Oh, 2022
antipope.org
antipope.org
Future is complex, and not only "good" developments happens and start changing everything faster than ever before, bad ones does too. And we aren't rational enough to avoid the bad ones.
Anyway, I'm more worried about the consequences of climate change that are not the slow rise of the global sea level than about COVID. That is a general area where things are happening faster than predicted, and where we act slower than predicted.
that depends, have you recently received any Signal messages from lobsters representing the moscow windows NT user group?
Its going to be a wild ride! Hopefully it doesn't result in anything too crazy going on, I'd hate to involuntarily grow a new limb.
Related, your books, and others in the genre, helped bring about my own acceptance of people's differences. I realized that if I had no objection to a future where people modified their own DNA, then it followed that I should have no objection to people dying their hair, getting crazy tattoos, or making any alterations to their body that they so choose. Transhumanist literature was the final stepping stone that let me step back from the preconceived notions of ethics and morals that society had placed upon me and do a thorough analyze and decide what I wanted to keep versus discard.
https://ansible.uk/writing/t3_002.html
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm
https://www.nature.com/articles/44964
https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/different-kinds-of-darkness/
In 15 years, it'll be a 3-month endeavor unless we see the human limits of perceptual processing hit a hard wall. I liken it to how memory used to be expensive and engineers cheap, and it's now the other way around.
But really, accelerando was a great book, wish there was more in the genre but maybe I just haven't been looking hard enough.
I think Accelerando itself is precisely complaining that things are going too fast. In the specific scenario in the novel, the incomprehensibly fast automation of capitalism is going to eat us all.
Most genuinely new things haven't had time to get too complicated for one person to get a functional understanding of the whole situation. You could talk to web servers in telnet and make the most complex web page anyone had ever made in Notepad long before starting a new web thing from a guide required a half gigabyte download.
Cryptocurrency is a small step forward with some potential to make online transactions easier. That's it. That's cryptocurrencies. Anyone making it more complicated is trying to fleece you. The most complicated thing is smart contracts, and what they are and what they do is right there in the name.
Either that, or if it actually is as complicated as it seems... Then it's usually too complicated to work.[1]
(Which is not to say that uncomplicated stuff can't also, sometimes, be bullshit. Like, IMO, crypto-"currencies".)
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[1]: At least too complicated to work well, and/or in the long run.
Who decides what is good and what is bad for the state of the planet?
At this point the proposed bans are on the sale of new vehicles that run on fossil fuels. As far as I know, no one is planning to outright ban ICE vehicles yet. Headline writers consistently get this wrong, because making the policy sound more extreme than it is attracts ad views.
> "As about half of global shipping is engaged in the transport of petrochemicals or coal at this point, this is goin to have impacts far beyond the obvious."
Huh, that's a lot. If that's correct, it's a lot more than I would have guessed.
In fact, when buying gasoline in those stations, it's common to receive some voucher for the owner's store.
Other stations are owned by petrol corporations but they are in direct competition when they are near stores or they are very expensive when they are located on our highways, which are privatized(and it's a shame), so they are in some sort of closed market since you cannot leave the highway without paying.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqkmaIfWMWQ
(Shot during another wave of rising gas prices)
My point is that several governments now have policies in place that say they're going to ban the sale of new ICE vehicles after a certain date. But they aren't going to disallow the use of ICE vehicles in their country or on their roads, which is what it would mean if they were literally going to ban ICE vehicles.
I've seen a number of articles with headlines like "X country is banning ICE vehicles after 20YZ" but then the article contents specify that it's a ban on the sale of new vehicles, which isn't the same thing. This is unhelpful sensationalism that is likely to convince a lot of conservative people that government agents are going to show up at their front door on a certain date with a tow truck to take away their Ford F150 or whatever, and that's just not the case. So, whenever I see anything that uncritically repeats that idea I find it necessary to post a comment saying that "banning ICE vehicles" isn't the same thing as "banning the sale of new ICE vehicle" in hopes that fewer people are confused and maybe more people will demand clear and accurate communication on this issue.
In the long run, bans on the sale of new vehicles will mean that existing ICE vehicles will wear out unless people want to make the extra effort to keep them running, which for most of them it's just not worth it. So, this achieves the needed policy objectives without antagonizing existing ICE vehicle owners. In other words, it's actually a much more reasonable and moderate position than what the word "ban" implies.
Not entirely. Government bans provide additional incentive for manufacturers to switch to EVs, which hastens price competitiveness through economy-of-scale effects.
For example, if someplace bans new ICE car sales from 2032, ten years from now, what does that do for the value of car-related businesses in 2027, five years from now? If you own a petrol station in a city and are offered a lowish price from a property developer, do you close the business? Or do you assume that you can sell at a higher price in 2037?
Or if you're looking for a new car in 2027, five years before the ban takes effect, do you think you'll be able to sell your car at a nice price in 2037? As of 2027 there's no ban on selling used cars, but do you trust that to remain?
It's like the reverse of switching from coal to natural gas heating. Coal required delivering and shoveling a bunch of dirty fuel and ash around frequently, which was a waste of time, so the switch to gas was welcomed as time-saving and much much cleaner. EVs are so much cleaner and quieter than ICE but the convenience factor is not solved yet
In every case that I am aware of, a business takes care of this (i.e. I've seen it done). It's not exactly complicated - it's just a bit of work.
But there WILL be higher congestion charges and maybe even localised bans for ICEs in city centres. No one wants a smoking diesel truck idling under their window if they have the option to replace it with a quiet EV.
There was a post here just yesterday, of a piece by Bill McKibben on this very topic. 40%. Seems about right to me.[1]
> > At this point the proposed bans are on the sale of new vehicles that run on fossil fuels [...] leading to a complete phase-out ...
> ... making the policy sound more extreme than it is
And the reduction in fossil fuels, too. Gasoline is somewhere between 30% and 40% of total oil consumption (if I am interpreting pages on the IEA's website correctly). There will be a ramp down, perhaps, but not a complete phase-out.
The ramp-down could happen slowly, then all at once, though.
On the one hand, ICE vehicles will be around for many decades after the bans come into force. On the other, most vehicle miles travelled are travelled by newer vehicles (say up to ten or twelve years old). I think there could be a tipping point after a while, in which the price of gasoline suddenly rises sharply because it's uneconomic to refine the small quantities demanded.
All the other components, not so much. There are lots of uses for which there are no good substitutes: industrial chemical feedstocks, ships, roadmaking, off-road construction and agriculture, trains, backup generators, military vehicles, and many more.
Diesel, kerosene (jet fuel), naptha, bitumen, etc., will be with use for a long time to come. Let's hope someone comes up with a cheap way of synthesizing them from atmospheric CO2.
That wouldn't disappear entirely if you electrified everything; coal is widely used for producing steel (1kg blast-furnace steel uses 750g met-grade coal, this is ~10% of imports in China) and preparing cement (producing 1kg cement uses 500g coal).
However, mass electrification would still be a dramatic drop in shipping.
Heating is mostly a solved problem. Coal is just cheap and someone else’s kids pay for the pollution.
Wyvernsridge | January 9, 2022 19:06 | Reply 8:
I love these kinds of posts! I would, however, caution about thinking that the end of ICE car manufacturing will be dictated solely by government diktat. It will most likely come earlier and more chaotically because of manufacturers being unable to source parts and components to continue making those cars.
The auto industry is basically a pyramid where OEMs [ie the car companies] depend on module/system [Tier1] suppliers as well as component suppliers [Tier 2] and Parts suppliers [Tier 3]. Those relationships are built on contracts that span out to five years and beyond. Today, contracts are being negotiated for 2025-2030. Those contracts, if happening at all, are being done for much lower quantities of units. After all, an EV does not need a cast-aluminium gearbox assembly. The manufacturers within those tiers are highly competitive among themselves and they know they need to find alternative to manufacture and remain viable well in advance of 2030. For OEMs this means trouble finding components, and paying much higher prices for those than they used to [ie the suppliers are costing in the risks]. This means that ICE car prices will skyrocket at the same time that EV prices go mainstream.
However, all that new electricity demand needs to come from somewhere. Drawing power from the grid at night works great today, but that's because of a coincidental uneven energy demand, which I doubt will last for too long. Once EVs are truly mainstream, it will (1) saturate the grid at all times of day and (2) make the grid more critical than it already is (meaning mitigations like rolling blackouts are gonna be even more infeasible). Sprinkle some demand surges from A/C and heaters from extreme weather events on top of this, and while we're add it let's decommision nuclear prematurely for political points (see e.g. Germany and Sweden).
Anyway, what I mean to say is that electricity supply will be a real problem (especially in the US due to car centrism) and short sighted politicians will need to provide immediate duct-tape fixes. Fossil fuels are sinfully well suited for fast energy injections, and I'm afraid that will often be the only option.
In other words, I worry little about the ICE-EV transition, but that doesn't mean anything for the fossil-renewables transition in general. I wouldn't be surprised if tomorrow's electricity will be dirtier than today's.
As far as grid stability though, in more advanced countries it's relatively easy to build out more grid capacity, just expensive. Only in politically troubled countries like Australia and the USA does the "but how do we create an effective market for building the grid" dominate that discussion, and result in a poorly functioning grid but also (obviously) a badly broken market in providing a grid. Back when I was exposed to economics electricity grids were a cliche example of things where markets are inappropriate and inherently unworkable - they're a natural monopoly. Even the most die-hard capitalist isn't going to suggest two or three independent grids supplying every building... well, maybe in Texas :)
I'm in Australia, and the big advantage we have over much of the USA is being closer to the equator... only about half our current houses have solar PV on them, and less than a third of commercial buildings. We could get 20% more electricity just by fixing that, and it would be conveniently close to demand as well.
Yes, the vehicle is heavier (=less efficient) when you carry the range extender around with you, but that's compensated for by not needing as heavy a battery. Eliminates dependence on the grid; replaces it with dependence on the current refuelling infrastructure. Which latter, at the moment and in most places, certainly is better than the currently available EV charging infrastructure. Crossover point where pure EVs become more efficient TBD by how fast fuel infra is reduced and how fast charging infra is improved... With an additional confounding factor introduced by GP's hypothesized grid instability.
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[1]: Wow, what a genius I am, look what a great new idea! ... Or, well, maybe not so new after all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lohner%E2%80%93Porsche
As a result 1MJ of petrol consumption replaced with electricity when somebody replaces their car with an EV is not 1MJ more electricity to deliver but perhaps 600kJ. This can mean guesses of the necessary infrastructure investment to deliver a fit-for-purpose supply network are significant over-estimates.
