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More Everything Forever

nytimes.com

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Re: More Everything Forever

#241

Post by hnbad »

mcosta wrote: post #213
johnea wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Zeroly, there's absolutely 0 reason for people to go to Mars, AT ALL. This whole idea is the stupidest thing I've heard people seriously discuss. What would be the point? If you want to experience "life on Mars", bury a cargo container in your back yard, and live in it for a year. If there's some burning need to go live underground, as you would on Mars, why not just do it in Nevada? The grocery store is a lot cl…

And Zeroly, there's absolutely 0 reason for people to go west, AT ALL - Portugal, 1490

Except that the Americas were already inhabited prior to 1490 because they were in fact relatively easily reachable at an earlier point in history and extremely habitable. Mars by contrast is an environment that is actively hostile to life. Even the dust is lethal. And you're so far away from the rest of humanity you can only get resupplies every few years. The Americas had water, soil, edible plants and animals - and practically infinite amounts of breathable air. If you want to go homestead on Mars, dysentery is going to be the least of your worries.

Re: More Everything Forever

#242

Post by alganet »

lurk2 wrote: post #218
alganet wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is known that the specifics of the story were modified. The current text is kind of frozen by its own similarities to itself. The use of extracted quotes is probably a mistake. You have to find the same event in a lot of other books beyond Matthew to be able to find a tiny whiff of historical information, very faint, very difficult to do with translated versions.

> You have to find the same event in a lot of other books beyond Matthew to be able to find a tiny whiff of historical information The same event is described in the book of Mark (10:32-34) and the book of Luke (18:31-34). There are two other predictions that appear in all three books: Matthew 16:21-23 Mark 8:31-33 Luke 9:21-22 Matthew 17:22-23 Mark 9:30-32 Luke 9:43-45

I mean a lot of other books, not just slightly different accounts.

Re: More Everything Forever

#243

Post by Ukv »

pdimitar wrote: post #232
kaonwarb wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some evidence that street lights reduce crime! E.g. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10940-020-09490-6

Reduce, yes, absolutely. Eliminate -- no.

Were there any serious claims that street lights would entirely eliminate crime? A "sizable reductions in nighttime outdoor index crimes" sounds like a pretty positive result.

Re: More Everything Forever

#244

Post by pdimitar »

Ukv wrote: post #243
pdimitar wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reduce, yes, absolutely. Eliminate -- no.

Were there any serious claims that street lights would entirely eliminate crime? A "sizable reductions in nighttime outdoor index crimes" sounds like a pretty positive result.

I can't claim anything objectively because I never truly looked at it scientifically.

I simply come from bad neighborhoods and the amount of times I heard "shhh, don't go there, people will see you" from guys who clearly were looking to start for trouble, was substantial in its own right.

Anecdotal evidence, sure, but from a psychological point of view the people who want to steal or harm others feel much safer doing so in the darkness, I have found.

Re: More Everything Forever

#245

Post by hnbad »

anarticle wrote: post #220
johnea wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Zeroly, there's absolutely 0 reason for people to go to Mars, AT ALL. This whole idea is the stupidest thing I've heard people seriously discuss. What would be the point? If you want to experience "life on Mars", bury a cargo container in your back yard, and live in it for a year. If there's some burning need to go live underground, as you would on Mars, why not just do it in Nevada? The grocery store is a lot cl…

> I'm an advocate of exploration and science, and in the modern world we have effective automation. There is NO need to send people to Mars, absolutely not in any large number. Can you write this with a straight face? This feels like the opportunity of a life time for someone who wants to push the envelope on what is possible. Yes it will be expensive, but the tech and lessons we learn will surely be worth more. Cons…

A rover is expendable, a human much less so. The PR cost of having a human smash into the surface of Mars the way it happened with a rover would easily outweigh the PR boost of having a human successfully land on Mars. And even if we managed to actually land someone, they'd most likely die there before we could bring them back.

A rover runs mostly on solar power. Humans need breathable air, food, potable water, medical supplies, stable temperatures, radiation shielding, etc etc just to survive, let alone actually do anything. Unlike sunshine, Mars has none of those things. And if any of them fail, your human rover would quickly go kaput.

It seems far more reasonable to use automation to build a livable outpost before sending a human there - especially because a human is going to need that outpost to survive anyway. So even if we want to send people to Mars eventually, automation would be step one.

