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Oh, 2022
521–530 of 557 posts
Re: Oh, 2022
#522Should 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…
I am definitely not worried about the consequences of climate change. I am ready to deal with it. What I am worried about are politicians forcing us to do things justified by climate change.
Conversely, I'm more worried about people with your point of view than I am about climate change. Since this kind of "I'm scared of representative government telling me what to do" stance means that even if we're able to collectively decide to take meaningful action on improving the state of the planet, there will always be a group who declares that they won't help.
Re: Oh, 2022
#523Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reading most stuff on "crypto" I tend to feel I need a bolt on to my cognition system - but then again I'm probably just getting old. :-)
Nine times out of ten, when something new seems too complex to understand, it's not. It's just been obfuscated to make it seem complicated to sell you something. Most genuinely new things haven't had time to get too complicated for one person to get a functional understanding of the whole situation. You could talk to web servers in telnet and make the most complex web page anyone had ever made in Notepad long before…
> Nine times out of ten, when something new seems too complex to understand, it's not. It's just been obfuscated to make it seem complicated to sell you something.
Either that, or if it actually is as complicated as it seems... Then it's usually too complicated to work.[1]
(Which is not to say that uncomplicated stuff can't also, sometimes, be bullshit. Like, IMO, crypto-"currencies".)
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[1]: At least too complicated to work well, and/or in the long run.
Re: Oh, 2022
#524Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's unlikely that ICEs will be phased out as quickly as the optimists are suggesting. Once there's critical momentum things move quickly, so +1 from me. However, all that new electricity demand needs to come from somewhere. Drawing power from the grid at night works great today, but that's because of a coincidental uneven energy demand, which I doubt will last for too long. Once EVs are truly mainstrea…
In a worst case you could just burn gasoline in some turbine supplying the grid and it would probably still be more efficient and cleaner than ICEs.
In that case, you could just skip the grid and put the turbine in the car.[1]
Yes, the vehicle is heavier (=less efficient) when you carry the range extender around with you, but that's compensated for by not needing as heavy a battery. Eliminates dependence on the grid; replaces it with dependence on the current refuelling infrastructure. Which latter, at the moment and in most places, certainly is better than the currently available EV charging infrastructure. Crossover point where pure EVs become more efficient TBD by how fast fuel infra is reduced and how fast charging infra is improved... With an additional confounding factor introduced by GP's hypothesized grid instability.
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[1]: Wow, what a genius I am, look what a great new idea! ... Or, well, maybe not so new after all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lohner%E2%80%93Porsche
Re: Oh, 2022
#525Earlier quoted context omitted.
Closer to 40% than 50% from the most recent numbers I've seen, and that's of volume shipped, not volume*distance (Australia to China / India being a relatively short route that carries quite a lot of the coal). That wouldn't disappear entirely if you electrified everything; coal is widely used for producing steel (1kg blast-furnace steel uses 750g met-grade coal, this is ~10% of imports in China) and preparing cement…
We can't keep making steel with coal either. It's slowly shifting over to other reduction agents.
Back to charcoal?
Re: Oh, 2022
#526Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even on a long road trip most stops will be for peeing, a drink and maybe snacks. The times you actually need gas are few and far between (obviously, because cars are efficient these days and the tanks are quite big). If you're going to pee and get a sandwich with a meatball (or a hamburger, a sack of carrots or whatever it is counts as a snack for you) anyway, you may as well do so while charging your car. Given tha…
So, I recently took a trip that is 7.5 hours for a gas car (my friend did the same trip in her Audi) and took me 9 hours in my electric car with ~220 mile range. It definitely made me want to think about 400+ mile range cars, which seem to only be two makers: Tesla long range and the new Mercedes EQS. At least one of our stops (visiting Joshua Tree) was at a charger that I think is essentially a glorified 110v socket…
> ... 400+ mile range cars, which seem to only be two makers: Tesla long range and the new Mercedes EQS.
Also the EQE, I would have thought? If not to begin with, then probably such a variant will be introduced as a follow-up. And maybe if you drive a Taycan reeeally carefully...?
Re: Oh, 2022
#527Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are piling on tech companies that purport to care about climate and diversity and other such things while locating their HQ in Silicon Valley, which is obviously not the optimal strategy if those are really priorities. I refer to the [once legal] housing deeds that literally excluded sales to Blacks, developers who did not sell to Blacks as a way of marketing to whites, extreme zoning designed to limit working cla…
Race was definitely a bit of a side tangent, but you're absolutely correct. Let me share an interesting anecdote... I live in a small community on the SFBA peninsula. Our property's original CC&R's (Covenants, Conditions & Restrictions) from 1929 specifically state: "Said property shall not at any time be occupied by any person or persons of the African, Mongolian or other Asiatic race, except as a domestic servant."…
Wow, I really appreciate that anecdote. There are historians of the Bay Area who research those sorts of things.
From what I gather, many do consider that the WWII concentration camps for American citizens of Japanese ancestry was a racial terror on Bay Area residents comparable to what happened in the 20th century South.
Anyway, after covenants ended, for several decades developers and real estate folk found it legally, politically, and financially expedient not to sell to certain minorities. Want that subdivision project to go smoothly and sell quickly? Apparently in many cases it was optimal to subtly or not so subtly advertise exclusionary sales policies.
So you see, there were not as many Black Steve Jobs or Mike Markkula as their could have been -- because certainly as late as 1960, a Black teacher or firefighter or qualified professional would have found it relatively difficult to relocate to Mountain View or San Jose as Steve Jobs' own parents did. And this robbed minorities out of participating in the economic engine.
This was not special to Santa Clara county, as it was common practice all across the nation.
But because SV has such poor commuting conditions for any relatively proportionate critical mass of Black Americans, particularly those who are descendants of slaves, the exclusionary effect is quite extreme and one really can't purport to care about diversity by locating there.
By comparison, an economic engine like Wall Street is a modest subway fare away from literally some of the poorest census tracts in the nation that are located in the Bronx. Which at least in theory allows a poor kid to work up from the mail room, and does not by geography alone minimize opportunities for poor minorities.
Re: Oh, 2022
#528> 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…
>but lots of people were predicting a pandemic, even covid-like if I remember correctly. If you look at [1] the January 2020 - predictions for 2030 thread here on HN, and look for hints of the Covid pandemic, there are only 3 mentions of any type of pandemic, and none of those was close to an actual hit. I did the reading, all of the reading. 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21941278
Obviously I'm not talking about techbros on HN, almost none of whom knew anything about epidemiology, vaccines, or viruses until they all became experts by obsessively staring at youtube twitter and wikipedia for hours on end, predicting a pandemic before 2020.
Re: Oh, 2022
#529“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…
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…
> Sweden exists. They never locked down.
And about five times as many Swedes have died from Covid compared to their Nordic neighbours.
Re: Oh, 2022
#530Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you are saying a pandemic could potentially collapse a civilization, but the flu was not serious enough to do that? The Inca should be a cautionary tale. The human race is unlikely to go away unless we have a dinosaurs-like extinction event. However, civilizations are much more delicate.
> However, civilizations are much more delicate. But they're really not. Civilization in Norway survived the Black Death killing 60% of the population. We could regress a great deal in terms of the technology we could apply with large enough fatality rates but if we can still feed large numbers of people and maintain things at all we can keep civilization going. If one third of the US population dropped dead it would…
> We could regress a great deal in terms of the technology we could apply with large enough fatality rates but if we can still feed large numbers of people and maintain things at all we can keep civilization going.
Take away enough technology and you'll still have people, but not so much civilization. In a way, technology is civilization.