Cars are also an excellent target for "demand side control" in electrical grids. You'd be very angry if your refrigerator shuts down temporarily when the grid load is high, and pretty unhappy if your lights or TV shut down, but how about the tumble dryer? Most days you wouldn't care, and if you got paid for the option you might jump at the chance. However charging your car overnight who cares whether it charges from 1830 (when you arrive home) to 0340 (full) or from 2230 (as people go to bed and the network is less strained) to 0740 (just before you get in the car to drive to work) ?
There are plenty of studies showing that an hybrid car is much better for the environment on the long term than the current state of lithium battery electric cars. Long range EV are a pest. Lithium mining is way worse for the environment than people believe, and there is the whole other issues related to mining in general.
We still need ice cars
Changing every car to EVs is missing the point. We need much better transport for both inter-city transportation, and for intra-continental goods transportation.
EVs are just going to change the location of the pollution.
If you're going to pee and get a sandwich with a meatball (or a hamburger, a sack of carrots or whatever it is counts as a snack for you) anyway, you may as well do so while charging your car. Given that even the really cheap ones can charge to a pretty significant level (80+%) in 20 minutes or so, these activities are compatible.
At least one of our stops (visiting Joshua Tree) was at a charger that I think is essentially a glorified 110v socket (ChargePoint in Yuca Valley). We charged there while eating breakfast and while it reduced the range anxiety some, getting to 80%+ was not on the menu.
On main highways you're right, although traveling over the holidays led to at least one wait for a charging spot. To be fair, even the gas station had a line.
Also the EQE, I would have thought? If not to begin with, then probably such a variant will be introduced as a follow-up. And maybe if you drive a Taycan reeeally carefully...?
What's interesting about their design is that the end-to-end losses are within a couple percent of the end-to-end losses of a conductive charger (the losses move from the transformer to the induction coil).
And lots of other places. About 1 billion people live along coastlines at 20 meters or less above sea level, and 200 million at 5 meters or less. I live in a wealthy country but well within the 5 meters range and am already having to think about whether it wouldn't be more prudent to sell my house today, now that it's still worth something, and emigrate to somewhere with a more future-proof elevation.
Worst case if Greenland's ice sheet melts, that adds 7 meters to sea level, and Antarctica's another 60 meters. I won't see that in my lifetime but my children might.
another thing to think about is the global geopolitical/civil war/economic possible disruptions and consequences of something like potentially half to 3/4 of bangladesh's population becoming international refugees. imagine what happened with syrians around 2012-2015 and people trying to get into europe multiplied by a factor of 50.
and in a theoretical scenario like that happening with bangladesh, simultaneously other groups of aggregate hundreds of millions of low-income coastal residents from around the world also trying to move to safety at the same time.
Much of the tropics will become literally uninhabitable: being outside, in the shade, not moving, you die of heat stroke. Not every day, but in several days of the year, which is entirely enough. Before that, of course, the crops fail.
The effect of massive refugee influx has been seen to drive a rise of fascism in democratic nations.
Why not? We have a lot of promising developments both in cheap energy production and in reducing the cost to vacuumed green house gases out of the atmosphere. I can easily see a world where we change almost nothing about life and still achieve net negative carbon by just ripping it out of the air.
Honestly we even have the technology to do it now just limited will if things ever get real bad that would change very quickly.
COVID tells me that’s highly unlikely. We literally have a movement rejecting known-to-save-lives technology for non-scientific reasons. If things get real bad people will dig deeper to try to protect their own lifestyle right now, even if that means screwing things up 10 years from now.
And enough of those people have enough wealth and power to effectively counter even movements supported by the majority of humanity.
COVID is different because you need a massive majority, 80%+, to follow certain guidelines (vaccine, masks, etc). For carbon it just needs to happen, anyone can do it. If the tech gets cheap enough Bill Gates will just setup shop in the desert and start sucking.
Decarbonizing is happening, at least to electricity generation and transportation. There is a group insisting on denying this, but it's just your usual form of denialism.
There is reasonable freedom to debate the last 10% of emissions. Those are not being replaced right in front of our eyes. There is also room to claim that decarbonization is not enough. But then you'll have to claim that stopping things as they are is either catastrophic or won't stop the consequences from changing. That's not unthinkable, but not a reasonable default assumption either.
I imagine you are talking about that last one assumption. If so, starting from it is kind of an extreme position. Anyway, it's not clear what kind of cost you are classifying as insurmountable and why governments that are used to spend real amounts of money on all kinds of projects just can't spend on those.
I responded to a comment implying that if there is a philantropist like Bill Gates camping out in the desert sucking CO2 out of the air, we won’t need a massive collective effort.
Maybe this will be a somewhat effective solution one day for areas where fuel energy density is important (e.g. flight), but that’s about it. Carbon neutrality will still need a distributed effort as point source capture is massively more economical where feasible.
> Honestly we even have the technology to do it now just limited will if things ever get real bad that would change very quickly.
Someone had a theory that covid won't be the apocalyptic plague. Instead we'll be hit with another deadlier one that ends up poorly controlled with all the covid fatigue. Something like MERS or Ebola, that the old world managed to control.
I expect this to be the case of climate change. Gov has burned their political capital trying to control covid that there's none left to handle climate change.
This is delusional thinking. There is no future where humanity will be able to continue the way it has and still have a non hostile planet to call home.
The math does not add up for carbon capture tech.
There isn't some scientific silver bullet there that will increase the capture yield.
Building the infrastructure will also emit. Powering the installations will take a lot of energy. There would need to be enormous amounts of these capturing station built around the world for them to make any significant dent in what is already in the atmosphere.
The resources and effort required is so wast, and for so little gain, that we should rather use the alternatives that would give us much more for less.
Subsidize farmers to switch from cattle rearing to forestry for instance. Turn swaths of reclaimed land back to its original wilderness.
Have you seen the movie Don’t Look Up? It’s not gonna happen.
And if I may add, before COVID I was also concerned about antibiotic resistance, mainly because of how we produce a big part of our food (meat). But after two years of COVID, and given how we dealt with it so far, I think it's an even more worrying threat than I thought. Combined with air, water and soil pollution, there's too many fires to look after.
The big mistake is that we try to solve global problems with local control.
That would create a whole different sort of climate change.
If you're in Bangladesh, where can you go, other than another country. And people will fight for that. They'll fight wars. With neighbors that have nuclear weapons. That will not end well for any of us.
It's about proximity to the sea-level being an indicator of severe damage done to property and infrastructure done by sea-level-rise and other climate-change factors like increased storm severity and frequency, increased dilapidation speed from salt and extreme temperature changes, etc. Not to mention the increased cost of living due to the above even if damage to life and property is minimal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering
It's risky, but if their alternative is millions of deaths, why wouldn't they?
Edit: not accusing any particular person, ceo, or entity of malice.
I live in a small community on the SFBA peninsula. Our property's original CC&R's (Covenants, Conditions & Restrictions) from 1929 specifically state: "Said property shall not at any time be occupied by any person or persons of the African, Mongolian or other Asiatic race, except as a domestic servant."
A few observations: (1) Obviously, these are no longer legal or enforceable; (2) my wife & daughter both fall into these restricted groups; they laughed when they saw them, but it was a pretty stark reminder of past incidents of discrimination; (3) This community and many others like it command a 30% dollar premium (good schools & city amenities) compared to neighboring communities without those legacy CC&Rs. Crazy how these differences propagate through time.
Bay Area definitely has its share of warts, though it doesn't hold a candle to some of the stuff we witnessed in the rural South.
From what I gather, many do consider that the WWII concentration camps for American citizens of Japanese ancestry was a racial terror on Bay Area residents comparable to what happened in the 20th century South.
Anyway, after covenants ended, for several decades developers and real estate folk found it legally, politically, and financially expedient not to sell to certain minorities. Want that subdivision project to go smoothly and sell quickly? Apparently in many cases it was optimal to subtly or not so subtly advertise exclusionary sales policies.
So you see, there were not as many Black Steve Jobs or Mike Markkula as their could have been -- because certainly as late as 1960, a Black teacher or firefighter or qualified professional would have found it relatively difficult to relocate to Mountain View or San Jose as Steve Jobs' own parents did. And this robbed minorities out of participating in the economic engine.
This was not special to Santa Clara county, as it was common practice all across the nation.
But because SV has such poor commuting conditions for any relatively proportionate critical mass of Black Americans, particularly those who are descendants of slaves, the exclusionary effect is quite extreme and one really can't purport to care about diversity by locating there.
By comparison, an economic engine like Wall Street is a modest subway fare away from literally some of the poorest census tracts in the nation that are located in the Bronx. Which at least in theory allows a poor kid to work up from the mail room, and does not by geography alone minimize opportunities for poor minorities.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Karar-Ahsan/publication...
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nicolas-Guilpart-2/publ...
People aren't going to migrate unless there is infrastructure and job opportunities there, so if we want to help these people we should be helping these countries to build new cities that are outside the risk of flood zones. We could even take the opportunity to provide more western standards of living - Dhaka only treats around 1/4 of its waste water - and build more environmentally friendly buildings - Dhaka is within a climate where houses could be heated passively.
It is easy to say people can move someplace else in their own country, but other people already live in those places you suggest they move to.
People obliged to move out with just what they can carry are generally not equipped to build new cities. People already in places they hope to move to are generally ill-disposed to building them a place to live for free.
How likely is this worst case?
IPCC in 2021 [1] projected a 0.5 m to 2.0 m sea level rise by 2100 (see Figure SPM.8) and NOAA in 2020 [2] suggested a worst case of 2.5 m sea level rise by 2100. It appears that neither are considering the possibility of an entire ice sheet melting?
[1]: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...
[2]: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
Ice is less dense than water... but only just. If an ice sheet collapses into the sea, it doesn't need to melt. The ice will displace seawater perfectly effectively just by floating. Most of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet sits on rock that is well under sea level – in places, a kilometre under sea level. It doesn't need to melt: it just needs for the seawater to get underneath it, allowing it to slide off into the sea and break up. Seawater is, obviously, salty and warmer than ice.
The resultant sea-level rise will only take on the order of 12 days to stabilise world wide.
I looked at the figures for this and it was a factor in my decision to sell my house on the outskirts of London and move to Czechia, which is above the level of any possible sea-level rise. Its lowest points are ~120m above mean sea level.
