Earlier quoted context omitted.
Global Warming is absolutely a slow motion comet strike. We don't believe the science, because we don't WANT to believe it. Those of us that DO believe it feel like robots, speaking to the rest of mankind in ones and zeros. And it's still 10-20 years away, we all think. We will just move north (or south). We will just move inland or uphill. We can science our way out of this shit. Not true. None of that is true. When…
> We can science our way out of this shit. Not true. Why not? We have a lot of promising developments both in cheap energy production and in reducing the cost to vacuumed green house gases out of the atmosphere. I can easily see a world where we change almost nothing about life and still achieve net negative carbon by just ripping it out of the air. Honestly we even have the technology to do it now just limited will…
Oh, 2022
271–280 of 557 posts
Re: Oh, 2022
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#273“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…
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.
> But the so-called "childhood diseases" like mumps, rubella, and chickenpox used to kill infants by windrows.
Chickenpox is nowhere near that deadly. Remember the "Simpsons" episode where Maggie gets the chickenpox and Homer hosts a pox party?
Re: Oh, 2022
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sweden exists. They never locked down. The Hong Kong flu of the 1950s[1] happened. It was a really bad flu season. Many, many old, very young and sick people died. Civilization was never in danger from COVID. Civilization survived smallpox. The Inca civilization came very close to surviving getting the entire old world disease package and being invaded by people with horses, iron weapons and gunpowder all in the spac…
The Incas had a very limited set of Old Worlders coming over, though. Not hundreds of flights per day. Plus it depends on what you mean by civilization. What the Incas built was sophisticated but child's play compared to a modern civilization. A SARS 1 global pandemic would have probably set back the entire world 50 years or more. Cities would have been abandoned, supply chains destroyed, most likely major wars start…
> Before 1492, Native Americans (Amerindians) hosted none of the acute infectious diseases that had long bedeviled most of Eurasia and Africa: measles, smallpox, influenza, mumps, typhus, and whooping cough, among others. In most places other than isolated villages, these had become endemic childhood diseases that killed one-fourth to one-half of all children before age six. Survivors, however, carried partial, and often total, immunity to most of these infections with the notable exception of influenza. Falciparum malaria, by far the most severe variant of that plasmodial infection, and yellow fever also crossed the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas.
Re: Oh, 2022
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Stanford professor who I saw on a recent lex Friedman podcast confirmed what many people already suspected: the death count is exaggerated because the criteria for a Covid death is that a person is dead and also tests positive for Covid regardless of how the person really died. And also that cases were massively undercounted because of the fact that many people never have symptoms bad enough to justify any concer…
How would explain the excess deaths models[1] that often show that if anything the COVID deaths are undercounted? If the current COVID death total isn't accurate, what would be your ballpark estimates for the real death and case totals in the US? [1] - https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
> machine-learning model, which estimates excess deaths for every country on every day since the pandemic began. It is based both on official excess-mortality data and on more than 100 other statistical indicators
let me get the premise of this right: they built a "machine learning" model, using empirical data from normal years, and magical "statistical indicators", to predict excess deaths in a time of unprecedented events. Then, when the model does not fit, the conclusion isn't that the "model" is full of shit, but the "COVID deaths are undercounted"?
Re: Oh, 2022
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Oh, 2022
#277Regarding spacex in this, my starlink terminal recently hit a milestone of 0.00% ICMP loss to terrestrial ISP things in the pacific northwest. Averaged over 5, 6 hour periods. 20 icmp pings every 60s, basically a default smokeping install set to once a minute. Previously it was running somewhere around 0.15% to 0.60% which was still totally usable... if you put a similar test setup on a noisy/oversubscribed coaxial c…
What's your next hop time? Mine is about 20ms at home (FTTC - Fibre to the Cabinet) Satellite links are quite phenomenal to be honest (when they work). The metrics to worry about are latency and loss and throughput. Jitter is really a SIPnRTP thing. Don't use ICMP to test for "quality" - it isn't even the same protocol that you worry about (TCP/UDP), it is what it is - ICMP (use it wisely).
jitter is really quite consistent at 23-28ms
I agree on the icmp, for me, icmp loss is really more like a cheap/easy early warning sign that something is wrong. if a properly implemented last mile connection has no icmp loss it's also unlikely anything else is wrong. if there is a few % icmp loss, very likely normal tcp and udp things will also behave badly.
Re: Oh, 2022
#278Regarding politics, information overflow, and general increase in lunacy. To put it simply, it was expected the level of noise and sensation will rise after smartphones emerged. Loud lunacy seems to be a great way to catch public attention currently and this is well understood by both the media, politicians and vegabonds of wealth. Sensational journalism was always a problem, now add to that billions of people able t…
This is good news in the same sense that it's good news that you can do your bit for the climate crisis by walking everywhere, switching to vegetarianism and wearing only hand-crocheted hemp clothing.
i.e. it's not really good news at all because even if you do it, hardly anyone else will, and the world will carry on just as it is regardless.
We the people have been gaslit by large corporates trying to pin the responsibility on us. It's time to fight back, and put the responsibility onto those that create these problems in the first place for their own profit.
Re: Oh, 2022
#279> But this is all predictable. (Except for COVID19 which was wide-screen WTFery, like the second world war—September 1st 1939 was not in fact predictable from September 1st 1929, for example: all that was predictable was that another European war would sooner or later see France and Germany at loggerheads.) I can't understand what this is saying. Not sure what 'wide-screen WTFery' is, but lots of people were predicti…
The world being in complete lockdown, in bonus with a large anti-science movement, or nukes being developed and used within a few years are quite advantageous predictions, to put it lightly.
And of course the pandemic was "quite easy" to predict ; the problem is that we have a lot of survivorship bias in those predictions. For every prediction that's "scarily precise" right now, hundreds have completely failed.
Re: Oh, 2022
#280Earlier 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?
The only other options, until Starlink launches in my area, are traditional satellites. My neighbor previously had one of those, and he had an 8GB cap per MONTH. Plus the ping time averaged like 600ms.
I'm not even mad about the price of $94. Internet is way, way worth it. The quality of the connection sucks, though. I would pay $200 for Starlink once it's reliable. I'm not actually sure what my limit is, but it's pretty high, because rural internet is painful