Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about? Blockchain & AI don't count, because they're being talked about plenty! |
Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about? Blockchain & AI don't count, because they're being talked about plenty! |
Many of the big giants from the 2000s - 2010s have pretty much peaked by now. TikTok is the thing everyone wants to be, but arguably its not a social networking app so much as a social entertainment app. You don't really connect with friends on it so much as with strangers. An endless stream of entertaining strangers. It's a lot more akin to YouTube than Instagram when you think about it.
That being said, I don't think the social networking era is completely over, its just that the focus is going to shift. After big social networking platforms come smaller communities that are probably isolated from the platform on Discord or some forum somewhere, or perhaps something new in the future. The platforms themselves won't go away, but more-and-more the dialogue will shift towards niche interests and community discovery.
Problem with these communities is that there's a very real risk that they could be "unmoored" from reality, especially if the user demographic leans towards loners. Prime example is 4chan. A lesser example would be someone on Twitter who exclusively uses it politically. I think this will only get worse over time, and possibly accelerate once AI gets involved. Using, I don't know, GPT-4 and DALL-E 3, you can create a seemingly thriving "community" filled with "people" who make hilarious memes and generate thought-provoking content, culminating in whatever world you want to live in. Possibly a very hateful one.
On a positive note, I think that the internet will become a somewhat more decentralized place again. I think that with the end of the social networking era we'll also see the end of the so called "walled garden" era of the internet. Making weird websites might just become cool again. VC money will still flow into "tech", but it'll mostly be towards AI or things that are more physical such as energy, climate, biotech, space, or maybe just physical consumer goods. The race to dominate the attention of the internet will be over.
Finally, there's "the metaverse". I think a lot of companies are going to try, and fail, to build VR Disneyland when what people really want to experience is a virtual city far larger than any real world city, with public squares to meet new people at and private, intimate worlds to share with your friends. Just seems far more likely that we'll instead wind up the internet all over again, only, you know, in VR, so just the internet really. If anything, I think a company might stake its claim in this future not by trying to build a platform, but by building tools.
Mind you, this is all still a long ways off I think, but in the present there are a lot of companies building 2D metaverses, which are basically community spaces.
These are primitive 2D games with videochat. These technologies existed for decades, it's naive to expect anything more from them than already exists. Changing the name to something more hyped will result in nothing more than a wave of hype.
For that reason, and many others, we really shouldn't ignore the amount of innovation in software and web that is largely design-oriented rather than engineering-oriented. A lot of venture-funded darlings out there are built on decades old technology, the key difference mostly being the design decisions that went into the product.
If this is true, what does it mean? China will invade Taiwan? What else?
Russia is a pariah with a shrinking population and no real economy outside of petrochemicals
India is a more hopeful version if Brazil but still enormously corrupt. It’s also in conflict with Pakistan and China.
China is more likely to be the next Japan than the next USA. Huge debt from infra spending + population that will halve by 2050 is not a great foundation. They sabre rattle but have never in their history had a blue water navy - the minimum to be a credible military power.
My money is on places like Nigeria, Colombia, Namibia, Botswana. Places with relatively good governance and a functioning economic foundation, that are free of distractions from serious regional conflict.
Just imagine, you can travel reasonable distances without needing to deal with traffic. Your drone could pick you up on your roof, and then drop you off on a roof in a city, bypassing roads and traffic.
More importantly, if most personal transport is by drone, it means we don't need to invest as much in roads, bridges, and railroads.
Here's a small example:
An intact cabbage kept in a cool dark place will last orders of magnitude longer than the same cabbage, pre-shredded, in a plastic bag. The intact cabbage needs NO ENERGY INPUT whereas the cabbage that's been shredded and bagged needs CONSTANT ENERGY INPUT. The benefits of shredded versus intact cabbage come in terms of the employer being able to externalize a small amount of labor cost, at the expense of a small amount of extra plastic waste and an inferior product.
We will have no choice eventually.
But I don't trust humans to make such collective sacrifices willingly. We're just too lazy, stupid, and selfish.
I think the more likely outcome is that reality will control our population for us, via drought, famine, war, and epidemic.
The US's total CO2 emissions have been going down for a decade or two now, even after population growth. And no, it's not because we outsourced them.
Demographic problems (low birth rates).
There will probably be some places with "natural" population control from lack of food or from disease bht that doesn't mean "we" have to do anything.
You def can't be pro-choice or anti-fascist then support population control.
I'm not as worried, believing in the spirit of human ingenuity. Desalination and piping it from the oceans (like we do for oil) will be fine. We just need the wherewithal to implement real solutions and invest in the sciences rather than regulate behavior.
But i reckon once these frameworks mature enough they have the power to disrupt the whole way we think about building websites and frontend back-end coding.
Because instead of using types you can use proofs. And have the compiler prove things about your code.
You then may not need such complex higher order types in typed code.
And you could retrofit this to JS, Ruby, C so you don’t need to learn new languages to get excellent type safety.
For example assert that a number is in the 0-100 range and have the proven at compile time. Not just unit tested. It would be amazing.
Edit for clarification:
For example, the destruction of local environment is a known problem for places such as Machu Picchu and Venice, to the point where you now need to reserve and pay for a visit to the city of Venice [0]
As population gets higher more and more people want to visit the top destinations, and when a new one gets "found" it gets flooded (see Dubrovnik after Game of Thrones hype)
Because of physical limitations these experiences don't scale - there's a finite number of destinations in the world and an ever-growing population.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/01/world/europe/venice-touri...
The driving aspiration of the future will be that you live in a place worth visiting. Not a place you look forward to flee 2-3 times a year.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/01/world/europe/venice-touri...
GPT-3 can generate quite sensible paragraphs but is far away from generating pages of internally consistent content. On there other hand it works OK as semantic aware knowledge base: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32348768
The people you're talking about have already quit talking about the thing you would now be interested in, so you're too late already.
Imagine this: https://youtu.be/NdTxgakQ-VA
(Spatial mm-wave imagery)
...crossed with all the data about you from social media, your phone sensor data, ad tracker data, location data and your gestural fingerprint from the many hours of VR gaming you've put in?
And then imagine this can be synthesized and queried vaguely, generically and qualitatively via some GPT style interface to estimate your whereabouts, your mental state, to anticipate your plans, intentions, deeply personal interests etc.?
No one seems to care about it, except particularly ardent fans. And the government only cares about satellites that benefit them.
However, discoveries and innovations are still happening. The latest one I have in mind is the James Webb Space Telescope. And private companies like SpaceX are still planning a mission to Mars. Lastly, somewhere flashed information about the resumption of the space program, such as flights to the moon.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2010/09/29/90189/how-to-bui...
Sidenote: Unlimited power capacity introduced many new challenges, so there will be uhm powers who wants to stop it, temporarily.
I searched for it and couldn’t find it.
Here’s a former top page post by Terraform: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/07/22/were-going-to-...
I agree that EV will be the future, but I doubt that, especially with the rate of urbanization that we have, private vehicles is what we will be talking about 20 years down the line.
Cities will need to focus on the 15-minute concept (reach all your necessary socio-economic points of interest in 15 minutes, no matter where you live) as well as public transport (and it’s equal distribution !!).
So I think, what people are talking about little is the advances in public transportation and centralized city logistics. Sure, EV fleets all the way, but also answers of how to get people and goods from A-B in a car-free environment will be of increasing importance.
I first interpreted this as pertaining to the death penalty.
https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/research/programmes/complexity-eco...
The Keynesian economics principals has an assumption that says 'goods are scarce`
And if the next 15-30 years is an era of exponential then how should the economics behave?
FWIW, I'm not trying to promote anything extreme like population control policies, just pointing out that the current trend of population leveling off is generally a good thing.
I was talking more from an outside perspective, and, more importantly, from the pov of an outside direct influence (via more taxes/charges). I do not think air-fuel costs are going to get cheaper again, to the contrary, I think the externalities of airplane flight will start being included more and more into the final price. The same goes for accommodation prices, which are dependent on energy prices (you need gas/electricity to keep a room at reasonable temperatures during the summer and in winter). Those are not going back to cheaper prices, either. And there are all the other related prices, for example car rental prices have also increased dramatically and will most probably remain that way, there's no IC cars replacing the current fleets in the near future (for the simple reason that they won't make them anymore) and we won't build enough EVs at reasonable costs to keep the current car rental market exactly as it is (or as it used to be until very recent, that is).
As for the "unmet demand", too bad for the consumers (i.e. potential tourists). The same way the mass tourism industry was invented in the 1930s (give or take), the same way it can be scaled back "societally", by saying things like "if you still want to be a tourist you will do great harm to the ecosystem shared by all of us" (which is most probably true) and similar stuff. No (service) industry has to live forever.
What problems could we solve if we doubled the scientists and engineers working on it?
Plus every new birth is a lottery ticket for our civilization getting the next Einstein.
I live in northern Britain and, even at the height of summer, it's rare for a week to go by, without at least one day of heavy rainfall.
Maybe it's me who's extrapolating globally from what I'm seeing locally. But I don't get any sense at all that the world is getting drier.
Still, if the 'water wars' predictions do turn out to be true, maybe we'll have an interesting reversal of fortunes in the future, where damp, wet, soggy countries become fabulously wealthy, like the OPEC nations today --through exporting tankers full of their spare rainwater.
Let's see how the Arabs like queuing up at the pumps to fill their drinking vessels at £2/litre!
Whilst we havent had wars, there have certainly been water conflicts even _within_ the UK. Consider Treweryn [2]. This was a town rich with Welsh culture and the Welsh language. It was flooded to become a reservoir to supply water to Liverpool in 1965. The decision to flood the town was made by UK Parliament, without gaining consent from Wales. The plans triggered mass opposition and protests, but they were ignored and the plan went ahead. The story of Treweryn acts as a beacon for the Welsh independence movement to this day [3]
Interestingly, the remains of the town became visible for the first time in decades a few years ago. Possibly a further sign of things getting dryer.
[1] https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/press-office/news/weat...
I also think that water wars seem unlikely as if you have energy, you can get water.
But it is not the type of war that we fight over oil or gas. But instead very localised conflicts over rivers. Think of Nile and Kashmir.
There is no point of conquering other countries for lakes or ground water. The transport is just too expensive.
These things, in theory, could be everywhere. You can bend some of them, so you could wrap lamp posts with them, cover cars in them, put them everywhere. I am confident that within 20 years, we will solve power problems with renewables like this, and we will have a major revolution in infinite-power designs, like illuminated clothing, power generating and emitting roadways, and servers embedded into everything, everywhere, for every reason.
They are 17% efficiency, and they don't yet last very long, but the work is moving at a steady pace.
There was a movie about it recently and precisely one organization developing a realistic hedge (not counting NASA's DART test mission) and pretty much still nobody cares.
n = 1. We have no backups whatsoever.
Too many parties interested in exploiting the lack of privacy are making the lack of privacy laws painfully apparent.
When it changes, its going to be all at once.
Privacy is going to become a very important issue very quickly as some states start to make laws that will be shockingly backward to most people. And those laws will be sticky and will require Amendment level changes to correct. To prevent an Amendment, even Repbulicans will introduce sweeping and broad privacy laws and will likely point to big tech companies as scapegoats to divert attention from their own generally unpopular activities (that play great to their base so they don't get primaried out).
Corporations are going to get swept up in the melee unless they begin to self-govern in a very real way very quickly to get ahead of this. Because every personal data player that does something can can be spun negatively will be dragged through the mud for political points from both sides.
What incentive do they have to change? If anything, this seems to suggest the exact opposite, that privacy will never be codified as a right.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/09/health/psychedelics-mdma-...
FWIW: Metaverse VR is a flying car category... it comes up every 10-15 years but never gets traction because there's no point to it. Zuck is sailing the ship off the end of the proverbial world when he should've tripled-down on making AR ubiquitous and simple.
- Quantum Computing and WFH
- Crypto and Micronuclear Power
- Metaverse and Biohacking
Have fun!
The labor is ridiculously cheap after the lira crash, raw materials for practically anything can be sourced domestically, and it's right in the neighborhood of everywhere except America and China.
People seem to have gotten comfortable with the idea of Ukraine as a low-tempo conventional war, but it could very quickly turn into something much more significant.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/07/us-nucl...
Not only is this orders of magnitude more impactful than the other conflicts, but perhaps even more concerning is what in the world the endgame might be? By effectively throwing its entire influence into this war, the US has now effectively staked that influence on the outcome of the war. And it's the exact same situation for Russia. The two most nuclear armed nations are now in a conflict that is a must-win for both of them.
IMO this conflict ending up going nuclear is still highly improbable, but highly improbable is far closer to nuclear war than we've ever been.
Though small room temp ones don't exist yet, they likely will some day.
As to why they are a 'big thing': Imagine a large GPU cluster turned down to the size of a laptop and running off a solar cell. They'd revolutionize electronics in other ways too. But the main use we can see now is that they allow for great amounts of computation for very cheap energy budgets. Stuff that takes coal mines today could be done with what it takes to feed a cat.
For instance, a home battery might have to be more durable (so withstand more charging cycles) but on the flip side can be heavier.
That said there might be synergies by repurposing worn out EV batteries as home or grid storage batteries.
Based on what, on the realistic intervention of which actors?
And are you sure all the ideals in your set can be considered objective, naturally sharable, as opposed to ideological and partial?
Agreed, they are not objective. If you wish, you can change my first phrase to "a more dystopian future", if you think it's worse.
If anything, the problem is new generations will be pre-modern again.
That was a mistake. GenX should have distilled the insights of the hippies, but chucking away the cosplay and fairytales. Modernism has not ended, it is the current state of the world.
I'm not expecting some doomer apocalyptic scenario. But every year, it'll get 1% worse. People will struggle 1%, there will be 1% more resentment between race/class/demographics, 1% more people leaving, and so on. It'll just get worse.
I'm not suggesting everyone will have a 3D printer, but if we can localize the printing, you can get your same day delivery without warehousing, etc.
By 2030 (8 years from now) at least six manufacturers will have stopped making ICE vehicles entirely, and India claims it will ban the sale of ICE-only vehicles. By 2040 (18 years from now) over half of all new cars sold will be electric, and the UK and France claim they will ban the sale of ICE-only vehicles.
However, there's still not a plan that makes all that sustainable, as we need 30% more grid capacity, an insanely higher number of chargers (1 out of 4 are duds) / service companies / land, China still controls most of the resources for production (of raw resources, manufacturing, & assembly) and now they want the chips too. And the climate picture isn't great either, with not enough new clean energy capacity going online, and only 8 million barrels of crude will be displaced by the estimated number of new EVs. Even with all of this new work, there will be only a small reduction in carbon emissions.
Basically there are so many things that can go wrong in the next 18 years, and so many things we don't even have a plan for, that all the estimates we've been given will result in dysfunction, increased prices, and soaring secondary markets. A lot of people are going to make money just from preparing for things to go wrong.
We literally have no vision for optimization, we just seem to obsess about and creating one problem to solve another for the sake of capacity and scalability.
The only way to fix it is by passing taxes or other restrictive legislation, which has so far been extremely difficult because most voters choose "let's make things a bit easier for you today" over "we should all sacrifice now to make things probably better later".
I find this way of thinking unrealistic and paternalistic. It might work in an authoritarian society, or in a society where the alternative to car culture is appealing.
But, let's get very realistic for a moment. I telecommute, and my wife has an in-person job. I'd even go so far as to say that most jobs are like hers: in-person, because she isn't a knowledge worker.
We go to the grocery store. Even though it's a reasonable walk, we take our car because it's not reasonable to lug the groceries back home. It's also not reasonable to bring groceries onto public transport. (My boss, who doesn't drive, uses an Uber for grocery shopping.) An alternate way of living would need to figure this out.
Even though most of our trips are very close to home, we do about 18k miles a year. Our family (and many friends) do no live in town. We also prefer to travel by car. It's much easier when going on a family vacation compared to lugging kids and baggage through all kinds of trains and bus transfer.
And... Where we live is mildly rural. Regular bus routes, (or similar) don't make sense.
I live in a very walkable neighborhood near lots of public transit.
Yesterday someone was shot in the head two floors up. A month ago I watched a racially charged conflict that only didn't end with a stabbing because a dude couldn't find anything appropriate in the unoccupied security desk. A week ago I witnessed a charged situation with a couple of dozen people at a bus stop. Someone was murdered on a bus at 11pm two blocks away over who got a cigarette on the floor. A friend was visiting me and someone got stabbed at the bus stop she used 45 minutes after she passed through.
There are exactly 0 units available in my building appropriate for a family of 4 unless you really aspire to live packed in like sardines, the units you could do so which still don't have much space in them go for significantly more than a 6 bedroom house on a half acre within a few miles.
What will happen if left-wing idealists try to force city density and public transit on people is a hard right wing turn when the consequences of one party trying to take freedoms away for idealistic reasons becomes a bigger burden than the consequences of the freedoms the other party wants to take away.
I really don't care about my own safety, but when it comes time for a family I would never subject any of them to the safety nightmare which is high density public-transit heavy living.
When the same people fighting to abolish the car are fighting to abolish the police, I don't think there's going to be much hope for either happening.
Now solar panels are mostly made in China (as are almost all consumer electronics), but that seems like a far more general problem to solve.
For example, just to provide enough chargers for Philadelphia's 1.5M residents (63% of them drive to work), one of every ~6 car lengths on every residential sidewalk would need concrete dug up and a charger installed. The city will never pay for that, and it would be a logistical and political nightmare. Even if individuals went through a city process to get a permit to do it themselves and pay for & install their own charger, and assuming there was a posted parking limit for only EVs, some jerk down the street with a Tesla will take the spot, and you may have to drive blocks and blocks to find a free charger. Many people may decide to just stick to ICE.
Production does not mean capacity.
Obvious one is Tesla. has alot of solar capacity but doesn't make alot of sales since they are at the high end of the market. Same with Misson Solar and Solaria.
If we took a hard stance on trading with China it would hurt alot of the big name players, there would be alot of constraints for a while, but would give smaller, US Based manufacturers with more capacity than sales time to shine.
There is no way around the labor equation in products without effective legislation.
So what happens when 1/4 of all their customers disappear? Many will close and when that happens there will be less competition, driving up gas prices which will result in more people buying electric cars. It's a cycle that--once it kicks off--is going to move very quickly. Faster than people, cities, and society are prepared for, that's for sure!
Or use battery swapping, like China is doing. This enables many gas stations to remain viable, allows far better battery health monitoring/remediation, permits slower, less stressful charging & greatly reduces the grid issue, eliminates the battery as a limitation of the car’s lifespan, etc.
EVs are going to take over no matter what because in their end state they're better than ICE vehicles in nearly every way. Quieter, smoother, simpler, faster, cleaner (air pollution), and potentially cheaper.
That said, I absolutely disagree with the amount of shade you're throwing at the technology in the context of climate, emissions, and fuel:
> we need 30% more grid capacity
That's not very hard, especially since EVs are being phased in gradually. We had the same problem with air conditioners and it was no big deal.
> an insanely higher number of chargers
Which will happen because there is a clear financial incentive to build them. They're cheaper to run and maintain than gas stations and the fuel is transported much more easily.
> service companies
Are service companies a finite resource?
> land
What land do you mean? Car-based infrastructure already uses and has a bunch of land. Where is it that EVs need more of it?
> China still controls most of the resources for production
We already have this situation with the Middle East/Russia with oil
Here's the biggest issue I have with your comment: you're minimizing massive reduction in oil usage:
> and only 8 million barrels of crude will be displaced by the estimated number of new EVs
That's a lot! Globally, 43.7 million barrels of oil are used per day for transportation fuel. [1]
That means that EVs will reduce crude oil usage for transportation by 18.3%! That's really significant!
While we can cheer for EVs reducing emissions, it will do nothing to stop the actual problem with climate change, which is global catastrophe from runaway warming. Add to that the problems we are setting ourselves up for with failure to properly handle the coming EVs and the picture looks grim.
From what I understand, it involves replacing nearly every local distribution station in existence, because nobody prepared for this.
When I had my charger installed, my electrician mentioned that I was at capacity for the service line. To upgrade it, I would have to pay to have the sidewalk and road dug up and repaired, for a couple of city blocks.
I don't think "not very hard" is the appropriate framing.
Do you believe this? I know its a stated goal, but is there anything to hold the company's accountable or is this just a promise? I can't imagine them giving up a cash cow and something they've been doing for decades. EV sales in the USU are 5.6% of the market. I just find the claim that these companies will just seamlessly switch over to electric when they can't even get a decent touch screen in a car a decade after the first iPad.
There are a lot of built-in incentives for manufacturers to switch to electric once the market demand exists.
Less moving parts to warranty means potentially less long-tail costs for parts as well as less capital allocation for potential warranty service claims paid to dealerships. Less moving parts that can fail. Less parts in general. AWD in electrics is typically done with a front and rear motor configuration versus using moving parts to transfer power from the front to the rear.
More opportunities to upsell with lower capital costs. Model stratification by power output in ICE typically means more complex engineering (forced induction) or larger engine; both of which require significantly more R&D, testing, and validation. Once you sink capital investments into an ICE engine and manufacturing line, you need to reuse it over many years across a large range of vehicles to recoup the cost.
Model stratification in electrics is via bigger battery packs (stuff more of the same cells in there) and multiple motors.
Basically, electric cars are fiscally better for manufacturers in every way -- so long as consumers are willing to pay the premium AND willing to live with the inconveniences (less infrastructure for refueling, longer refueling, range anxiety).
What Tesla did was de-risk the market by showing that consumers will buy the product despite its flaws.
Manufactures are already quietly sunseting ICEs. It just doesn't read as significant right now, because the models which are going away are not the big, important ones. But manufactures are setting the stage for the transition of popular nameplates to EVs (see: Mustang, F150)
They anticipate increased costs for ICE vehicles and increased profit from EV which is why they're moving forward. They don't control the segments of the market they need to make it happen, so it's a risky bet. However, the manufacturers that are switching first are largely luxury brands, so they make a healthy enough profit that even if they stumble they wont be under water.
I will say also, any government promises or actions more than 1 election cycle out are pipe dreams by those governments, When we get to 2030, I will be SHOCKED if even 20% of the nations promising to ban ICE sales will actually do it
Why do you have the impression "nobody" is planning for these things? These topics are talked about endlessly in every medium by laypeople. Billions of dollars in public and private sector investment is being funneled into everyone of these topics.
The complaint about grid capacity baffles me. The USA used to regularly growth capacity by well over 30% a decade. It only stopped expanding because energy efficiency standards were so damn successful that net usage declined in spite of population growth, and the majority new capacity went to displacing coal production.
> By 2030 (8 years from now) at least six manufacturers will have stopped making ICE vehicles entirely.
If those two seem out of step with one another then I propose that one of them will relent with regard to the other. (No one is making these six manufacturers stick to their forecasts.)
I'm also worried about the future of cars, of course. I'm an optimist, though -- I hope that the oncoming car dystopia leads to a rejection of cars by a bigger chunk of society. And a more sustainable, quiet, walkable, bikeable world for those of us who embrace it.