I couldn't afford Austria or Switzerland, and most of the other high-and-dry countries don't have the employment prospects (or beer as good) as the Czech Republic.
Previously it was running somewhere around 0.15% to 0.60% which was still totally usable... if you put a similar test setup on a noisy/oversubscribed coaxial cablemodem DOCSIS3 segment in a randomly chosen house in a suburb somewhere, you might also see an average of 0.50% loss in many cities.
For anyone who has seen packet loss, jitter and transfer quotas on deeply oversubscribed consumer geostationary services, this is amazing.
The next big thing will be to see if they can really get satellite-to-satellite laser links working so that starlink service area and coverage is not limited by having multiple moving LEO satellites in line of sight of both the CPE and a regional spacex earth station at the same time. for instance if people wanted to put a working starlink terminal somewhere really difficult to reach like socotra, yemen.
oneweb is just now becoming barely usable above 55 degrees north latitude. they have a lot of launches to go before it's anything like a real network (and will not be for individual end user CPEs, a oneweb terminal is much bigger and more costly). other things like telesat LEO network remain in the land of vaporware, same as with amazon's.
(RIP Douglas Adams)
Useful low orbital shells around the Earth are an awful lot smaller. They're still big, like the sky is big, but airplanes do manage to, at least somewhat regularly, collide with each other "in the middle of nowhere" (most midairs are around airports, since there are a lot of airplanes heading in and out of them).
Aircraft debris, however, falls out of the sky in short order. Orbital debris doesn't.
The probability of an initial collision is fairly low, but once you have a few, or someone decides to show off their new ASAT weaponry (which is functionally a satellite collision, just one of them only having been in space for a short while), you now have flak that won't go away, moving in all directions at orbital velocity. That, then, has the potential to start causing all sorts of problems, and once that's taken out a few more satellites with orbital-energy impacts, you start having a real problem.
Will it happen? Those invested in littering certain useful orbital shells with satellites claim not. We'll see.
I've heard SpaceX claims to deal with it by putting their satellites in an orbit that requires periodic boosting to stay put -- if they don't, satellites decay and de-orbit after a few years.
The plan is, I think, to regularly retire (de-orbit) and replace these satellites so they can continuously improve the design, and as a nice side-effect any collisions or otherwise misbehaving objects will at least stop being a problem after a known maximum span of time.
Now, how many other satellites are likely to get hit in "5-10 years" of flak flying around at orbital velocities? It's nice if your goal is to say "Well, it probably won't render space useless forever..." - but that assumes one collision, and no ongoing collisions. If it's "5-10 years per collision," and each new one resets the 5-10 years timeframe, well, there's a lot of stuff up there that can make a mess.
Unfortunately, the low orbital shells are also "everywhere." It's not like geosync orbits where if you Kessler them, well... not going to have geosync stuff anymore, but you can still use other orbits. If you Kessler LEO shells, you pretty much have a high risk of anything you try to send to space getting blasted on the way up. It doesn't take much of a bit of debris, at orbital speeds, to trash your booster and make you have a bad day. I guarantee a bolt at 17,000 mph will do some damage (typical LEO velocities) - that's about ~22x the speed of sound in the atmosphere, depending on altitude.
If there are tens of thousands of things up there and you start things colliding and blowing up, you've basically put a defensive shell around the earth for a century, if not longer, by the time all the satellites get fragged and the debris eventually comes down.
It's not.
The concern is that unwanted collisions will become common enough that satellites break down or are completely destroyed within months. There will never be enough debris that we can't fly through LEO.
Flying through and flying through safely are very different things. With tens of thousands of objects in and below LEO and (presumably) increasing flights to orbit, it's only a matter of time until a rocket gets taken down. It doesn't require a particularly large piece for an involuntary update to your deorbiting plans.
> There are currently over 1,600 Starlink satellites in orbit, and that number will continue to grow; SpaceX has filed paperwork for up to 42,000 satellites for the constellation.
https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-internet-satellites-la...
They're aware of the risk of collisions, but toss in a few more vendors trying for the same size, and you can have potentially hundreds of thousands of satellites in the shells. They're big, but they're not that big.
Obviously that is something to avoid, but it's not like we're filling up a non-renewable resource in low earth orbit. It cleans itself naturally.
FWIW.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/p0qws3/self...
Imagine you have a string wrapped tightly around the earth, how much more string to you need to raise the string 10cm above the ground everywhere? The answer just feels so hard to believe, but it indeed only depends on pi and 10cm.
Yes, they have a plan to deal with collisions.
Announced but not implemented Leo other than SpaceX include amazon, Russia, china, telesat.
Probably a better thing to observe is loss and congestion on normal TCP sockets, using retransmit counters, congestion window collapse, etc.
It'd be cool to see what a long running mtr in TCP mode says about Starlink.
As an example I've been looking at properties outside of suburbia since testing a friends Starlink terminal. I know i can get proper broadband on par with cable anywhere. It's changed my personal long term future plans. I think it's going to change a lot of things.
A regular unlimited Gigabit Uplink runs 40€-80€ a month, with hardware included and a power usage in the range of 10W.
But, unfortunately, anywhere you have a Garden large enough to host starlink, you probably won't have anything near that speed available, so it's still pretty competitive.
:(
If you get a good tech they will help you, you may get a dud, in which case you simply have to call them up and work the system again.
It's totally doable, I've done it dozens of times at every dwelling I've inhabited. I'm currently on their 1GB plan, and I do get 1.4Gbps down (they recently upped their provisioning rate, and with a newer modem with 1 2GB link on it, with a suitable router [I run the UDM Pro] it works).
This also means that, at least for us, 99$ (88€) per month for such a thing is a lot more at the end of the year (+756€). I hope they’ll eventually adjust that price for different markets because at the moment it’s not even competitive in my area.
I get 1gbps for ~$100/mo in the bay area, but if I lived a few miles further from the city I’d get 10mbps DSL over wet string regardless of how much I’m willing to pay.
People are comparing (sub)urban US multi-carrier options, or heavily populated countries (like Italy), that have much cheaper pricing. It's not surprising that terrestrial services there are better spec'd and cheaper.
For me (in AU) it's compelling because I otherwise have an option of a 3G yagi / booster (nearest tower is 15km away, service is awful normally, but unusable in storms, frequently highly contended, etc), dial-up (there's very few places that still offer such a service, and just the landline connection fee is $40 / month to start with), or geo-stationary satellite (what I've just moved away from after 2+ years, which has > 600ms RTT to the nearest capital city, and a max downstream of 25Mbps, which is also frequently highly contended during peak times.
The 100W / hour usage is frustrating, and claims of electricity being 'just 10c / kWh' are quaint, I guess coming from well serviced parts of EU / US? Here most people are up for 30c (AUD) / kWh, and if on ToU that can go up to 60c during peak (2pm through 8pm). I've got solar, so on average I'm powering this 'for free' 25% of the time.
in your case about $16.74 if you subtract 25% for the estimate of benefit from your solar (grid tied?) kWh going back to the grid
For the average Australian user, it means you add ~ $200-350 / year to your effective ISP cost. Not end of world for most, but certainly not trivial for all, either.
The regrettable history of Australian internet provisioning (specifically our national broadband network) and electricity pricing (specifically the rorts and corruption, and higher-than-rest-of-world pricing) are described much more eloquently by others.
Dumb Q - is satellite any better in a storm?
1) The storm would have to be right on top of the ground station to be in the line of sight when talking to a satellite. For the 3g case, the storm could be anywhere along the 15km between the two ground stations.
2) Storms typically cover a larger area horizontally than they do vertically, so for most angles, communicating with a satellite should go through less of the cloud than horizontal 3g communication. I'm sure there could be storms where this is not true (eg a tall thunderstorm directly above the ground station), but my guess is that such storms are more rare.
Starlink during storms, and we've have a half dozen big ones since I got this service 4 months ago, seems to do more re-acquires during those events (several seconds of drop-outs) but I'm not seeing significantly lengthy outages.
The dish is still sitting on some concrete blocks on the ground, so it may simply be that it's wobbling more during the wilder winds.
The only other options, until Starlink launches in my area, are traditional satellites. My neighbor previously had one of those, and he had an 8GB cap per MONTH. Plus the ping time averaged like 600ms.
I'm not even mad about the price of $94. Internet is way, way worth it. The quality of the connection sucks, though. I would pay $200 for Starlink once it's reliable. I'm not actually sure what my limit is, but it's pretty high, because rural internet is painful
actual dedicated 1:1 geostationary network capacity costs at a minimum $1600 per Mbps per month each direction (eg: 2 Mbps down x 0.5 Mbps up circuit would easily be $3500/mo)
Your anecdote doesn’t really cover “game changer” since land outside of suburbia is pretty either scarce, big and expensive, underdeveloped, etc. and not many people want to live there (and I doubt fast broadband is the only thing holding people back).
I honestly don’t think starlink is useful for that many people. Personally I would categorize it as a quality of life improvement for a small group of wealthy individuals (and maybe even smaller number of industrial workers which work onsite in remote locations). I have a hard time seeing it doing anything more.
Serving these communities with traditional infrastructure and maybe a 5G tower is very possible today, and frankly not that expensive for a country like USA. I think you undercount the political feasibility a bit. Politicians in the USA make a huge buzz about serving rural communities, infrastructure is a political buzzword at the moment. A good politician could easily capitalize on rural broadband. They don’t even have to be that well intentioned since they could take some lobby money from the telecom companies and bid out the infrastructure build out with conveniently specific requirements for contractors their family just so happens to own stock in.
Yes everything you've said about the possibilities is technically true, but it hasn't happened and there is no evidence it will happen. The RDOF has awarded another provider funding to bring fiber to within a few miles of my place but not directly to me.
Meanwhile I've been on Starlink since last February. I just checked and I'm getting 110M/12M with a 28ms ping time, which is 10x what I was getting for effectively the same price. Not only that, if I want to go on the road I can pack that little dish and take that bandwidth with me just about anywhere in the US. If I was broke I could pool funds with a few neighbors and we could split the cost.
With that available now, why would anyone spend millions of dollars to drop in a 5G tower to pick up another 50-100 customers?
> With that available now, why would anyone spend millions of dollars to drop in a 5G tower to pick up another 50-100 customers?
