4 ms·

Yes, but all in service of what amounts to automated stealing (cough) supplying liquidity. Better than adtech, anyway. Or nukes. Lots of things, really. (I wou

by ncmncm 4y ago

Yes, but all in service of what amounts to automated stealing (cough) supplying liquidity. Better than adtech, anyway. Or nukes. Lots of things, really. (I would have said weapons, last year.) The only really defensible tech activity these days is things to help get off carbon-emitting processes. Making factories to make electrolysers. Making wind turbines better. Adapting airliners to carry liquid hydrogen in underwing nacelles. Making robots to put up solar fences on farms and pastures. Banking energy for nighttime without lithium. Making ammonia on tropical solar farms for export to high latitudes. It's even money whether we can get it done before civilization collapses. I guess we will need plenty of liquidity...

kragen 4y ago
Those are worthwhile problems to solve, but they seem well on their way to getting solved, though it's not guaranteed. Your civilization is collapsing because you're fighting each other, not because of climate change. Fighting each other is also why it's not guaranteed. Other problems are also worthwhile to solve. I agree that zero-sum HFT and negative-sum adtech and arms races are not the most prominent ones.
- culi 4y ago
  > Your civilization is collapsing because you're fighting each other, not because of climate change 10% of all deaths each year are due to air pollution. There's pretty much no place on earth where unfiltered rainwater is still safe to drink. Ocean acidification is accelerating and killing off the organisms that are both the biggest producers of oxygen and the biggest sequesterers of carbon.
  - kragen 4y ago
    Air pollution is not due to climate change, unless you count CO₂ as air pollution, but that's eargrayish misreasoning — that's not the kind of air pollution that causes 10% of all deaths. The sort of local air pollution we're talking about amounts to factories strip-mining local children's lungs for profit; it's a form of fighting each other. Rainwater harvesting risks seem to be primarily due to birds pooping on your roof and other fecal contamination, and they can be adequately mitigated by boiling or chemical sterilization: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41545-019-0030-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41545-019-0030-5. Climate change very likely would collapse your civilization, given enough time, but that isn't what is happening now.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  If we spent on those what we spend instead on adtech etc., it really would be guaranteed. Even with fighting invaders. Albeit probably not invaders using nukes.
  - kragen 4y ago
    I think 228 GWp of solar power generation capacity is being installed in 02022, which is about US$50 billion for the solar modules and another US$50 billion for balance of plant, not counting things like battery storage, pumped storage, transmission, and Fischer-Tropsch. Wind energy generation capacity is getting installed at a similar pace, in terms of peak gigawatts per year, but I have the impression that it is significantly cheaper. Tesla's revenues are US$53.8 billion per year, of which about US$0.07 billion is solar panels and therefore getting double counted. I don't know how to measure other automakers' EV production, housing switching to heat pumps, housing adding insulation, and R&D, so I'm just not counting them. Alphabet's yearly revenue is US$258 billion, some of which is earned from things like Google Play, Google Cloud, and Google Workspace, and some of which has been spent on things like Makani, Verily Life Sciences, DeepMind, and Google Fiber. Meta's revenue is US$118 billion. https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/internet-services-technology-media-and-telecom/googles-revenue/ https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/internet-services-t... says, "Google earned nearly 81% of its total revenues in 2021 from advertisements," and it's talking about that US$258B number, not some smaller number that excludes other Alphabet companies. We can maybe estimate the whole adtech spend, generously, at US$400 billion per year [edited: was US$300 billion]: most of Alphabet, all of Meta, plus a handful of smaller fish. (I say this is "generous" because it's counting all the effort that goes into running Google Search, YouTube, Instagram, and Android development as "adtech", because it's monetized through ads, even though most of the people working on those projects are not directly concerned with ads; if you omit that, you might size adtech at only US$50 billion.) And maybe US$200 billion per year goes into the renewables transition. I'm not convinced that doubling that to US$400 billion per year would guarantee a win, particularly when the humans are going around bombing each other's power plants, snarling up power plant construction and energy-efficient housing in red tape, and publishing disinformation that "debunks" global warming. These are of course very rough estimates, but how would you estimate these numbers? As far as I know, there aren't any invaders the humans are fighting; they're only fighting other humans, plus the occasional rogue elephant.
kajaktum 4y ago
I think we have more than just environmental issues in this world...but sure.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Not for long, unless...
eru 4y ago
Who would they be stealing from?
- ncmncm 4y ago
  The body politic. People program computers to exchange messages furiously, to no external effect besides power consumed. Then they go buy yachts. It's all perfectly legal, of course.
  - eru 4y ago
    I'm not sure how this 'stealing' is supposed to work.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      The stock market is a zero-sum game. Every single penny taken out was a penny put in. Money going in is people's pensions, largely. As a society, we like to reward people who do things that are useful: feed, house, clothe, warm, transport, educate, protect, medicate, lately amuse people, and get money that may be exchanged for those services, or yachts. HFT traders provide none of those, nor anything comparable, but get yachts anyway.
      - Kranar 4y ago
        >The stock market is a zero-sum game. Every single penny taken out was a penny put in. Money going in is people's pensions, largely. Ah, so you lack a basic understanding of how the stock market works, but think you're qualified to make very strong statements about it.
        ncmncm 4y ago
        Trades batched by second would provide as much liquidity as anybody could use, without the yachts.
        4y ago
sanitycheck 4y ago
Well, there's education - that's net good. And I think entertainment is pretty neutral (even slightly positive) if it doesn't involve gambling or rely on player addiction. Fintech and adtech are where people bright enough to contribute positively to society go to make money instead, kind like the oil industry. All IMHO, YMMV, etc.