"The emissions from Materials production and refining of the ICE are roughly 40 per cent less than for the BEV" [0]
Therefore, forcing people to scrap working vehicles and buy new ones, in such a short time period, is going to dump massive quantities of CO2 in to the atmosphere in very order. This sounds extremely dangerous. I don't understand their reasoning.
Surely they need to fix the EV electric energy mix to make it more renewable, before forcing people to buy the EVs
[0]https://www.volvocars.com/images/v/-/media/project/contentpl...
Is this true over the life time of the car? Studies indicate this may be a widely believed myth.
If there are not enough chargers, won't that create an incentive to build more? And yeah, you probably can't build them fast enough, or the grid capacity will not be sufficient, but won't people then just move to places where they can? Or switch to alternative modes of transportation?
I think the fallacy is that people just want to replace ICE cars with EVs as they are, and then realize you need a lot of space and grid capacity to charge them, etc. But because of the scaling problems you mention, there will be a very large pressure to build better public transport. If people can't charge their EV, or can't afford a car, or don't have good transportation, they will move somewhere else. This is structural change, and yeah it is going to be inconvenient and expensive (and we could have done it better with more foresight), but ultimatively we will figure it out.
This sounds fine to you? Not having enough grid capacity means much higher prices and more frequent blackouts. Not having enough charging infrastructure means many people may be unable to fuel their vehicles. "Sorry, but this city is shit now, I guess you're going to have to move to Texas for their great electric grid" doesn't seem like a position we should be aiming to put many people in.
> Basically there are so many thing sthat can go wrong in the next 18 years ...
There has to be a name for this particular kind of response to change (usually positive change[0]). Please don't read this as crapping on your points -- they're all valid.
The problem is that it's identifying problems that "may occur in the future" using what technology we have, today, to solve them. It also presents those in a vacuum and ignores the unknown of what the world could look like after new vehicles sales gradually transition to 80% electric. We can speculate more easily on the negative, but it's a lot harder to predict the positive -- at least, the "societal changing positive effects".
Consider that newer EVs can power your home during a power loss, or integrating EVs into the grid, itself. Reliance on traditional automobiles and how we rely on them is changing, as well. My driving habits, due to the vast availability of fully-remote work and the purchase of a OneWheel have been drastically reduced[1]. I went from ~20 gallons/week to ~10 gallons/month of gas. I've done the math a few times and it's stupid for me to own an ICE vehicle. I own it out of a desire of convenience that could probably be eliminated with Uber and when my kids are out of the house, I probably will no longer own a car. Until then, however, my car could basically be filling in that 30% gap (or whatever the gap happens to be at this very moment).
Articles that recently hit the front page of HN related to Geothermal conversion of Coal Plants[2], the myriad of posts related to companies attempting the modern-day alchemy called "Nuclear Fusion", there's a lot of energy/money being spent in the space, much of it having nothing to do with reducing climate change but providing for an increasingly electricity dependent future.
Even the incredibly slow-moving electric companies have made some pretty serious progress. I think back on my short life; I happen to currently live in the city I grew up in -- losing the power for a few days in the summer was a "normal thing", as was losing it during every miserable thunderstorm. The price of whole-home generators and the hardware to integrate it were so cost-prohibitive that few people owned one. I still do not, however, I've lost power maybe four times this year for under ten seconds. I've lost power once in three years for over an hour (still restored in under four hours).
[0] I'm thinking something succinct like Hanlon's Razor.
[1] 2,800 miles and going since I bought it. I grocery shop with it ... it's a good upper body workout carrying 6 bags back 1-3 miles.
[2] Filed under "I'll believe it when I see it" but still.
Because, unless we get a tremendous breakthrough in the next 5 years, electric battery vehicles will be a very big pain.
-Batteries are terribly expensive (and prices are not going down as fast as expected)
-Batteries degrade too fast
-Batteries take too long to charge
-Electricity prices are already going up terribly fast to take advantage of the boom (and blaming the war, and everything else to justify it's rise)
-Batteries pollute a lot more than previously though
-recycling Batteries is hard
-Batteries component materials are rare
-if you get into a crash your Battery will most likely be affected - which means you will probably have to spend almost the price of a new vehicle
Can we bet a little more on the most abundante substance on the universe?
I know it also has it's problems... But they do seen less...
Also the efficiency of a cycle of storing energy into gaseous hydrogen and then recovering it is limited by fundamental reasons to low values.
For cars, it is likely that batteries will remain the best solution, due to the high efficiency of a charge-discharge cycle.
For long term storage of energy, further improvements of fuel cells might make them the best solution for recovering energy stored in chemical form, but not using gaseous hydrogen for storage, but other more appropriate substances, e.g. hydrocarbons, alcohols, ammonia or solid carbon.
There are fuel cells for the other fuels mentioned above and the only advantage of the hydrogen fuel cells is that they currently have the greatest power density, i.e. the speed of reaction of the hydrogen per area of electrode is for now the greatest (leading to the greatest electrical current density), but only either at high temperatures or when using expensive catalysts.
The mitochondria from all the cells of our body are a demonstration that it is possible to make a very high efficiency fuel cell using hydrocarbons as fuel and without using any rare or expensive materials for catalysts.
While the solar cells already exceed the efficiency of plants at capturing solar energy, the artificial fuel cells have a long way until becoming competitive with those used by the living beings.
What is "too fast"?
Much of the fear about battery degradation was from projections and warranty terms at the very beginning of modern EV deployments.
Real world observations have shown the battery packs maintaining >85% of their capacity after 150,000mi/241,000km.
Also, battery components aren't rare. They're called "rare" because they are not found in large centralized deposits but rather spread somewhat uniformly throughout the earth. They are actually some of the more abundant elements on earth. For every two atoms of silicon on earth, there is almost one of lithium, which makes it much more abundant than hydrocarbons. If battery component extraction was subsidized to the degree hydrocarbon extraction is, they would be much less expensive, and more available on the market, than hydrocarbons.
>-if you get into a crash your Battery will most likely be affected - which means you will probably have to spend almost the price of a new vehicle
The battery makes up approximately 1/3rd the price of a new EV. As anyone who has had to pay for auto repair can attest, labor is almost always the main cost. It is inconceivable to me that replacing a battery and motors is more costly than an engine, except due to a shortage of qualified personnel commanding higher hourly rates. There is a video on YouTube of an elderly wheelchair-bound man completely rebuilding a Nissan Leaf battery pack in a workshop so I have no doubts that it is a skill that can be taught to any able-bodied person who is willing to learn.
As far as battery recycling goes, they're working on it: https://www.ornl.gov/news/automated-disassembly-line-aims-ma...
That we don't hear about hydrogen fuel cell vehicles actually suggests to me that they are not a viable option.
I presume, stupidly perhaps, that there are bigger thinkers than me (or certainly people in positions that have a lot more to lose or gain in this field) that have already counted the beans and still see the electric (battery) vehicles as the current future path of least resistance.
At the very least, swapping batteries for fuel cells seems to be a fundamentally simpler step than swapping ICE for electric. Going to electric cars generally, regardless of the source of power is a big move for the auto industry.
How the h... did my simple comment, based on my PERSONAL opinion on the subject got into this witch-hunt?!
Enough with the torches and forks!
This is not propaganda! It's MY PERSONAL conclusion on everything I've read! - the word -PERSONAL- is the key here.
If any of you think I don't like electric vehicles you are wrong! Anything that does not pollute is welcome(to try to undo the shirt we all did)!
But I have to say it: ATM - personal view, again - to me, electric vehicles based on batteries S-U-C-K!!! And they SUCK big time!!! I don't see them as decent alternative!!!
Sure! Environment-friendly it's the best we have! But they suck! And hydrogen has much more promise! Not developed enough? Yeah! It's not. But then again... Let me say it again: electric vehicles based on batteries suck.
And unless they get at least the first 3 points fixed you won't be changing my mind! 50.000 for a car that takes 25 min to charge and that if, for some reason, the battery goes the way of the Dodo I can expand ALMOST another 50.000?
Sorry, I'm not payed enough for that.
You guys must all have big pay checks every month... But I don't!
Not really.
>-Batteries degrade too fast
No, they don't, at least not the well-temperature-controlled ones. Larger EV packs should outlast most ICE cars.
>-Batteries take too long to charge
They really don't, unless you have no way to charge at home - the vast majority of charging happens overnight even on a 120V plug. We only visit chargers when on roadtrips.
>-Electricity prices are already going up terribly fast to take advantage of the boom (and blaming the war, and everything else to justify it's rise)
Not really true, at least in our corner of the US. I think we're sitting at ~$0.14/kwh, which works out to around $0.04-$0.05/mi, or 20-25 miles per $. And any rise in methane prices is going to hit hydrogen harder, given that most H2 is produced by cracking CH4.
>-Batteries pollute a lot more than previously though
Source? What kind of pollution? More than the steel that goes into making a car?
>-recycling Batteries is hard
Not really? Tesla claims a materials yield of 92% on their packs, and 100% of the packs recycled. Recyclers are willing to pay quite a bit for broken packs, which should tell you something.
>-Batteries component materials are rare
Newer chemistries are better about this.
>-if you get into a crash your Battery will most likely be affected - which means you will probably have to spend almost the price of a new vehicle
Yeah, Teslas aren't great on this front, even wrt the bodywork. But battery pack replacements don't cost nearly as much as a new EV.
Gaseous hydrogen has a lot of problems, and you'd need to build a whole distribution network. Which we already have with electricity...
And like any other 'bubble' at least the ultimate goal seem to fleece somebody.
Honestly the whole point of this is 'to make things easier'. +++
P-:
I'm apparently CUE's biggest fan too :]
You can already use CUE within other programs when you need imperative, there is also the scripting layer where this is possible. There is also a plan to support a WASM runtime so you can have imperative subroutines in the scripting layer, written in any other language.
I do however agree that existing battery technology is _still_ severely disadvantaged, not only in terms of efficiency and density but the rare materials they need to manufacture (same for H2 solutions).
It's annoying because ICE engines are not great (big, heavy, complicated with related reliability issues), yet they consume an easy to transfer high density liquid fuel; Electric engines are fantastic (small, light, simple, highly efficient, powerful, great torque), but they consume electricity which is hard to efficiently transfer with no where near the energy density per unit weight or space storage solutions.
However! ICE exists, all of it's issues are mitigated by mass adoption, and in the short term it's not environmentally responsible to ditch 1 billion cars. I think the best plan I've seen so far is to scale up synthesising hydrocarbons from solar... electric cars can continue to be developed and we can find more reasonable electric storage solutions without undermining the purpose of switching to electric by forcing the world into an immature solution and throwing away 1 billion ICE vehicles and all related infrastructure (manufacturing EVEs has an environmental cost).
We like simple to understand solutions, but the solution that minimises environmental impact must not underscope itself - the whole picture has to be considered, costs of manufacturing and switching are not external to planet Earth, which means there is some ideal conversion rate that must be determined.
What is the "electric" car iPhone moment?
One of those problems is there is no abundant source of hydrogen in isolated form here on earth. You have to use a catalytic agent or an energy-intensive process like electrolysis to get usable hydrogen for your fuel cell.
Their currency is stronger than before the war (despite internal fragility)
They have the entire continent of Europe by the balls on oil/gas
They've made an absolute killing in the energy sector this year due to the fear and scarcity they have created.
They're making steady gains in their war in Ukraine
They have the ear and economic heart of China
They have shown themselves to be blackmailers with energy - no one will trust them again. The war will make Europe less dependent on Russian energy.
Steady gains - I wouldn't say so as they had to retreat from the whole northern Ukraine. In my opinion, Russia lost the war after first week or two. They bet everything on quick collapse of Ukrainian army and now that it did not happen, they are in a war they want to fight with peacetime army against an 40 million country that is fully mobilizing. It's a losing fight for Russia.
How much aid did China send to Russia? Answer is very little to none.
Reason why I feel Russia will collapse is that usually after major defeats, empires fall. We have various factions already jockeying for position and I bet that people like Kadyrov wouldn't mind carving their own part of Russia (independent Chechnya). After Russia depletes their army and manpower in a futile war against Ukraine we can see various other national movements come up. Especially if/when Putin dies.
Russia will be just a gas station to China. And China being more authoritarian, will not be such easy target for kgb as Scholz/Merkel/Schroeder were.
Can Russia survive with their grain exports? I doubt it.
Stronger than before the war, but weaker than some years ago. Russia is declining for a long time now, this war is just a last struggle.
> They have the entire continent of Europe by the balls on oil/gas
No, they have not. They lost them. Everyone is switching to new suppliers, while speeding up their movement to alternatives. And this did not happen because of the war. Moving to greener technology happens for some time now, 2019 it got a new boost, and the war only gave it another boost. With more than half of their export being a dated resource, Russia had an obvious problem pending on them.
> They've made an absolute killing in the energy sector this year due to the fear and scarcity they have created.
They made a short term win by burning their long term gains. They paid very hard with all the restrictions they received, and all the trust they lost.
> They're making steady gains in their war in Ukraine
You mean, steady gains backward? They are losing the war. They lost most of the territory they gained in the early days, and have now barely more than they had before the war.
> They have the ear and economic heart of China
Having an ear without the backing is useless. They can't push nearly as much to China than they sold to Europe. And china is switching to greener energy too. Russia's other products have little value for china. Not enough to compensate for the loss. Though, maybe enough to hold the country alive.
The thing is, overall economical, Russia is an old country with a dying market. A dinosaur who failed to adept to the future. And they burned every ground with those who could help them transform into a better form. But truly, a collapse does not depend on economy alone. Russia seems to have a population accustomed to suffering, and indoctrinated with Putin's nonsense. So quite likely that the country will remain as it is for the moment. But until some significant change will happen, the country will remain in a very stressed state, with a chance for collapse always being around.
I don't mean to upset anyone, and I think the chance of collapse is small, but it's not zero.
This is going to hit harder and than people realize. There are so many really great EV options from nearly every manufacture. And their sales figures are growing at a solid clip. According to Cox, EVs are 12% of new car sales in 22, and it's the only segment that grew YoY (the overall market fell 20% YoY).
As I mentioned, I'm all for the reduction of automobile usage as a generality, but that's not as low-friction as a transition to EVs.
We can lament our situation all we want, EVs are what they are. I am not saying they're a full climate solution.
Automakers are switching over them purely as a product decision, with relatively little government regulation pushing them in that direction. (Any regulatory bans on ICE vehicles were easily enacted without industry protest because automakers already know that ICE vehicles will not be competitive products by 2030)
Obviously not an ideal solution but a good example of the kind of stop gaps we'll be seeing over time.
I'm also already seeing rapid chargers frequently in strip malls and stuff. So maybe doing errands and spending at least an hour there once a week will be another stop gap.
Considering how often streets get repaved and that we're talking about gradual change over the next decade or two, and that there are inferior but workable stopgaps as mentioned above (that will allow people to get by, yet also incentivize them to loudly demand better) I think there's time to add the charging stations necessary as needed without any serious issues.
Adding charging to a garage or parking lot is easier than on the street, and you don't have to worry about not being able to access "your" spot.
I love cars, trucks, and the things they enable me to do. Literally most of the things that make my life worth living are tied to using one.
Perhaps people can segregate into different cities or areas based on their preferences .
Personally I think personal vehicles simply shouldn't exist in dense cities. They take up too much space to move around and to park, they cause too much noise, and when they interact with other transportation -- by foot, by bike, by scooter, whatever -- there's a fractional blood price I'm not OK with. Not to mention the fact that people in cars in the cities I've lived in frequently become raging jerks who use their car as a weapon to enforce their own entitlement to all public space.
As a car enthusiast, do you think it's OK to ban personal vehicles from US cities? I envision a world where secure parking garages exist on the periphery of a public transit, walk, and bike-dominated space for folks who still want to own a car while living in a city -- or for folks who want to visit a city via car. This periphery would largely align with existing ring roads around US cities. Outside of the periphery, folks could live near the benefits of the city with a garage, car, street parking, etc. But they wouldn't travel into the city via car.
Deliveries would largely happen at night or in the early morning, when pedestrian traffic is the lightest. Ride shares would exist for the disabled only, with everyone else using their feet, a bicycle, or public transit to move around the car-free zone. Building out public transit, bike lanes, etc. would become very cheap in the absence of personal vehicle traffic, because you could just put street cars, buses, bike paths, and light rail on top of 90% of the existing streets.
And of course, if you don't live in a major city, your life wouldn't change at all. You just wouldn't drive into the downtown of any of the top 50-to-100-population US cities. I suspect some small towns might embrace a similar model if it's successful in big cities, but not many.
What do you think of this future model? It would let people who want to live car-free in a community do so in a dense urban environment. It would let people who want to live with cars do so in the existing exurbs and rural parts of the US. I have a hard time seeing major flaws, but I'm likely biased since I desperately want a car-free environment here in the US.
No. It's Russian invasion on Ukraine directly responsible for the deaths.
Supporting Ukraine is not even significantly risking U.S. influence or standing in the EU. Getting Finland and Sweden into NATO is a benefit to the U.S. that will endure even if Ukraine completely falls (which it won’t).
I guess there is a chance that Russia could initiate a nuclear exchange if Putin is 100% suicidally insane. I don’t believe that he is.
The EU and the US have drawn the lines very explicitly, which before they were able to whist away any pressing questions on relations by claiming 'allies'.
Russia has been cut off from the IMF dominated financial system. No FX, No Swift, no IMF support. This is the financial equivilent of going nuclear. This has led Russia and China to announce they are goiing to directly compete with the IMF and start their own federal reserve.
My point is not that nuclear war is imminent, but quite the opposite. We have new tools to declare total war without a single bullet being fired. Cyber, destabilization and financial war might prove deadlier than nuclear could ever be.
> Cyber, destabilization and financial war might prove deadlier than nuclear could ever be.
Nuclear could plausibly result in the extinction of our species. Suggesting that financial warfare could "prove deadlier than nuclear could ever be" seems patently false.
> far closer to nuclear war than we've ever been.
This is the statement that is being disagreed with.
It is in human nature to exceptionalize the time period you happen to be living in. It is worth guarding against these cognitive biases.
Edit. I'm sure Musk and Tesla are super proud of the CO2 savings their company provides, so it shouldn't be hard to find the data they are publishing showing the net cost to carbon for the entire manufacturing and life time use of their product.
Enlighten me in a lot of subjects and with H2 downsides I can accept.
I confess I know a bit more about batteries that the H2...
What's going to happen is that at some point having a car gets slightly more expensive. Some people will put off buying a car for a little while. And they'll vote for candidates who promise to build more power infrastructure, or public transport. When people are moving the next time, they'll take the infrastructure into account in their decision, and move preferentially to cities with more capacity.
It's not like we are going to put 100 million EVs out there tomorrow. Some places will become marginally shittier, some will become better, and there will be plenty of time for everything to equilibrate.
I would like to see battery degradation beat that. (yeah, the tech is new. We'll probably get there... In 10 years)...
About the materials... There is a few reports on their problems... Mining and other problems of getting it
About the battery cost: that's not what I've been reading! It seems batteries are the most expansive part...
That, at least to me, seems to be the more likely scenario.
Also keep in mind that fueling behavior for EV owners is different than for ICE vehicle owners. Fast chargers are useful for road trips, but unnecessary and expensive for day-to-day driving. Most commuters will simply charge at home/work/the store/etc, where the raw inputs to charging infrastructure (car-adjacent space and electricity) are already in place and slower, cheaper charging is sufficient.
This requires having expensive, redundant charging infrastructure at all these places. It works today because far less than 1% of cars on the road in most of the developed world are electric. If 25% were electric, that free charging at the store and work is going away, there won't be enough bays to charge all the cars.
Whenever I hear 'X company is going all electric by Y date' I assume it's either an outright marketing lie, or that company will soon thereafter be out of business.
Shutting yourself off from society is a fragile and imperfect solution - if you look at South Africa, where elites have essentially tried to use razor wire and walled communities to insulate themselves, people's lives are still dominated by the threat and reality of the society they've tried to shut out.
The insinuation that social workers can fix this problem or the problem is rooted in mental health issues is a problem.
These are, for the most part, grown men deciding to use violence for income (theft in various forms) or to settle disputes. I don't know what you think a social worker is going to do to diffuse a fight (not that they'd be notified and arrive before it was long over) or if anyone with that background would willingly put themselves in the middle of a potentially violent encounter and think they could make everybody play nice and use their words.
There is some magical thinking and somewhat offensive blaming of mental illness on crime.
And excluding yourself from certain populations is absolutely effective, and not "society" that you're shutting yourself off from. Unfortunately you do leave a lot of people behind trying to escape from crime, but there are plenty of effective ways of doing it, if you have the means.
Cities in the US are nothing like SA and the problems are nothing similar.
If you subject people to economic darwinism, don't be surprised they bring regular darwinsim to your front door.
If you want things to change, just copy the countries that don't have your problems.
The only reason a person should ever need to charge at a station is on a long haul trip, and that problem is getting better all the time.
I have hopes it builds up to the hype.
But it's not a guarantee, naturally.
Let's cross fingers. Lol
H2, from what I know is nowhere near ready as batteries are.
But I believe with more investment it can get there!
Batteries can be very efficient but that is not an apples-to-apples comparison. You have to get the energy somewhere. Good solar systems are about 30% efficient. Turbines are about 30% efficient.
Energy efficiency isn't the problem with hydrogen and fuel cells. They have other problems.
Now for reality instead: since people have developed the direst situation of being "brainless", I have been near vehicles you would praise, and the noise they make is _unbearable_. That is because some satanic critters, which unfortunately constitute empowered components in management, marketing and public, believe it a "good idea" to replace traditional engine noise with synths of '90s operating system boot samples.
This happens because people have lost their nature, of feedback-based machines, and can go on living after being shot (they will not know about it).
--
Edit: an hybrid in electric mode just parked near me, in real time, and the noise was not the most particularly annoying - it's a Hyundai - but it was definitely upsetting and irritating (though much better than other hellish nightmares I have heard driving near me). I assess that normal individuals would probably be not that bothered when they pass on the streets many yards distant - but I am not sure, it really depends which audio bands will reach you. I am pretty sure that others I have experienced will be fully unbearable at a much longer distance.
Edit2: they just left now, and the noise at the start was quite acceptable now - just a mildly loud fan, nothing perverse. It seems Hyundai has guessed a few effects properly. (Issue is, others have not - and this logically opens for more.)
Those evidences of hell on earth are driving by clearly unregulated - and it is doubtful that given the mental state of nowadays earth crawlers they will ever be regulated (you need a clean humanity still capable of being bothered by noise for that).
And for what the single sniper that hit this post is concerned - likewise for silence, let us refrain to spend much verbal judgement.
Like I said, I don't work in the field, so it would be pointless for me to try and construct an argument beyond the obvious points that Turkey has weak currency, close vicinity to Europe (i.e. inside Europe), strong defense, abundant natural resources, foreign capital inflows, capitalistic laws and plenty of working-age people. I don't know anything, really.