Your county would—and should—spend a few million dollars with some extra funding from your state and local telecom companies to drop a few 5G towers to pick up a few thousand more customers and voter happiness for sure. Your county counsel can call it something like Rural Broadband initiative and have a plan to bring a broadband connection to 30-70% of under-served rural households in the county before 2030. A good politician should be able to sell it even to city folks as serving the community.
It's a utility. If it costs twice as much as elsewhere you still need to pay it, until it starts getting really difficult.
Although Comcast is a thing in town, most of the otherwise eminently suitable locations have no cable access. The choices are old-style satellite or Starlink.
We have met an increasing number of people who have left the Bay Area and moved to our area. Nearly all of these are remote tech workers. They have generally held their noses and signed up for geosynchronous satellite while waiting for their Starlink service. Those who have transitioned to Starlink are very happy they made the move when they did.
I think Starlink will prove useful to so many people that it will increase pricing for rural real estate.
It is amazing how our traditional telcos have failed us. Buildout of broadband was fully-funded by the government in the 90s, and it flopped; They took the money and never built anything. These communities still do not have access to reliable broadband as it was defined then.
Comcast could have built out service in so many of our current residential areas, but chose not to. For no apparent reason but that it cost capex.
There was so much funding to extend internet access to rural areas. None of the major vendors engaged these funds and used them to provide capacity.
If Starlink succeeds, I'll raise a glass to the memory of Comcast and others.
spot on:
>> a quality of life improvement for a small group of wealthy individuals
Only question is, will the money from this small group of wealthy individuals be sufficient to pay for the full system? We'll see in about 4 years the latest, when satellites will start falling down, and will have to be replaced by new ones...
Starlink exists.
If you live in a dense metro area it will probably fill up very quickly - but then again Starlink is not really designed for those locations, which probably already have good connectivity.
My guess is that enough rich people moving into the middle of nowhere will cause the government to pay for terrestrial solutions ("incentivize") within the next 10 or so years.
I reckon if they put their mind to it they could cause enough pollution to make cellphones unusable, maybe even open-air wifi. They're smart, I'm sure they have the technology, they could make the whole EM spectrum so dirty the whole sky would glow.
You could get a Verizon hotspot (and ration data). But Starlink is pretty good. Video streaming does stutter a bit--you're better off downloading. I could actually work up there which I couldn't really with the old DSL.
The metrics to worry about are latency and loss and throughput. Jitter is really a SIPnRTP thing. Don't use ICMP to test for "quality" - it isn't even the same protocol that you worry about (TCP/UDP), it is what it is - ICMP (use it wisely).
jitter is really quite consistent at 23-28ms
I agree on the icmp, for me, icmp loss is really more like a cheap/easy early warning sign that something is wrong. if a properly implemented last mile connection has no icmp loss it's also unlikely anything else is wrong. if there is a few % icmp loss, very likely normal tcp and udp things will also behave badly.
Admittedly, most of my trouble is probably caused by the 70 meter coastal redwood on the western horizon. The network isn't quite dense enough yet that I can get a satellite visible at all times amongst the trees. It's just a bit sad, as the Starlink app reports like 95% clear sky. You really do need 100%.
for people with trees they cannot cut down I see a lot more 40' aluminum light duty towers with foundation kits getting sold in the future. Much like people used to put up in very rural areas with yagi antennas on them to receive OTA TV a logn time ago.
We were seeing drops of a few minutes each day, but as of December we've gone days without even the slightest interruption. We had to really work to get Dishy to not have any obstructions, but since then it's been great:
https://pics.rickosborne.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/01...
We also have Ukiah Wireless, point to point microwave, as a backup. I use it for my work uplink as it has more stable upload bandwidth than Starlink. And when we had those really bad storms over the last few weeks, Starlink definitely struggled more than microwave.
starlink is not even close to oversubscribed, so I'm not sure why you're making this comparison.
On the other hand, when someone confidently opines about a lot of things and then rejects mild corrections (I literally just said something like "thing isn't part of B, it's owned by the same parent company"), you wonder what facts are feeding into those opinions.
Mr Stross seems not share that view. That's fine too.
Personally, strongly curating something like Twitter with all the tools they give you is pretty much the only way to keep somewhat high quality of conversation.
There are tools that are even more powerful than Twitters kinda lame (we’ll give you just enough control so you can’t reduce our engagement metrics” ones. A certain Mozilla founder who you can’t link to from here blogged about being dogpiled by the cryptobros, and mentioned https://megablock.xyz/ as a useful tool.
Way too many people think they have some right to the time of other people. They don’t. I can choose to never hear from you or anybody else at any time, there’s no legal or moral or ethical or even politeness problems with me doing that. The way you choose to use Twitter has zero impact on the way I choose to use Twitter, and if I want to be Blocky McBlockface for any reason at all, that’s just fine. You can go and r random stranger nit picky arguments with someone else. I wouldn’t put up with it in person, and I don’t have to put up with it online. And if you’re behaving in a way that even slightly annoys me, I will block not only you, but all the people who seem to be your friends or entourage. Sucks to be them if they actually wanted to talk with me, but you know what, I get to choose who I’m friends with, and if you hang out with people who are annoying to other people in public, you get tarred with the same brush. If your friend is a jerk in a bar, expect the bouncers to eject the whole group. Especially if it’s a certain SF SOMA nightclub…
https://twitter.com/mrfilmkritik/status/995446576536530944
> When someone disagrees with you online & demands you prove your point to their satisfaction by writing a logically sound defense, u can save a lot of time by not doing that.
> Dude, I’ve known u for ten seconds & enjoyed none of them, I’m not taking homework assignments from you.
I can see hitting mute on accounts that make uninteresting comments, I'm not sure why you'd block someone that comments on ~1 tweet and isn't being persistent or otherwise antagonistic (I suppose it can be better curation to block).
https://twitter.com/maxerickson/status/685506107695972352
Anyone with that many followers is likely going to disengage with low-effort replies of that nature. It adds nothing of consequence to the lengthy post it is correcting.
And I learned something about his concern over accuracy. For instance, reddit hasn't quite lived in the shadow of Conde Nast in the meantime.
Muting fulfills all the goals those features are supposed to solve. Does blocking actually add anything sensible on top that I missed?
https://www.videogameschronicle.com/blog/hideki-kamiya-twitt...
That you'd be wound up about it five years later speaks volumes to how unhealthy the exchange between the two of you was.
I enjoyed reading his books as was certainly disappointed when like 2 years after my tweet I realized he had blocked me for it. I of course don't recall my state of mind when I sent the tweet, but I don't think I paid it much attention until years later when I couldn't see a tweet someone else was quoting and wondered why.
Your comment is way way too cancel culture for me. It hurts a lot having one bad exchange & having the door slammed in your face. Especially if it's some topic you feel strongly about, that you were trying to engage in.
You may be right that it's a better tact than engaging. It's a shit system though, deeply dehumanizing ways of treating each other.
The system was already deeply dehumanizing. "Block early, block often" is simply the inevitable and, frankly, only reasonable reaction to years of dealing with psychopaths, assholes and trolls on the internet.
I only wish Hacker News came with its own killfile. Mine would be hundred of entries long by now.
It's remarkable how callouslness & cruelty, how "fuck these people why should i give them any slack" options like you present run roughshod over civility. It's beyond words to me that such absolutely dejectable, hostile, negative, piss-off-and-die fucking-you attitude as you present is allowed to ride so high & mighty, that we believe that tension & disagreement, that some occasional fuckery means all those fuckers can all just fuck off and die. This is never going to beget a rising up, a better society. It will lead only to tension. And it's built in, at the deepest technical layers: an increased amplification of tension & pissery.
It is cancel culture. And it's amplified enormously by technical systems which don't have options like digital juries, don't have options for justice to be enacted, which afford only digital death to the other. Fuck this times a million. This is callous bullshit we exist in, and the enormousness of people being bad online isn't some weak-kneed shit ass justification for being bastards to one another like you claim: it's part of the fucking problem, and it is cancel culture. 100%. Saying that the fucker deserved it, that there's so many fuckers about, doesn't make it less so.
We do need defense. But fucking a!!! Not like this.
Stross blog has a user known as "the seagull" who creates new accounts frequently and spams vulgarity daily. She knows Stross personally and apparently he has decreed that she is allowed to do that. So a lot of his readers install plugins to suppress her comments... and have to regularly block new accounts that she creates (she has a very distinctive posting style)
Even if they were, they aren't inherently infinite or remorseless; they aren't permanent and irrevocable. (And, on some platforms, they aren't even total when in place.)
And, as most algorithms require a certain level of positive engagement to retain the baseline visibility even of something you aren't actively following, most platforms have at least one more, less extreme, negative signal—don’t positively engage with the content you don't like.
So, no, blocking accounts is not only acceptable, but the only line of defense for someone who still wishes to engage in honest discourse on those platforms.
This is not technology thoughtlessly trampling over human dignity; this is human nature expressing itself within a certain environment.
This is me realizing I cannot suckle off the financial teet of my parents and the state; and I actually must go out, make money, and keep my "work life" balance in-check -- because I'm a bag of meat with a reward-behavior system that needs certain things to remain functioning.
Online discussion is where I get my "fix." It's one source of stimulation that keeps me functioning at my best, and prevents me from degrading into a certain state of being that my biology considers "not good" -- one where I cannot meet the goals my entire mind and body have decided are "to be done."
I'm not some nobleman's son living in utter luxury and leisure. I do not have the resources available to live in an "ideal" world where I can spend my time worrying about the ultimate repercussions of blocking someone. I live in the "real" world, where I have to manage the repercussions of my own actions against my goals, and take into account how seriously engaging some nitwit on an online shit-flinging message board is going to affect my goals, and therefore my feelings and behaviors.
One could make an argument here that material inequality (and its great disparity between the two ends) has lead us to such a state of affairs; and that man's greatest faults are caused by his greatest sufferings: a system that breaks him down, and grinds away at this soul, preventing him from living a life predicated on ideals, and some greater cultural values.
But to disparage the tools which man made to try and adapt to the circumstances of his environment is silly.
I could choose to become a hermit, and live a life of anarchist pacifism, in order to live an exemplified life of idealism; but I don't want to.
Like me putting a Gmail rule in place to move messages from a specific source, say a specific mailing list thread that I'm not interested in out of my inbox.
Is this considered taboo on Twitter?
Block prevents the blocked user from seeing your tweets from logged in contexts and ability to reply to any of your tweets and so on. That it sort of curates a feed by limiting replies can go in both directions of course.
