myrmidon

34 ms·

661.
by myrmidon 1y ago
This is exactly what I mean-- I think also the whole housing affordability is just another side of this coin: Buying a home grew more expensive (in terms of median income) for decades, and that alone is a huge problem in my view, with no re
662.
by myrmidon 1y ago
I'm not saying that things are necessarily gonna get worse-- just that human work decreasing in relative value creates huge (new!) problems for our current wealth distribution mechanisms. Maybe there is an easy way to have our cake and
663.
by myrmidon 1y ago
I think increased automation and now AI are making wealth inequality problems inherently worse. The existence (and prevalence) of food delivery work alone is a depressing portent in my view: If delivering food for objectively shitty pay
664.
by myrmidon 1y ago
Still a no-can-do for our species currently, and it's not close. Would need around 1km/s on top of its average orbital velocity to escape, but the mass is probably roughly in the 10^22kg range, so thats like 10^28 Joule. Significa
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by myrmidon 1y ago
This is very interesting. Apparently beam collimation is much less of a show-stopper than I would have assumed. But I don't see us putting a a 1000 kilometer lens into orbit anytime soon, and that multi-terawatt (sustained!) laser syst
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by myrmidon 1y ago
This direct fusion drive is a really interesting concept. Maybe something like this could be used for interstellar travel in a century (or five), it is very encouraging that there is active research on it. ~5kg of thrust is not a lot, but o
667.
by myrmidon 1y ago
I do agree that the method is sensitive to X-scaling (and also Y-scale, which is logarithmic here!)-- but the "methodology" is at least defensible: scale X/Y to make existing data appear linear and make the "linear extra
668.
by myrmidon 1y ago
Good point, but I think those are "worth" less from a risk-analysis PoV: 1km diameter is apparently about 200 times more likely (1/500000 years) according to wiki, but would need to kill 40M people to match the extinction-lev
669.
by myrmidon 1y ago
I agree that detection is a very helpful first step and almost enough on its own. But I'm unsure how far this can be pushed-- I think impact certainty for a century or more might be physically impossible, because of uncertainty in orbi
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by myrmidon 1y ago
I don't believe that this would change the outcome much: It seems hard to argue that preservation of a nonhuman species would be worth more than a million lives (=> negligible) and assuming global loss of all human life is already u
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by myrmidon 1y ago
These numbers are not what I expected at all. So you could actually make an argument that to a country like the US, full 100% reliable asteroid protection is only worth like $50M/year (even if an impact means full extinction)? So if
672.
by myrmidon 1y ago
Note that Germany already finished bringing back 300 tons of gold from NYC and about the same amount from Paris in 2016, so this is a bit out of date (that whole transfer was completed ahead of schedule, which indicates, in hindsight, that
673.
by myrmidon 1y ago
This is not as much as it looks like at first glance. "Revenue" for the german state is something around $2000B, while their ~3000 tons of gold are worth ~300B. It is plausible to me that building up a gold reserve might be worth
674.
by myrmidon 1y ago
It seems difficult to argue that this would apply, because what would the "technological measure to control access" be that a bittorrent client (or tracker) is circumventing? I also don't know of any precedent where bittorren
675.
by myrmidon 1y ago
> Compounds consisting only of the element nitrogen [...] are considered promising clean energy-storage materials They are not actually serious about this, right? I feel if that directly acknowledging Klapötke of all people is basicall
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by myrmidon 1y ago
> Putting a price on it does not solve it because the entities that compete for the water with the data centers are out-matched financially. I don't think this argument works at all, because bigger datacenter operator does NOT mean
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by myrmidon 1y ago
Yes, but thats is not what the article advocates for (allocation of water between farming/residential/industry). It wants to keep industrial water use away without even having a discussion about water allocation/price. This
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by myrmidon 1y ago
Be very careful about considering this a "grassroots campaign" against "evil foreign megacorps". This is lobbying effort directed at policy makers and the public. As others have pointed out: There is an very simple solut
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by myrmidon 1y ago
Sure, but bjorkandkd unpromptedly accused Preston of being a liar, which is just incorrect as far as I can tell. Everyone is of course free to make up their own mind, but when making public accusations I would at least expect an honest effo
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by myrmidon 1y ago
Where is OP not being truthful? You assert that there was domestic violence unrelated to drugs, but you present no evidence for this, and substance abuse is strongly correlated with domestic violence.
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by myrmidon 1y ago
I do believe that this article is a bit overly dramatic (how online journalism tends to be). But it did change my outlook on the recent sycophancy-episode of ChatGPT, which, at the time, seemed like a silly little mis-optimization and quite
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by myrmidon 1y ago
> Ok, so say they don't evacuate the city. What is the actual risk here that we're talking about? The risk is that hundreds of people avoidably die of cancer over the following decades, and that you lose an immense amount of tr
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by myrmidon 1y ago
Do you think that if we simulated a bee, molecule for molecule, that this simulation would behave differently from the real thing because the simulation fails to replicate its soul? What kind of behaviors in animals/humans does this so
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by myrmidon 1y ago
Direct death counts from nuclear meltdowns might be rather low, but the damage is clearly that entire cities need to be evacuated (and stay uninhabitable for decades ). Fukushima alone cost the Japanese taxpayer close to $200 billion. >
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by myrmidon 1y ago
> The regulators managed to invert the learning curve [0] This is conjecture. If you wanted to establish this, you would have to show that cost of (skilled) labor was unchanging or negligible. It is also important to consider that nuclea
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by myrmidon 1y ago
Do you consider Westbank and/or Gaza a full state independent from Israel? Because to me, those are (somewhat) autonomous regions under Israels control-- so still responsible for people living there.
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by myrmidon 1y ago
Which one you prefer is just a matter of taste. But also, you can stay sufficiently hydrated by drinking just tea. Trying that with coffee will skyrocket your caffeine intake to unhealthy levels.
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by myrmidon 1y ago
Have taken this in Europe, was really nice, and I consider this quite competitive with inter-European airlines: It saves a lot of time, because you can use central train stations instead of transfering to/from the airport, and you depa
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by myrmidon 1y ago
I think there is a big disconnect in this debate, and a lot of it comes from framing and conflicting definitions. I'll try to describe this from my PoV: Zionism, to me, is just jewish-flavored nationalism. To me, the question "has
690.
by myrmidon 1y ago
You are absolutely correct, and framing makes a huge difference on how such statements are perceived ("women are 65% the strength of men" vs "men are 50% stronger" vs "1 in hundred women stronger than average man&qu

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