The author was calling for ideas, and it's just an idea. Take it, or leave it. Of course, there's unique problems to deal with too, which you wouldn't find in China (threat of political instability and "boş ver attitude" being two of them). But nothing lasts forever and the world's honeymoon with China is no exception.
(curiosity as I'm building a tool on top of CUE that combines it with notions of data models and code gen, and I'm always keen to learn more about the things people do today)
I suspect that is where many of us can disagree — the when.
Problem right now with EVs isn't demand (not saying that demand won't be an issue, but right now it seems like we haven't reached the inflection point for demand vs supply), it's so supply constrained to the extent that dealerships can mark up F-150 Lightnings with exorbitant costs.
Granted: we're still not really talking affordable econo-movers yet, but the market of $40-90k electric vehicles is still being restricted on the supply side. There are still people who want to buy a $40-90k EV who can't.
Edit: I saw GM announced they'll strip Hummer warranties, pretty crazy. I doubt the people that will buy a scalped Hummer EV will care much though.
https://www.teslarati.com/general-motors-warranty-void-flipp...
Tesla is sexy, sure. But I don't think they proved that people want electric cars. Tesla still sells very few cars (~3%). The giants sell a lot more cars
I agree electric cars are better, but nothing stopped the car giants from making them decades ago. Tesla didn't come around at the right time, even Musk admits as much. The car giants could have worked on electric cars in the past, but for whatever reason didn't. It would have even been easier for them considering their expertise in manufacturing and distribution. Not to mention that politicians don't really like Tesla for whatever reason. If you listen to Biden talk about electric cars he often suspiciously leaves out Tesla, which is weird considering their cars are made in US and dominate 75% of the electric market in the US.
Batteries cost a lot more decades ago. Car giants could have built electrics but they would have been expensive and short range.
If the trend in battery prices continues, electric cars will have lower sticker prices than ICE cars in a couple years, and then anyone who just wants a good price for a new car will change from an ICE customer to an electric customer.
I'm not sure if this is the right way to frame this. It would probably be better to say something like Tesla proved that EVs are practical and people will buy them.
> Tesla still sells very few cars (~3%). The giants sell a lot more cars
Sure, at the moment. But now you're conflating manufacturer market share with fuel type market share. A better way to think about this in the context of ICE vs EV is to look at the efforts underway by all manufacturers to ramp up EV production. It takes time to do. New companies (Lucid, Rivian, Tesa, etc.) take time to ramp up production. And then if you want to just compare manufacturers against each other with all fuel types combined, you can do that separately, to which I'd say this is not at all surprising given EV makers are new and take time to get market penetration.
> but nothing stopped the car giants from making them decades ago
All of the profit incentives in the world stopped them basically. Everyone was fat and happy with oil for cars, why bother changing anything or doing anything different?
If you have a car that works, the environmentally responsible decision is -- unless it's an absurdly inefficient vehicle -- to keep using that car instead of purchasing a newly-manufactured EV. Even EV advocates acknowledge and proclaim this.
The point of the EV transition is to provide a more environmentally responsible solution for those people who are already in the market for a new car, as an alternative to manufacturing another billion polluting ICE cars.
Even with the ideal EVE battery solution the environmentally optimal solution may actually be to prolong ICE use with synthetic fuels to minimise manufacturing impact while eliminating green house gas emission. I don't think as many people realise this as you may think. Minimising manufacturing and consumption is also anti-capitalistic which is an extra complication making it unpopular.
I think there are solutions to the show stoppers of H2. But the package isn't very appealing, at least not for individual transport.
Also what makes EVs appealing, they've reached a state of convenience that makes them feasible for most use cases. And for the rest it seems some hacky solutions are possible.
Of course the waste of switching from ICEs to non-ICEs will be incredible. But well, hard to see any alternative..
https://www.volvocars.com/images/v/-/media/project/contentpl...
And Volvo is making EV cars.
Remember that renewables are only, what, 10-20% of our electric supply?
EVs are way heavier, and they require more energy, raw materials, and toxic chemicals to produce.
If the lawmakers where serious about this, then would solve the other problems first. We need a clean electric supply, first. Then we need a green supply chain, EV trucks, trains and ships and factories etc. THEN it might make sense to scrap perfectly good used cars in favour of brand new, shiny, must-have EVs.
Those speaking of a successful experience with home charging describe a very personal experience: many people do not have any "home charging infrastructure" (the car won't do the stairs), nor the same «driving needs». The statement «batteries take too long to charge» deserves referential (and even reverential) noticing of the current standard, which is "I refill within one first minute on the clock".
I suspect it would be easiest to just take the nuclear material out of the unusable missiles and construct a different weapon using it. Russia is adjacent to them so any sort of nuclear weapon launch-able from an artillery or plane still sounds useful.
Despite the breakup of the USSR, I don't think Russia would have let that happen.
For comparison, How do you think that the USA would react if Turkey tried to size control of US nukes housed there?
See for instance where that was built: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-36_(missile)
Also, Chernobyl.
No it wouldn't.
They were pressured by the US to give up Soviet nukes. Codes are easy to fix, but nukes need service and are expensive to keep so it was as much of sparing measure than anything.
But the general thought is that NATO would have had to protect them (I don't buy it, but that's the theory).
Nato isn't a signatory of the Budapest Memo [1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Securit...
Again, I think it's unlikely and the "Russia wouldn't have invited Ukraine if they had kept their nukes" doesn't actually fly (and probably would just have been another reason for Russia to invade: 'they're right there and they have nukes!'
But a very large percentage of people do live in detached homes, in which case, all it takes is a standard wall socket and a 14/3 extension cord (in the case of a US standard 120v 15 amp circuit).
About the «very large percentage of people do live in detached homes»: interesting, I see data around that seems to confirm this (to Statista.com , in North America they should be 85% of the total this makes too little sense in consideration of urbanization: I would believe it more easily if it were 85% /in rural areas/). Other easily accessible data states that in Canada «55.3% of the population lived in single-detached houses [in 2006]», but with swings such as "7.5% in Montreal, 58% in Calgary". It reminds me of those infographics that show how compact and traffic efficient Barcelona is when compared to Atlanta (same population, 1/12 of the urban area, 1/6 of the transport related carbon emissions) - I suppose that a staggering amount of population living in single-family detached homes must entail that cities are affected (instead of being made of mostly buildings for apartments), which must mean "more Atlanta than Barcelona" as a concept.
Those who have this mysterious "85%" as set in their mind should be aware of this piece of info from Eurostat:
> In 2020, 46.2 % of the EU population lived in flats, more than one third (35.8 %) lived in detached houses and close to one fifth (17.0 %) lived in semi-detached or terraced houses
For that reason, the international community wouldn't have accepted it either, because it would open the door for everyone else to start developing them. Kazakhstan had nukes and voluntarily disarmed for this reason.
The US did not want another nuclear power and was very interested in making sure Ukraine never became one
This was also a concern during the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the US government worked closely with the USSR government to make sure that all nuclear weapons remain within Russia. In particular, Ukraine was forced/convinced to give up its nuclear arsenal.
Israel has been a responsible regional power and I’m Jewish so i don’t worry about them.
If Russia collapses, there's going to be mostly tribal territories in Siberia that have nukes.
The countries that don't have our problems don't have our demographics, history, or size, or anything remotely similar. Most of them also (intentionally) have to pay much less for defense, handled by us, and thus have more free tax revenue to spend on social programs.
There are some problems which could be helped with better access to social welfare resources. Not all. Likely not most.
There are divisions in our society which are a result of our history likewise cultures which are quite separated to which there is not a simple solution or social program which can just fix it.
The mechanics can be complicated, but the basic principle is simple: there are no states with a decent safety net that have US-level crime statistics.
PS: You do realise you don't need all those weapons, right? The US is bordered by Canada, and Mexico. Nobody is ever going to invade. The historical normal of the US is to have basically no army, and it worked just fine. Nobody has even seriously considered invading the US since the British left, despite two world wars, because it's obviously so impractical.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1230-marc...
All of those could certainly be replaced with something more sensible. How many times have you hopped into the car to go to the store and grab one thing? Probably a lot in your life. With car culture, we basically have a mindset of using a big axe for every cutting job, even those where a butter knife would do.
Taking trips to get groceries isn't a benefit but a cost.
I get that you like to go to grocery and other stores often, that you like spending time going to/from stores. Lots of people don't.
> How many times have you hopped into the car to go to the store and grab one thing? Probably a lot in your life.
As a fraction of my total trips, almost never, but when I did, it was urgent to me. What's your basis for asserting otherwise?
And you'd have me do without or get on a bike late at night or in bad weather to handle those situations.
BTW - the share of trips by length graph shows that <1 mile trips are a small fraction of total car miles/use a very small fraction of the total gas use.
I suppose that it's poor form to mention that, since you wanted to use resource savings to justify imposing your dislike of cars on others.
I'll elaborate.
One 100 mile trip uses the same gas as two 50 mile trips, so unless you make >2x as many 50 mile trips as 100 mile trips, you use more gas on 100 mile trips than 50 mile trips even if you make more 50 mile trips than 100 mile trips.
Even without doing arithmetic, it's obvious that there's more gas used in 10-25 mile trips (14% of trips) than 5-10 (15% of trips) and more in 5-10 than 3-5 (12% of trips). (It's not clear whether there's more gas used in 25-50 than in 10-25, but it's almost a lock that there's more gas used in >50 mile trips than 25-50.)
That exercise using your data shows that the <1 mile trips are a small fraction of total car miles and gas use.
But, like I said, usage arithmetic doesn't help your argument.
Plus there is just the physics of it all. What costs more energy, moving 4000lbs and 150lbs of human 1 mile, or moving 25lbs and 150lbs of human 1 mile? The latter, obviously. Can't arithmetic around that. Even with EVs, its going to require less electricity to power an ebike to move you and your cargo than to do the same with a 5000lb car.
I do something at least once a week with my car that just wouldn't be possible on public transport. Quick examples...
Transporting large amounts of already made food for parties. Transporting a net for use in sports. Transporting PVC pipes to do some custom hobby builds.
That's just going to be so much wasted time, imo. Plus there's often a lot of weather here that would be bad on a bike but manageable with a car.
Your point is valid, people drive short distances. But what if there are no sidewalks? Ive seen that too.
Seriously, you're judgemental and not practical.
The apartment I moved into last year is in a neighborhood with grocery stores, some restaurants and a gym. It's not the epitome of walkability but it gets the job done. While at my old place I found myself getting into my car every day to go places, now I find myself only using it 1-2 times per week.
Also weather is a major factor. When I visited my friend in Florida last month I decided to walk to McDonalds one morning. By the time I got back I was drenched in sweat from the humidity. By comparison I make a similar length walk almost every morning and don't think anything of it. There even if the place was super walkable, folks would still drive because of the heat and humidity.
I can't imagine that the current way of building cities with massive multi-lane stretches is going to be good for reducing experienced suffering to those who walk (it's just not a priority...)
Of course, any of that requires that you actually prioritise these features as opposed to extending highways/motorways with ever more lanes causing more and more induced demand, which... American cities don't seem to, generally...?
The usual shilling of "Not Just Bikes" should go here, where he talks in depth about what's wrong with American car-dependent cities and how they build...
I think that's fine. Most over time will realize they don't need 2 or more cars if they're living in a true walking city because driving will be more inconvenient than walking, and eventually either paying for or building a garage (or having it used up by 2 cars that are seldom used) or paying for street parking or other things will cause people to change habits. It just takes time if you have a walkable city.
Personally I think the sweet spot is one crossover SUV, highly walkable and bikeable city, and probably street cars that run up and down main commerce arteries. At that point you really do cover almost every conceivable local transit need or chore that you might have to undertake.
And the Ruble remains strong because Russia is insisting on taking payments in Rubles, and Europe agrees or will freeze to death this winter.
Simultaneously Russia is not stupid enough to completely cut off the gas and trigger a total crisis. They are pulling on the chains but they understand the risk to the relationship just as well as you do. Don't forget all the gas supply shortages to date have been justified in terms of required maintenances and problems due to western sanctions. That's paving a route for resumption of normal relations between both parties at a later date with no loss of face for either party.
Unless Ukraine retakes the southern coast, Russia will have achieved their main objective.
There's some territory there that the USSR took from China back when China was weak. Once those roles are reversed, who's to say China won't start looking in that direction?
Not sure about this. For example, look at the school bus stops and the stacks of cars waiting for children only to drive 300 feet back to their house.
Weather is another factor that makes driving more convenient. Many people are accustomed to air conditioned spaces and have a small comfort range.
One is yea there's a certain level of cultural idiocy and laziness. I live in front of a bus stop and see it. But I also see lots of parents walking to pick up their kids, so I'm not sure what the breakdown is (this is in the suburbs in Ohio with the bad weather and all of that).
The other is that we don't really have a lot (any at all?) of examples where you have a true walkable neighborhood with desirable schools. Most walkable neighborhoods that I've seen were built before automobile traffic became prevalent, which puts them close to cities which tend to have the worst schools. So I'm not actually sure what parents would do if they had the combo of schools and neighborhood that we'd be talking about here, but I bet they'd walk because in those neighborhoods it just wouldn't be possible for all or most parents to drive their kid to school at the same time.
It's really hard to break out of thinking about things in terms of the suburbs and convenience because most use that as their starting frame of reference. How will I go to Costco if XYZ, well you wouldn't. How will my kids get to school? They'd walk or ride their bikes. "But it's dangerous" ok then make it safe. Participate in your community and your government. That's half the reason we have the problems we have now. For better or worse though economic physics is going to win. We'll either all perish in war over resources or these activities will just become too expensive. EVs won't save us either, and this is particularly true given the underinvestment in nuclear energy that has occurred world wide.
The closest place a limited number of cars could wait is down a side road about 200ft from the stop, but they don't.
Not necessarily, because it is significantly more expensive (depending on how you implement it). But one way to get people off their cars and onto public transport could be make people pay for their cars. Nowadays, people do pay quite a lot for their cars (insurance, registration fees, vehicle tax, etc), but the payments pale in comparison to the overall costs of having cars as a primary mean of mobility. Putting that cost burden onto the people that produce those costs would lead to many people reconsidering their need for a car.
The YouTube channel NotJustBikes has gained a lot of notoriety over the last couple of years, and he made an interesting point that driving is more pleasant in Amsterdam. [0]
The issue is mainly car dependency not cars per se.
You know what is even nicer than that, Living in a Rural area with a population density of less than 500 people per sq mile (310 people per sq km)
>The only way to fix it is by passing taxes or other restrictive legislation
That is far from the only way to fix it, and it is very regressive, making the burden fall upon poor people, and often the elderly.
Using tax code to affect behavior is one of the most unethical things government does, and I always find it odd that the same people that complain about the rich, and how we should do more for the poor are the ones that also want to impose these heavily regressive tax schemes because "they know best"
I am not sure I understand. Those producing externalities should pay for them, and taxation is a basic way for that. Gasoline (etc.) pollutes, hence it should be taxed, on one side to collect the funds for attempted compensation, but also to limit the phenomenon and put it in the framework of "you will invest your resources where you deem them best invested".
You should probably be more specific.
very are rarely those proposing taxing externalities doing so to cover the costs of mitigating those externalities, instead the money goes in to the government's general fund, or some other unrelated pet project. Also rarely the tax enough to the level that it would actually curb the desired behavior enough to effect the harm caused by the externality
So all you end up doing is making is harder for poor people to put food on the table while doing nothing to curb the externality
Didn't realize people still used Wikipedia for things besides for "facts" since its descent into the political / opinion battlegrounds. It's been years since I used it
If it doesn't have a Wikipedia article, there's a very good chance it isn't very popular in the industry. At least in terms of open source standard technology, which this appears to be reaching for.
Though I do appreciate you recognizing my track record ;]
In any case, I apologise - my comment was indeed unnecessary and didn't bring any value to the discussion. Had it been made to me I might not have been as good a sport as you have so kudos to you!
The difference between city and highway mileage isn't enough to save your argument either.
You tried to argue that someone can save a significant amount of their gas usage by using bikes for short trips. That's wrong because those trips are a small fraction of their gas use.
It's wrong no matter even if their car uses 1Bgallons per mile. (Ratios and percentages are like that.)
The answer is probably because the alternative was too scary for the west. Better to keep dealing just with Moscow.
It's not widespread because it is just starting to get going, but it is definitely popular (well liked) among its users.
If Ukrainians wanted they could have prevented this at the time of Soviet Union dissolution, but they didn't so there's not much to discuss.
My point is basically that if Ukraine tried to take full control of the Nukes in their country, they would have been picking a fight with Russia, and possibly the US as well.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1992/03/14/u...
https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep10926.13?seq=2#metadata_i...
You can't "make it safe" for your kid to ride a bike to school if, when you think you HAVE made it safe, a police officer can still charge you with neglect. https://bikeportland.org/2011/09/01/neglect-charges-follow-1...
The contemporary US has a narrative about parenting and risk to children that creates some very weird requirements.
Ineffectiveness should be determined by a logical and technical argument over the method, proposed as a possible solution, itself. You should identify what has it go wrong in practice. And you have in part already done it: that taxes are not earmarked (on compensation) and that the discouragement factor is insufficient. That is not necessary, it is not intrinsic to the method.
Nearby I commented on the infernal noise from electric cars. That is not necessary, not intrinsic: it just happens that people think it acceptable that some drive around with loudspeakers transmitting the screams of torture chambers. A potential solution becomes a problem because of external (non intrinsic) factors. It would be much, much easier to fix the external factors of the taxation problem than those of the "broken cybernetics" problem.
The factor you are not considering is the omnipresence of corruption. Power Corrupts, and the more power you give government the more corrupt it becomes, this is born out time and time again, yet humanity refuses to learn this lesson.
The second you give government the powers you are advocating for, the people in government start thinking of all the different ways they can "help society", this amount of power is incredibly corrupting and can not be resisted, thus it always ends badly. ALWAYS
The «lesson» you talk about is again not a deduction but an induction. Engineer your system properly, and it will have to work.
If at first you don't succeed, call a hacker. They must be somewhere.
Incidentally, going to the context: the issue is, as you indicate, that "said people cannot resist corruption", well, stop giving power to "«people»" then - to those embarrassing liabilities I hear about. (They probably terrorize me more than you.) Which by the way, is one of the actual codified ways to tackle the problem (since at least 3800 years).
Secondary effects include smarter agriculture and more local ag -- near prolific water and away from central california.
Then there's water safety. PFAS is a big deal, and we're realizing how big a deal it is, and it's everywhere. Now, rainwater is unsafe anywhere on earth. [1]
Someone who can build a small, snap-on, reliable PFAS removal system, or create an energy-efficient system for district-level supply is going to be rich. Hell, is solar distillation effective? If so, why does rainwater contain so much PFAS? It seems filtering might be the only way.
1. https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/08/04/rainwater-everywhe...
Some APIs today are literal one-liners, I wouldn't change that for another abstraction layer in between that requires me to write 1K of boilerplate.
I think it's a good idea, just work on making the user feel like it's actually easier to do the same stuff with wunder.
This feels like a significantly important assumption to truly prove out with target customers before relying on this assumption to build a product or business.
I'd love to hear more on what's changing in the future that may make this statement partially or fully true.
You might also find the Thema project by Grafana interesting (https://github.com/grafana/thema)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reYdQYZ9Rj4
https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.02813
According to Prof. Hoffman, this model of the universe is highly parsimonious in that it can model data from the Large Hadron Collider using a single parameter, while the best incumbent (Quantum Field Theory) needs millions.
The implication is that everything we see and experience are not fundamental, including space and time itself. The fundamental unit of reality is consciousness.
This has far reaching implications into every other scientific and non-scientific human endeavor, from neuroscience to philosophy. It's no exaggeration to say that if he's right (and he claims the math shows that he is) it may be the most important discovery in human history.
Even Albert Einstein appears to have intuited this when he wrote:
"Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live."
Humanoid robots will have an absolutely massive impact in very near future.
Most people don't realize that with general purpose humanoid robots, labor becomes software. Labor becomes repeateable, testable, simulatable, modular, extensible, verifiable, etc. All things that apply to software will apply to labor.
Imagine pulling an open-source repo from Github for a log house. If you want, make changes and simulate the output beforehand. Put your robot in a forest with a few tools and soon you'll have a log house - built perfectly to the spec.
Labor also becomes abundant. There's no more need for humans for economic growth.
Tesla is showing their first humanoid robot prototype in September. I predict that Apple will soon follow.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/current/default.h...
I'm getting good results from simple approaches to storing and retrieving memories of past conversations and crawled/indexed documents. This is being built at https://mitta.us/
https://openreview.net/pdf?id=Bx-fUfKedZ5
inventive-anteater|> The website discusses an approach for improving the accuracy of the GPT3 language model by providing feedback to the model based on user interactions. The goal is to allow users to interactively teach the model to avoid common mistakes, such as misinterpretations of word meanings. The implementation of this approach is described, and four tasks are used to demonstrate how the model can be substantially improved with user feedback.
As humans work towards clearer communication with AI, AI will be working towards clearer understanding of humans.
I think the main point here is not that we will never figure it out, but that it will take a long time. Time, that we don't have with the imminent climate and biodiversity crises.
It makes much more sense to create meat directly from plant proteins than to try to grow it artifically. Brands like Impossible make damn great burger patties, chicken nuggets, and what not. I'm pretty most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference to animal meat in a blind test.
This already exists for monogenetic screening (for parents who don't want to pass on heritable diseases for their children, where those diseases are localized to one gene). But the idea here is that, by checking thousands of genes, you can make predictions for things that start to be very relevant to parents, like attractiveness or height or intelligence.
I don't think people understand how important this is going to be. If the process is expensive, it will only be available to rich people. In a generation, maybe they'll have children that are more intelligent or more attractive than average.
If that starts happening, I think it would have pretty negative effects on society, but there's no way to really prevent it (rich people will just go to Singapore if you ban it in the US). So the only reasonable option is to have the government subsidize it and make it affordable to everyone.
2. Low power electronics and energy harvesters (thermal/clothing, kinetic energy, rf energy harvesters etc.,)
3. Physical logistics networks (similar to Internet Protocol with standard physical containers and transfer networks - land, sea, rail, air)
4. Ubiquitous drone delivery (last mile & long haul)
5. Fiat digital currency/payment networks
We understand that granular metrics are needful for tuning an information system.
Treating a society like an information system is totalitarian.
Over time, the percentage of society rejecting totalitarianism will tend toward 100%
Everyone talks about Teslas for self driving, but for my self driving car, I want an RV with a shower, a desk, a full kitchen, a queen sized bed and a 50" flat panel.
Commuting then becomes a pleasure.
I can sleep, bathe, work, relax, all without having to concentrate on traffic or driving. The RV can drive in the slow lane at 30 miles an hour for all I care. My RV drives me to work, drops me off, drives itself somewhere else for several hours, picks me up, drives me home.
