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Oh, 2022

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Re: Oh, 2022

#241

Post by JohnBooty »

rektide wrote: post #199
krapp wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's a shit system though, deeply dehumanizing ways of treating each other. The system was already deeply dehumanizing. "Block early, block often" is simply the inevitable and, frankly, only reasonable reaction to years of dealing with psychopaths, assholes and trolls on the internet. I only wish Hacker News came with its own killfile. Mine would be hundred of entries long by now.

Quoted post unavailable.

There was a lot I loved about Slashdot's moderation, and it really was a step forward, but ultimately it was a failure. The end product was a giant hivemind where a narrow range of opinions (essentially: "libertarianism good, Linux good") would be automatically upvoted and everything else was quashed.

It was a step forward but I'm not really pining for it 30 years later. I agree about the lack of progress in the meantime, though.

Ultimately I'm not sure it's a solvable problem. People don't want to change their minds, and are nearly always going to seek out little "bubbles" of likeminded folks.

Re: Oh, 2022

#242

Post by llamataboot »

the_arun wrote: post #222
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll go as far as to say that Starlink is now so good i honestly believe it's going to change the other industries and not just its own. As an example I've been looking at properties outside of suburbia since testing a friends Starlink terminal. I know i can get proper broadband on par with cable anywhere. It's changed my personal long term future plans. I think it's going to change a lot of things.

Isn’t starlink internet connection expensive atm? $99 per month plus one time h/w costs?

about the same as comcast in the US...

Re: Oh, 2022

#243

Post by winrid »

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Re: Oh, 2022

#244

Post by TameAntelope »

I always enjoy long term future predictions, because our human brains are obsessed with trying to resolve tension somehow, or rather assuming that tension will resolve itself.

Specifically, in the political sphere the prediction that there's a) any intentionality or consistency in what's happening globally and b) that it'll have evolved into a "steady" state over the next ten years, one way or another.

A possibly better prediction is that we're permanently past political "stability" such as what arguably existed in post WW2 America (I guess) and western Europe (I know even less about that). From maybe 2015 (or earlier?) onwards, forever, politics will stay complex, seemingly cataclysmic, and will seem as if the other shoe is perpetually about to drop.

We've developed a permanent emotional complex around political discourse, where the boss music is playing all the time, even when we're just hanging out on our couch. By having the deluge of information about everything that we have now, any random thing can now become The Final Straw for whatever issue you'd like to pay attention to. Any given moment, any given news article can portend the doom of Your Favorite Thing, and it will be, truly, The End.

If this is right, the good news is it's not actually going to get nearly as much worse as it always seems it's about to. The bad news is it's not going to get all that much better, either. Just small steps forward or backward, where progress is measured in decades, not years.

Hopefully we get used to living in the tension, though it's probably more accurate that we won't, and that'll probably be okay.

Re: Oh, 2022

#245

Post by wk_end »

redisman wrote: post #80
ErikAugust wrote: post #76

“If the SARS family of coronaviruses had emerged just a decade earlier it's quite likely we'd be on the brink of civilizational, if not species-level, extinction by now—SARS1 has 20% mortality among patients, MERS (aka SARS2) is up around 35-40% fatal, SARS-NCoV19, aka SARS3, is down around the 1-4% fatality level. If SARS1 had gone pandemic we might plausibly have lost a billion people within two years.” That’s a sc…

Isn’t that kind of nonsensical reasoning? The viruses evolved how they evolved. I don’t see how the decade they emerged in makes a difference? It didn’t cause a pandemic because of the properties of the virus. Not because of the “decade”

One other thing to note - our ability to lockdown and maintain a functional society was contingent on the ability for enough (privileged) people to work from home that the internet has now afforded us. A few decades ago our world looked and worked very differently, and the pandemic response would have differed accordingly; if lockdowns might have actually had a direct material impact on the intelligentsia, managerial class, liberal elite, etc. or cost them their homes or their jobs, there would have been far less of a push for lockdowns.

Naturally, the working class still got screwed - either you're "non-essential" and lost your job or were "essential" and ran a risk of contracting COVID that your overlords got to avoid from the comfort of their own home - but it might've helped slow the spread of the virus, some.

