after getting flooded every year) easily have the capacity to "seriously effect human civilization".
It doesn't have to. Unprecedented development of infrastructure for those people and an unthinkable change of culture (both of the migrants and the native people they join) could mitigate this. So could unprecedented violence at the borders.
I'm a pessimist. The west doesn't have the capacity for either of those options.
pbmonster
1mo ago
our primary concern should be consumption inequality, because consumption is ultimately what really matters
Even if the first premise is true (big caveat), we'll have to look at how an increase in consumption scales when isolated from wealth. Because we'll run into fun non-linearities pretty much immediately.
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For a very slight increase in your "consumption of housing", you can get a massive increase of your living standard - because for close to the price of rent for a shitty apartment, you can afford the interest on a mortgage. Sometimes, this could even mean a decrease in consumption allowing you the quality of live jump of renter --> home owner.
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For another increase ("only" double digit percentage) in "consumption of housing", you can decrease your commuting time by >100 hours per year.
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Especially at the lower end, food quality also scales non-linearly.
And of course, when comparing two subjects with equal consumption, the presence of wealth makes a huge difference in the feeling of security in life.
billionaires would have to consume 3,300 times more per capita
In all three metrics (consumption, income, wealth), statements like that make little sense. In the end, only quality of life matters. But that's notoriously hard to measure.
Honestly, then just use feedly.com or feeder.co
Both have decent Android/iOS apps. If you want to mess around with it only for a few minutes to begin with, Outlook also still has a built-in RSS reader. It's really easy to use. Rightclick the "RSS-Feeds" folder, select "Add Feed" and paste something like "https://www.astralcodexten.com/feed/". Done. (All Substack blogs provide their RSS feed just by adding /feed/ to the end of the address.)
RSS doesn't need to be this open source nerd fest, that just happens to be the guys who still use it most consistently. The reason for that is a bit historic. RSS used to be hugely popular 15 years ago. Everybody in tech was using it, every day. But it's by definition a decentralized technology - and Google, Meta and Amazon really have no use for something like that. So they worked hard at replacing it.
pbmonster
1mo ago
Yeah, but almost nobody self-hosts on their PC. You either rent a server/virtual machine somewhere for cheap, or you put something like a RaspberryPi on your network. That uses less electricity, and you can mess with your PC without taking your private cloud offline.
If don't have a server somewhere already anyway, or if you're not extremely privacy conscious, or if you're not actively looking for a beginner's hacking project, don't bother with self-hosting.
pbmonster
2mo ago
Mine is the fear of missing out on potentially helpful information. What is yours?
This is certainly part of it. Even if you don't 'like' any content at all, twitter, youtube et. al will feed you only more of what you consumed previously - even worse if you follow other accounts. But I also just really don't want those companies to built up a profile about me in order to sell me ads.
It also has previously unintended side-effects: for example, people now frequently report having trouble ad-blocking on youtube. This isn't an issue if you're not logged in.
Complicated question. Quick answer for normies: Feedly.
Complicated answer: Are you OK with making an account and maybe even paying for it? Do you need cross-platform support (sync between your phone and a tablet/PC)? If no, your options are endless. I like miniflux.
If you want cross-platform without a third party, you need to self-host your feeds. I really like the RSS features Nextcloud brings. Use and app on your phone, the web interface anywhere else. Miniflux can also selfhost.
You can have extremely accurate and liquid corn futures without high frequency trading, and without sucking thousands of man-years of the highest human capital down the drain. We're not arguing about banning future markets, but I'm pretty sure corn farmers still can grow corn if you take away synthetic collateralized debt obligations and other modern financial vehicles.
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