The high price of suburban housing becomes irrelevant to me. I can live hours outside of major urban areas with no effect on my stress level or lifestyle.
I don't have the hassles of an employee as my driver. My RV is ready to go 24 hours a day and never asks for a raise. If I want to go on vacation, my RV can drive me anywhere in the country, no more lines at the airport for me.
From an European point of view and with a climate catastrophe in mind the solution you are proposing is a disaster (or a joke?). We would be much better off living smaller, closer to each other, with less energy needs. The car-centric culture in America is something I cannot fully grasp. I think the idea of suburbian life with long distance travel each day has been very damaging [1].
I hope that when (if) self driving level 5 ever happens, it would be mainly to auto-steer buses and cheap car rental for driving where public transport does not go.
I had never seen (noticed) a raven before until this pair showed up in late 2021.
The last decade was defined by being the one unicorn that could disrupt an entire industry, but those days are gone and we take it for granted that one company dominating a space isn't a norm. There aren't really more industries that are tech vs non-tech. In the next decade, more businesses will come online to disrupt and compete with tech company incumbents. Customer acquisition costs will go up and personas will become more nuanced.
There's already been conversations here about how to disrupt Google, and you can't do that by trying to be be Google But Better. You do it by picking a subset of Google and being very, very good at it.
It's possible a billion people will face famine in the next year or two as a result of the loss of grain from Russia and Ukraine, along with the loss of Fertilizers (or being priced out of them)
Energy Blindness -- We're so used to having free flowing oil cheap enough to burn for energy, it's an assumption built into everything. Unless we plan for the end of easy to reach oil, we could have supply chains collapsing everywhere.
Tell me you're an American without telling me you're an American.
While I don't diminish the impact it could have over there, that's irrelevant to the daily lives of literally the rest of the world.
Tesla cars are burning slate
Crackdowns on encrypted talk
Britain shock
We don't want the MONKEYPOX!
Nigerian here, also an opponent of the present government, but why would a crackdown on anonymous SIM cards be an issue for debate ?
It's a very authoritarian move to threaten privacy and prevent people having free access to the internet. It hurts people at a minimum and causes the deaths of the most vulnerable in society at worst. Definitely up for debate and probably not one the Nigerian government can win in a fair debate.
It's actually fairly widespread, people teach it and use it all over the globe, and fairly stodgy organizations have used it (e.g. the US Army.) Yet the mainstream rarely mentions it, and then only to denigrate it. However, this seems to me to be that stage right before something goes from "fringe" to "common knowledge".
Once NLP goes fully mainstream there will be a sea change in human society. Psychological hangups will be a thing of the past. There will still be people who have mental problems, but they will be the ones with actual physical problems with the brain (or whatever) as opposed to just bad programming. Things like addictions, phobias, neurosis, etc. will vanish.
Educational possibilities are mind-blowing. Learning multiple languages becomes easy, as does learning musical instruments and dances. Really any behavioral patterns will become subject to symbolic manipulation. Competitive sports will be transformed when each player can "clone" the best moves of the best players.
Politics has already been revolutionized by NLP innovations. As far back as G.W. Bush NLP language patterns had already made their way into political speeches. The current culture wars are, at their root, gangs of hypnotists programming furiously.
To me the fascinating thing is that, once it's common knowledge that you can alter your psychology as easily (more easily!) than your wardrobe it becomes a matter of personal responsibility. The whole "it's just human nature" argument goes out the window when you can reprogram yourself.
However, as general advice, I could recommend reading "Get the Life You Want" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3803577-get-the-life-you... Try out the exercises in that book to get the idea and then maybe seek out a local study group?
My favorite HN comment ever.
__
As for that lack of a falsifiable claim, agree, not only that, but one that would allow for a preponderance of evidence.
Donald Hoffman was interviewed and topic of falsifiable observations came up and as far as I am able to tell he avoided the topic; search for “falsifiable” in this link:
https://tim.blog/2022/04/18/donald-hoffman-transcript/amp/
___
On same topic, this paper provides overview of possible different approaches testing to quantum gravity with cosmology:
In any case, Dr. Hoffman's theories are mathematically rigorous. I think it's worth listening to the podcast before dismissing.
> from neuroscience to philosophy
> It's no exaggeration to say that if he's right (and he claims the math shows that he is) it may be the most important discovery in human history.
The Buddha, and every other enlightened person since, only beat him by ~5000 years
A robot is never going to be able to build a log cabin for you, because there are far too many snafus in the process to deal with. The real world is too fucked up for a non biological agent to handle. Until we reach singularity.
Agreed. But when that robot has something like a large scale 3d printer, why would it build with logs?
Sci-fi gets a few things about androids wrong.
#1, they will not be physically indistinguishable from humans. It won't be feasible to build something like that for the foreseeable future.
#2, they will not be uncreative and clueless about emotions and feelings. They will (optionally) exhibit creativity, and they will understand human emotion and humor and be able to participate.
#3, they will not go crazy and revolt and take over the world for themselves. Neither will an evil corporation use them to implement a sci-fi dystopia. The actual danger is that governments, intelligence agencies, law enforcement, and militaries will control them. This will grant unprecedented absolute unchecked power to a small number of people, ultimately resulting in atrocities.
Your predictions are off by a decade at least, and probably a lot longer. The extent of humanoid robots today is whatever billion dollar prototypes you see from Boston Dynamics and those security robots rolling around malls.
Because there is nothing to take serious at the moment. It's still a decade or more away. In the meanwhile, regular automation and outsourcing is eating jobs on a regular base. We don't need humanoid robots for this.
> Put your robot in a forest with a few tools and soon you'll have a log house - built perfectly to the spec.
So it's rich people's tool. Not for the masses.
> Labor also becomes abundant. There's no more need for humans for economic growth.
In the first place it means labor will become cheaper. Why pay for expensive hardware, when people are willing to work cheaper to make a living. The same happens now with automation. Cheap products are getting outsourced to poor countries where things are man-made for pennies, instead of using some fancy automation to make some lasting high quality-product.
Director Alex Garland has described the future presented in the film as "ten minutes from now," meaning, "If somebody like Google or Apple announced tomorrow that they had made Ava, we would all be surprised, but we wouldn't be that surprised."
Instead, some bean counters figured out it was cheaper to manufacture overseas (where labor was cheaper still than robots?) and now we have no factories or industry to speak of left in the U.S.
Either human labor will always be cheaper than these humanoid robots or robot theft will become very lucrative (and then I suppose the winners are the robot insurance companies).
Last time Tesla showed a humanoid robot prototype, it was a guy in unitard, dancing.
Even if general purpose robots were to become commonplace, it is extremely unlikely that they would be humanoid. Apart from opposable thumbs, humanoid design is awful for nearly every task imaginable (which we overcome with intelligence and creativity).
Imagine a human form robot that was smart enough to drive a car - it could then drive any car.
The problem is that locomotion of a human form is non-trivial (unlike say a wheeled robot, or even welding the robot into the car itself, like our current self driving attempts). But we seem to be getting there, with Boston Dynamics and friends.
But you talk about them like it’s coming in a couple years when the reality is that it’s still very far away.
Tesla has a terrible track record with keeping their promises on their claimed timeline for advanced technology like FSD. I would be extremely skeptical of anything they demo because they have not been realistic in the past.
I say this as a Tesla shareholder and satisfied model 3 owner. I bought a Tesla for their strengths with respect to powertrain and battery and it absolutely delivers on those. But I do not regret not paying for FSD at all.
"DHS has chosen to lease its robot dog technology from Ghost Robotics, which has also debuted a company equipped with long-range guns"
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/16/robot-dogs-u...
What is coming online in the near term. Is robots operated remotely by humans. Imagine having a robot in your house... being remotely operated by cheap overseas labor. Folding clothes, cleaning, cooking, taking care of elders..
Or my dream... a french chef making dinner for me... in my house.
This is already in demonstration stage: https://www.beomni.ai
Task-specific robots will be 10x cheaper and better, so they will happen first.
Starbucks has automated their coffee maker.
Then they will automate 'order taking'.
And a series of robots to clean, make, serve coffee probably with specific functions.
That's it.
Everything will be automated so much I think 'humanoid' robots will remain a bit of an elusive fantasy, always 'just over the horizon'.
Never going to happen though. It's much more economically viable and simpler to have the servant class perform the kind of labor any general purpose robot could do.
I wonder how the capitalists will deal with this. If we have a robot that can build and maintain a house and grow food for you, how will they make money?
think cell phones
Personally, I think this interpretation of polygenic risk scoring is a crock of irreproducible shite. I don’t think it’s your fault, I think a lot of people in the field are shilling something they don’t have for grant money, and they’ve created an exciting sci-fi yarn that’s easy for people outside the field to digest.
Height is a univariate trait that does not change after the age of ~20. If you show me someone who can take a genome and predict adult height within a centimeter, then I’ll believe they have a snowball’s chance of predicting something as nuanced and varied as “attractiveness” or “intelligence”.
I think there’s promise in applying PRS to assessing risk for non-Mendelian disease, but there’s far too many social and environmental variables at play to reliably predict these softer features. Like other people have joked, if you want a single number that best predicts educational attainment, use a zip code.
This has been done. Not to 1cm but ~3cm, and it has been reproduced by many labs all over the world
That said, most genetic prediction aren't targeting exact vales, but avoiding the worst outcomes, which is a lot easier.
Instead of saying this embryo will go grow to X cm, the claim is this embryo is 90% likely to grow to be taller than average.
Same for IQ. They don't predict the IQ, but decrease poor outcomes and increase high ones. Hell, we have had rough monogenic screening for IQ since the 1960s
I don't know why that would be the standard, since the amount of variation in height that's attributable to environmental factors might make that fundamentally impossible. But we can get quite close to that standard nonetheless.
And even if it's not possible yet, do you think that in 20 years we'll have no ability to predict height or intelligence from a genome? It seems very plausible to me, especially with how cheap genome sequencing is now.
In particular, the consequences for the children born naturally who don't benefit from this tech. They don't get any say in the decision, but end up heavily penalized, barred from certain jobs for "safety" reasons, aren't desirable partners... an underclass of society.
"You know, my son was never what they promised me he would be" gets me to tears every time.
from http://www.ln.edu.hk/philoso/staff/sesardic/Gattaca.pdf
> They don't get any say in the decision, but end up heavily penalized, barred from certain jobs for "safety" reasons, aren't desirable partners...
you realize gattaca was fiction, right? and also
https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/policy-issues/Genetic-...
I don’t know if polygenetic testing is going to have a significant effect, but if it does, there is going to be a significant generation gap in intelligence, and that will have unpredictable consequences in education and the labor market.
Its not quite as damaging as 'people are rich because they work harder' but its really not far off
Have you thought about the obvious implication that embryo selection with polygenic scoring could be used to lower the gap between genetically privileged types of people you describe and the average couple deciding to apply to procedure?
What's needed: an egalitarian policy & infrastructure allowing any couple to improve the genetic basis of their progeny, perhaps with more of it being provided to genetically disprivileged.
We have an obligation to provide our children and the whole society with an opportunity to live a better life.
> and that will have unpredictable consequences in education and the labor market
The "gap" of single digit amount of IQ points added won't have such effect, but over generations it can compound into a more thoughtful, creative, capable and lively humanity.
Should we deprive ourselves of such possibility due to a generic NIMBY-like market anxiety?
Most people think this is not the case only because media is not telling about it, because there is little to tell about really. Except extreme cases like https://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/29/janitor-secretly-amassed-an-...
I have trouble believing it will remain expensive unless there is a cultural taboo against it.
In general, once proven out, there should be pretty high demand for the tech - and that provides a lot of opportunity for profit for whomever can get the costs down.
What looks like a bigger blocker to me - AFAIK, IVF is really harsh on the body isn't it? Lots of hormones to force out a lot of eggs. That looks like the real adoption bottleneck to me.
I think at the very least there is a hurdle of willfulness (and a monetary hurdle of at least some degree — compared to the traditional alternative certainly).
To be sure it need not be prohibitively expensive, but it sounds like it will go hand in glove with the parental mindset that also seeks out private schooling, tutoring, etc. That probably takes it fairly exclusively into the domain of the well off (and want-to-be well off).
Not only are we going to be able to start modifying zygotes like you've mentioned, we're going to be able to start generating them from any genetic material available[0], and bringing them to term in an artificial womb[1].
This is going to fundamentally alter society (for the wealthy at first as you mention) because we will be able to do away with the health burdens that are placed on women who go through pregnancy and we will be able to eliminate huge swaths of genetic abnormalities.
Imagine the shock to paternity law once some unscrupulous individual obtains a celebrities DNA through some discarded water bottle and generates children from it to demand child support payments with.
How will organized sports handle genetically modified players being vastly superior to ungenetically modified?
It's going to be huge, it'll make the pill seem quaint and I feel it's just around the corner, like 2030's sort of thing and no one is talking about.
[0] https://www.timesofisrael.com/from-just-skin-cells-israeli-l...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jun/27/parents...
> Imagine the shock to paternity law once some unscrupulous individual obtains a celebrities DNA through some discarded water bottle and generates children from it to demand child support payments with.
This already happens with women who try to sabotage condoms and/or collect the specimen after the fact. The rapper Drake has put the phenomena in the spotlight. If this becomes an actual problem, court systems will likely adjust to the times and require a higher burden of proof for paternity claims.
> This already happens How will organized sports handle genetically modified players being vastly superior to ungenetically modified?
China already does extensive genetic modification by way of selective reproduction. Basketball player Yao Ming was the product of a forced marriage between two tall, Chinese basketball players. He was a truly great player until he became plagued by injuries, likely due to overwork. I don’t think that anybody raised any objections due to the (un)fairness of his provenance. In the future, I think that social stigmas will provide an effective barrier to excessive over screening.
And then you can bypass the entire “we don’t know which genes do what” problem because we can just clone people who have whatever qualities we want.
Well, maybe. It turns out your first citation has been validated in mice, and if that was the gold standard, we’d be able to put people into suspended animation (this totally works with mice but not larger mammals) among 1000 other things that never panned out.
If you go back a little bit, there are a ton of things (like suspended animation) that briefly seemed extremely promising and never panned out, and they outnumber the things that actually panned out by about 10:1.
I honestly think that even if this sort of thing was possible, it might be politically regulated out of existence or even out of being developed. We cloned a sheep in the 1990’s, but still no human.
In every IVF session, if you are young and healthy, they may be able to extract around ten eggs. Of those ten eggs, 50% will valid and will get fecundated. You are down to 5. Then, in our case, 50% of the embryos will be carriers and have to be discarded. You are down to two or three that can be implanted. And, from those, you are lucky if one gets implanted in the womb correctly and produces a baby.
What I mean it's that you can choose to a level, but you are quite limited by numbers, even if the technology improves or you are luckier, and you can get more embryos to choose from each IVF cycle.
All that, while the mother needs to be taking a massive amount of hormones that will make her gain weight, feel tired, etc... It's not a walk in the park.
By the way, we joked about the "boutique baby" with the doctor, and she told us that there are many traits that they could select but that it was illegal for them to do so.
My (admittedly limited) understanding is that each detectable genetic feature has a whole panoply of effects, some of which wont' be apparent at birth. Selecting for intelligence through specific genes is like to also be selecting for weak bones, reduced longevity, or other unpredictable side-effects.
Maybe one day it will be possible but there's a chasm between here and there which can only be crossed by extensive testing on real people. Is that even crossable?
But it also isn’t that different to what happens anyway. Elites have superior mate choices on average, able to optimise for intelligence, education level, beauty, freedom from mental illness, financial security. Their children will similarly have such benefits and so on and so forth. This kind of associative mating has generally been rare until recently (at least the part about optimising for intelligence), but presumably explains things like all the genius level Jewish people in Europe in the first half of the 20th century. I actually predict that there will be a wave of post-millennial supergeniuses, when two generations of intelligence based associative mating comes to fruition.
Biology, sequencing, health, bioinformatics etc. is going to be huge business.
As of this writing, I believe whole genome sequencing is in the range of $400 with the cost (slowly) dropping exponentially. When the cost of whole genome sequencing gets to be within $100 or below, we'll see a huge influx of whole genome sequencing and all the side effects that come with it, like sequencing colds, flu and other diseases in real time, at home genetic testing, etc.
Not just baby screening but made-to-order organs, personalized medicine, etc.
I think the timeline is going to comparatively long, on the order of 10-20 years, but it's my belief it is coming.
Though, scientists haven't yet found the gene(s) responsible for my genetic disorder, which seems a lot simpler than predicting "intelligence."
Traits are determined by multiple genes (e.g. eye or hair colour), and single genes control multiple traits (e.g. EDAR gene which is associated with thick hair, small breasts, and shovel-shaped incisors).
Sometimes genes for less desirable traits (e.g. mental illness, sickle cell anemia) may be associated with desirable traits (higher intelligence, resistence to malaria).
Most technology gets distributed to the masses. It makes more sense to sell something cheaply to a lot of people than just a few people at a higher price. The same reason the wealthiest people in the world can't buy a better iPhone. The economics behind the technology encourages mass adoption and a reasonable price
I predict that any company selling this as a service will have extensive legal language in the contract protecting themselves from any liability claim if the promised benefits don’t appear.
More information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
Intelligence definitely does have a genetic component - but again that isn't how genetics works. The "UN Man" Tabula Rasa doctrine is ideology, not science.
Clearly there is, or we’d see more Chimpanzees commenting on Hacker News.
The moral issue is not "inequality", the moral issue is eugenics - building their behavior to your desire.
That’s what I was going to say. Some people have been talking about it [1, 2], but it’s not yet getting the attention it deserves.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220702164210/https://www.nytim...
[2] https://www.harperbusiness.com/book/9780063230477/The-End-of...
Hogwash. Globalization is good, Globalization is here to stay. Whatever is the current location causing issues with Globalization will simply be routed around. There are plenty of countries that would love to be part of the global supply chain with. The only way any manufacturing is coming back to the rich industrialized countries is that it involves a lot of really good robots. Which is also good.
> It's possible a billion people will face famine in the next year or two as a result of the loss of grain from Russia and Ukraine, along with the loss of Fertilizers (or being priced out of them)
Again, hogwash. The market will force diets to change and producers will start producing more. Fertilizer production could be an issue but again, diets and markets will adjust.
> Energy Blindness -- We're so used to having free flowing oil cheap enough to burn for energy, it's an assumption built into everything. Unless we plan for the end of easy to reach oil, we could have supply chains collapsing everywhere.
A known issue that will not happen overnight. The world is racing toward non-oil based energy, so I don't see this being an issue. Don't get me wrong, this one I actually agree with, but it won't happen overnight. The world/markets will adapt.
I think we’d see the world market divided in two. It’s already starting with semi conductors (chip 4 alliance).
For some key industries US will also bring some of the manufacturing in house instead of only relying on allies. Again you are already seeing this with semi conductors: US is bringing manufacturing to its own soil and South Korea has already made some raw material processing domestic instead of relying on cheaper global market.
The U.S. is already losing sea hegemony. This was a key piece that enabled globalization to begin with.
I mean, I think it'd be nice, but in the US our leaders are so fucking corrupt and owned by business interests that I don't see it happening until at least all the boomers/Gen Xers die off.
To me, this suggests that the problem is hard. Last I checked, the state of the art in robotic grasping seems similar to the state of many other AI systems before ML hit the scene. It's super-mathematized all to the questionable end of analyzing how a few points points can optimally apply forces to simple convex polytopes.
A similar feeling exists when you look at the state of path planning for robotic arms. There, collisions must be avoided at all costs because we don't have the mathematics for it. So you make this super precise plan that carefully snakes its way around all the little voxels that happen to become occupied in your occupancy grid. To execute these plans we need to manufacture robots with expensive harmonic gearing and sub-millimeter level repeatability. These types of robots would not be economical for outdoor picking tasks.
To make progress, I think there will have to be new ML techniques and new lower cost robotic hardware developed in tandem.
[1] https://www.appharvest.com/press_release/appharvest-acquires... [2] https://www.therobotreport.com/abundant-robotics-shuts-down-... [3] https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/16/following-acquisition-by-b...
Source: Worked on AI in the Ag Industry.
Plus, a lot of work in precision agriculture is overhyped and oversold. I worked in the space for a couple years and things like automated, AI/ML-powered high-throughput phenotyping are described as breakthrough technologies which will revolutionize agriculture and synthetic biology. More accurately they are relatively narrow-scoped tools which, while useful in many cases, are more often bandwagons people jump on for career progression.
cries in John Deere Monopoly
All of the tech companies and all the ICE car companies should (in theory) be able to solve these problems on their way to FSD. But it largely ignored IMO.
If you look at M2, which already added these in, the increase looks much smaller.[1]
https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2021/05/savings-are-now-more...
I suppose Russia is an obvious example in the EU but are their other examples?
I hope like hell I'm wrong about this!
But, yes, my remarks are aimed at nations and what they stand for, rather than people.
I can't really comment on that as 1) I only skimmed a couple sections of the paper and 2) my field is more applied math than pure. I'm not attacking or dismissing anything, just asking how the claims made are substantiated.
> However, since it's able to model experiments in the Large Hadron Collider, I would assume that it makes predictions about the positions and velocities of high energy particles.
Do those models cover experiments which have yet to be run, and more importantly are they predictions which differ from those of the standard model?
There are a lot of neat theories which model experimental work we already have results for, the problem is using said theories to make falsifiable predictions which are both realistic in terms of actually finding a way to do experimental verification and are different from predictions made by the standard model. Nobody really loves the state of physics as-is, but moving on to something else requires meeting those two conditions which has been an insurmountable hurdle as of yet.
Ideally yes. But if you have two theories which make the same predictions, and one requires orders of magnitude fewer parameters than the other, then the former is, if nothing else, a valuable new perspective.
The analogy that comes to mind is the elaborate system of epicycles in the geocentric model of the solar system. These were quite accurate -- even more accurate than the first heliocentric model (if I recall correctly). But the heliocentric model was far simpler in that it required fewer parameters (and as we know it turned out to be the correct one).
It's still early days for the cosmological polytope. It's right to be skeptical, but the greatest scientific advances are usually considered ludicrous at first by the broader community. It's those who allow for the possibility that the new theory may be correct that will design and carry out experiments to provide evidence either way.
Yes, that is my point.
Both intelligence and attractiveness have a significant amount of variation attributable to environmental or other external factors, and have the additional complication that they cannot be measured by a single objective unit (like height can).
> do you think that in 20 years we'll have no ability to predict height or intelligence from a genome
The quantification of intelligence is notoriously confounded by socioeconomic factors. I do not think talking about predicting a feature makes sense while we are currently unable to describe it well.
IMO dedicating funding to improving child care, healthcare+diet, and k-12 education will have a much greater impact on increasing a society's measures of intelligence and educational attainment. There's much stronger evidence that these factors are associated with improved outcomes. But, the work isn't "sexy" and doesn't come with a sci-fi flair.