Re: More Everything Forever

#246

Post by hnbad »

kurthr wrote: post #79
aeturnum wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really think you are under estimating things here. The trip to mars is ~145x longer (at minimum!) than the trip to the moon. Let's say it only takes us twice the time to develop a rocket & ship that can do that (and come back ofc) - so that's 20 years (for 145x the distance). Then you gotta develop structures and building techniques, some of which you can look at with robots, but some of which will need human feedb…

Yes, the quote "a million earthlings will be living on Mars in 20 years", is hilarious. It would require us to start launching hundreds of SpaceX Starship rockets a day every day, now. It's just dumb. I know that there can be an amazing level of self confidence and denial of current reality required to build a new company from scratch, but this stretches all bounds of credulity. I just don't believe that they believe…

Remember that the quote is coming from the same guy who has been promising FSD for years and hasn't come any closer to delivering it because it turns out that the devil is in the details. Elon Musk allegedly has a photographic memory that allows him to commit entire science books to memory but he apparently fails to appreciate real-world complexity. Even if you would want to give him credit for being a hype man, ideas guy, visionary, whatever, it's pretty obvious that he doesn't concern himself with the nitty gritty of every step of the way and he also doesn't seem to actually conceptualize them.

It's very much like the reasoning problem many of us software developers face: because we're used to working in extremely complex business domains without having actual real-world domain expertise, we overestimate our understanding of those domains and thus underestimate the complexity of various domains in general. We look at problems, recognize patterns we're familiar with and think the problem is trivial to solve. Hence "second system syndrome" and all that - even when looking at software we underestimate the complexity because we see the general structure and mistake the complexity for cruft.

Re: More Everything Forever

#247

Post by ZeroGravitas »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #231
janalsncm wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are inventing things to fix it though. We have massive advancements in battery technology and solar cells and nuclear generators that will lead to cleaner energy. If you have an alternative to growth as a viable path forward, that solves the global group decision problem which explains why Brazil must stop burning down their rainforests and India isn’t allowed to industrialize, I’d love to hear it. That isn’t to s…

>We are inventing things to fix it though. We have massive advancements in battery technology and solar cells and nuclear generators that will lead to cleaner energy. Yet the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has never been higher nor has the rate of increase.

I'm fairly certain the rate of increase has been higher, whether you mean in percentage or absolute terms.

It could be a decade long blip but since we've peaked per capita and various large nations have peaked and we have extensive research on what the causes are and active programs to mitigate those it's probably more reasonable to say that CO2 (and Greenhouse gasses generally) are growing but at a slower rate with some credible hope to reverse that growth.

Don't get me wrong it is fucked up that we partly squandered a few decades and let it get this far and things could still go badly wrong but we have enough data that we can stick to the scary facts.

Re: More Everything Forever

#248

Post by mikeyouse »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #194
mikeyouse wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source for any of those claims? It's pretty well known after a few weird political fights that she grew up in a tiny house in Yorktown and that her dad died when she was a freshman in college and that her mom was a house cleaner. [her childhood home: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DhCMERUXUAAY68Z?format=jpg&name=... ]. Hard to square with her family "owning multiple brownstones". Trump's dad gave him millions of dollars…

Here's the New York Posts' investigation: https://nypost.com/2019/02/23/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-is-no... The actual land records that prove this are impossible to link, for reasons that are charitably described as "Monstrous incompetence of government officials".

None of which mentions brownstones or growing up wealthy.. the land records are accurate but she’s renting the spaces so her landlords name is on ACRIS.

Re: More Everything Forever

#249

Post by os2warpman »

FL33TW00D wrote: post #237
os2warpman wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Starship is just orders of magnitude less than this. Starship does not exist. Starship is the name given to a design for a fully reusable superheavy launch vehicle intended to take 100t to LEO. The things being launched by SpaceX are not Starship. They are impressive, but are not Starship. They are called Starship, but are not Starship. Let me be clear. I am not saying that Starship will not exist. What I am saying…

We can argue technicalities all day long but to me, this exists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMGiNKcVSek

The payload on that flight was a single stuffed toy banana, for scale.

On all test flights with a payload exceeding the mass (~300 grams) of a single stuffed toy banana (for scale), the flight has failed.

Flight 7: 20,000 kg payload (starlink mass simulators) - engines fail after 7m39s

Flight 8: 8,000 kg payload (starlink mass simulators) - engines fail after 8m04s

Flight 9 is not currently planned to carry a payload.

None of this is a technicality. It is technicreality.

Re: More Everything Forever

#250

Post by schnitzelstoat »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #231
janalsncm wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are inventing things to fix it though. We have massive advancements in battery technology and solar cells and nuclear generators that will lead to cleaner energy. If you have an alternative to growth as a viable path forward, that solves the global group decision problem which explains why Brazil must stop burning down their rainforests and India isn’t allowed to industrialize, I’d love to hear it. That isn’t to s…

>We are inventing things to fix it though. We have massive advancements in battery technology and solar cells and nuclear generators that will lead to cleaner energy. Yet the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has never been higher nor has the rate of increase.

Some of the problems are political not technological though.

If nuclear power had continued to grow at a normal rate since the 60's the developed world would all have emissions per capita in line with France.

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