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Entropy Is Fatal

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Re: Entropy Is Fatal

#71

Post by wildmanx »

toss1 wrote: post #6
superb-owl wrote: post #3

I'm not sure "Entropy" is the right word for what the author wants to talk about, but the article raises some interesting points > 1st poison: Unlimited and uncontrolled growth IMO this is by far the biggest poison, and the one our society is most prone to ignoring. Every company, government budget, population, etc is considered "successful" if it's growing, and "failing" if it's shrinking. And the growth is always m…

From the article: >> ...a program with more lines of code is better... Immediately reminded me of Bill Gates' comment on how measuring progress on a designing and building a software project by using a Total_Lines_Of_Code metric is about as dumb as measuring progress on designing and building an airplane using a Total_Weight metric. What you want in both is the least amount of code/material that will actually do the…

> Yet so many supposedly intelligent managers use such approaches...

Yet so many supposedly intelligent engineers work for such managers...

Re: Entropy Is Fatal

#72

Post by metamuas »

The main mistake you made was not realizing artificial complexity exists, that it is not natural, and that it is a form of control, possibly the most important. Evidence A: C++.

Re: Entropy Is Fatal

#73

Post by proc0 »

cryptonector wrote: post #69

https://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question Asimov was way ahead of TFA :) I like to think that life is a thermodynamic mechanism that: - locally reduces entropy by consuming lower-entropy energy and casting out higher entropy stuff - reproduces by which definition stars are almost alive. I say "almost" because stars only manage to keep local entropy from growing ver…

This is negentropy (not my fav. word, but it is the term used). Indeed it's the signature of life, although I think there would be a threshold that all living creatures meet, but non-living systems do not. In other words life produces lots of negentropy, probably exponentially, unlike other systems like celestial bodies.

Re: Entropy Is Fatal

#75

Post by Klapaucius »

sumy23 wrote: post #9
toss1 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that productivity growth is still necessarily limited in the end by physics. Remove the unnecessary actions to produce X, and you're down to the bare minimum set of actions. Now speed up those actions and you'll eventually reach some minimum time requirement, and the output of X is a function of Required_Actions * Required_Time and how many Producing_Units you have and available time. Seems it'd be asymptoti…

Everything is limited by physics. But I think the limit is not close to where we are right now. Consider a smart phone. Physically, what is it? Some silicon, glass, a lithium-ion battery, and some other trace metals. If you were to have the raw inputs in front of you, it would be a small pile of dust. Yet, with just that small amount of material, a person can get access to a near infinite amount of information and en…

If you look at the weight of the tech product (phone) in isolation, you are correct although not in a very meaningful way. If you look at the amount of physical material that went into the process leading up to producing that product, the quantity would amount to many tonnes of material in terms of crushed ore, fossil fuels, water consumption, chemicals, packaging and so on. A phone does not only represent its own grammes material, but an enormous tail of environmental impact in form of waste, emissions and extraction remains. (This is not to mention the human labor cost involved in obtaining some of the rare earths used, from countries with, ehrm, lax labor laws).

Re: Entropy Is Fatal

#76

Post by buescher »

superb-owl wrote: post #3

I'm not sure "Entropy" is the right word for what the author wants to talk about, but the article raises some interesting points > 1st poison: Unlimited and uncontrolled growth IMO this is by far the biggest poison, and the one our society is most prone to ignoring. Every company, government budget, population, etc is considered "successful" if it's growing, and "failing" if it's shrinking. And the growth is always m…

"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." - Edward Abbey

Re: Entropy Is Fatal

#78

Post by jimmySixDOF »

proc0 wrote: post #73
cryptonector wrote: post #69

https://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question Asimov was way ahead of TFA :) I like to think that life is a thermodynamic mechanism that: - locally reduces entropy by consuming lower-entropy energy and casting out higher entropy stuff - reproduces by which definition stars are almost alive. I say "almost" because stars only manage to keep local entropy from growing ver…

This is negentropy (not my fav. word, but it is the term used). Indeed it's the signature of life, although I think there would be a threshold that all living creatures meet, but non-living systems do not. In other words life produces lots of negentropy, probably exponentially, unlike other systems like celestial bodies.

There was a recent podcast episode from Sean Carroll's Mindscape [1] where they focus on and around the Krebs Cycle and discuss it as an example of Entropy. Turns out Entropy really is fatal.

[1] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2022/05/23/198-...

Re: Entropy Is Fatal

#79

Post by kgwgk »

lazide wrote: post #56
nightski wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with that wholeheartedly. I'd go further and say that I think companies are getting too big to the point where different divisions have no relation to each other at all. Any major tech stock has this problem. The problem is I have no idea how it could be discouraged. It feels like whenever something is regulated it just results in something completely different than intended.

Part of the problem is the tax code. Dividends (what a value company typically produces) are taxed at a much higher rate than long term capital gains (which a ‘growth’ company produces). Dividends usually at the same rate as income, from 10-37% at the federal level, and often the same if the state has an income tax. Long term capital gains are 0-20%, and many states don’t tax them at all even if they tax income. Ever…

Do you know what is a share repurchase or buyback? [I find it unlikely that you don't - but your comment doesn't make much sense if you do.]
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