Is it easier to block or to mute? Which one is the de facto default in the UI?
It seems most people who use twitter don't understand this though.
If you mute him, you'll still have him and his hundreds of friends shitting in your feed.
If you block him, he won't see your tweets, and you've raised the effort he has to put in if he wants to shit in your feed.
Some people will put that effort in, others won't.
It’s basically twitter’s fault/design choice that choosing not to see someone’s replies to you also blocks them from seeing anything you post [0] (of course, cleverly circumvented by simply logging out)
> Blocking helps people in restricting specific accounts from contacting them, seeing their Tweets, and following them.
There were some court cases [1] to this effect since politicians would block annoying trolls/constituents, but this apparently violates the blocked users’ first amendment rights to access the public information. I don’t know, never made much sense to me, point is, blocking someone is, I wouldn’t say taboo as it’s quite normal, but it’s also very annoying to be blocked.
[0] https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/someone-blocked-me...
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/can-government-officia...
I block them then even if people I follow retweet I never see them.
For me, it makes twitter infinitely more pleasant.
(This includes compliments. They're bad for you.)
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/the-cra...
(The first chapter of Accelerando is about a two decades in the future 2018.)
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/08/houston-...
But I will say his 2015 piece, "A different cluetrain", still holds up with grimmer and grimmer shades of beige*:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/02/a-differ...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9106983
* a 2013(!) piece: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/02/politica...
Populist demagogues and pandemics might come and go, but the automated, over-financialized, post-political bureaucratic intelligence state is here to stay so long as civilization looks the way it does now. That piece has a lot more deep, systems-oriented thinking. I'd say cstross' pre-2016 predictions still hold up so much better than the more "ripped from the headlines" attempts in these later pieces. His 2017 three-parter in particular has some embarrassingly sensationalist, hand-wavy stuff.
And so quite a lot of readers think there is some super duper smart guy offering this cool hidden insight that they can easily use, only to forget it by the next hour.
I think there are a handful of "obvious" interactions that should have been called out.
Politics + Space: Greater international competition for space-resources will likely begin, and we may see the end of first-come-first-serve orbits. The international inward-turning politics may be particularly poorly timed; we may see irregular military action in space.
Politics + Cyberspace: Inward-turning politics combined with greater awareness/impact of breaches (including on increasingly-autonomous vehicles?) will almost certainly lead to countries closing their digital borders a-la China. Its already been proposed in the UK, I believe.
AI: This is going to be the source of some huge wildcard, and I think everybody knows it. Companies have massive amounts of data on people regarding how they behave; eventually someone is going to give that data to an AI with the right/wrong instructions to make a noticeable impact on society.
Most "cool hidden insight" can be attributed more to the autor's writing skill (and acting skill if it's youtube talking heads) than to any actual useful info inside. Do not let yourself be mislead by Mr Stross' profession, most internet "experts" are even worse than that. And they don't even admit they're fiction writers.
A near-future series (Halting State) was also cut short when the Scottish independence referendum (and the subsequent Brexit vote) rendered that future impossible.
That said, his Empire Games trilogy is set in a near future where the internal multiverse concept successfully allows for explicit discrepancies from our timeline.
Lol, and yet it still loads lickety split compared to something like cnn.com for instance.
Huh? Losing a billion people in two years is not "brink of civilizational, if not species-level, extinction". I hate this kind of over exaggeration wrapped up in seemingly reasonable and scientific sounding statements.
Truth is that if covid/sars had occurred a decade ago, it wouldn't have been much different in the infection and mortality stats. What might have been different is the population's reaction to the extreme authoritarianism displayed by governments.
That’s a scary thought.
That wasn’t possible in the 90s.
That depends quite a bit on how rapidly it spreads. If COVID had started with Omicron's level of infectiousness, it'd have been a dramatically more deadly pandemic.
If the first wave of SARS-Cov-2 was Omicron we'd have seen a worse 1st wave on net, but a far higher survival rate, more population immunity pre-vaccine.. and part of me thinks that the response would have been better, the original SARS-Cov-2 hit a bit of a sweet-spot in terms of political accountability with respect to how slowly it moved across the world and the gradual build up of hospital crisis in most places (1st wave hot-spots excepted of course).
It is the quantity and quality of psychological manipulation.
What happened to Germans in 1930s won't repeat again, people are more knowledgeable and less susceptible to mass hypnosis in the 21st century, right?
And bang, all of a sudden there is a menace which didn't exist before. By mere redefinition of what a menace is.
Naturally, the working class still got screwed - either you're "non-essential" and lost your job or were "essential" and ran a risk of contracting COVID that your overlords got to avoid from the comfort of their own home - but it might've helped slow the spread of the virus, some.
Somebody forgot to tell that to smallpox, which had something like a 25 or 30% IFR before vaccines came around. And there were lots and lots of pandemics of that!
If you are contagious on day 2, symptomatic on day 17, and drop dead on day 180, such a disease will happily spread through a population, despite having a 100% fatality rate. There will be no evolutionary pressure for that virus to become less lethal, just like how there's no evolutionary pressure for people to live to 200.
The species as a whole was much more robust when large fractions of the population were engaged in subsistence farming and we hadn't disbalanced the atmosphere and doomsday weapons didn't exist.
Edit: minor grammar correction
> But the so-called "childhood diseases" like mumps, rubella, and chickenpox used to kill infants by windrows.
Chickenpox is nowhere near that deadly. Remember the "Simpsons" episode where Maggie gets the chickenpox and Homer hosts a pox party?
Civilization can survive an awful lot of people dying and even if COVID had a 2% fatality rate it would roll on more or less without a blip. The Spanish flu didn't lead to the fall of civilization anywhere and it killed a lot more people in the prime of their life. COVID deaths are highly concrentrated in the over 50s.
Things are different now, yes.
Plus it depends on what you mean by civilization. What the Incas built was sophisticated but child's play compared to a modern civilization.
A SARS 1 global pandemic would have probably set back the entire world 50 years or more. Cities would have been abandoned, supply chains destroyed, most likely major wars started due to shortages.
> Before 1492, Native Americans (Amerindians) hosted none of the acute infectious diseases that had long bedeviled most of Eurasia and Africa: measles, smallpox, influenza, mumps, typhus, and whooping cough, among others. In most places other than isolated villages, these had become endemic childhood diseases that killed one-fourth to one-half of all children before age six. Survivors, however, carried partial, and often total, immunity to most of these infections with the notable exception of influenza. Falciparum malaria, by far the most severe variant of that plasmodial infection, and yellow fever also crossed the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas.
COVID can be considered a warning shot. If we don't get our house in order, something like SARS-1 or worse will set us back a century (depending a bit on location, but still).
But I do wish people a) understood stats and b) listened to reason not rhetoric.
But they're really not. Civilization in Norway survived the Black Death killing 60% of the population. We could regress a great deal in terms of the technology we could apply with large enough fatality rates but if we can still feed large numbers of people and maintain things at all we can keep civilization going. If one third of the US population dropped dead it would have the same population as in the late 1960s. They kept civilization going. Things would get a lot worse for a long time but there'd be no danger of civilizational collapse.
Take away enough technology and you'll still have people, but not so much civilization. In a way, technology is civilization.
And about five times as many Swedes have died from Covid compared to their Nordic neighbours.
1. Delayed onset of symptoms. That you can spread the disease for a couple days before you first have symptoms has caused so much spreading. If, instead, people were showing symptoms within 12 hours, they'd be much more likely to not be out and about the next day spreading the disease.
2. Wide range of symptoms. Some people felt nearly nothing. Others dealt with it like a minor cold. And others it killed, but not a high enough percentage for most people to take it seriously enough. "Oh, even if I get it, it won't be that big a deal..." kind of thinking. If everyone got at least a "worse than the flu" like reaction to it, everyone would have been taking it more seriously.
There would be almost no antivaxxer sentiment if it killed 20%, because everyone in an area with an outbreak would know someone who died, likely even have seen them sick.
If those political institutions collapse, there is nothing scarier than an angry mob of starving people who are united with each other through a common culture, but disunited from you.
To put it simply, it was expected the level of noise and sensation will rise after smartphones emerged. Loud lunacy seems to be a great way to catch public attention currently and this is well understood by both the media, politicians and vegabonds of wealth. Sensational journalism was always a problem, now add to that billions of people able to elevate the wildest stories, let alone create their own. If course we're drowning in digital noise and it isn't going to subside as long as it's effective.
But there's good news.
I cannot stress enough that it's entirely possible to control the level of exposure to said digital noise. You don't have to follow news, politics and social media intensely. You can just opt out. If you find yourself constantly angry on Twitter, fighting endlessly on Facebook, and cussing at the news, it's entirely by design. The only way to win this game is by not playing.
This is good news in the same sense that it's good news that you can do your bit for the climate crisis by walking everywhere, switching to vegetarianism and wearing only hand-crocheted hemp clothing.
i.e. it's not really good news at all because even if you do it, hardly anyone else will, and the world will carry on just as it is regardless.
We the people have been gaslit by large corporates trying to pin the responsibility on us. It's time to fight back, and put the responsibility onto those that create these problems in the first place for their own profit.
Only in certain circles. Keep in mind, those tabloids sold in large numbers and not everyone was reading them ironically or as SciFi.
That's a democracy. Not a problem.
I mean, I agree it's ineffective, but it's hell of a lot better than thinking that paper straws, recycling and buying from companies with some green leaf-looking stamp will solve the problem, which is the majority view. In fact, consuming less — both products and instagrammable experiences — is probably the best you can do in terms of personal footprint, along with not having kids of course.
That said, abstaining and "not playing" isn't gonna cause the revolution, or even a slow paradigm shift. We need to evolve, too. And fortunately, changes happen, even if they rarely get the attention they deserve. One example today is the independent podcast boom - where tabloid-style fear media and Twitter flame wars have been losing market share to... Long form conversation. The cynic in me did not see that coming. It shows, in my opinion, that not even carefully engineered amygdala hijacking is enough to keep people from curiosity and reflection. Human behavior is complex and fascinating.
You're right, but I didn't mean it as a way to make things better, I meant it as a way to make your life better, assuming the world isn't going to change. The good news is it's your choice if you don't feel like being swept up in the torrent of digital noise.
But what about the hundreds of millions that don't opt out, and spawn the lunacy?
