Oh, 2022 • Hacker News Board

Re: Oh, 2022

#291

Post by Karrot_Kream » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 2:52 AM UTC

beachy wrote: post #278

shmoopi wrote: post #267

Regarding 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…

> But there's good news. I cannot stress enough that it's entirely possible to control the level of exposure to said digital noise. You don't have to follow news, politics and social media intensely. You can just opt out. 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 clothin…

While I'm a big supporter of alternative digital networks, I think you're being much too pessimistic. We've known that humans can produce written junk; that's what tabloids were in the past. The problem is that humans haven't developed the culture yet to safely deal with this amount of digital noise. If you tried to breathlessly talk about why the world is ending due to a tabloid article you read, you used to be laughed out of the room, but if you reblog/retweet/share a random social media post you resonated with where someone talks about how the world is ending, then your friends take it as gospel. I'm optimistic that humanity can eventually develop the cultural norms to deal with the era of everyone having a voice. Until then, it'll probably be very chaotic though, much like the Protestant Reformation was in Europe.

Re: Oh, 2022

#292

Post by walrus01 » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 2:52 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #256

walrus01 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the immediate personal need to not live in a flooded zone is one thing to consider another thing to think about is the global geopolitical/civil war/economic possible disruptions and consequences of something like potentially half to 3/4 of bangladesh's population becoming international refugees. imagine what happened with syrians around 2012-2015 and people trying to get into europe multiplied by a factor of 50. and…

The answer is pretty simple, though you may not like it: lots of people will die.

yes, very likely, how many need to die before low lying nation state governments collapse into absolute chaos and civil war remains to be seen.

Re: Oh, 2022

#293

Post by ineedasername » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 2:53 AM UTC

rhaps0dy wrote: post #150

gmuslera wrote: post #19

Should 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…

> Should be be worried that the author of Accelerando complains about things going too fast? I think Accelerando itself is precisely complaining that things are going too fast. In the specific scenario in the novel, the incomprehensibly fast automation of capitalism is going to eat us all.

IIRC, in Accelerando the ability by meat people to even vaguely understand Economics 2.0 required something like a literal bolt-on addition to the human cognition system.

Re: Oh, 2022

#294

Post by barry-cotter » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 2:53 AM UTC

csomar wrote: post #190

barry-cotter wrote: post #133

Earlier 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…

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 have the same population as in the late 1960s. They kept civilization going. Things would get a lot worse for a long time but there'd be no danger of civilizational collapse.

Re: Oh, 2022

#295

Post by walrus01 » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 2:55 AM UTC

Jedd wrote: post #268

the_arun wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t starlink internet connection expensive atm? $99 per month plus one time h/w costs?

In Australia, it's $140 / month, plus the capex of $700 for the dish, which obviously won't work on any other provider. I suspect resale on that device, if the carrier allows it, would be reasonable, but I don't expect I'd be moving away from this service. People are comparing (sub)urban US multi-carrier options, or heavily populated countries (like Italy), that have much cheaper pricing. It's not surprising that ter…

rough calculation in US dollars, if a starlink terminal is 100W constant load and electricity costs $0.30 per kWh, it would be about a $22.32 extra on the monthly electrical bill.

in your case about $16.74 if you subtract 25% for the estimate of benefit from your solar (grid tied?) kWh going back to the grid

Re: Oh, 2022

#296

Post by walrus01 » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 2:56 AM UTC

Teknoman117 wrote: post #290

walrus01 wrote: post #12

Regarding 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…

That's awesome! On Starlink in Mendocino county (CA) (in the woods), I'm still dropping out for a few seconds every couple of minutes. Fine for calls, Netflix, and browsing, but most video games will boot me whenever they happen. Some streaming services seem to buffer far less than others. Disney+ seems to stop playing the moment it can't phone home. Admittedly, most of my trouble is probably caused by the 70 meter c…

I agree on the trees. Mine is also at a considerably further northern latitude so the simultaneous density of overhead satellites at any point in time is quite a lot more.

for people with trees they cannot cut down I see a lot more 40' aluminum light duty towers with foundation kits getting sold in the future. Much like people used to put up in very rural areas with yagi antennas on them to receive OTA TV a logn time ago.

http://www.texastowers.com/towers/ss.htm

Re: Oh, 2022

#297

Post by bbanyc » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 2:57 AM UTC

> Once those IC cars are no longer manufactured, we can expect a very rapid ramp-down of extraction and distribution industries for petrol and diesel fuels, leading to a complete phase-out possibly as early as 2040. As about half of global shipping is engaged in the transport of petrochemicals or coal at this point, this is goin to have impacts far beyond the obvious.

I wouldn't be too sure about that. Most electricity is still generated by burning fossil fuels. Solar and wind have increased in recent years but still have a very long way to go. We may just be relocating the engines rather than decarbonizing.

(See also, New York City banning gas lines to new construction, requiring the use of electricity for heating and cooking, just after the metro area's sole nuclear plant was decommissioned and new gas plants were built to replace it... so the ban is not going to reduce the amount of gas burned at all, is it?)

Re: Oh, 2022

#298

Post by ineedasername » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 2:58 AM UTC

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #291

beachy wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But there's good news. I cannot stress enough that it's entirely possible to control the level of exposure to said digital noise. You don't have to follow news, politics and social media intensely. You can just opt out. 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 clothin…

While I'm a big supporter of alternative digital networks, I think you're being much too pessimistic. We've known that humans can produce written junk; that's what tabloids were in the past. The problem is that humans haven't developed the culture yet to safely deal with this amount of digital noise. If you tried to breathlessly talk about why the world is ending due to a tabloid article you read, you used to be laug…

...tabloid article you read, you used to be laughed out of the room

Only in certain circles. Keep in mind, those tabloids sold in large numbers and not everyone was reading them ironically or as SciFi.

Re: Oh, 2022

#299

Post by MichaelZuo » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 3:00 AM UTC

Apocryphon wrote: post #198

YMMV, but feels to me that cstross's Cassandra pessimism has increased rapidly each year, with good reason, but some of these pieces are overly-sensationalist. I still remember his whole bit in 2017 about how Hurricane Harvey was going to destroy Houston - how'd that turn out? http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/08/houston-... But I will say his 2015 piece, "A different cluetrain", still holds up with gr…

The trouble with blogs like antipope is that more often than not they read like GPT-3, or a more advanced GPT-4, where every sentence seems coherently linked with every surrounding sentence but there’s something that doesn’t seem quite right upon reflection.

And so quite a lot of readers think there is some super duper smart guy offering this cool hidden insight that they can easily use, only to forget it by the next hour.

Re: Oh, 2022

#300

Post by klodolph » Mon, Jan 10, 2022, 3:02 AM UTC

bbanyc wrote: post #297

> Once those IC cars are no longer manufactured, we can expect a very rapid ramp-down of extraction and distribution industries for petrol and diesel fuels, leading to a complete phase-out possibly as early as 2040. As about half of global shipping is engaged in the transport of petrochemicals or coal at this point, this is goin to have impacts far beyond the obvious. I wouldn't be too sure about that. Most electrici…

> ...so the ban is not going to reduce the amount of gas burned at all, is it?

My understanding is that the purpose of the ban was (1) increase indoor air quality and (2) reduce the amount of gas that leaks in distribution. Natural gas has something like 20x the GWP of CO2. Burning it at power plants reduces the amount leaking into the atmosphere. About 5% of anthropogenic methane emissions come from distribution.

There are much bigger things we could be doing, but just because this particular change isn't reducing the CO2 impact doesn't mean it's not a positive change.