by ncmncm 4y ago

kragen 4y ago

Those are worthwhile problems to solve, but they seem well on their way to getting solved, though it's not guaranteed. Your civilization is collapsing because you're fighting each other, not because of climate change. Fighting each other is also why it's not guaranteed. Other problems are also worthwhile to solve. I agree that zero-sum HFT and negative-sum adtech and arms races are not the most prominent ones.

culi 4y ago
> Your civilization is collapsing because you're fighting each other, not because of climate change 10% of all deaths each year are due to air pollution. There's pretty much no place on earth where unfiltered rainwater is still safe to drink. Ocean acidification is accelerating and killing off the organisms that are both the biggest producers of oxygen and the biggest sequesterers of carbon.
- kragen 4y ago
  Air pollution is not due to climate change, unless you count CO₂ as air pollution, but that's eargrayish misreasoning — that's not the kind of air pollution that causes 10% of all deaths. The sort of local air pollution we're talking about amounts to factories strip-mining local children's lungs for profit; it's a form of fighting each other. Rainwater harvesting risks seem to be primarily due to birds pooping on your roof and other fecal contamination, and they can be adequately mitigated by boiling or chemical sterilization: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41545-019-0030-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41545-019-0030-5. Climate change very likely would collapse your civilization, given enough time, but that isn't what is happening now.
ncmncm 4y ago
If we spent on those what we spend instead on adtech etc., it really would be guaranteed. Even with fighting invaders. Albeit probably not invaders using nukes.
- kragen 4y ago
  I think 228 GWp of solar power generation capacity is being installed in 02022, which is about US$50 billion for the solar modules and another US$50 billion for balance of plant, not counting things like battery storage, pumped storage, transmission, and Fischer-Tropsch. Wind energy generation capacity is getting installed at a similar pace, in terms of peak gigawatts per year, but I have the impression that it is significantly cheaper. Tesla's revenues are US$53.8 billion per year, of which about US$0.07 billion is solar panels and therefore getting double counted. I don't know how to measure other automakers' EV production, housing switching to heat pumps, housing adding insulation, and R&D, so I'm just not counting them. Alphabet's yearly revenue is US$258 billion, some of which is earned from things like Google Play, Google Cloud, and Google Workspace, and some of which has been spent on things like Makani, Verily Life Sciences, DeepMind, and Google Fiber. Meta's revenue is US$118 billion. https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/internet-services-technology-media-and-telecom/googles-revenue/ https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/internet-services-t... says, "Google earned nearly 81% of its total revenues in 2021 from advertisements," and it's talking about that US$258B number, not some smaller number that excludes other Alphabet companies. We can maybe estimate the whole adtech spend, generously, at US$400 billion per year [edited: was US$300 billion]: most of Alphabet, all of Meta, plus a handful of smaller fish. (I say this is "generous" because it's counting all the effort that goes into running Google Search, YouTube, Instagram, and Android development as "adtech", because it's monetized through ads, even though most of the people working on those projects are not directly concerned with ads; if you omit that, you might size adtech at only US$50 billion.) And maybe US$200 billion per year goes into the renewables transition. I'm not convinced that doubling that to US$400 billion per year would guarantee a win, particularly when the humans are going around bombing each other's power plants, snarling up power plant construction and energy-efficient housing in red tape, and publishing disinformation that "debunks" global warming. These are of course very rough estimates, but how would you estimate these numbers? As far as I know, there aren't any invaders the humans are fighting; they're only fighting other humans, plus the occasional rogue elephant.

kajaktum 4y ago

I think we have more than just environmental issues in this world...but sure.

ncmncm 4y ago
Not for long, unless...

eru 4y ago

Who would they be stealing from?

ncmncm 4y ago
The body politic. People program computers to exchange messages furiously, to no external effect besides power consumed. Then they go buy yachts. It's all perfectly legal, of course.
- eru 4y ago
  I'm not sure how this 'stealing' is supposed to work.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    The stock market is a zero-sum game. Every single penny taken out was a penny put in. Money going in is people's pensions, largely. As a society, we like to reward people who do things that are useful: feed, house, clothe, warm, transport, educate, protect, medicate, lately amuse people, and get money that may be exchanged for those services, or yachts. HFT traders provide none of those, nor anything comparable, but get yachts anyway.
    - Kranar 4y ago
      >The stock market is a zero-sum game. Every single penny taken out was a penny put in. Money going in is people's pensions, largely. Ah, so you lack a basic understanding of how the stock market works, but think you're qualified to make very strong statements about it.
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        Trades batched by second would provide as much liquidity as anybody could use, without the yachts.
        4y ago

sanitycheck 4y ago

Well, there's education - that's net good. And I think entertainment is pretty neutral (even slightly positive) if it doesn't involve gambling or rely on player addiction. Fintech and adtech are where people bright enough to contribute positively to society go to make money instead, kind like the oil industry. All IMHO, YMMV, etc.