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On the other hand, eliminating sugar (actually, just fructose, and then only with not enough accompanying fiber!) from the US, UK, and Indian and Pakistani diets could be overwhelmingly easier than getting and keeping everybody vaccinated against SARS. Doesn't mean it will happen, though. It is easier to pretend it is not a problem, and blame all the deaths on the tertiary effects.
Herd immunity works only for microbes that have species preference.
So, herd immunity turns out to be a fond delusion. We can only hope that the mice don't innovate a 40% fatal (in humans) strain as contagious as omicron. We certainly can't prevent it.
It is just lucky that the fatal ones often also work fast. But measles and smallpox, for two examples, did not self-limit at all effectively, depopulating whole regions. And the ones fatal to us but not to animal carriers completely sidestep the trend, even such as it is.
A future strain of SARS hosted in animals can probably be counted on to sidestep that trend.
And, the other sugars are not harmful to your liver in any amount, although sharp spikes of them may not be great for the rest of you. Again, enough fiber mutes those.
I have a hard time believing this, if it's something that's supposed to happen globally, including for all good transportation, which is a category where I don't remember seeing much electric vehicles. And as for it happening globally, that'd mean everywhere on the globe, there'd be enough electricity to supply all the needs for transportation and agriculture.
Governments are rolling out policies that vehicles manufactured after 2030/2035/2040, etc will not be eligible for vehicle registration.
This makes much more sense than banning existing fleets, as the vast majority of any car fleet will be replaced over the period of a decade. (Average US car lifespan is 12 years).
This serves as a slow ramp up time, as well as less political pushback. Will the electric grids be able to keep up? Mostly. Will electricity prices increase as a result of demand that is costly to build new generation sources to satisfy, almost certainly.
Most of these "green" policies are taxing those with little upfront capital to invest (bottom two quintiles) and subsidizing those with capital.
Are these policies going to impact me or my family? Not really. I'm specifically investing tens of thousands of dollars in my home to reduce my grid costs to negligible levels and make my home non-grid dependent. The grid is mediocre, at best, where I live. Also, there is no net metering, so I need batteries to service a large portion of my non-solar generating hours.
The long tail for ICE vehicles, even in western countries, will be decades after the last new one is sold.
The 1992 Nissan Sentra was still being manufactured and sold in Mexico until 2017 as the Nissan Tsuru. It was finally retired as Mexico has moved upmarket enough on the global scale that the government can do things like ban a $7k car due to safety concerns.
Similarly, I expect ICE vehicles to still dominate until such time as solar becomes so incredibly cheap and electric cars destined for Pakistan can be plugged directly into the PV array.
I can't understand what this is saying. Not sure what 'wide-screen WTFery' is, but lots of people were predicting a pandemic, even covid-like if I remember correctly. I suppose that does not absolutely prove that it was predictable and not just unreasonable predictions being made by scientists and experts which just happened to be right by pure coincidence, but still.
He also seems to say with the WWII example that it's not predictable if it can't be predicted to a very precise date. By that definition sure probably covid19 could not have been predicted to a date or even year. But he claims everything else is predictable, but he is making some pretty wild predictions with very vague timelines. So I don't understand his criteria for predictableness.
yes — even William Gibson, in a book Stross references in this blog post by using its term “the klept.”
for that matter, Obama predicted it too, setting up a pandemics office, and he did that because as (again) Stross himself says in this blog post, this pandemic came along after two prior coronavirus pandemics.
(I’m a fan, but I don’t think he did a ton of proofreading on this.)
I suspect you (and parent) may have misunderstood him. IMO, he meant a pandemic (like COVID-19) - just like WWII - was predicted by a lot of people. What people could not predict (for both scenarios) was when it would happen.
Not ten years ago.
It is kind of funny, the pandemic could have been politicized the other way as well: "wear a mask to protect yourself from ethnic group's disease", and such.
But as it turned out, the primary concern was with just one man's ego, and trying to pretend that everything is fine... until it clearly wasn't.
I saw a quote recently along the lines of as much as spent on a single soccer team as the worlds budget for detecting near earth asteroids.
The world being in complete lockdown, in bonus with a large anti-science movement, or nukes being developed and used within a few years are quite advantageous predictions, to put it lightly.
And of course the pandemic was "quite easy" to predict ; the problem is that we have a lot of survivorship bias in those predictions. For every prediction that's "scarily precise" right now, hundreds have completely failed.
It absolutely makes sense to say the pandemic was not predictable in a given 10-20 year timeframe. The issue is if that is the standard he sets then many of his other predictions are also not predictable.
If you look at [1] the January 2020 - predictions for 2030 thread here on HN, and look for hints of the Covid pandemic, there are only 3 mentions of any type of pandemic, and none of those was close to an actual hit. I did the reading, all of the reading.
It feels crazy now that, despite all that, I went to the Ghibli Museum with my friends at the end of February 2020 and it was packed with people (and barely anyone wearing a mask). Just a week later, my return flight to Germany was canceled and I became concerned that I might get stuck in Japan. By the way, I was able to get on a flight on 20 March 2020 (Narita to Frankfurt) and it was almost completely empty. Things happened so fast.
Bill gates in the interviews talking about disease X still haunts me. As does the faux optimism espoused in that vox explained episode.
My point is that if bill gates predicts it, it was predicted.
Okay so the pandemic was predictable and it was predicted. I'm not interested in semantics quibbling if you want to say it wasn't predictable, I'm interested in the contradiction between claims that the pandemic was not predictable and yet other similarly hard to predict things are predictable.
That is a little bit too simplistic, isn't it? First, there was political instability before social media. Second, it seems that a lot of people are dissatisfied with how things are going, which is of little surprise given huge wealth inequality and a general rise in totalitarianism and authoritarianism all over the world.
The sentence also carries the connotation that political instability is inherently bad, hinting that the status quo cannot be improved. I'd argue against that - sometimes it's good to show the ruling class that they will not get away with everything and are being held accountable by the people whose fate they decide.
1. The aging population in many societies with the associated adjustment of services in some economies including medical and care homes, perhaps also reduced economic growth rates and strain on savings and pensions. Rise of the robo-attendant? Increased 'retirement estate' mode of living? 2. Medical advances to deal with age-related disease (telomere studies, stem cells, advances in treatment of alzheimers, cancer, arthritis, deterioration of eyesight, hearing and teeth, new prosthetics etc). 3. Increased wealth concentration - a natural outcome of capital accruing a faster rate of return than labour (see Piketty), and associated with reduced per capita and overall productivity. How to preserve high standards of living for the wealthy and increase the standards of living for the less well off whilst dealing with the tensions with the potential to turn this into a zero sum game. 4. Technological advances which may increase productivity, including AI and robotic process automation. Perhaps further labour shedding associated with the increasing automation of 'thought' and 'creativity' (i.e. brought under the remit of capital).
And of course a raft of other things... Plenty of opportunity and risk ahead.
I wouldn't assume a person doing that wants to have any conversation, they have a speech and just want a megaphone (an approving audience) to relay their speech.
Weigh this against his experience, wisdom, and level of thought put into his work, and apply salt to taste.
Specifically, in the political sphere the prediction that there's a) any intentionality or consistency in what's happening globally and b) that it'll have evolved into a "steady" state over the next ten years, one way or another.
A possibly better prediction is that we're permanently past political "stability" such as what arguably existed in post WW2 America (I guess) and western Europe (I know even less about that). From maybe 2015 (or earlier?) onwards, forever, politics will stay complex, seemingly cataclysmic, and will seem as if the other shoe is perpetually about to drop.
We've developed a permanent emotional complex around political discourse, where the boss music is playing all the time, even when we're just hanging out on our couch. By having the deluge of information about everything that we have now, any random thing can now become The Final Straw for whatever issue you'd like to pay attention to. Any given moment, any given news article can portend the doom of Your Favorite Thing, and it will be, truly, The End.
If this is right, the good news is it's not actually going to get nearly as much worse as it always seems it's about to. The bad news is it's not going to get all that much better, either. Just small steps forward or backward, where progress is measured in decades, not years.
Hopefully we get used to living in the tension, though it's probably more accurate that we won't, and that'll probably be okay.
Climate adaptation technologies will bridge whatever gaps are left by the destruction we have on the environment that happened before we decarbonize the economy.
>Quietly and without any fuss Ruth Bader Ginsberg has had a stroke: Pence indicates that her replacement will be a pro-life fundamentalist Christian. (Goodbye Roe v. Wade and, quite possibly, Griswold v. Connecticut.)
Even a blind squirrel finds a nut occasionally.
But the other details are all wrong. There hasn't been a Protestant on the supreme court in awhile, let alone a fundamentalist.
https://religionnews.com/2019/11/19/the-rise-of-fundamentali...
The change against immigration is rooted in real problems found in immigration-heavy areas. See hotspots in Europe as an example. Countries have a duty to protect their borders and way of life, or else why have them in the first place?
No oil cabal pushes up asset prices, it’s the common people doing it to each other (hint: check the proportion of private owners in home ownership).
SpaceX is inconsequential, currently. Their effect on everyday life is nonexistent. What they did is launch for cheaper, not cheaply enough though as to make it a real commodity and drastically change what gets into orbit. Starlink though is potentially huge. That could end up as a whole new Internet of sorts.
It was neither Koch nor Mercer who destabilized politics. It was Facebook and the greater internet which removed elitist moderation and gave the people what they want (vs, apparently, what society needed. My favorite quote goes like “Facebook gave the people the means to connect without stopping to think what would happen when they inevitably do”). There was money and influence of all sorts in politics long before Koch and Mercer. You had Murdoch and Soros and many others. Yet nothing came close to what social networks did. Trump was not the product of any single billionaire.
So he’s claiming long COVID (what ever its definition) has 16.7% chance of organ damage etc.
Except that’s not supported by the data at all.
The author is talking about the aforementioned omega strain not covid strains.
Then shop for internet. It's a travesty. I don't know where you live, or what kind of bubble you're surrounded by, but the situation out here is hot garbage.
I'm currently on a 5g wisp, but $100/mo gets me 24/3 speeds. Which wouldn't be stable enough for 4k, and on the off chance it was, nobody else in the house could do anything. (I'm currently on a 12/3 plan for $60)
I have to plan a day in advance if I want to play a new game with friends. A fresh backup takes months. When I was on DSL, 3/768k my phone's photo auto backup would basically render our connection useless.
It was unfathomable for me to think about moving to some family gifted farmland to build on. Or a house even more remote to our current one. My wife and I thought about buying a large plot in Utah for retirement, after taking a trip there. We laughed because we couldn't survive without internet. But now, we have options.