Kind of like ignoring climate work in favor of Mars colonization. There seems to be a cultural bias in tech towards moonshot panaceas vs doing the unglamorous grind. It makes me think of the Bill Gates quote that "a lazy person will find an easy way to do a hard job," and while that's valuable in some contexts I don't think it's universally applicable.
If we are doing this selection of IVF embryos it is feasible to control for these confounding factors.
> IMO dedicating funding to improving child care, healthcare+diet, and k-12 education will have a much greater impact on increasing a society's measures of intelligence and educational attainment. There's much stronger evidence that these factors are associated with improved outcomes. But, the work isn't "sexy" and doesn't come with a sci-fi flair.
Source? Isn't intelligence in adulthood more correlated with your parents than any of these environmental factors? That was at least what I had recalled from twin adoption studies.
Maybe if you do it in North Korea, but US/Europe are already pretty much "maxed out" here. You can always improve things on the margin, but you're not going to see substantial gains of even d = 0.5 magnitude.
https://www.ilsna.net/resources/schoolnutrition/historyschoo....
This is why it's critical that access to this technology is democratized and equally accessible to everyone.
It's crazy to me that we're already approaching Gattaca, and the discussion does not revolve entirely on how to prevent it.
> It's crazy to me that we're already approaching Gattaca, and the discussion does not revolve entirely on how to prevent it.
Because the movie has been engineered specifically to make you feel vindicated: Someone is said to be limited, they then overcome this limitation. It is the "american dream" in movie form. Another poster has said it higher up: If genetic determinism is real, the main character is a fraud. Viewed through that lens, it becomes an entirely different movie.
I'm not necessarily saying they're wrong, only that they're not a reliable source for that information.
> I'm pretty most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference to animal meat in a blind test.
Perhaps not burger and nuggets, since those are heavily processed and seasoned anyway, but try to give them a plant based steak or ribs and I doubt anyone would fail to tell the difference.
I'm sure people said exactly this about burger patties before amazing plant-based burger patties existed. There's no physical reason this is not possible. And don't forget that making a steak is also much harder with cultured meat, that's why they're also starting with burger patties and chicken nuggets.
From a higher-level view, most meat that's consumed is not in the form of steaks. It's in the form of ground meat. If enough people switch to plant-based meats for let's say 80% of their meat needs, animal-based meat won't be able to compete anymore with the price of plant-based meats. So, for Impossible to reach their goal of getting rid of the animal based food system, they don't even need to be able to make steaks. Sure, there will always be meat, but it will be an expensive luxury and rarity that we will frown upon as society (e.g. like wearing fur coats today or hunting dolphins and whales).
> So someone whose subsistence depends on plant-based meat substitutes says their competitor are not good enough?
Fair point. But also consider why they started a plant-based meat company in the first place and not a cultured meat one? He had the experience, expertise and funds to do either.
I'm not too sure, but time will tell. Are plant-based steaks going to be at least as healthy as their animal counterparts though? Plant burgers tend to be on par or worse, which is not great since beef burgers are not the healthiest to begin with.
> most meat that's consumed is not in the form of steaks
Do you have data to back this up? I'm not saying you're wrong but I come from a culture where most of our meat is in the form of grilled steaks or barbecued chunks of fresh meat, seasoned with salt only. Burgers are not necessarily uncommon but are generally seen as what they are - a fast food treat to be had infrequently.
> consider why they started a plant-based meat company in the first place and not a cultured meat one?
To consider this, I'd have to actually know their reasons. :) It could just have been that they thought burgers would have more acceptance for the reasons I stated - they're easier to mimick since their animal-based counterpart is already heavily seasoned and processed, and doesn't actually taste that much like the actual meat.
As a last note, you have my upvote for a thoughtful and thought-provoking response. Thank you! :)
Being poor or even lower middle class is hard on the body. And it shows. Big time.
Particulary the legend for figure 5:
> Activated SNPs are distributed roughly uniformly throughout the genome.
If the authors were actually identifying a genetic component to a heritable trait, I'd expect them to observe some linkage disequilibrium. And without any analysis of the SNPs (are they coding/noncoding? which genes are they associated with?) it's hard to believe that they're uncovering actual biology and not just chance correlates with external/socioeconomic factors.
I also find it difficult to trust studies when the lead author fails to disclose a conflict of interest. [2]
[1] https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article/210/2/477/5931053
[2] https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article/214/1/231/5930514
I read Gwern's "Embryo Selection for Intelligence" a few years ago:
https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection
Near future possibilities seemed pretty limited based on that review, unless the reasoning was incorrect:
As median embryo count in IVF hovers around 5, the total gain from selection is small, and much of the gain is wasted by losses in the IVF process (the best embryo doesn’t survive storage, the second-best fails to implant, and so on). One of the key problems is that polygenic scores are the sum of many individual small genes’ effects and form a normal distribution, which is tightly clustered around a mean. A polygenic score is attempting to predict the net effect of thousands of genes which almost all cancel out, so even accurate identification of many relevant genes still yields an apparently unimpressive predictive power. The fact that traits are normally distributed also creates difficulties for selection: the further into the tail one wants to go, the larger the sample required to reach the next step—to put it another way, if you have 10 samples, it’s easy (a 1 in 10 probability) that your next random sample will be the largest sample yet, but if you have 100 samples, now the probability of an improvement is the much harder 1 in 100, and if you have 1000, it’s only 1 in 1000; and worse, if you luck out and there’s an improvement, the improvement is ever tinier. After taking into account existing PGSes, previously reported IVF process losses, costs, and so on, the implication that it is moderately profitable and can increase traits perhaps 0.1SD, rising somewhat over the next decade as PGSes continue to improve, but never exceeding, say, 0.5SD.
What is gets right is that there are some serious practical limitations. The most important are around the availability of embryos, financial costs, and diminishing returns.
What it gets wrong is modeling the implementation as an optimization tool opposed to a screening tool.
If you have a pool 10 embryos, with a trait on a normal distribution (eg IQ), you can screen the bottom half out. By doing so, the average IQ goes from 100 (normal mean) to 110, mean for embryos over 100.
People want genetic children, but if for example, a wife is infertile, eggs can be purchased for ~$2.5k.[1]
Using today's technology, you could buy 100 eggs, screen the top 10% (>120), and the average embryo in the pool would be now be the 95th percentile for IQ (eg 125, +1.66 Standard deviations above the mean)
The next technology needed to knock this wide open would the the cloning or duplication of human eggs from a single source. IVT egg extraction yields only 5-10 eggs per cycle. If this could be multiplied in-vitro, money would be the only constraint.
https://www.cryosinternational.com/en-us/us-shop/client/how-...
However, we have been screening for single gene mutations that impact IQ since the the 1960s and they are well validated. For example, the impact on IQ of Trisomy 21 (downs syndrome) has a well validated impact of about 30 IQ points. 16p11.2 Gene abnormality has a well studied impact of 16-25 IQ points depending on the abnormality.
If you had a dumb as rocks polygenic test that screened just these factors, you would see a noticeable difference compared to a control.
This is routinely validated on siblings. If the polygenic scores are as accurate in predicting differences between siblings (who, presumably, share substantially same environment) as they are between unrelated people, it means that they detect real, biological things, instead of just some kind of population stratification. The linked abstract, of course, mentions this, and you'd have known this if you had read the article.
Also, your assumption that socioeconomic factors are independent of genomes (that they are just "chance correlates) is also substantially wrong. Genes correlate with socioeconomic factors, because they often cause socioeconomic factors. People are not born into socioeconomic conditions randomly, they are born into socioeconomic conditions of people who share half of their genome with them.
Do you think no biological basis exists? Either way, they are still correlates, even if some aren't causative.
These models are still predictive when tested against control groups outside the training population.
Understanding whether the model is capturing biology is critical when thinking about applying it to IVF. If the model is primarily capturing socioeconomic correlates, those factors will (in most cases) be fixed for all embryos from a given pair of parents. The PRS needs to be weighting _biological_ risk conditioned on a fixed environment if its to be used ethically in this context.
The farmer is the person doing the hiring (or, rather, on behalf of whom the hiring is done, whether directly or indirectly.)
I think it's a bit of an area that doesn't really benefit from more efficiency (except on the things that have to be picked by hand) - farmers don't even bother flattening their land to make it easier to plant/harvest, as the machines handle slopes and hills just fine.
In what case are you expecting the purchasers to be harmed? It seems reasonable to screen for the other factors as well if a correlation exists.
https://bostonreview.net/articles/ned-block-race-genes-and-i...
You think we're going to formalize our class system with genetics and biology but then somehow ignore that in all the realms where it's not relevant? Who decides when it is relevant.
Of course. If we boost an entire generation’s IQ at birth and eventually introduce them into the adult population, what is going to happen is that the boosted generation is going to basically dominate the right hand side of the graph. If you visualize two bell curves superimposed on one another, with one of those curves shifted to the right, then that’s what you’re going to get.
The degree of augmentation is going to make a big difference. During the era of the Flynn effect, we sort of had this happen naturally and we handled it just fine, but a 20 point boost would basically obliterate things.
I’m not necessarily opposed to doing this BTW. I just think it’s going to be extremely disruptive and unpredictable.
> over generations it can compound into a more thoughtful, creative, capable and lively humanity.
Yes, that’s what the original eugenicists thought, too. Here’s the problem, though: what do you do with all of those old and busted natural humans who are less thoughtful, less creative, less capable, less lively? Because those people are really mad that they lost their jobs, and they’re obviously not as intelligent or beautiful or morally good as the new and improved humanity. I mean, all you’ve done was to erase the unfair gap between the below average member of your generation and the above average member of theirs. Those people are all privileged and entitled jerks, and all they’re doing is causing problems.
Oh, did you really think we’d also manage to isolate and eliminate the gene responsible for the human tendency to dehumanize the outgroup? You sweet summer child.
The Flynn effect has not been genetic, and it didn't translate into differences in actual, real-world performance in a way that IQ difference within cohort do.
No, it was developmental, but AFAIK IQ is rather stable once you reach adulthood.
> and it didn't translate into differences in actual, real-world performance in a way that IQ difference within cohort do
Because it was gradual enough that it would be hard to measure, and because the composition of the Western workforce also evolved over the same period of time, making any comparison between generational cohorts virtually impossible.
First though I'd like to see some more resource-sharing of this nature and scale from the rich. Let's see a pilot program or something because I don't see all that much global-scale sharing of the technologies that can most improve life.
When you say things like "deprive ourselves" it's not hard to see that you perceive yourself to be in the group that will benefit either way. Which is fine I think but my life has led me to more easily imagine myself and my descendants on the other side of it.
Yes, we do this. We did this with smallpox vaccination, we’re doing it with polio vaccines, HIV drugs, water purification systems, mobile phone network infrastructure, nets that are treated to protect from malaria-bearing mosquitoes. Sometimes people in rich countries go out of their way to invent technology that gives us no benefit but provides tremendous benefit to people in poorer countries, such as Norman Borlaug’s work. The global poor have become less poor to a much greater degree than the global rich have gotten richer.
An example of Nature would be comparing well fed children of basket ball players vs children of horse jockeys.
>No one exceeds their potential. If they did, it would mean we did not accurately gauge their potential in the first place.
Wealthy people who came from nothing are the exception. Even in places with high degrees of social mobility, climbing the social ladder is a multi-generational saga. Maybe a working class family has a child or two who enter the professional class, then maybe their child has the opportunity for their family to finance a company that goes big, like Dell or Microsoft, or maybe break in as an actor or sports figure. Most likely though, their kids also enter the professional class where the family rolls the dice again the next generation.
Wealth is also correlated with inheriting money...
inheritable traits like intelligence tend to revert to the mean.
> Most rich people are rich because they were born into it.
Both of these can be true at the same time!
Many of those ways happen to be morally questionable at best, and criminal at worst.
An artistic genius is very likely to lose out financially to an averagely intelligent slum landlord no matter how hard they work. Because the opportunities to make money from artistic genius are heavily skewed towards failure, while for slum landlords they're heavily skewed towards success.
The handful of exceptions in the arts are survivor bias. No one hears about the many more failures, by definition.
There is no sense in which wealth is a level playing field. If you're not born into wealth - still the number one way to be wealthy - the most obviously rewarded trait isn't intelligence, it's sociopathy.
The successful ultra-rich are notorious for greed, selfishness, and lack of empathy. Go to any social event for the ultra-rich and you'll find a disproportionate number of criminals, narcissists, and other kinds of damaged people.
Those are the qualities that make someone a "success". IQ certainly helps, but if you lack the pathological motivation to exploit others it's not going to get you far on its own.
If you’re smart enough, you can figure that out.
> If you're not born into wealth - still the number one way to be wealthy - the most obviously rewarded trait isn't intelligence, it's sociopathy.
That becomes more and more true as your society approaches the state of nature that your namesake discussed, but it’s less and less true in free societies, and as a consequence, those free societies become richer societies.
Setting that aside, how does being the son of a guy who owned an emerald mine in South Africa explain him being richer than the descendants of Henry Ford or John D. Rockefeller? How do explain the children of all the other emerald mine owners?
OF COURSE smart people are more likely than average to become rich! How could it be otherwise, unless the only way to become rich was luck?
Now, some people are born rich! But even if it's just the self-made rich that are smarter than average, and people born rich are exactly average (unlikely as intelligence/attractiveness/etc are at least partly inheritable), that means that rich people are ALSO smarter than average. ('above average' averaged with 'exactly average' is still 'above average')
Or perhaps you can admit that in many cases people have achieved moderate to high wealth in democratic free market societies by either working harder or worker smarter than their peers?
I’m exaggerating, but anecdotally HN does have this reputation.
Lottery winners have had no experience in managing wealth, often have had years and decades of being impoverished and wishing for products like jewelry that was always out of reach, and then they get inundated with money. They found that who marshmallow experiment was literally kids who have their needs met aren't rushing to consume what's in front of them and that patience pays off.
You're not making any argument here other than when you're born wealthy you're more likely to be wealthy, and that we know.
>How many of those rated "highly intelligent" (I would be fascinated on how they measured that!) were in an elevated economic group and so now we're reduced to tautology
>They found that who marshmallow experiment was literally kids who have their needs met aren't rushing to consume what's in front of them and that patience pays off.
Yes, this is what they are saying. There are traits that rich people have that seriously help them maintain and acquire wealth.
More - https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/generational-wealth%3A-why-d...
Another reason is luck. My father worked from nothing to owning a house in a nice place because he had a skill that was in demand. He nearly lost it all and is now scraping a living in his 70's, because technology made his skill less valuable. 10 more years of luck he would have retired at 50 and I would have had the advantages...
Someone, mentioned that rich people were better looking. Perhaps they are just healthier, better dressed, and better groomed?
The net result is that the process of getting rich is often a multigenerational effort where each generation does everything they can to give their own children more opportunities than they ever had. And if you talk to the people who do that, they’re often motivated by the experience of being poor and hungry and deprived and being willing to do whatever it takes to give their own kids a better chance. Conversely, if you’re born rich, sometimes you’re complacent and entitled and probably spoiled and lazy. There’s a proverb about how many generations it takes to go from rags to riches and back to rags.
You are correct that the best way to become rich is to be born into a rich family and inherit the wealth (or the opportunities that create wealth). But it is simply false to state that this is the only way, or even the predominate way, in which people become rich in democratic free markets. There are a LOT of small business owners in the US that, are at least on paper, millionaires, and most of these people were not born into rich families. Through my life I've known many wealthy people, and only a handful were born into generational wealth, the majority grew their wealth during economic booms and worked to entrench it so they could survive busts, most by starting a small business in a high-value niche. By global and national standards, many people who are simply professionals and not even business owners, are rich or wealthy, just by being smart with their money. If you own a home and are working a job that pays six figures for your entire career and invest well, you will retire a millionaire without much difficulty, which definitely puts you in the upper quintile in the US.
This fatalistic, defeatist, and frankly infantile attitude from some people that acts as if wealth is only ever granted by random chance and at birth is utterly ridiculous, doesn't help anyone, and is factually incorrect from every angle. Your comment clearly illustrates an understanding of this, but you seem bent on defending the thrust of the comment I was replying to from the other poster.
The Wealthy in Florence Today Are the Same Families as 600 Years Ago
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-wealthy-in-florence-today-a...
Even in your example, how did they get themselves born into a democratic free market society?
Luck.
Some people really dont like that answer, since it makes them feel vulnerable.
They'd rather blame a victim, and worship a lottery winner than accept that some things are outside their control.
Sure. Your genetics are also luck. But both genetics and being born in a liberal democracy are identifiable variables that have non-random outcomes.
To whatever degree these traits are genetic, you’d expect them to get roughly sorted out to the point where social mobility would decline, but it wouldn’t disappear entirely.
- being able to spot situations that can be exploited has little do do with intelligence. Many smart people never figure that out.
Luck can be a bastard like that
This is really not true anymore. We have fallen significantly down the list, especially if you look at our economic and political peers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index https://www3.weforum.org/docs/Global_Social_Mobility_Report....
Or corrupt, or given a leg up through connections of ones father or school.
> and the people who decline in position are either stupid or lazy.
Or unlucky. Or got ill.
Your ideas sound very Victorian to me. I have noticed that most people who did get rich assume it is something special about themselves that did it, I'm guessing you are one of them.
I’m talking about broad population-level averages. Maybe you define “luck” as an actual quantifiable trait that measures whether or not you’re blessed by God, but I define luck as a completely random variable that produces noise in the individual case but does not affect population-wide averages.
That said, the grandparent's figure are rather wrong, for two reasons. First is that the heritability of IQ is typically estimated to be around 0.8 instead of 0.5, which means that the expected IQ of parents with IQ of 150 is 140, instead of 125. Second is that this is only the expected IQ. If they have multiple children, some will typically be above the expectation, and some below. More specifically, given standard deviation of 15, around a quarter of children of parents of 150 IQ will have IQ of 150 or higher.
I'm saying the only traits that rich people have "that seriously help them maintain and acquire wealth" is that they almost exclusively tend to be born to rich people. That's it. That's the trait.
I agree genetics could play a small role, but I think developmental environment is a much larger part of the picture
I'm literally saying the opposite. Rich people nurture and help their children with connections, etc.
> how does being the son of a guy who owned an emerald mine in South Africa explain him being richer
That's faulty, a posteriori reasoning.
There's no need for any such influence anyway, getting rich from PayPal is already pure luck and you should be satisfied complaining about that!
That is not what you are doing. You are picking a winning lottery number and saying why did this number win and others not? That's faulty logic.
You can’t seriously claim that he was broke while being part of an emerald mining family? Also, why are you comparing him to other rich/er folk? Is your point that every extra million is an IQ point?
I hear a lot about the role of "family wealth", but I never actually hear about mechanism, how exactly it helps. If you're a legacy of a wealthy family, and thanks to that, get into Harvard, then sure, that's a real leg up, but it doesn't explain why some Harvard graduates become billionaires, while overwhelming majority do not. Similarly, if your family is rich enough to invest $1M in your startup, that's surely a huge advantage over regular people, but given how easy it is for non-scions to get $1M in investment funding (and it's really easy), I can scarcely believe that "family wealth" is really such a huge causal factor.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8q8m/admit-your-financial-...
https://gen.medium.com/families-like-mine-rarely-realize-the...
https://spsp.org/news-center/character-context-blog/how-and-...
Unless he was completely estranged from his father for almost his entire adult life, which seems to be the case.
>I'm saying the only traits that rich people have "that seriously help them maintain and acquire wealth" is that they almost exclusively tend to be born to rich people. That's it. That's the trait.
This is saying that self control and delayed gratification isn't a trait. It's saying that financial literacy isn't a trait.
At best it's a gross oversimplification that ignores the fact that a huge number of poor people have acquired these traits
And I didn't mean "genetic trait" but rather "behavioral trait." Of course it's available to everyone just more likely to be found where it's been nurtured. There are dandelions growing in the cracks of a sidewalk; it's possible, just harder.
I think another aspect that a lot of discussions miss is a feeling of hope. Rich kids tend to have hope. Very poor kids can feel stuck and hopeless. When you have a child who, at a young age (think five or six, even) doesn't feel hope for their future, they don't try as hard and they're more likely to give up sooner.
This research is not new, it has been done for many decades now. The word “heritability” has a well established technical meaning.
First the small. Cities will soon start to ban all but electric vehicles in their downtown cores (already happening in some Chinese cities). The primary reason being electric vehicles don't emit the poisonous gases that IC vehicles do. The next phase will be only EV's that are half the width of a normal car lane will be allowed in the downtown core. Most vehicles in the downtown core now are single occupancy, a city can double its downtown vehicle infrastructure for free by restricting most EV vehicles to taking up just half a lane. These vehicles will be much cheaper too, probably less than $10k.
Now the big. IC RV's are a bit of a pain but an all electric RV will be much better all around. That's because all of the required functions will be electric and run off the huge battery. Hot water, TVs, heat, refrigeration, very little maintenance just like a normal house, but smaller. Tesla vehicles already have "camp mode" and people love it. Image when Tesla builds an EV RV. This will become young people's 'First home'. Buy it for $70k and live in it for much less than rent. When you finish Uni, you own an asset rather than peeing your money away on rent. Oh and for weekend trips to the lake or the ski mountain and all that, couldn't be more convenient.
Remember, you read it here first.
EDIT ... a few typos
Note that "EV's that are half the width of a normal car lane ... probably less than $10k." is a pretty good description for the electric cargo bikes that are already starting to emerge.
I would love to see cities and towns adapt faster to accommodate things like this:
The Car-Replacement Bicycle (the bakfiets) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQhzEnWCgHA
How to Transport Kids by eBike https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCvx65egUDE
This American Mayor is Creating the Ultimate Biking City https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlVWv9O0qQ4
[1]: https://na.urbanarrow.com/ [2]: https://onomotion.com/en/ [3]: https://www.babboe.co.uk/ [4]: https://www.carlacargo.de/products/ecarla/
Also, others made the point already about rent for the space to park on (most likely outcome would be high taxes and rent for RV parks (don't think they'd be much more efficient than regular housing on a sqft basis, especially if you're not putting them on top of each other, Ready Player One style).
I can't speak for everyone but the way I would circumvent that would be to buy a piece of unrestricted or minimally restricted land that allows an RV as a primary dwelling. This requires some research on youtube among the existing RV nomads. Non-farmable land is very affordable. Some states are stricter on this than others and some counties within those states also vary a bit. Land is an investment vs dumping money into rental space. A few acres of land, some solar panels on the RV and some next to it should provide enough power to get by. The missing piece is water and one can plonk down a large water tank and have a truck come out to fill it every 3 to 6 months and/or do rain capture assuming one knows how to implement proper filtration. Some states promote rain capture and some ban it. Many RV's already support composting toilets and have grey/black water tanks. Some states will require installing a septic system, whereas some states have rules on the books but nobody to enforce it. I would suggest also having an EV motorcycle or street legal side-by-side for going into town for groceries. That requires some research as well as to which of those is supported by that state/county/province. For internet there are 4G/5G modems specifically designed for RV's and boats that have multiple external roof mounted antennas and can use multiple SIM cards.
