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Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?

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Re: Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?

#271

Post by somenameforme »

dangus wrote: post #252
somenameforme wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you're discussing in good faith there. Obviously what happens in Chad, Nigeria, and so on has relatively little consequence on what happens in America and the Western world in general.

Please don’t confuse disagreement with discussion in bad faith. I promise you I’m making a serious argument. It has consequence because trade exists. The Western world imports and exports goods to Africa. If the West loses population it doesn’t mean it loses economic output because there are customers and vendors in other countries with higher growth rates. Country boundaries are arbitrary.

Things do not make themselves. Economies scale with population size in both directions - consumption and production. For instance even India will be overcoming the US economy over the next decade or two. That's in large part thanks to their population size.

And with falling fertility rates within a country you end up with heavily skewed age ratios meaning not only do you have far less people but far less of them are of working age so you get hit with a double whammy there. The age ratios similarly also strongly influence the shape of the economy which will shift to adapt to to the new demographics.

Re: Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?

#272

Post by JCattheATM »

lenkite wrote: post #266
JCattheATM wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what makes _your_ opinion better than mine, or that of the Singaporeans? Because I believe it can be supported and be shown to be objectively correct. Not that I'm willing to put in the effort when it already took this much for you to realize I was stating an opinion though. > Okay, why should they? Drug traffickers are perfectly capable of not attempting to smuggle drugs into Singapore. If you think casual murder…

> Because I believe it can be supported and be shown to be objectively correct. Out of curiosity, How can your argument "be supported and shown to be objectively correct" ? It seems the evidence is actually the other way around. After introduction of the death penalty in the 90s, the average net amount of opium trafficked to Singapore famously dropped by ~70%. I do not support the death penalty myself, but primarily…

> After introduction of the death penalty in the 90s, the average net amount of opium trafficked to Singapore famously dropped by ~70%.

If we introduced the death penalty for minor shoplifting, minor shoplifting would probably drop by a huge percentage. Would that justify it?

> But not "objective ones" since the evidence clearly supports the death penalty for "objective reasons". For these positions, objectivity should be left in the gutter.

I disagree. When you evaluate all the pros and cons, I think the evidence is solidly against the death penalty.

Re: Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?

#273

Post by philwelch »

dangus wrote: post #200
philwelch wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a whole damn solar system we’re barely even using. Overpopulation is a fake bugbear of small minded bucket crabs.

I'd love to hear about your economical plan to extract resources and populate the rest of the solar system. It currently costs approximately $4,000 per kg to transport anything into space, that's current bargain basement SpaceX pricing. It also consumes non-renewable fossil fuels to do so. Let me know how you plan to figure out planetary terraforming, gravity manipulation (so we can live on planets with vastly differ…

> I'd love to hear about your economical plan to extract resources and populate the rest of the solar system.

A good starting point is Gerard O’Neill’s 1977 book The High Frontier.

> It currently costs approximately $4,000 per kg to transport anything into space, that's current bargain basement SpaceX pricing. It also consumes non-renewable fossil fuels to do so.

There are plenty of materials in the solar system that aren’t at the bottom of a gravity well. It’s just a question of developing ISRU infrastructure. The fossil fuel problem is already solved; all of the newest rockets use methane fuel, which can be produced without fossil fuels.

> Let me know how you plan to figure out planetary terraforming, gravity manipulation (so we can live on planets with vastly different gravity), planetary climate management, off-earth mining. How many of these problems have been solved even with 1-5% progress?

Half of those aren’t serious problems. You don’t need to terraform anything to fit quadrillions of people into the solar system because you can just use small bodies like the moon as material for space colonies. You stated yourself how expensive it is to get out of the gravity well; why go back down into another one? The space colonies—which can be built with known materials, at scales approximating that of a US county—would rotate, providing artificial gravity through centrifugal force. ISRU (“off-earth mining”) is a very active field of research.

The obvious next step is to industrialize the Moon and build a mass driver out of lunar materials that we can use to ship lunar materials into cislunar space for construction. The best discussion of how to do the practical next steps that I’ve encountered is Ian Long’s YouTube channel, Anthrofuturism. (https://youtube.com/@anthrofuturism). The best starting point there is “How To Develop The Moon” (https://youtu.be/WZN2xXMb28g), largely based on his book, also titled How To Develop The Moon (https://a.co/d/0dn84hJa).

There’s a beautiful future available to us if we can escape the bucket crabs.

Re: Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?

#274

Post by dangus »

somenameforme wrote: post #271
dangus wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don’t confuse disagreement with discussion in bad faith. I promise you I’m making a serious argument. It has consequence because trade exists. The Western world imports and exports goods to Africa. If the West loses population it doesn’t mean it loses economic output because there are customers and vendors in other countries with higher growth rates. Country boundaries are arbitrary.