Re: Oh, 2022

#246

Post by elihu »

ip26 wrote: post #155
elihu wrote: 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 EVs will quickly overtake ICE vehicles once they're price competitive and battery manufacturing scales up to the levels needed, but that's a separate issue from government bans.

My point is that several governments now have policies in place that say they're going to ban the sale of new ICE vehicles after a certain date. But they aren't going to disallow the use of ICE vehicles in their country or on their roads, which is what it would mean if they were literally going to ban ICE vehicles.

I've seen a number of articles with headlines like "X country is banning ICE vehicles after 20YZ" but then the article contents specify that it's a ban on the sale of new vehicles, which isn't the same thing. This is unhelpful sensationalism that is likely to convince a lot of conservative people that government agents are going to show up at their front door on a certain date with a tow truck to take away their Ford F150 or whatever, and that's just not the case. So, whenever I see anything that uncritically repeats that idea I find it necessary to post a comment saying that "banning ICE vehicles" isn't the same thing as "banning the sale of new ICE vehicle" in hopes that fewer people are confused and maybe more people will demand clear and accurate communication on this issue.

In the long run, bans on the sale of new vehicles will mean that existing ICE vehicles will wear out unless people want to make the extra effort to keep them running, which for most of them it's just not worth it. So, this achieves the needed policy objectives without antagonizing existing ICE vehicle owners. In other words, it's actually a much more reasonable and moderate position than what the word "ban" implies.

Re: Oh, 2022

#247

Post by scatters »

Houshalter wrote: post #217
scatters wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stross is writing as a UK-based author; obviously Brexit is having a worse effect than Covid on the UK economy.

The UK is still under covid restrictions and went into a huge amount of debt during the crisis. The events are not remotely comparable.

The UK is not under any real level of restriction, and the (own-currency) debt taken on is not of a form that would harm growth. Compared to its peers the UK is doing abysmally; the distinguishing factor is Brexit.

Re: Oh, 2022

#248

Post by TameAntelope »

fartcannon wrote: post #235

"until we develop a temperature-stable, cheap, broad-spectrum coronavirus vaccine that is patent-free" "A few weeks later, Oxford—urged on by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—reversed course. It signed an exclusive vaccine deal with AstraZeneca that gave the pharmaceutical giant sole rights and no guarantee of low prices—with the less-publicized potential for Oxford to eventually make millions from the deal and wi…

FWIW he claims that was due to manufacturing concerns, specifically that only AstraZeneca would be able to be reliable and consistent enough to reproduce the related vaccine in a way that wouldn't cause potentially catastrophic adoption issues (vaccines actually killing people due to contaminants, etc.).

Re: Oh, 2022

#249

Post by mattrighetti »

the_arun wrote: post #222
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll go as far as to say that Starlink is now so good i honestly believe it's going to change the other industries and not just its own. As an example I've been looking at properties outside of suburbia since testing a friends Starlink terminal. I know i can get proper broadband on par with cable anywhere. It's changed my personal long term future plans. I think it's going to change a lot of things.

Isn’t starlink internet connection expensive atm? $99 per month plus one time h/w costs?

In Italy an average Gbps fiber connection costs about 25€ (about 28$) per month which is insanely cheap compared to other countries.

This also means that, at least for us, 99$ (88€) per month for such a thing is a lot more at the end of the year (+756€). I hope they’ll eventually adjust that price for different markets because at the moment it’s not even competitive in my area.

Re: Oh, 2022

#250

Post by CamperBob2 »

gjm11 wrote: post #206
CamperBob2 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not an idiot for believing the professor, but you could stand to apply more critical thought to the question, and look for additional sources before thoughtlessly propagating what you heard on a podcast. Just because "a professor" says something doesn't mean you should reflexively believe it. As an example, a Stanford professor by the name of Dr. Scott Atlas was a prominent voice within the Trump administratio…

Just out of curiosity, was the phrasing of your letter (or email or whatever) to Stanford a deliberate echo of https://lettersofnote.com/2011/02/14/regarding-your-stupid-c... ?

Yes.
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