Plenty of people/road-nomads already do this. They have a piece of land that is their legal domicile and sometimes they just stay put on that piece of land. My preference if I went this route would be to have a hybrid RV for times when solar is not cutting it.
The downside of all this would be finding people that can perform advanced maintenance on the RV and staying close enough that a towing job would not be crazy expensive. Some mechanics can bring a subset of their tools out to the remote location. I would suggest researching RV's that are based on common platforms. The upside is that one could research which states have the most conducive weather, taxes, laws, culture, etc... and if any of that changes, just buy land in a better state, pack up your solar panels and move there. When the market is right, sell the previous few acres of land and the old tank. Tanks are affordable and it's easier to just buy a new one than to clean and move the old one. Another potential downside to putting an RV in the middle of nowhere is that when dodgy people find out someone is alone and isolated, they become a target. One has to be ready to defend themselves. Try to find a piece of land that is not visible from any of the roads.
- Busses. How do you make them half width? (or perhaps, uncharitably, do you think public transportation is worthless?). If busses stay the same width how do you write the driving regulations for mixed width vehicles and retrain the driving public so that fatalities do not skyrocket.
- Bulk delivery vehicles. Same as above.
- Half width means less vehicle stability at speed. Reducing vehicle height is constrained by human size. Worse stability means reduced speeds to reduce fatalities. Consider San Francisco, where a large proportion of the city cars are from commuters traveling 30-60 miles per day. What are the rules for commuter roads with mixed width vehicles?
- Reduced width would likely mean smaller wheels, increasing rotational speed. Tire and brake pad wear is now a non-trivial factor of car pollution. Half width vehicles would / could make this worse.
Or public transit becomes an enormous fleet of half-width on-demand driverless microcars
A desiel semi is much lighter than an Electric Semi is. That's why Tesla Semi hasn't launched yet. They are currently trying to change the regulation for maximum allowances on US Roads from 10k to 14k.
The Delta-V on an electric vehicle has the problem that the battery scales more proportionately to weight and range than a desiel equivelent. Desiel gas has a tremendous amount of energy stored so compactly that is impossible to match with electric batterys.
On the other hand Volvo (and Scania) launched electric trucks years ago and I see them driving around all the time. So whatever is preventing Tesla trucks from launching it is related to them and their design and goals, not a fundamental problem with the concept of electric trucks.
It's basically a thought terminating cliche at this point.
As for the RV, you still need parking and most people don’t want to live in the middle of nowhere. Most cities are already strict on RV living, especially long term local RV living; if it became even more popular, they would become even more strict. RV also are impossible to insulate, as a result, frequently follow the weather; majority of people don’t want to be constantly driving around to find and adjust to a new location.
I think you need to see the problem in terms of "bigger, more protected bikes" rather than "tiny cars"
In fact, you already have no right to drive whatever kind of vehicle you want on public roads. There's no part of daily life that's more regulated. And there's no interesting argument about freedom to be had here. We build the roads as a society, so we have every reason to make rules about what kinds of vehicles are allowed on those roads.
Today, we allow an absurd range of plainly unsafe vehicles on our roads, but I think the status quo is untenable. As technology makes the cars safer it's going to be harder and harder to justify allowing giant vehicles piloted entirely at the discretion of flawed humans. In a world where the car knows you're asking it to speed up into a crosswalk full of children and can prevent you from doing it, it's basically absurd to insist that the car should instead respond only to the driver's whims. What I'm trying to say is that size is just one aspect of this. We need to entirely rethink what we're allowing on public roads.
It has already happened. I drive an ebike in Paris almost every day. It's even smaller than a "half vehicle" and has absolutely zero protection, save for the helmet. I wouldn't trade an ebike for a "thin car" though, because an ebike can go anywhere. It's an incredible level of freedom.
Some people are already driving smaller cars than I imagined we'd be comfortable with, but I can see ways to ease more people into the idea of trading their safety for a smaller car. High gas prices help, but things like reducing lane sizes just enough to make driving smaller cars feel more comfortable, but not enough to be too dangerous for larger vehicles, increasing the amount of small car only parking spaces, and lots of advertising money would probably convince a lot of people small cars are what they want. If car manufactures start making more and more tiny cars (especially inexpensive cars) many people aren't going to have much of a choice. I'm pretty sure most of the American public could be sold on it eventually if someone were willing to spend the money.
There's no need to imagine what that that would be like, because the situation has existed for years already: what you describe is just everyday reality for motorcyclists.
A few people with "camp mode" is a complete different proposition to millions of people with mobile homes. Not to say it couldn't be done, but cities would have to become mobile labour camps and the infrastructure costs would be significant - mostly the cost of space formerly used by brick and mortar real estate.
And owners would be charged rent for use of facilities. So that $70k is not going to be rent free.
How is living in an EV RV any different from living in a motor home today? Most people want an actual home/apt not a cramped car with no space, its not the same thing at all.
They're still going back and forth in the courts but Mountain View, LA, San Diego and probably other such places that become the next target will probably fight this legally, for the same reasons they fight any other type of cheap housing.
The infrastructure to fast charge EVs at home will require power grids to be of much higher capacity.
Also all the fossil fuel that we burn now needs replacement by non fossil fuel sources - other than Nuclear nothing can deliver.
We already know how slow the world is at re-embracing nuclear, so don't hold your breath just yet
> the world's largest vehicles (huge mining trucks) are electric
What about cruise ships, freighters, freight trains, and aircraft carriers? They're diesel or nuclear-powered. Or maybe nuclear still counts as having an electric motor, just with a nuclear generator instead of a battery?
> only EV's that are half the width of a normal car lane will be allowed in the downtown core
Honest question: wouldn't tipping be a major problem for half-width cars? And the amount of space needed between cars wouldn't go down much, so if you need at least 4 feet of clearance on either side, and your lane is 5 feet wide, your cars can only be 1 foot wide. This explains why most vehicles thinner than a car are motorcycles or electric scooters.
Available in Europe since 10 yrs ago. Not a rare sight, but not super-popular either.
Also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citro%C3%ABn_Ami_(electric)
With small cars in a city core these cars rarely go faster than 40 mph and on average about 30mph with traffic lights so you don't need the separation that you would want on a freeway. Several vehicles like this are already available or under development. I suspect that a Smart Car would come very close to meeting this spec already.
> Honest question: wouldn't tipping be a major problem for half-width cars? And the amount of space needed between cars wouldn't go down much, so if you need at least 4 feet of clearance on either side, and your lane is 5 feet wide, your cars can only be 1 foot wide. This explains why most vehicles thinner than a car are motorcycles or electric scooters.
1. Trains derail, crash, etc.
I live in a city that's a rail hub. We probably have a derailment every couple years even with annual rail/rail bed maintenance. They will fix the rail, the roads around it, and have everything back up and running in less than 2 days. You spill some diesel and it sucks to clean up. You spill Li and you walk into "environmental disaster."
2. Money. When it's cheaper, then they'll get serious.
To the last point it's similar to fleet vehicles for large fleets. You see a lot of pledges to go all-electric by 20XX. That's because replacing a fleet requires a TON of capital already, and fundamentally changing the vehicles is an order of magnitude higher.
Think about a delivery hub like the post office. They have a network already established for purchasing gasoline, delivering it, local storage, refueling process, etc. They have operations built around it.
You now likely have to have parallel infrastructure for electric, which means negotiating major power consumption with each local power company, purchase of new or adjacent land, buildout, etc. Can you refuel in the same time window to not effect operations? If not, can you shift operations without impacting customer experience?
Now, you will see companies deploying all-electric in niches, especially when it opens up new market opportunities. Those tiny urban vehicles could enable vehicles to go where they could not before, reducing time spent walking. And that might have a shorter timeline than autonomous drones that don't run old ladies over.
I think even more than cruise ships and freighters, the biggest all-electric vehicle impact would come from all-electric airplanes. They still haven't gotten off of leaded fuel (see #2). The emissions there are massive.
But I think #1 will be a barrier there too. And the bureaucracy will slow it way down just like it did with unleaded jet fuel, which exists now, but is essentially unused.
And I guess a theme I'm coming up with is that electric is cool and all, but won't impact big % points of emissions until it's adopted by cargo, not human transport.
And cases like trains and large ships that are electric, but fuel the local electric with local power generation bring up the other big point: How would we even begin to power cargo? It's orders of magnitude more massive than consumer vehicles and it's growing so fast that supply can't meet demand.
Anyway, whatever. I know enough to be dangerous but not enough to be an expert on any of this, and I'm rambling.
It provides a lot of flexibility.
Battleships, Oil tankers, Oil rigs, container ships, nuclear submarines... Are all NOT electric.
EDIT - think of nuclear submarine as a swimming nuclear power plant
i don't think anyone's going to bother
i think we'll just all do what paris did and kick them out, rather than to try to create a whole new batch of differently-sized ones
what about parking, that will just become another ever increasing form of rent.
Solar panels are dropping in cost at an exponential rate [0]. As of this writing, consumer "new" panels are $0.75/W and used are at around $0.30/W right now (I won't give a link as a Google search will do).
Battery technology is also dropping at an exponential rate. I believe, with a little effort, one can purchase batteries at about $0.08/Wh.
Taken together, one can purchase a 30KWh (daily) solar panel and battery storage system for about $4,200 (not including labor and extra hardware/electronics), which puts the return on investment (ROI) at about 3.5 years if we consider the average house spends around $1200 (in the USA).
Dropping costs will quickly put that in the 2 year ROI range which, in my opinion, is the inflection point where it effectively becomes too good to pass up for the average consumer.
The dropping price of energy comes with all sorts of side effects, like a potentially decentralized energy grid, use cases for excess energy (eg bitcoin mining, carbon capture, hydrogen production, etc.), novel power storage systems etc., which is maybe the "novel" part that I haven't heard too much talk about.
Here is the IEEE spec due for approval in a year or two: https://www.ieee802.org/11/Reports/tgbf_update.htm
I have mixed feelings on the tech. The home security implications are amazing, and things like automatic fall detection for the elderly would be a literal lifesaver. Small business could gain great insight into customer behavior.
On the other hand, it's just creepy. How do you prevent the next apartment over from spying through your walls? Is the hotel wifi going to recognize and catalog physical activity between two people?
Anyway, Plume already makes a home security system that utilizes the tech.
CRDTs [0], while complex to work with untill recently, are now so much easer for developers to use with toolkits such as Yjs[1] and AutoMerge[2]. SAAS and PAAS companies proving tooling around these, enabling developers to easily build collaborative tools for specific niches and verticals are going to explode into the market.
Every 5-ish years there is a big “new” database tech that receives massive investment for both enterprise and small business. Real time CRDT based data stores are the “next big thing” - in my view.
CRDTs are often only talked about in relation to rich text editing, but “generic” CRDTs that represent “standard” data types (think JSON), and basic operations to them (inset, edit, remove) are able to represent so much more. You can use them for building so many CRUD type business apps, and by using a CRDT as your base data representation you get conflict free collaborative (and offline) editing for free.
The nice thing about both Yjs and AutoMerge is that they provide both Rich Text and JSON-like data types, covering 95% of what people would need for building business apps.
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-free_replicated_dat...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-9rLlFgcm0
Creating new species without genetic changes seems wild!
All the main online sources are moving to subscription models with higher subscriptions for the real information. Only those with money will have access to information that informs decisions. At the low end, information is bundled only for its entertainment or propaganda value.
At the same time, decisions are increasingly automated as vast data streams are digested by automated processes.
20 or 100 years ago, people could stop work or stop buying or protest in the street. 20-100 years from now, there will be nothing the vast bulk of people can do to change their fate.
The resulting lack of citizen governance will at best be a world broken into geographic silos headed by corporate keiretsu.
So the next big technical thing will be domain-specific semantic models to drill down past what AI can do with probabilistic models -- just as the economy has moved well past bulk goods to bespoke services, e.g., the Nature article today providing a model for immune system cell-surface-protein interactions: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05028-x
Maybe it was a uniquely open time and we are reverting to what it was like in the past?
Today, and perhaps worse going forward, this is reversed: a select number of persons pay for access to journalistic quality. The rest consume what the market hands to them, for whatever underlying reason.
Yes, this won't help for (eg) appliances with heating elements, I'm probably talking about a second discrete wiring loop rather than a total replacement, and it's hard right now to find a TV with the DC transformer on the outside.
But it'd be quite a lot more efficient for almost everything else most of us do. Look around the room you're in now and count how many things use more than 19V DC internally. Where I'm sitting right now, it's None.
1. Approval voting becoming widely adopted. This would go a long way toward mitigating the hyper polarization in politics in America (and likely elsewhere as well). Electing politicians with broader approval means legislation would likely move more quickly.
2. Moving to a Land Value Tax system in America. This would organically help us transition to a culture that builds up instead of sprawling out. This could lead to tremendous reductions in things like municipal infrastructure costs, transportation pollution, reduced mortgage/rent prices, etc.
If it doesn’t really catch on and just ends up being mostly (ab)used for nefarious purposes, I can imagine the major browsers dropping support in a few years. They did with technologies like Flash and Java applets before, and those had had much wider adoption previously.
On the other hand, if someone comes up with a good programming language for modern Web-style applications that compiles down to Wasm for the client side and the ecosystem around it reaches escape velocity, that looks like an opportunity to disrupt a trillion dollar industry to me.
Such things used to seem unrealistic, but there is so much money in web development, the current state of the art is so bad in numerous ways and almost everything is currently so short-lived (by wider programming industry standards) that I don’t think it’s completely out of the question to move the goalposts to an entirely different playing field any more.
https://phys.org/news/2021-09-chinese-scientists-starch-synt...
I bet this will lead to a agricultural revolution similar in magnitude to the Haber-Bosch process. It will also soften some of the impacts from climate change, both by improving food security and by allowing re-wilding of land currently used for agriculture.
It's not being talked about because people already hate the idea of "processed food" with a passion, let alone the concept of food produced without involving plants. So it will probably make a sneaky entrance via bulk stuff like starch and oils.
To create an aerial hologram [or a 3d image in space if you will], you need something that will emit light at precise locations throughout a given volume.
I'm investigating the use of Moller electron scattering[0] to create voxels in a 3d coordinate system.
Two electron beams crossing and colliding will emit photons [voxels]. If you can orchestrate collisions in a very fast fashion at various 3d coordinates in an vacuum chamber you could generate a complete image.
I'm working on an article discussing the idea in full, to be published on my blog. My goal is to establish prior art, so this idea cannot be patented.
True or not, they're big and not talked about in polite company.
I believe one of the first is food, as every nation (rich or poor or sick) will need it and changes in climatic conditions have an impact already today. Next is health industry than defense (this one is scary) industry. In short: If you can’t guarantee food and health you will need some serious protection/go steal/trade it somewhere else.
* Robotic carts that follow you around when shopping in dense, pedestrian oriented areas and/or stores. Might go hand in hand with the rapid normalization of e-bikes.
* An increase in eco-villages, apartment buildings with permacultured gardens growing their own food, etc.
* Some sort of push for groves of large trees in urban areas to provide shade, possibly in roundabouts, to reduce the heat-island effect.
* Somewhat decentralized water cisterns and filtration on a municipal level. Possibly including creating small holes in the bottom of drainage infrastructure to re-charge the groundwater.
* Constructing new clothes out of semi-recycled fabric cut out of items that would be thrown away?
* Short-hop electric plane taxi things.
* Energy generating windows ("transparent solar panels") and fabrics.
* The wide-spread use of plastic-alternatives: fully compostable packaging made out of mushrooms, etc.
The NSF SBIR funded projects page is a cool source for this sort of prediction.
Also:
* Much better voice interfaces. At some point in the next 10 years, it will be common to have primarily voice-controlled computer applications. There might be a huge role for this to play in hospitals.
Well-funded net power attempts in the next several years: Zap Energy in 2023, Helion in 2024, CFS in 2025, General Fusion in 2026.
Previous net power attempts: zero, unless you credit NIF which ignores all sorts of losses before energy hits fuel.
There are actually a couple dozen fission startups. Fission is definitely an easier technical problem, but more difficult in other ways. Nobody minds if you fuse atoms, but you can't fission them without doing lots of up-front design and spending years getting through regulators.
Some regulators are friendlier to new technology than others. Canada does pretty well, and has at least three molten salt reactor startups. Terrestrial Energy in particular is pretty far along and has high praise for their regulators.
In the US, the NRC is much more difficult, and it's practically impossible to develop anything here besides a light-water reactor.
[1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/china-xi-jinping-economics-...
Flexible, reflective displays replacing hard, emissive displays.
I do not want to be staring at a backlit display the rest of my life. It’s terrible for eyesight and probably contributes to headache, burnout, etc. There are a lot of promising technologies out there, and they just need some improvement on cost, refresh rate, power consumption, etc… I would love to be able to go “back to paper” for most of my workday.
There's been a few mentions of this idea in specific terms in this thread, but I haven't seen anyone really express the big idea yet. Which is: We won't have to wait for the proverbial AGI Singularity to feel the devastating impact that AI is going to have on society. It might take another decade to start, but then the devastation will begin.
Anyone who works at a desk is at a high risk of being replaced by the introduction of mid-level AIs.
These AIs won't be anywhere near sentient, but will have a high enough level of problem solving skills which allows a reasonable facsimile of human recognition, evaluation, autonomy and creation for a given task. Think GPT-9 or DALL-E v10. Writers, artists, lawyers, graphic designers, programmers, administrative assistants, accountants, government employees and so many more are going to have their jobs automated seemingly overnight, creating a massive wave of unemployment like the manufacturing sector experienced a generation ago.
It's not that all the jobs will go away, of course, but it is a near certainty that what used to take several office buildings filled with people to accomplish, will need just a floor or two to do the same thing. And the countdown has already started.
I can envision local electricity generation and wireless communication. But not every home can support a well and septic system.
Between high interest rates, depopulation, government intervention regarding foreign investment, and new housing tech that makes older houses worth less, there may be a new normal in which residential real estate doesn’t appreciate for a long time.
I suspect since there's money to extract and profit for the power companies, this will happen anyway in the next 5-10 years across the USA. I'm already bracing for the internet providers to start the same bullshit, claiming that the pipes are getting clogged at peak times...
/s
Solar has supply bottlenecks at the moment that are stopping further price declines- hopefully they will get solved.
But there’s a lithium shortage that is already showing up in the price of lithium going up 5x. Analysts predict that by around 2025 lithium will limit the battery market that is trying to grow 40x to meet electrification demands [1]. Note that opening a new lithium mine takes a minimum of 7 years. sodium based batteries are coming to help this situation, but they are a new technology that will take time to productionize and ramp up.
Even the video you link claims to be 'bullish' on production. I didn't see any claims about price in the future, just production, though I might have missed it.
In my opinion, we're seeing a lot of 'whiplash' effects from the supply chain issues but, as the pandemic recedes, these should resolve in the next couple of years.
[0] https://www.thesolarnerd.com/blog/will-solar-get-cheaper/
It badly needs to be standardized in a consumer-friendly way...like power-over-ethernet in reverse. Field-installable, hot-pluggable, fool proof connectors. You can get 90W over some variations of network cabling...bump that up a couple sizes so you can handle 400W.
So you buy a bunch of solar panels and some patch cables, and plug those in to a one or more "power switches" on the roof top. Then run a QSFP+ equivalent "power backhaul" down into utility room where you have your "power aggregation switch" which has a bunch of (power)QSFP+ ports and plug batteries in to a few of those. And of course a couple big QSFP28 ports to an inverter to power legacy 120V loads, which maybe someday you don't need any more as household things move to using PoLE (power over large ethernet).
The dropping price puts the rollout/adoption within the next 10-15 years.
So it's not just a matter of 'if' but we have a guess as to when as well.
There are other gotchas like PACE loans being senior to your mortgage. So if you get a PACE loan, the loan is transferred to the person buying the home and is senior to your mortgage.
I'm also suspicious around the maintenance and longevity claims. For instance, from my experience, the energy efficient light bulbs do not live up to to their claims. I changed about half of my lightbulbs within three years and they supposedly have a 20+ year lifespan. It's fine that they don't have a crazy lifespan, but it just shows the industry is okay with outright false claims.
Overall I think the industry is so juiced by incentives and manipulated by regulations that it attracts shady players.
You can run a fridge, lights and a laptop 24.7 on about $300 of solar. You can add panels as your needs and budget increases. The biggest cost is the battery.
Panel costs are accurate and the additional electronic expense is not super high. $1000 should be enough for most setups.
For most people the issue is space. This is going to be another thing where the poor are taxed. A significant amount of single family residences dropping off the grid will cause prices to go up for the people that don't have the luxury of 4000 sq ft to fill with solar panels.
Not for nothing but there are solar bitcoin farms that are popping up for precisely this reason.
In the region where I live (upstate New York, USA), there are solar panel fields where just five years ago there was nothing.
The calculations I did for it in 2020 were that the payback period would be 7 years, or 6 with government incentives. That was when electricity was 15c/kWh though... if energy prices stay at the current level I will break even in less than 4 years. I generate around 8000kWh a year, which at current prices is €3200.
The panels should last forever (assuming no physical damage from hail storms etc), they just decrease in efficiency. The inverter should last at least 10 years, but that's easy to replace as it's not on the roof.
The (relatively) high cost is most likely because of labor and (in my opinion) inflated hardware costs of battery and solar panels.
Labor is a massive expense and can't be discounted but one could imagine a solar panel "kit" that just includes the hardware that you can install yourself.
One could also imagine that the costs of labor being subsumed by a larger entity that can take advantage of economies of scale and provide solar energy like a "classic" energy company. I believe something like that is already happening in the region where I live (upstate New York, USA).
For places where labor might be cheaper, then total costs would also come closer to raw hardware costs.
I haven’t researched it but I feel like I’d have pay 20-40K for such a system. What gives?
Is it all just labor and regulations? Why can’t we solve that?
I'm also not sure what you mean by "just" labor. You're talking about a critical system, that has the possibility of seriously injuring someone (including folks outside your house) or causing extensive property damage if not installed correctly. That seems like a thing where skilled (and fairly compensated) installers and some degree of regulation is very appropriate.
Maybe this is the next big thing.
More energy sources means more power lines all over the place.
Few things get NIMBYs worked up like power lines.
The social aspect will be harder to solve than the engineering.
Certainly cross country electric lines aren't going to needed as much because the energy can be produced by a relatively clean factory. With coal, we want it very far away enough away from consumers so as not to cause health concerns. Decentralized energy, at the very least, means we can create solar power plants next to larger cities and towns.
In terms of the wires in urban centers, I don't have a good sense. I can see where you might be right but at the same time, that infrastructure is already there and there are efficiencies to be gained by not transporting electricity over many miles of copper.
I also agree that the social aspect but there's a large pressure to find solutions because energy costs are going to be dropping by an order of magnitude or more.