Things do not make themselves. Economies scale with population size in both directions - consumption and production. For instance even India will be overcoming the US economy over the next decade or two. That's in large part thanks to their population size. And with falling fertility rates within a country you end up with heavily skewed age ratios meaning not only do you have far less people but far less of them are…

Meanwhile, Boston Dynamics robots are doing gymnastics routines and speaking in human language using LLMs. I wonder what they’ll be doing in 10 years.

I’m not particularly worried about a labor crunch long term. Labor availability is more detached from economic output and prosperity than ever before. If prosperity had to do with labor and birth rate you’d have to explain why Japan and South Korea have better living standards than Bangladesh and Nigeria.

The automotive industry’s production employee count peaked decades ago, despite making more cars than ever before.

The amount of labor put into a product has very little to do with its economic value. Are your shoes worth more than RAM chips? Because your shoes take way more manual labor to make per item.

Re: Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?

#275

Post by dangus »

somenameforme wrote: post #268
dangus wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll buy your argument for the sake of it. We are killing two orders of magnitude of cost. $14 per kg to get something to space. Well, right now a gallon of gasoline all-in after extraction, refinement, transportation, and taxes retails for $3-4 in the US. So that gallon of gasoline isn’t worth transporting to and from space. That gasoline would cost $38 just to import it from space (2.7kg). Okay, fine, we’re just do…

Deep space solar solves the intermittency problem of solar, benefits from an inverse square relationship with the distance meaning you can get way more power per panel, is directly applicable to SpaceX's primary goal of getting to Mars, and so on. The big picture goal is making humanity multiplanetary, of which every SpaceX project can tie into one one way or the other, even the ultimately unsuccessful Boring Company…

Batteries also solve the intermittency problem, for less money, and their materials are essentially 100% recyclable. Solar+batteries together are already cheaper than any other form of grid scale electricity production. Entire islands with thousands of people on them have replaced their fuel-based power generation with solar+battery and are seeing lower costs and higher reliability.

If the economy is dysfunctional on earth, why is SpaceX a special snowflake company that is not also dysfunctional? It’s a US-based company. It’s publicly traded just like UPS. UPS has more competitors than SpaceX (FedEx, USPS, DHL, Amazon fulfillment, numerous B2C couriers, international couriers)

Using the price of bottled water is not meaningful to this discussion. Bottled water is a convenience product, the water is not a significant aspect of the retail cost of the product. Bottled water costs $5 inside the airport and $.15 at the Costco 2 miles down the road. The water is not the driver of the cost.

We only have one proven habitable planet and we need to protect it. Multi planetary habitation is some combination of 4 things:

1. Billionaires’ excuse to extract the earth dry for profit.

2. Billionaires’ fantasy to escape the pitchforks at their doorsteps, to build a gated community in the cosmos

3. Billionaires’ pump and dump investment vehicle

4. Billionaires’ science fiction affirmation of their narcissistic belief in their own demigodhood.

Re: Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?

#276

Post by dangus »

philwelch wrote: post #273
dangus wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to hear about your economical plan to extract resources and populate the rest of the solar system. It currently costs approximately $4,000 per kg to transport anything into space, that's current bargain basement SpaceX pricing. It also consumes non-renewable fossil fuels to do so. Let me know how you plan to figure out planetary terraforming, gravity manipulation (so we can live on planets with vastly differ…

> I'd love to hear about your economical plan to extract resources and populate the rest of the solar system. A good starting point is Gerard O’Neill’s 1977 book The High Frontier . > It currently costs approximately $4,000 per kg to transport anything into space, that's current bargain basement SpaceX pricing. It also consumes non-renewable fossil fuels to do so. There are plenty of materials in the solar system tha…

Why does everyone in this thread keep talking about bucket crabs like they’re in some kind of groupthink cult? I don’t know what the fuck anyone means by bucket crabs.

Living in space is essentially like living in the ocean with all the same environments challenges. We don’t do that and never have because it doesn’t really make logical sense, we have better options available. It lends the question of “why do that?”

Why? Why do we want to live in space colonies? To what end?

This planet will be habitable for tens of thousands of years at the bare minimum if we take care of it, certainly moreso than the vacuum of space.

Re: Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?

#277

Post by dangus »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #259
dangus wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we reading the same verse? I read it and it doesn’t seem relevant at all. It almost looks like the commenter pasted the wrong book/chapter/verse.

