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Oh, 2022

antipope.org

171–180 of 557 posts

Re: Oh, 2022

#171
post #159

I think just as his previous article might have been overly optimistic, this one is overly pessimistic. As the pendulum is in the process of swinging to the other extreme, I think we will see a lot of negative events slowing down now that people are seeing the negative consequences of their actions and try to revert course. For example, even though the world is tending towards a worst place in terms of things like cl…

Considering how US food policy continues pushing sugar consumption, driving mortality from secondary effects of liver disease (diabetes, high blood pressure, circulatory disease, cancer metastasis, obesity, gout) and tertiary effects of those, that makes COVID-19 look like, well, flu, he is not pessimistic enough.

On the other hand, eliminating sugar (actually, just fructose, and then only with not enough accompanying fiber!) from the US, UK, and Indian and Pakistani diets could be overwhelmingly easier than getting and keeping everybody vaccinated against SARS. Doesn't mean it will happen, though. It is easier to pretend it is not a problem, and blame all the deaths on the tertiary effects.

Re: Oh, 2022

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a twitter user, but this is the equivalent of "I'm not interested in being notified if this person contacts me again" right? Like me putting a Gmail rule in place to move messages from a specific source, say a specific mailing list thread that I'm not interested in out of my inbox. Is this considered taboo on Twitter?

That's mute. Block prevents the blocked user from seeing your tweets from logged in contexts and ability to reply to any of your tweets and so on. That it sort of curates a feed by limiting replies can go in both directions of course.

Why would anyone want to block, rather than mute? I suppose it's more 'honest' in some ways but the implementation as described almost feels designed to create drama.

Is it easier to block or to mute? Which one is the de facto default in the UI?

Re: Oh, 2022

#173

Do the rich, a ka "the klept" as he calls them, really suffer the most from unchecked immigration? It seems rather doubtful to me, as presumably immigrants would compete with and provide cheap labor?

Depends where we are in history. With functioning political and legal systems, police, public order, and general protection of property rights and taboo against violence, the rich benefit from immigration. It provides a more abundant, cheaper workforce, and societal institutions can prevent any negative consequences. If those political institutions collapse, there is nothing scarier than an angry mob of starving peop…

Sure but "the klept" according to the article are doing their benefitting (stealing) now, according to the article. And the institutions are still kind of working. There would also presumably be enough poor already to form a scary mob, even without immigration.

Re: Oh, 2022

#174
post #155
post #123

> "Looking further afield: it seems likely that the end of internal combustion engines will be in sight. Some countries are already scheduling a ban on IC engines to come in after 2030—electric cars are now a maturing technology with clear advantages in every respect except recharge time. Once those IC cars are no longer manufactured, we can expect a very rapid ramp-down of extraction and distribution industries for…

Cars don’t last as long as you’d think, on average. There will also be a knee in the curve where the ICE fleet drops below critical mass and gas stations start shutting down - and the harder it becomes to find a station, the faster people will switch.

They last a hell of a lot longer than they did when we were still putting TEPb in the fuel.

Re: Oh, 2022

#175
post #155
post #123

> "Looking further afield: it seems likely that the end of internal combustion engines will be in sight. Some countries are already scheduling a ban on IC engines to come in after 2030—electric cars are now a maturing technology with clear advantages in every respect except recharge time. Once those IC cars are no longer manufactured, we can expect a very rapid ramp-down of extraction and distribution industries for…

Cars don’t last as long as you’d think, on average. There will also be a knee in the curve where the ICE fleet drops below critical mass and gas stations start shutting down - and the harder it becomes to find a station, the faster people will switch.

I think ICE cars will see a retro use period like many nostalgic things, so while I agree the daily driver will change, it's very likely that fuel will be seen as some sort of luxury product. Right now fuel is a loss leader for most gas stations, that dynamic will definitely change as ICE vehicles become a toy or status symbol for upper middle class and wealthy people.

Re: Oh, 2022

#176
Tangential PSA on a lesser known work by CStross: Palimpsest, a novella that is one of the most interesting and original time-travel stories that I've come across.

Re: Oh, 2022

#177
Can we please stop linking to such long winded crazy ramblings? If this came from certain other news outlets it would have been dropped as spam

Re: Oh, 2022

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The extinction part is hyperbole though - with 7 billion humans out there it would need to hit fatality rates of 99.9...% for a decent chance of the human species to be completely wiped out. And also assuming that it would persist and/or spread well enough to also wipe out the various uncontacted tribes on 2-3 continents.

Modern society functions by virtue of a century of businesses cutting margins as thin as possible, trading supply chain fragility for lower labour and capital costs. We're already seeing wild economic issues from a much lower fatality rate disease and the labour shortages/supply chain blockages/etc it has caused. It's very easy to imagine a 30% fatality rate pandemic causing total worldwide economic collapse, causing…

I guess that I still consider global nuclear suicide-"war" to be very unlikely even (especially ?) under these conditions, but it certainly changes the calculus if you don't think the same way.

Re: Oh, 2022

#179

Should be be worried that the author of Accelerando complains about things going too fast? Future is complex, and not only "good" developments happens and start changing everything faster than ever before, bad ones does too. And we aren't rational enough to avoid the bad ones. Anyway, I'm more worried about the consequences of climate change that are not the slow rise of the global sea level than about COVID. That is…

> Should be be worried that the author of Accelerando complains about things going too fast? that depends, have you recently received any Signal messages from lobsters representing the moscow windows NT user group?

Them? I though the message was another tech support scam message.
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