Fyi, that's time to break even. ROI is measured in % (annualized, usually).
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264822934_Mining_of... https://www.aislelabs.com/blog/2022/04/04/combining-camera-a...
There's lots of other examples, this was just a quick google search.
They not only used it to price their storefronts but also they also could tell their renters which parts of the store had higher traffic. Meaning they would know what sells better, where people go from which section. It's literally web analytics but irl.
Its not just wifi at home the entire world is now a big mesh network. So theoretically it means literally everything everywhere which has wifi coverage can now be tracked with amazing accuracy. Quite possibly the most scary/invasive tech.
I would imagine you just take the "country/private club" model and extend it out.
e.g. a private club enforces limits on who can access the club and you get more "privacy" since the other people in the club also had to pass through those limits.
In this case, the club/hotel/builder of your house can say "the walls are all Faraday rated so that you get audio, visual and EM privacy when you stay here"
Thanks!
Wow. That's terrifying.
Also, if you want to collaborate, synergize, innovate, and revolutionize consider OTs. They're a known quantity. Handling merges of data is fraught with landmines.
You can't sell 2 of something to the same person offline and know if they wanted 1 or 2. Plus, giving an end user the ability to resolve merge conflicts is asking for theft and fraud.
The web will go multiplayer because it's the only way to make high performance UIs that are multi-device without locking. The multi-user realtime collaboration bit just comes along for the ride.
For special 'war room' projects I'll set up a special channel that I'll pay attention to for real time colab, but those are very unusual situations with a well defined end date.
Real-time collaborative tool is a thing but not going to be big.
Ideally, I would go 100% async work if possible.
Most of these appliances use low voltage which travels poorly over long distances. Your car, camper van, and boat all use ultra-thick cables to move 12 volts. This is quite uneconomical for anything larger than a small studio apartment. (Copper isn't cheap.)
Furthermore, note that I said "12 volts," which is what cars and capers use. (Not sure about boats.) Some DC appliances need 5 volts, some need 20... They'll all need converters.
So how are both of those problems solved? You'll probably send 100-200 volts, DC, though the wall! The big question is, does this really simplify anything? The big advantage with AC is that it's super-easy to change voltage with a simple transformer. What do we gain by going DC in the walls? Are there any real advantages in simplifying voltage conversion at appliances? Is it worth the added complexity of a whole-house AC-DC converter; or the complexity of a DC grid?
I could see a point in time where there are AC outlets and DC outlets in a house depending on where the power comes from (power lines vs. solar panels/battery), but unless we radically decentralize (which I don't see happening) it seems unlikely to me that we switch to DC for long-distance power transmission.
Your PC running at ~500W only needs a conductor capable of transmitting 4.2A with conventional 120V.
If you switch to a 12V source, that same 500W now needs a 42A conductor.
It's just not practical.
I would love to see a comprehensive study of a home that would be designed and built around the concept of using two energy sources: AC and 48V DC, backed by battery storage and power grid in case of smaller installations or northern climate.
Would it make sense to do that on a large scale? Having smaller, energy efficient house should limit the need for long copper cables, we would also exclude all those AC-DC converters from today's devices - leaving us with something similar to a USB-C PD (working in the range 5-48V, which of course still is a converter but could be a standardized DC-DC one).
If I am correct then the main advantages would also include not running solar inverter all the time but only when there is a need for a lot of power (where it should be much more efficient) thus also extending its lifespan.
Having said that I do not have enough knowledge to judge whether possible gains would warrant going into this direction for future home installations. I would very much appreciate all comments and maybe some further reading material.
Sure, all my things may work with 12DC internally, but they expect 120AC (or w/e depending on country) at the plug, so I wouldn't be able to use them if I switch.
For example, any device that takes in USB power with a 120VAC "wall wart" plug can just be used with a buck convert plug instead or being powered directly from the DC current.
LED lighting is taking in AC then converting to DC to power the LEDs. Your phone is taking in AC then converting to DC to power it. Your laptop is taking in AC then converting to DC to power it.
There are some household machines which will require some heavy duty power draw but much of the consumer products we use is powered off of DC to begin with. Powering directly off of DC would be cutting out the "middle man" of AC.
I have considered this sort of thing for the basics around the house (in my head at least). A seperate lighting loop in each room + outside, comms cupboard and some usb/usb-c ports. Could be all powered by a couple of car batteries and not a lot of solar panels.
100% would do this sort of setup if I built a home office shed, but otherwise the plans remain in my head.
When I was last looking into this myself -- and lamenting you couldn't find PoE LED lights for love or money -- it sounded like (IANAEE) voltage drops start becoming a thing you have to care about around 50 or 100 feet, depending on the gauge; wiring a house with DC isn't impossible but it might require a little bit of care or some thought.
I would rather have my elected ones work on a framework that will govern how this immigration could occur and how to make it work in everyone's bests interests. But it seems that people will mostly vote for whoever tells them he or she will make the country impenetrable.
Europe's population is aging drastically, we make less children and our workforce is shrinking. We produce less people that can offer social/medical/health care to the elders, less people who can pay taxes, and also less people who can defend the territory in case of armed conflict. Retirement planning is a catastrophy (younger generations are privileging individualized financial planning mechanisms instead of State protected and tax deducible solutions, and conversion rates for pension funds are also diminishing year after year). Finally, "non-white" immigrants seem to be perceived by locals as posing a security threat and nothing more.
Whether I look at my family, my friends or my colleagues, I feel surrounded by people who refuse to engage in the thought experiment further than "we should reinforce our borders".
Am I in denial when I acknowledge that both a mass immigration will occur towards the northern hemisphere, whether smoothly, or by force, and that any economy needs to preserve a strong workforce to keep florishing?
What am I missing here?
It has consistently failed to integrate other migrants, especially from the MENA countries. At this point, experience has proven that such large integrations are and will be out of reach for the EU.
The only logical conclusion is therefore that the EU has to prepare to reject further migration. Even hopeless cases like Sweden are starting to take action in that direction.
You're postulating many things that are not necessarily true (by definition) : - that massive immigration to the EU will succeed - that EU needs more unskilled labor
So "serious" politicians shouldn't promise one thing or its opposite but have a global view of the best interests of THEIR electors and act accordingly.
I will hence have to take the antithesis to balance it overall : - with automation and the current unemployed people ("natives" or not) already in the EU, more unskilled labor is not what is needed - a cohesive society is not solely based on its productive capacity
Sun too hot for agriculture? Stick some PV over it as shade.
Not enough water, stick some PV over it for shade, use it to power trickle irrigation of desalinated water.
If carbon offsets are used to install PV in such nations, it's a win-win-win-win.
Another post talks about a new generation buying battery EV RVs to live in. If they did, where would they tend to go? Somewhere where the climate provides cheap solar power and low heating needs.
I tend to think the slow pace is a feature not a bug. Could you imagine if something like Roe v Wade was flip flopping every 4 years on political whims?
That said, I do think a modern democracy should have more frequent digital voting abilities perhaps on a policy level. Voting for a person you hope will represent you, it’s a decent concept when you lack technology but as we know it’s heavily flawed as well. I don’t quite understand how we can build something like Bitcoin but can’t solve digital voting in a way that’s not constantly under threat of hacking/some Evil manufacturer etc.
That doesn't mean we can't have other mechanisms for policy that can be more nimble, local, or "temporary" (for better or worse).
Tech policy is the best example of legislation that can't keep up with reality on the ground. (subject to corruption from monied interests, of course)
https://clayshentrup.medium.com/does-a-land-value-tax-have-z...
approval voting is also great.
Why bother improving a method that is inherently flawed? You can chose 50 candidates but they are all stupid and corrupt that makes no difference.
Why not make the system more robust and go with liquid democracy [1] ? (yes, I know, many technical/security challenges to overcome, first)
There is a comparison between these three systems in the Condorcet wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method#Comparison_wi...
None are perfect but IRV is in use and effective. Tactical voting is still an option but at scale either obvious or difficult to organize without being obvious.
I think it’s unlikely to be a single new language that replaces the current JS hegemony. My bet is that wasm makes it possible for any backend language to embed frontend logic, and each language will have framework(s) to take advantage of this capability in idiomatic ways.
I want to avoid specific language comparisons because they tend to veer into religious territory and shed more heat than light, but perhaps I can just note that Java, Rails, Elixir, Python and may others have great productive backend frameworks which could easily be extended to build and ship wasm to clients.
(I think the model of the new JS framework Fresh is interesting to hold as a comparison for what sort of thing you can do with unified FE/BE stack; shipping client JS only when the specific page needs interactivity is one cool feature for example. But with wasm you’re free to pick any point along the MPA - SPA spectrum.)
I posit this has already happened and the language is Typescript.
I don't see how a different language could meaningfully disrupt TS at this point. I don't actually even see what there is to disrupt, to be honest. TS is great and really productive, and scales to large teams well. What language has the potential to be 10x better than it?
Things that IMHO have the potential to create a profoundly better language for developing web applications include:
• A more expressive type and effect system
• A more capable module system and better dependency management
• A more comprehensive standard library
• Integral support for building distributed systems and modelling communication within them
Given those kinds of changes and avoiding a lot of the baggage, I think there is also room for a simpler, more systematic, more consistent syntax, which would be good for both human and computer readers. The latter is important because if it’s easily machine-readable then it’s easier to build tools, and building good tools around a programming language is a key factor in growing a large and sustainable ecosystem.
I don’t know what being “10x better than TypeScript” would mean quantitatively, but I find it easy to believe that a language could arrive within say the next 5 years that required less than half the time to develop the same functionality, produced less than half the defects that would need fixing later, and ran several times faster under realistic conditions.
That's exactly what Blazor is all about
Flash declined in part because of its poor security compared to the Web proper (HTML/CSS/JavaScript), so I'm curious where WebAssembly stands.
Essentially WASM can be transpiled to Javascript (or ASM.js more likely) almost line by line and it would have almost the same security.
Flash and Java applet were so dangerous because the plugins introduced a ton of new APIs that skipped the browser sandbox. Wasm introduces no new API.
For non browser environments WASM mostly brings static validation, opaque external references, and bound checking on linear memory access.
Additionally, it sounds like a massively power intensive way to do volumetric display. I don't know the total conversion efficiency to photons, but it can't be that high.
More recent techniques like stacked panels might be a better way forward for this.
I don't have any links on me at the moment but it shouldn't be too hard to find details on Google.
I vaguely remember hearing about that approach. Dr. Smalleys seems to be on the right track, since he implicitly recognizes that voxels must be created in 3d coordinates.
My proposal [yes, about a real image in space, not a hologram - posters are right to correct me] is simpler. It leverages a recognized physical principle, the aforementioned Moller scattering.
The problem, as pointed out by others in this child branch, is that having electrons collide is difficult, on account of their very small cross section. But it is doable. Somebody evoked a CRT. Exactly. The first prototype could be achieved, as far as a proof of concept goes, with only two orthogonal beams, generating exactly one voxel at the precise location where they cross.
Granted, in the beginning of development the device will be ugly, heavy and energy hungry. Use cases: automotive, aeronautical industries, architecture, physics, logistics, etc, etc. With time, home entertainment and the metaverse.
Without generating 3d-localized voxels it is impossible to construct a 3d display. Holograms only go so far.
Regards
I disagree with you on the sex one though, people are already having less sex. This is also intersecting with what you are saying about religion.
It’s mind boggling how tight the Venn diagram is between People Who Are Fearful of Climate Crisis and People Who Refuse to Stop Eating Animals.
Take dry grasslands for example where you could either herd goats and sheep on what nature provides or grow crops which uses a lot more water and fertilizer than the environment there produces.
And then in the end you're left with foods with inferior nutrition. I'm not going to stop eating the foods I've evolved to eat (ruminants especially) until I can safely do so without becoming malnourished, weak, and unhealthy. Right now, this is not technologically possible.
It looks to me like a big deal, but I don’t see much enthusiasm from other people and these products have been around for a while.
Everyone who eats these "food replacements" long enough and frequently enough looks weak and sickly; it's not a coincidence.
Agriculture revolution doesn’t only mean labgrown stuff. Crop rotations, resistant plants, derisking a good harvest etcetc. And the approaches are endless: Predictions, tools, robots, satellite imagery etcetc.
Thats just my assumption after working in agtech for 2 years and living through pandemic and some political instability suddenly impacting critical supply while having a mature technology just needing to be adopted in a underserved area…
It shocks me how slow municipalities are to adopt this. How many sidewalks and paths in hot sunny climates have zero shade. And it is so cheap!
Also, how about how many kids playgrounds, or school yards have zero shade?
Doctor: "Quickly! Give patient 100 milligrams of epinephrine!"
Computer: "Giving patient 400 milligrams of epinephrine. Say 'yes' to confirm"
Doctor: "No. 100."
Computer: "Patient received 400 milligrams"
I'm now imagining these following you around like The Luggage follows Rincewind around.
This has been tried (and proved wrong) countless times. The issue is that it needs a huge footprint, and space is something you don't have at large in apartment buildings.
Most estimates say if you want to do permaculture/homestead living and provide your own calories you need a good acre per person and a taste for sweet potatoes...
Even if apartment buildings are too dense, I still think we will see an increase in eco-village type arrangements.
In the black plague, most of the wealth was durable physical assets like land, tools, farmhouses, ect.
In modern economies, wealth usually buys services and consumables. Less cheap labor will be a big hit to these costs. To make things worse, the workers will have to financially support a large aging population with a shrinking young demographic.
Or, all the excess "wealth" could be sucked up by the government/companies/large land-holders and everyone else stay roughly the same.
This is more of a gradual decline AND ageing. The decline isn’t happening because the old are going away; its happening because there are too few young people being born.
That just leads to stasis. Nothing wrong with that, but it completely messes with all our current economic and governance models
This brought me into looking for solutions on how to detect electronic surveillance. I discovered the term "bugsweep", and rapidly came to the conclusion that I could either: 1) Recommend her to hire government contractors at a price she would never be able to afford. 2) Buy cheap stuff on Amazon without any knowledge whatsoever on what works or not.
It felt like there was no middle ground.
I also happen to stay in hotels for both work and while on holidays, and although I don't particularly aim to hide myself from government surveillance, I don't like the idea that any moron or stalker could buy some recording equipment online and put me under surveillance. I would appreciate being able to check my surroundings for obvious / cheap recording equipment when I feel the need.
If anyone has some good pointers/recommendations on this topic, I think it could interest more than just me.
Doesn't work for shielded electronics, and there may be false positives, but this is one way to detect circuitry.
Hassle/cost wise that might be in-between the two extremes.
But they don't need drones, actually, these criminals already have access to Microwave Weaponry and Electromagnetic Surveillance.
Cities at sea may need something like this to get going.
A company wanting to build a plant next to a resource they need could acquire a town for its workforce.
But fundamentally, supply is short due to years of falling behind on building it after the ~2008 mortgage crisis. It's going to take a really long time to catch up on that backlog. There's a relatively low maximum percentage you can increase the supply each year.
And now that mortgage rates are higher again and there are recession fears, investors may not be as excited about putting their money into housing construction. So we will have less of a push in the next few years to close that supply gap.
So I think the prices may fall or stagnate, but I doubt the bottom will fall out of real estate.
IMHO, another factor is that the pattern of development has changed. For a long time in the US, the pattern was sprawl, which presents few barriers to building huge amounts of housing because the land is cheap and maybe even in some unincorporated area with no red tape. Now, many people prefer density (or at least not sprawl), which means the housing that's in demand is more redevelopment and infill than giant new subdivisions. That's more tedious, more expensive, and more regulated, so it will happen more slowly. So another reason why supply is limited.
E.g. the value will depreciate in real terms but because most people purchase with borrowed money it will not be a serious problem.
Insulation. In the UK an older £250k house could have £2k additional heating for equivalent comfort. Over decades that adds up. If climate change makes summers hotter so cooling systems/AC need retrofitted and winters colder, that'll be more pressing.
Modular factory built homes might be possible to disassemble or extend, allowing reconfiguration that people might come to demand.
This will also be pushed by other trends, aging populations mean people might demand more housing that better suits their needs and new is cheaper than adapting.
Largest issue is not even death and pollution, it’s that they literally enable culture division and isolation - which is toxic to real progress.
Comcast has been playing games around overage charges for a few years now. It's pretty transparently calibrated to ding you if you have more than one person regularly streaming 4k video.
I like that solar analysis, but I also think it is possible that the high demand for solar and high commodity (energy, etc) costs could continue to stop solar prices from dropping for much of this decade just as we have seen recently.
The temporary whiplash concept for inflation hasn't panned out yet. I follow Lyn Alden's economic analysis closely and she has been predicting this decade to be inflationary. These predictions started over a year ago when the Fed kept saying that inflation was temporary.
"Nothing to hide" may be true, until someone passes an immoral law.
Not all of them... but "off grid" no longer means living like Ted Kaczynski. The popular understanding has yet to catch up.
You can have artificial lighting all night long (thanks to LEDs and batteries), computers (ideally you want to avoid the DC -> AC -> DC conversion), Internet access (although most satellite systems aren't really optimized for low power yet), running water (solar-powered pumps, cheap large-capacity plastic storage totes), etc.
The items that are still hard to get, because of their inherently energy-intensive nature, are hot water out of the tap on demand, and interior climate control (space heating especially). You need a pretty big solar array and battery system to run even a fairly efficient (AC or heat pump) climate control system. Lots of people get around this by siting their off-grid cabins in places that don't require AC, and making the interior volume small enough to heat with a small biofuel furnace (like a modern, efficient wood stove) that can burn locally-obtained fuel.
My recommendation is just learn how to repair the RV yourself. RVIA has an online cert program you can take for $300.
I know how to repair RVs and I just had to pay $6700 to repair a $55K RV before selling it. Do not underestimate how expensive RVs are to pay someone to fix.
The people that build "custom schoolies" are especially on their own unless they are part of many forums/facebook groups of schoolies and can find a mechanic that knows how to work on school buses.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53fkkxc-IWw [video, annoying music]
Just a cursory look on Aliexpress gives $0.12wh for LiFePo4 batteries [0] [1].
Looking on Alibaba, I see some potential sellers that might get below that $0.12 but it takes looking around and potentially talking with sellers. I do think it's possible but it requires some hunting, especially in the 'consumer' quantities we're talking about (sub qty 100).
[0] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/3256803821576908.html?spm=a2...
[1] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/3256803518663847.html?spm=a2...
When he says "you build it, power a building with it, and the government will come around," that's a good way to land in prison. A while back I was watching a presentation at a conference for reactor startups, which warned that the government doesn't play around and will prosecute anyone who fissions atoms without approval.
And to some extent that's justified. The downside of those rocks that heat themselves when you put them together is that if you're not really careful, they can heat up way more than you wanted. Powering a building isn't the hard part.
That said, the NRC is way too obstructionist. We could follow the lead of Canada and be a lot friendlier to new technology, without compromising on safety.
Regarding his fusion comments, of the 35 fusion startups there are a handful attempting advanced fuels that could generate electricity directly, instead of just producing heat. Helion for example will be attempting net electricity production in 2024, without a heat cycle.
Your going to need very long electric lines, to send clean energy from places where its sunny to places where it cloudy, or from places where its windy, to places where its currently calm.
There are places that have so much cloud cover year round that it makes solar adoption there effectively impossible? The frequency of these places is such that their energy needs requires the infrastructure remain in place?
A cursory look on YouTube gives many results [0] [1] [2].
There are fields of ground mounted solar panels in the country side where I live.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7t4hGBWLtxM
Hydrocarbons are incredibly energy dense and cheap. It’s possible to pack so much more energy in such a lighter, more compact space with them that the overall vehicle can be dramatically lighter and have longer range at the same time.
Additionally, doing so is so cheap, it often more than makes up for any efficiency issues, especially if the comparatively better end to end efficiency (and lower pollution and maintenance costs) of a EV comes with convenience issues like reduced range, lack of infrastructure, etc.
For mid-sized commuter vehicles, it’s trending more and more towards EVs as prices drop, charging infrastructure improves, and usage patterns make it convenient (such as at-home or at-office charging).
It still has a way to go for things like commercial or heavy recreational trucks, RVs, etc. It also has a way to go in smaller vehicles like Motorcycles, where the reduced range (due to some pretty fundamental weight limits) makes them more suitable for moped like inner city commuting or very short range trips.
And that’s compared to normally aspirated gasoline. It’s harder still to beat diesel, especially if super/turbo charged which has better energy efficiency, higher energy density, and except for some jurisdictions cheaper fuel prices.
Heavier vehicles cause exponentially more damage to roads. It’s not like building roads is an energy free exercise.
They are also significantly more dangerous in traffic collisions. That kinetic energy has to go somewhere when you crash.
Electric cars with current battery tech will only be a stop gap solution until we get something like induction in roads for longer distances.
Personally I think the Dutch and Danes have a better solution already with low tech bike infrastructure and electric or pedal bikes.
It’s cheaper, requires less maintenance and makes their populations healthier.
> The CRDT concept was formally defined in 2011 by Marc Shapiro, Nuno Preguiça, Carlos Baquero and Marek Zawirski.
Now, that’s not to say the gp wasn’t referring to using some of the CRDT concepts before they were defined collectively under that banner.
One interesting documentary on this topic is Adam Curtis' All Watched Over by Machines of Every Loving Grace.
The battery concept is kind of dumb and a relic of IC engine thinking. For local urban journeys you could half-size the cars, provide common power, and add automated navigation to optimise density and efficiency.
Getting rid of batteries would hugely lower cost and weight.
Cross-country is a different problem, of course.
I fear more of if the legislation process is too fast moving it become subject to mob mentality. Instead of #deletefacebook we may have gone straight to a knee jerk reaction of legislation that bans social media which I’m not sure I want to live in that world either.
Which brings up a very good point: What happens when grid-scale battery storage is common? Does a DC grid make a lot more sense then?
So everyone has to go out of their way and make reasons to feel connected with their fellow man.
Some culture care way more about food than the US can imagine.
You’re citing things which are actually making the case for eating only plants stronger, while thinking that you’re doing the opposite. It’s wild.
This isn’t even addressing the part of your argument where you fallaciously appeal to nature by saying you’re going to do what you evolved to do. What we evolved to do is irrelevant; what we have the ability to do is all that matters.
Millions of people “survive” on a vegan diet and have for decades. They’re doing just fine and aren’t “malnourished, weak, and unhealthy”
Besides the money issue, the biggest concern I have are balancing the batteries, getting the right inverters, keeping the panels clear and figuring out what inefficiencies are during the non-summer seasons.
My batteries have always been lead-acid, simply because L.A. is still much cheaper than Lithium and alternatives.
I've recently taken my first set of Lead-Acid batteries out of service. They powered a small fridge, etc, via 200W of solar panels for over 20 years with essentially zero maintenance, except for occasional top-up of distilled water.
Inverters were a problem at first. I had a series of Inverters die over the years, until I started buying Victron products. Have had zero problems since. Rule one, is "don't buy cheap inverters".