You have to read the correct translation. The one that specifically references why it's good to die young

Well, that’s stupid. It’s not admirable to die young.

My grandma lived 96 years of a happy, healthy, enriching life. She got her college degree at age 60. She had a beaming smile when she played with her great grandchildren. She enjoyed the company of her husband well into her 90s. She lived independently until the last month of her life.

And there we go with the bible, you gotta read the correct telephone game translation of it and interpret the right way for it to make any bit of sense.

Nobody can just accept that it was written in a human developmental era that most of us wouldn’t relate with in any way.

For example, it was considered a blessing to die young and “go to heaven” in an era before surgical anesthesia. Better than living a long life with ailments that a modern doctor can treat in an afternoon.

We didn’t even get basic antibiotics until less than 200 years ago.

Re: Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?

#278

Post by somenameforme »

dangus wrote: post #274
somenameforme wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things do not make themselves. Economies scale with population size in both directions - consumption and production. For instance even India will be overcoming the US economy over the next decade or two. That's in large part thanks to their population size. And with falling fertility rates within a country you end up with heavily skewed age ratios meaning not only do you have far less people but far less of them are…

Meanwhile, Boston Dynamics robots are doing gymnastics routines and speaking in human language using LLMs. I wonder what they’ll be doing in 10 years. I’m not particularly worried about a labor crunch long term. Labor availability is more detached from economic output and prosperity than ever before. If prosperity had to do with labor and birth rate you’d have to explain why Japan and South Korea have better living s…

You're only considering superficial last mile manufacturing of stuff - not the entire labor pipeline involved in processes. Going from elemental silicon to RAM requires an absolutely insane amount of labor across a vast array of fields and specializations. And imminent seeming doesn't mean imminent.

A decade ago full self driving, let alone for commercial trucking, seemed obvious and imminent. Today, it's not only nowhere to be found but, in many ways, feels even further away than it did a decade ago. A robot doing backflips doesn't inherently foretell revolution ahead, especially as Boston Dynamics bots were doing backflips about a decade ago as well. Yeah they look nicer now, and perhaps in a decade we'll be again observing little more than that they look even nicer still.

As for country comparisons, it's not meaningfully possible yet because there's no precedent in modern history for countries going through catastrophic fertility collapse. And it does take some time. For instance Japan is in obvious and severe decline, but they're still at what will be considered 'the good ole days' in the future. So we will get to look on at what's set to come to much of the rest of the world over the coming decades.

Re: Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?

#279

Post by eli_gottlieb »

JCattheATM wrote: post #249
HighGoldstein wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do you know what an opinion is? Cool, what makes _your_ opinion better than mine, or that of the Singaporeans? >Singapore is perfectly able to control their borders better than most countries. It's not like the US where it's relatively easy to sneak in. Okay, why should they? Drug traffickers are perfectly capable of not attempting to smuggle drugs into Singapore.

> what makes _your_ opinion better than mine, or that of the Singaporeans? Because I believe it can be supported and be shown to be objectively correct. Not that I'm willing to put in the effort when it already took this much for you to realize I was stating an opinion though. > Okay, why should they? Drug traffickers are perfectly capable of not attempting to smuggle drugs into Singapore. If you think casual murder…

> Because I believe it can be supported and be shown to be objectively correct.

Then that's not an opinion, it's a proposition aiming at fact, and you should back it up rather than restating it loudly and more slowly when asked for justification.

Re: Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?

#280

Post by somenameforme »

dangus wrote: post #275
somenameforme wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deep space solar solves the intermittency problem of solar, benefits from an inverse square relationship with the distance meaning you can get way more power per panel, is directly applicable to SpaceX's primary goal of getting to Mars, and so on. The big picture goal is making humanity multiplanetary, of which every SpaceX project can tie into one one way or the other, even the ultimately unsuccessful Boring Company…

Batteries also solve the intermittency problem, for less money, and their materials are essentially 100% recyclable. Solar+batteries together are already cheaper than any other form of grid scale electricity production. Entire islands with thousands of people on them have replaced their fuel-based power generation with solar+battery and are seeing lower costs and higher reliability. If the economy is dysfunctional on…

Batteries don't scale well when you're speaking of extremely high energy needs, especially given their deterioration over time. There's more clever things like artificial hydroelectric, but even that runs into scaling issues. Deep space solar, once established, has nice scaling potential. The inverse square distance:luminosity relationship really opens the door to some truly sci-fi type scenarios.

SpaceX is not publicly traded. It's privately owned and operated, with Elon's motivation behind the company being consistently ideological in nature. The water prices were apples to apples comparisons - the cost of a 0.33 liter bottle of water in an average restaurant.

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