It is a game changer for stuff like this. To think otherwise is complete folly.
I wouldn't be too sure about that. Most electricity is still generated by burning fossil fuels. Solar and wind have increased in recent years but still have a very long way to go. We may just be relocating the engines rather than decarbonizing.
(See also, New York City banning gas lines to new construction, requiring the use of electricity for heating and cooking, just after the metro area's sole nuclear plant was decommissioned and new gas plants were built to replace it... so the ban is not going to reduce the amount of gas burned at all, is it?)
My understanding is that the purpose of the ban was (1) increase indoor air quality and (2) reduce the amount of gas that leaks in distribution. Natural gas has something like 20x the GWP of CO2. Burning it at power plants reduces the amount leaking into the atmosphere. About 5% of anthropogenic methane emissions come from distribution.
There are much bigger things we could be doing, but just because this particular change isn't reducing the CO2 impact doesn't mean it's not a positive change.
Much as I like Antipope, this looks like blaming others for something that is easily remedied.
I think his predictions on climate & politics are sound. I wonder if there is a listing of climate priorities for mitigation. Interrupting crops sounds like the top of the list.
If 50% of the population are COVID invalids, who's going to be doing the (building) work for a new economic boom? You can't seriously say "I'm going to make predictions - but let's just ignore the most important health event for over a century."
So - mRNA vaccinations. If you can vaccinate against AIDS, flu, cancer (being investigated...), and the rest, you get a bimodal population where a fair proportion of those born before Vaccination Day are cripples, and potentially everyone born after is super-immune to many killer diseases.
The important word being "potentially."
Political implications? Just a bit.
If there's a permanent Moon base - so what? Does anything really change? How? (What - in practical and economic terms, as opposed to symbolically - did the ISS change?) Can you even have a self-sustaining Moon base without relying on Earth. (Hint: not for a long time.)
Cars: I really don't think many people are going to be thinking about cars in 2030-2040. Cars are useless if your roads/buildings are flooded/burning.
Robots? Possibly. (See also: economic boom. Kind of)
But behind this the real issues are psychological. The planet without toxic media and mad billionaires is a much nicer place than the planet with them. Many of the biggest trad-media offenders will be dead by 2030. Will they be replaced? Will there be a Metaverse Abstinence movement? Can one be engineered?
I'd like to believe we can beat the raccoons yet.
There are a lot of benefits from the ISS:
There's the joint effort between otherwise adversarial countries. Even if it's just "symbolic" the most optimistic view of this would be it's been a contributor to preventing an outright war.
There's also the inspirational aspect that gets people interested in STEM with a very concrete and exciting application (even little kids find rocket launches exciting). More people interested in and entering STEM fields means more technology advancements. I'd argue this is not just a "symbolic" benefit, even in the case of inspiring kids where it can take a decade or more for them to graduate and actually start contributing.
There are also lots of real,b practical improvements to life on Earth. Sometimes it's just another use of technology developed for space, which otherwise wouldn't be pursued or funded, such as improved ways to grow plants, water purification, and remote medical and surgical procedures. It's not that these aren't possible to fund purely for Earth-based applications, but the trouble is the people with the money and skill don't have the need, and vice-versa.
There's also been unpredictable discoveries, such as bone density loss in astronauts leading to better understanding bones at a cellular level and treatments for things like osteoporosis. There's also a bunch of discoveries from experiments in zero-gravity: growing microbes, crystal structures and in fluid dynamics.
It's a good assumption that being on the Moon will have similar technology advances and (currently unknowable) discoveries.
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/15_...
This is a good question to raise, and IMHO does not invalidate the original piece: Two plausible predictions, but how do they interact? Which one gets the short end of the stick? Are the able-bodied hard at work throwing up temporary homes for invalids?
Combine that with the eugenics trend we're currently on, and, well, happy dreams.
The what
* The continuous drumbeat that the world would be better off if there were just fewer people
* The Tanton Group's influence on politics
* The rise of nationalism & authoritarianism (which inevitably leads to "the strong shall survive" eugenics movement)
* The debate about individual adjustment of healthcare payments based on fine-grained risk assessments.
None of these will (I hope?) result in the forced mass-sterilizations of the early 20th century eugenics movement, but these trends overall should give us at least pause. They are all centered on the belief that some people's lives are worth more than others.
I'd like to hope that they won't, but why? The same forces that produced the current crop are no weaker, indeed stronger. Past performance indicates that there will be more.
In practical terms, permanent Moon bases could make it easier to get to the rest of the solar system:
> Perhaps a more immediate use for this water, though, is to make rocket fuel. Water molecules are made of hydrogen and oxygen, both of which are super useful for rocket propellants. The molecules can be split apart by running an electric current through the water (electrolysis), yielding hydrogen and oxygen, which can then be stored as liquids, ready to fuel a rocket.
> If only there were places for rockets to refuel somewhere along the way … like, perhaps, a service station orbiting the Moon. This could allow rockets to leave Earth with just enough fuel to make it to the Moon, where they could then re-fuel before moving on to the next destination. Alternatively, fuel from the Moon could be transported to a fuel depot in low Earth orbit, allowing rockets to dock for re-fuelling closer to home. Either way, it means a more efficient use of fuel and energy that could potentially allow spacecraft to travel a lot deeper into space and lower the costs of space exploration activities.
https://www.science.org.au/curious/space-time/mining-moon
I agree that it's not likely to be very significant if we're only looking 10 years ahead, but on a longer timescale, I think it will be almost absurdist to look at the little steps we took to get off planet as unimportant. Sort of like saying that Europe has been largely unaffected by Christopher Columbus getting in a boat and going for a joyride across the Atlantic, though I suppose there could be a case made for that.
> But behind this the real issues are psychological. The planet without toxic media and mad billionaires is a much nicer place than the planet with them. Many of the biggest trad-media offenders will be dead by 2030. Will they be replaced? Will there be a Metaverse Abstinence movement? Can one be engineered?
This is one way in which I see a Moon base as an important symbol even over the shorter term. Something that could prompt realizations along the lines of: "We're not stuck here on this planet, we can go elsewhere and live in other ways... so maybe we can live in other ways here on Earth, too. Our reality can be what we choose to make of it together, not an 'inevitably' shitty situation where one of us is stomping on the other's head forever."
It is always surprising to me to see apologies on websites for them going slow under load. There is a cheap and easy solution to such things that has been around for ages.
Don't understand that line - Chickenpox is not vaccinated in the UK, and public health bodies in the UK choose not to do so deliberately because of public health. The reason is that older adults are vulnerable to shingles - which can be more serious - and being exposed to childen with chickenpox on the regular is thought to give them an immunity boost and prevent them from getting shingles or make it less serious when they do. Charles Stross is from the UK so I am quite surprised he doesn't know this.
I got Shingles at 25 (I'm 30 now). I didn't believe it at first because I thought Shingles was an "old person's disease". I remember going to the doctor the day it started, and he just prescribed me some painkillers. I said, "I don't think I'll need those I don't feel too bad." He just looked me in the eyes and said, "Oh, you will." It was awful. Some of the worst pain I've ever been in. I laid in bed for almost a week basically hallucinating.
Apparently, Shingles can come up multiple times in your life. I wonder if getting exposed to Chickenpox again would decrease the odds... I don't spend any time around children, so I don't think that's likely to happen to me haha.
Doesn't seem to be much out there about whether that is because of insurance coverage or if that is the population they tested in or if there are additional factors.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/may/02/the-chickenp...
I am always a bit surprised when I read on this site Americans taking offence that some crazy reckless people do not vaccinate their child against this and this. And I am like "Oh? there's a vaccine against that? Over here it is[1] considered normal to catch it because it is considered mild and just watched and cured in the rare serious cases."
> Charles Stross is from the UK so I am quite surprised he doesn't know this
Furthermore, it appears that the vaccine is rather recent, thus it cannot be that "we're generally vaccinated in infancy", let alone that he was. Strange.
------------
[1] 'is' or 'was', for over here too, in the name of fighting presumed anti-vaxers, more vaccines have been getting mandatory. It's a strange political mechanic to witness, because imposing rather useless vaccines has been a major factor in creating anti-vaxers, which didn't really exist before that.
"A few weeks later, Oxford—urged on by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—reversed course. It signed an exclusive vaccine deal with AstraZeneca that gave the pharmaceutical giant sole rights and no guarantee of low prices—with the less-publicized potential for Oxford to eventually make millions from the deal and win plenty of prestige." https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/apr/15/oxfordastraz...
The effect of teaching the immune system to attack something is difficult to predict because it is a natural system and we don't entirely understand how it works, only enough to get better at teaching it new things. In some cases it's so good at destroying related things that it produces "sterilising immunity" - a vaccinated person can't get the disease at all, even if directly exposed to it, in other cases, as seems to have been the case for COVID-19, you get something useful but much less effective.
AIUI There's no reason we know of why the platform (the mechanism by which we tell people's immune system about a new thing to be attacked) would influence how effective the defence put up subsequently is. The vaccine is not in your body when you're attacked weeks or months later by a virus, what's left is a "memory" of what should be identified as foreign and destroyed. So, it would be expected to depend on how AIDS works, and perhaps on exactly what the vaccine is teaching the immune system to attack, not on how the vaccine is manufactured.
Think about the difference between identifying wanted bank robbers with a hand-drawn picture of their faces, versus a still from a CCTV camera. It might be harder or easier to recognise the CCTV still, but we wouldn't expect them to do more or less jail time when identified by one method versus the other.
The data is showing that the likelihood of severe illness in a delta or omicron-infected person who previously had both doses of vaccine is significantly less.
...many more like that if you search.
Long Covid is my new normal. If 15% of everyone who gets Covid ends up like me, heck even if it's 1%, we're in for a wave of hurt.
If we assume it becomes endemic, and we all just treat it like the flu, then assume 1% of cases for each new variant also end up like me. At one variant/year, we're looking at decimating the working population before 2030.
This alone is a big enough shift, in our "just in time" world, to set of societal changes like the end of the feudalism and the beginning of the enlightenment.
> it may have long-term sequelae, like Shingles, which only show up years to decades later.
It is important at this point to remember that the first wave of the 1918 pandemic was much like the first wave of Covid, it mostly effected the old. The second wave of the pandemic was the one that killed more people than WWI, mostly the young and healthy.