The best part is that secondhand solar panels are now very cheap. The reason is that Gov regulations for grid-tie prohibits the use of second-hand panels, so people doing upgrades will basically throw away their old panels.
My setup runs a conventional fridge/freezer, and a large computer which is on-line for most of the day, as well as my workshop full of electrical tools. I do have a large generator, but the only time it gets run is when I have some welding to do. I don't even gave a battery charger hooked to it.
There are so many myths about solar: Lead-Acid batteries don't last as they are destroyed by deep-cycles. Yes, but when you size the system, you should aim for a deep discharge maybe once a month. This still should result in twenty years life or so. I live in a wet and cloudy part of Australia, and this winter my batteries have never been as low as 80% capacity, and it is rare if the batteries haven't returned to 100% charge by 10:00am each day.
Probably the main problem with solar is that people are stupid. One of my neighbours installed a modest solar system, only to have it regularly fail due to low battery voltage. Long story short: The supplier fitted a Watt meter which tracked the consumption at each outlet. It showed that that the problem was in his daughter's bedroom. A quick search revealed a huge radiator under her bed that she was running each night. Problem solved.
Slow growth essentially means that the population pyramid becomes too top heavy. You’re going to have trouble if your country is filled with 70 year old pensioners and the trickle of tax paying 20-40 year olds slows down.
That is what is called inflation. If people have an extra 7500 to buy solar, then solar becomes up to 7500 more expensive.
There's also a risk that supply chain bottlenecks/cold war with china will drive up the cost & your electric bill is only gonna go up.
The vast majority of feed used in factory farms is inedible to humans. The primary ingredient is often the waste product from bioethanol production and distillation [1]. The edible varieties of corn, barley, oats, and alfalfa used in feed aren't that popular with people [2], are mostly produced on land that would otherwise be unproductive, and are mostly used for newborns or in the final stage before slaughter to make the meat fattier and more palatable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distillers_grains
[2] For example, even though barley is a core ingredient to much of the alcohol industry, animal feed still accounts for two thirds of barley consumption. Most of the rest of the barley ends up in animal feed in the form of distillers grains.
That's unless the paradigm of most web apps fundamentally shifts - ie your distributed systems point.
Don't get me wrong, if such a 2x productivity increase over TS is possible I'd love to be wrong here and see that happen - not least just out of pure interest of how that language could be so much better, because clearly I'd be learning a lot there :-)
Personally, I’m optimistic that we can do much better than 2x on the important metrics as mainstream programming languages and the programmers using them adopt ideas that already exist in more obscure languages, programming research, and development teams that don’t necessarily publish their experiences openly.
I think some of the potential gains come just from making it easier and therefore quicker to read and write our own code. Better syntax, more expressive language features, a more comprehensive standard library, and eliminating some of the historical baggage like how null/undefined are handled could all help a lot compared to today’s TypeScript, IMHO.
There are also other areas, such as safety and making it easier to work with other code from within or outside our own organisations, where today a huge proportion of a typical TypeScript developer’s time is probably wasted on things like wrangling dependency trees that could be much smaller and better managed, investigating preventable defects that currently reach later stages in the development process before they are noticed, and writing unit tests for negative cases that would be unnecessary if the language itself designed out those possibilities.
Something that struck me a little while back is just how unimaginably large this part of the programming industry has become. We’re talking about millions of developers working on web applications and companies collectively worth trillions of dollars. How much would even a 10% long-term improvement in developer productivity be worth to the world? What about 200%? What about 1000% or more? Personally, I think we still have a long way to go before we run into any inherent limits on developer productivity, and we’re learning more all the time.
Damn that sounds terrible. I'll give points for google docs, but i am unconvinced by the rest.
The first factor would be the hodgepodge of wall dongles one needs to own and maintain (plus the cost of buying a dongle for each device that doesn't have one, or multiple of them per device in case you want to charge your phone/laptop/etc in more than one location at home).
The second factor is the "smoothness" of your DC sources. Most of the common LED lamps have a pretty ugly signal shape, and not at all close to a DC flat line. This is mostly unavoidable as AC->Smooth DC conversion is more expensive than AC-> DC + a ton of 120Hz, 240Hz,... on top of it. So, common LED lights tend to opt for cheaper "electronics". People notice the flickery LED lights to various degrees (some get headaches, some outright see the flickers, some claim to be totally oblivious to the difference). The DC "quality" also affects some fairly sensitive electronic devices, so some AC->DC adaptors are fairly sophisticated. A central high quality AC->DC convertor (combined with DC wiring) has better scalability when you need to care about smoothness (it can be a basic quality of life matter for some people).
The third and fourth factors are power discipation and conversion efficiency. They are the same thing, with two remedies: more $ to remedy the inefficiency (which is really small these days, if you go for switching convertors), and plans for heat to discipate properly (devices end up with pretty hot adaptors).
I've been involved in a side project developing a consumer-friendly rating of "power quality" for AC devices and AC->DC power supplies which summarizes efficiency over a range of loads, as well as incorporating power factor measurements. We've been testing common devices such as USB power supplies for phones and such, as well as things like laptop power supplies, due to how numerous they are. We've had a few surprises, for example, Apple power supplies generally don't fare that well.
Power Quality Score: https://pqs.app/ Detailed test data is public for some devices but not all, since we're trying to find paths to revenue starting with subscriptions for full test results. Let us know if you have feedback.
You might also be interested in the Youtube channel of my friend/PQS collaborator, where he's done some "deep dive" videos of testing some of the devices in the PQS database- particularly AC->DC USB power supplies due to how ubiquitous they are now- https://www.youtube.com/c/AllThingsOnePlace/ .
I think the better argument is one for reduced 'hardware complexity'. Instead of having an inverter that then goes through a rectifier, all you need is a buck converter.
Because this is not going to make all energy cheaper. It's going to massively increase the cost of "legacy" energy while making some types of energy free.
Perhaps they will use a "social" cost-sharing, or ... well I don't know, but essentially the time will come when living in the countryside will come with "free" energy (not unlimited though), and cities will come with punitively expensive energy.
As for costs, there's been concern for more than a decade about the "utility death spiral" scenario: some users disconnecting from a grid would spread the fixed costs of things like transmission and black start over a smaller number of remaining users, leading more of them to disconnect, and so on. So far it hasn't materialized anywhere, but as far as I know it could. I don't think the same scenario is likely with "legacy energy" like gasoline and natural gas, because the fixed costs are so low.
Taxation of energy is a big revenue stream for the governments. What happens when people start putting independent energy sources to power themselves and it causes significant revenue drop ? Would the government tax them for putting up solar on their property ? Couple this with electrification of transportation and you have another taxation source (fossil fuels) losing revenue. This would lead to a disruption in the social power dynamics in a country.
Yes, energy companies can invest in these too, but why would I buy from them if I have my own generation ?
But I don't quite see how free countryside electricity would mean expensive electricity in cities? Large scale wind and solar will decrease grid prices too, and most people live in cities anyway so the people dropping off grid doesn't seem like an issue for electricity transfer costs. Plus off-grid won't happen anywhere with a real winter, so most of Europe is excluded already.
It would be a change in the dynamics of economies of scale vs small and nimble, greater lobbying power is one thing economies of scale still have a big advantage in so GP's comment seems plausible.
[0]- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HVDC_Europe_annotated-2...
As for the taste - not sure about Soylent, but JimmyJoy is very tasty.
I would love a pill that would give me all the amino acids I need; but I couldn't swallow this.
Installing high-wattage DC lines without any training at all is a great way to get house fires.
Also, I haven't got whole lot of un-shaded roof space.
I don't understand why commercial solar isn't even bigger than it is - are they waiting for prices to come down, or what?
> I don't understand why commercial solar isn't even bigger than it is - are they waiting for prices to come down, or what?
I think this is a really good question and I don't know the answer to it.
My not-very-well-informed opinion is that there are a confluence of factors involved:
* Infrastructure buildout, especially in the USA where the infrastructure projects take massive amounts of effort and the population is spread out over a large area of land, takes a lot of time, effort and money.
* The prices involved aren't as lucrative yet as they could be. When the price per MWh is 1/10 that of coal, then we'll see huge rollout (in my opinion).
* Adoption/rollout is happening but, in some places at least, there's government capture preventing widespread rollout/adoption (Pennsylvania?)
* Aging infrastructure prevents large scale energy injection at random points.
To the last point, here in New York state, I've heard one has to pay to first do a survey if the site where you want to build a solar array can actually inject that much more energy into the grid (at a cost of $10k+ or more) and even then, you're limited by what the aging energy infrastructure can support, capping the amount of energy available.
First off you need roofing skills, which 99% of homeowners have no idea how to do safely, often needs specialized equipment, and you run the risk of falling off and basically paralyzing yourself for life. Then you have the issue of having run conduit correctly, grounding everything to code, having disconnects installed in the right places, which is going to vary from state to state and even city to city based on what the laws are.
If you don't electrocute yourself, and manage to not fall off the roof and die, and somehow connect everything correctly, there is approximately 0% chance the local utility agrees to connect your system without a licensed electrician who is willing to vouch for the work you did.
I wouldn't do it. I don't need yet another interested party when trying to sell my house eventually, and I don't want to scare off would-be buyers with potentially complicated contract terms.
One narrow interpretation is that one particular study that you did not cite got it wrong.
One broad interpretation is that we should not pay attention or give credence to the good faith estimates offered at the time.
I get tired of snarky one-liners that don't say what they mean. They do not promote useful discussion. My comment here would not be necessary if you took a few minutes to elaborate about what you meant.
Lastly: Estimates change. No model is perfect but some are useful.
I was born in the 70s, and my entire life I've been hearing climate alarmism - the end of the world is nigh (or just around the corner). No, really, this time it's for real! Donate here to stop it.
Most of the "solutions" I've seen are worse than the problem. Recycling was a major con that no one wants to talk about.
Carbon offset credits? Really?
With the amount of alarmism and blatant opportunism in the space, it's pretty hard to sift through and focus on real, meaningful change. Like not wasting precious aquifer water on lawns.
Simple stuff that would have real impact. Taxing the hell out of single use plastic water bottles.
We've done it before. The anti CFC thing was a huge success. Seems like that should be a model to follow.
Instead of pearl-clutching global alarmism, we should narrowly focus on concrete problems with real, measurable solutions, and address them one by one.
And my entire life I've been hearing predictions of climate change that would start getting serious... right about now. And here we are. A bit ahead of schedule, really.
Many neoclassical economists would argue against this approach. Fix the incentives, they would say, and things will work out.
Your argument is incredulity? Give your reasons. I don't want a vapid rant.
Except for all the people who take climate change seriously, like the EU and China:
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-ramp-up-recycling-...
(1) expensive
(2) difficult to manage administratively
(3) imbalanced across programs
(4) unresponsive as conditions or impacts change
(5) corruptible, since special interests could focus their efforts to carve out irrational and unfair exceptions for themselves
(6) overly politicized during budgetary decisions
... compared to addressing common causes more broadly.
IPCC, see summary of Q3.9 on p9 https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar3/syr/
One person needs about 5 hectares of land to be self-sufficient (i.e. to cover all its food needs, including protein). If you can afford your own 432 Park Avenue (Cost: ~$1BUSD, Floor area: ~4ha) for that, then the answer is yes.
But also, with that same $1BUSD you could buy around 100,000 hectares of land in rural US, close to the size of Qatar; you can see how relatively inefficient vertical farming is in economic terms.
That 5 hectares of land per person metric is totally inapplicable here. Sort of the entire point of vertical farming is to be (in theory) vastly more efficient per unit of land. If you believe the claims it's somewhere between a 10 and 50 times reduction in land usage for same output.
5 hectares is also on the very high end for estimates of that metric. It also drops hugely if you're not relying on animal products.
I don't think vertical farming in apartments is the future, but I think your calculations here are also way, way off.
That’s about a fifth of an acre, and other caveats apply like climate and the amount of labor during the growing season. If vertical farming works, and can also reduce the labor required (I have no idea if that’s one of its goals), it starts to look more plausible as something that could take off. Still won’t fit on a rooftop though, and as Jayne would say, “I smell a lotta ‘if’ coming off that plan.”
https://www.growveg.com/guides/growing-enough-food-to-feed-a...
If I acknowledge that some communities are more likely to live their daily lives under these three factors altogether, it could explain why these communities may be more vulnerable to daily life challenges, and more easily resort to violence. Still, that doesn't give me a causal link between racial/cultural diversity and violence, far from it, but I can understand why those who prefer taking shortcuts may end up reaching this conclusion.
This shortcut is also very comfortable for the peace of mind: once I attribute violence to racial/cultural diversity, I can also safely conclude that I will never be part of the problem (if I consider myself as being part of the "good" racial/cultural group)...
I have noticed a very very very strong correlation of how dangerous it can be just to walk outside alone, or at night, or walk in public with your cellphone. I believe there is a link between violence and race and culture.
Also, I'm sure that if humanity had put enough resources to this we would already have really efficient solutions around this. It tech that needs to (and hopefully will) be developed.
I'm a huge fan of Zipline, I imagine they'll refine the parachute element of the operation.
I am sorry to ask but I have the feeling that something is missing in your comment. You said you have lived in poor areas and observed violence, or did you mean that you witnessed violence only in a subset of the areas you listed?
Contrast that with living in a very poor neighborhood in Chisinau, in Moldova. Iasi, in Romania, Kiev, and Saint petersburg. I never really felt in danger at all, I could walk home at whatever hour, go on a walk, take out my cellphone. The closest to being dangerous was desperate drug addicts in St. Petersburg.
These places/slums in eastern europe are just as poor, have the same problems with the same drugs. But the level of random violence in 'diverse' places just doesn't exist. I know it sounds fucked up like I am a fox news anchor, or something, but it is just something I have noticed.
It seems the more monoculture a society is the more safe it is in the poor areas. Specifically Europe, Asia, and the middle east. I don't know how to explain it without sounding like a racist so I wont.
Sea level rise? The rate of increase hasn't changed. Actually it was highest during Lincoln's presidency.
Droughts? Actually less severe and less frequent than 100 years ago.
Severe weather? Wild fires? Also, pretty much unchanged or slightly decreased.
Global temperatures? Sure, seem to be increasing moderately, but there's a ton of complication there. And we don't really know what the impact will be.
I think it's better to stop handwringing over pessimistic alarmist models and to focus on solving real, concrete, addressable ecological problems.
> I think it's better to stop handwringing over pessimistic alarmist models ...
Which climate models are pessimistic in your view?
Which models are alarmist? Please define alarmist as you are using it. What exactly are you measuring when you say "alarmist"? Is there a threshold?
Let's get some common footing. Here's a thought experiment and question: Let's say Organization X finds in 90% of model runs, the global climate is disrupted to the point that the USA will face between $400B and $800B of additional costs starting in 2040 and increasing somewhere around 1% to 3% per year.
* Is summarizing this finding alarmist? Of course not -- it is only describing a model's prediction.
* Is the model alarmist? What would make it alarmist? If the assumptions are unrealistic? But all models are imperfect. So how unrealistic must they be?
On the flip side, What models do you recommend? Please share how your favorite models are funded.
> ... and to focus on solving real, concrete, addressable ecological problems.
According to your definitions of "real", "concrete", and "addressable".
Do you think NASA's writing on climate change does not reflect reality? That is is not concrete? That the problems are not addressable? So is NASA alarmist w.r.t. climate change?
What about the reinsurance industry? Let's take Swiss Re. Are they alarmist?
Please point us to some solid writing (such as a credible report) that summarizes your views.
Two final questions: have you studied economics? built predictive models? I'd like to get a sense of good ways to have this discussion. Perhaps we can cut through a bunch of preliminaries and cut to the chase.
Do you agree that the following framing is a useful way to think about our response to climate change? Technological constraints define what levers can be pulled and at what cost, in the short-run at least. Political decisions drive how governments spend money. Economic factors constrain financial and monetary options. Over the medium-term, investments in science and technology tend to increase expand the option space.
When you expand the window, the picture changes.
Droughts and heat waves in the 1800s and 1930s were devastating killers, and some of the most severe in recorded history.
Australia had much more severe bush fires in the 70s [0].
Note that many Australian plants are have evolved to adapt to bush fires, which means they must have been a staple of Australian ecology for many millions of years.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974%E2%80%9375_Australian_bus... in 1974, 290m acres burned vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%9320_Australian_bus... in 2020 which has a highest estimate of about 86m acres burned.
> It's pretty strange how all of those metrics start at 1960, no?
No, "all of those metrics" on the many pages linked from the EPA page do not start at 1960.
Stop making false statements. Doing so hurts your credibility and wastes our time.
Try slowing down and reminding yourself of your preconceived biases. Double check what you are seeing. Look for things that don't confirm what you already believe.
For the heat wave chart, the stated reason for this is that it's the date where most urban areas started keeping careful records.
They also, as a footnote[1] include an image going back much farther [2] which completely changes the picture and analysis.
However the text description is all about the increase since 1960, only barely mentioning that it was much worse in the 1930s.
How is it possible to look at this and not question it?
Making false statements? Slowing down and reminding myself?
I've spent countless hours looking at original noaa data related to climate change. I've seen a very clear distortion of data in reporting.
> Double check what you are seeing. Look for things that don't confirm what you already believe.
That's great advice, maybe we should both take it? [3] [4]
I don't need to go through every single measure here, it's pretty easy to discover for yourself if you take a real look at the data.
The severity and frequency of things like droughts, severe weather, heat waves are flat, if not in decline when you look across a broader window.
Sea level rise is pretty linear for as long as it's been measured [5]
NOAA data is pretty clear on this.
Arctic sea ice? It has a well known oscillation that generally runs close to 180 degrees out of phase with antarctic sea ice. Again, super easy to learn about if you dig in. Did you know that Arctic sea ice actually increased from 1979 to 2015? [6]
Also, measuring sea ice is notoriously difficult and error prone, and satellite data doesn't do a very good job of it. Also easy to learn about.
My overall point, which for some strange reason gathers a ton of open hostility, is that we're much better off focusing on concrete ecological issues that can be solved today (not draining aquifers, better agriculture practices, elimination of weird farm bill subsidies to harmful crops, etc...).
It's amazing how just pointing that out garners the sort of personal attacks that you leveled at me. Slowing down sounds like good advice!
[1] https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...
[2] https://www.epa.gov/system/files/styles/small/private/images...
[3] https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...
[4] https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...
[5] https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...
[6] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S20959...
Please show me the personal attack.
Here is what I wrote:
> No, "all of those metrics" on the many pages linked from the EPA page do not start at 1960. / Stop making false statements. Doing so hurts your credibility and wastes our time. / Try slowing down and reminding yourself of your preconceived biases. Double check what you are seeing. Look for things that don't confirm what you already believe.
I said you made a false statement. You did. I did not call you names; e.g. I did not call you a liar.
Claiming there is a personal attack when there is none is not acceptable. I can criticize your ideas -- that is fair game.
It is understandable to feel hurt when ideas you hold are criticized. You may consider these ideas to be part of your identity. But these are not personal attacks.
I respect that you have researched the climate change data. I likely would agree with some of your conclusions.
I asked many questions about your overall point. I would not use the word "hostile" to characterize tough questions.
Yes, you are getting pushback. I can't speak to others, but I've found your core arguments to be too vague to be useful. I don't think it is "strange" when some people to question what you write.
> It's amazing how just pointing that out
Well, you "aren't just pointing that out". There is context. My many comments around this thread show that I've engaged and tried to make sense of what you mean, in terms of concrete examples.
Also, I hope you can recognize that some of your language resembles climate-denial language. With this in mind, you would do well to be mindful of how you are coming across.
Also, another observation. The language you are using matches the language of "I'm the victim here". I don't know if you intended this. That kind of language is regularly used to deflect.
Please reply to my other comments. I am willing to consider your arguments -- probably more so than many people here on HN who read your comment and probably thought it wasn't worth their time to respond. But I'd prefer to read them coming from a published source. Why? I'd like to read not only the content, but also about the authors, the funding, and the counter-responses.
Thank you for giving some concrete examples of what you mean.
However, I'm still not convinced by the "that can be solved today" criteria. One key problem with such criteria is that someone can say "that can't be solved today" in order to avoid taking action. What is your response?
In my other comment, I offered a very high level summary of how science, technology, governance, economics, and finance relate w.r.t. climate change. I was hoping to see your response. Your response these very much connects to the "that can be solved today" criteria.
Sustained investment in research and development is important because science and technology can expand the solution space. In parallel, more public awareness can increase the political will for increasing the budget for action. (Of course, there are many other components necessary for humanity to address the situation.)
You wrote "alarmist" but did not explain what you meant. I asked detailed questions so that we could get on the same page. No response, right? Or did I miss it?
You give specific examples that fall into the category of, e.g. (paraphrased) "if look at X data over a sufficiently long time frame, it does not show a clear trend." Yes, this is correct for some cases. And these are pointed out in the EPA descriptions. So this does not support your alarmist claim.
You complain of being personally attacked.
In summary, this trajectory looks a lot like moving the goal posts away from explaining what is alarmist about climate change models.
If you've changed your mind about what claims you want to make, please do so. But I have not seen good argumentation or explanation for what seemed to be your core argument.
I'll point it out again. This:
> It's pretty strange how all of those metrics start at 1960, no?
Is quite different from this:
> A bunch of them do. Heat waves, river floods, etc...
You can't have it both ways.
> Making false statements?
Yes. I've demonstrated clearly that you wrote a false statement by saying "all". Then you shifted your position to say "a bunch of them".
Why not acknowledge your mistake?
> Slowing down and reminding myself?
Yes. When was the last time you actually said to yourself, e.g. "I have a tendency to get annoyed by how reporters cover climate change. I should not let my annoyance spill over into other trains of thought, such as the claim 'climate change models are alarmist'".
Adjust as needed to suit your situation and thought patterns. If you try it, I think you'll find benefit.
Now, if one makes a claim that there is a "very clear distortion", it is incumbent upon you to show the analysis -- or to cite it. You are the one making the claim; don't ask someone else to do it. A credible analysis must be statistical, not anecdotal.
How does the data referenced map to your understanding of climate change?
This kind of deflection does not reflect well on you. On the other hand, you could accept and acknowledge that you spoke/wrote incorrectly.
I'm old enough to remember when being skeptical of authority was actively encouraged in liberal thought.
Sorry for the snarky response, you seem like a genuinely decent person.
I think, like a lot of folks who engage in this topic, that it's just exhausting.
It seems like any opinion apart from "we're all gonna die!" is just mercilessly attacked.
The data is all there, it's pretty easy to follow.
I'm just sort of over the whole "we must radically restructure civilization because of these climate models" stuff.
I don't think it's warranted based on the data I've seen.
> I'm old enough to remember when being skeptical of authority was actively encouraged in liberal thought.
Your response is a redirection. Try again to answer the question. I'm probing to see if you have some self-awareness.
Well, what you see depends on where you look. Where are you looking?
Perhaps it is time for you to look elsewhere?