I hope you recover soon.
Chickenpox itself is certainly not uncommon- estimated at 113,000 cases per year, which is essentially the same number as the birth rate. In other words, every Belgian child can be expected to get chickenpox at some point.
Source here: https://adc.bmj.com/content/101/1/16
Good call on the vaccination, chickenpox is no joke at all. The prognosis combined with the massive rate of infection if left unchecked is unsettling.
Back in 2016, Stross was confident that Brexit would cause mass famine in the UK:[1]
> I'm calling Hard Brexit a road to mass starvation and famine-grade deaths on a scale not seen in the UK since the Hungry Forties (that's the 1840s, not the 1940s).
Despite the UK leaving the EU's single market, the UK's currency has not plummeted in value and such famines have not occurred.
Stross has also been calling bitcoin a bubble since before most people heard about it. You'd think after a decade of being wrong he would change his mind. Even in 2017 when BTC was a mere $10,000, Stross claimed it was a commodity bubble. After receiving criticism for that view, he went a step further and declared that when the bitcoin bubble burst, it would cause those who lost their shirts to become neo-nazis.[2]
If this all sounds unhinged, that's because it is.
1. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/10/facts-o...
2. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/11/unforsee...
> If the SARS family of coronaviruses had emerged just a decade earlier it's quite likely we'd be on the brink of civilizational, if not species-level, extinction by now—SARS1 has 20% mortality among patients, MERS (aka SARS2) is up around 35-40% fatal, SARS-NCoV19, aka SARS3, is down around the 1-4% fatality level. I
It felt sensational to me to the point the I could no longer take the author's view seriously as something worth reading. We survived the bubonic plague and the author himself quotes these diseases as having far lower mortality rates than that, yet then extrapolates it to the extinction of humanity. Huh.
Furthermore, the plague had a catastrophic impact on population - in just a few years it killed upwards of 50% of Europe's entire population! I wouldn't call that "extinction level" but it's really not something to shirk at so cavalierly. What would be the impact on civilization of losing half the world's population today over just a few years? Whether or not it would lead to a decline into extinction is kind of academic; undoubtedly, it would lead to a fundamental shift in society and civilization.
A plague that killed a third of those infected spread by modern international travel would be catastrophic. Medieval Europe got to spread the impact out over decades. Killing a third of the population in a year or two would be much worse.
I think he's being too generous.
Doctorow does it so much better, and while keeping it focused on the class war instead of the culture war.
It's always a little jarring to see others (who are generally good at writing) try to do it in that style and fumble it, because Doctorow and Stephenson pioneered that tone so skillfully.
Saying nobody expected the COVID 10 years ago it is like saying nobody is expecting a big quake in the west coast of the US.
this is known as the broken window fallacy
> I grant it; I have not a word to say against it; you reason justly. The glazier comes, performs his task, receives his six francs, rubs his hands, and, in his heart, blesses the careless child. All this is that which is seen.
What Stross does not say is that because rising sea levels are good for the construction industry they are therefore good in general. That would be an example of the broken window fallacy.
In most cases broken windows truly are good for glaziers, but that doesn't mean that we should break windows.
Noting the existence of the boom isn't the fallacy. Advocating for it is.
But he could have said we were lucky to not have gotten hit by a different virus that kills 80% and travels asymptomatically. The real nightmare virus. It’s totally possible.
We have had roughly 860k COVID deaths in the US. At a 0.02% fatality rate that would equate to 4.3b cases. So are you suggesting the US death total is exaggerated or that the average American has already had COVID 10+ times?
He said when you sample randomly and follow positive testers to their conclusion, the lethality rate is something like 0.02%. I’m sorry that it upsets you to hear something you don’t already agree with
Honestly does not sound too reputable to me on this specific subject matter.
Edit: I realize now that you are saying to listen to the podcast guest, not Lex Fridman himself. Is this the episode? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIOGUYOPAsA
"The Great Barrington Declaration […] advocated letting the virus spread in lower-risk groups with the aim of herd immunity, with "focused protection" of those most at risk." [0]
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-94-percent-covi...
You should go back to the person who told you this lie and ask them why they did it. A simple accounting of excess deaths ( https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm ) is all you need to dispel the notion of a 0.02% fatality rate.
That’s from sep 2020. I think professor Bhattacharya is aware of the numbers.
Professor Bhattacharya is apparently one of the main instigators of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrington_Declaration .
So I think he is fudging the numbers.
By a factor of ten?!?
As an example, a Stanford professor by the name of Dr. Scott Atlas was a prominent voice within the Trump administration who actively advocated disobedience of public-health orders at the state level. When the professor posted this (since-deleted) tweet:
https://i.imgur.com/z0OsMcg.png
.... I wrote his department head. "I thought you should know that some idiot is out there claiming to be associated with your university." They replied, "Agreed, this is irresponsible at best."
Funny thing, though. Dr. Atlas is still a Stanford-affiliated professor, more than a year later: https://profiles.stanford.edu/scott-atlas Tenure is a powerful thing, I guess. Stanford apparently can't distance themselves from this clown, but you and I can and should. That's not who you listened to, by any chance, is it?
What's not debatable is that the fatality rate is not 0.02%, or anything close to it. The numbers don't work. If that's what he's saying, then he's telling you that your state and local health authorities have been lying to you all along... and while not an unprecedented thing (unfortunately), that's still a deadly serious accusation. You should demand that he back it up with solid citations. He won't, so you'll need to look at other sources of data and evaluate them to the best of your ability if you want to get a more accurate picture.
In the meantime, it's important not to spread false info during a pandemic, as I'm sure you'd agree.
Why do you trust this guy's assertion on how many excess deaths there have been over the last two years, and their cause, more than the CDC's numbers?
I listened to the podcast again and he said he conducted serology studies pre-vaccine that indicate an overall lethality of 0.2% but 0.05% for everyone who isn’t 70 years old or whatever. That’s detection of antibodies with 0.05% false positive rate and then a follow up on death early on in the pandemic.
So one might point out that I changed my number from 0.02 to 0.2 and this is true. But what’s also true is that there’s a huge difference between 4% and 0.2%. And I was right to point out that 1-4% is bullshit. I feel mad because I remember hearing the 0.2% number all the way back at the start of the pandemic but everyone shouted it down. And here we are and it was right after all…
Let's for a moment assume your source is correct. If you were "right" to call out someone's "bullshit" because they were an order of magnitude high in their numbers, do you recognize that we were right to call out your bullshit for being an order of magnitude low with your number?
> SARS1 has 20% mortality among patients, MERS (aka SARS2) is up around 35-40% fatal, SARS-NCoV19, aka SARS3, is down around the 1-4% fatality level.
"Among patients" would make me assume that Stross is talking about case fatality rates, not infection fatality rates.
1-4% is a reasonable range for CFR, even if it's too high for IFR.
(Some quick Googling after the fact also shows that while MERS had a CFR in the 30-40% range, its IFR was estimated at more like 0.3-0.7% -- roughly the same range as COVID. Large numbers of undetected mild cases were cited as the reason for the large difference.)
If the current COVID death total isn't accurate, what would be your ballpark estimates for the real death and case totals in the US?
[1] - https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
> machine-learning model, which estimates excess deaths for every country on every day since the pandemic began. It is based both on official excess-mortality data and on more than 100 other statistical indicators
let me get the premise of this right: they built a "machine learning" model, using empirical data from normal years, and magical "statistical indicators", to predict excess deaths in a time of unprecedented events. Then, when the model does not fit, the conclusion isn't that the "model" is full of shit, but the "COVID deaths are undercounted"?
Sometimes you have to stop listening to what people say and get out your own tape measure/calculator. If not for yourself, so other people can take you seriously.
We have .25% of Americans officially dead from COVID so far. Not of infected Americans, of the general population. If not more person dies, "A Standford Professor" is already off by a factor of 12. Officially 1 in 5.7 of us (58m out of 331m) has been diagnosed, so even if there are people who got mild cases and didn't report, that number is likely to climb to anywhere between .7-1.4% of the overall population. Dead. In the ground. That's almost two orders of magnitude off. And if we cluster so much that hospital resources are exhausted, then that number will be higher.
When people don't want to agree with you, you have to be very very careful what statements and measures you use in your arguments. Because if you're off by a factor of X, then they will take what you say as hyperbole or outright lies. I'm not sure what X is, but it seems to be somewhere between 8 and 20.
If you say that I'm lying or stupid because the numbers I'm using are off by a factor of 3, then you look like a wackadoo if you substitute numbers that are off by a factor of 20 in the other direction.
Its why I keep comparing registered dead to the US population. That number is way below the actual rate, but until we learn that people are getting COVID three times and dying the second or third time, we can't have more than 331m people who have been exposed, so actual dead divided by population is a very, very pessimistic lower bar on the ratio. If my argument holds, or is even plausible, with the worst case version of my numbers, then the argument holds, even if that means I'm lowballing the priority of any actions I propose we take.
The latter can get us into plenty of trouble, and often does. But first you have to admit there's a problem before you can get any help (I solo a lot of things that I 'know' are a problem but can't sell anyone else on, and I deal with the consequences of that, but death is hardly ever on the line.)
Most people who die of a gun shot wound don't die instantly, they die from blood loss or organ failure. We write GSW on the certificate because the Rule of Law treats violent assault very differently from self-inflicted injuries. But if you're thinking like a longevity expert, it's bodily instability that is far more likely to kill you.
Covid has a lot of complications. But as an infectious disease, we can argue that we should treat it a bit more like an assault instead of an accident. Perhaps part of the disconnect in thinking between people is that not everyone agrees with that notion, and think of getting Covid like falling in the shower. It's my shower, and my body, if I'd rather die than install bars or get one of those stools then that's my perogative. Of course, your children probably disagree with this and tell you at least once per visit. In an overpopulated world maybe we let people go out their own way.
But you can't make someone else fall in that shower. You can make lots of other people die of Covid by being stupid.
What's the point of this? Cruelly mocking some mentally ill person's posts from years ago, as proof that "the future is unpredictable"?
Or claiming brexit is economically worse than covid. Massively disrupting the world economy for 2 years is less bad than some regulatory changes in a single country? "A crewed moonbase by 2031"?
I literally can not imagine thinking this is comparable to any other economic event, since the world wars or great depression anyway.
US GDP is around 2.5% below pre-covid trend; the UK is far behind that. UK exporters (and importers) have taken a huge hit from the new trade barriers.