ANewFormation

The big issue with aging is general cognitive decline. In some people it can happen faster, or slower, but it happens to all of us and is no more avoidable than muscular decline.

It makes it increasingly difficult for people to care for themselves, and highly vulnerable to exploitation, even when in 'perfect' health.

Fertility changes are exponential. They can be approximated (assuming a population with a common fertility rate among generations) as having a fertility_rate/2 scalar impact on population per 20 years.

So imagine a fertility rate of 1. The scalar would be 1/2 so the population would declining by about 50% every 20 years.

And this doesn't stop until you go extinct or start having more children. And you'd have to start having more children in the midst of economic collapse.

So think about a period of just 80 years, a single human lifetime - that would be a decline of 1-(1/2)^4 = 15/16ths of your previous population. The US would go from 345 million to 22million, about the size of Sri Lanka or Chile.

And you're right religious groups do retain healthy fertility rates, so we're bee-lining to a world where secular educated individuals are simply removing themselves from the gene pool, while highly religious, less educated individuals are thriving. Guess what the world would thus look like in the future and how concerned it might be with your issues of choice, like climate change.

Children are essentially your voice in the future - have no children, have no voice.

The largest probe ever launched afaik is Voyager 1, and it was less than a ton. Even 'massive' things like the James Webb telescope only weighs 7 tons.

Starship is aiming for being able to launch 200+ tons. So stuff like this on a dedicated mission would have vastly more delta-v available but also be kind of silly. There's no reason we couldn't scale things up and just launch hundreds of probes at once all through the Solar System. Alternatively instead of launching probes we could look to start launching modular observation stations that could one day even house humans, or perhaps even grander ideas.

Launching one off probes, rovers, and satellites is really something I think we should be aiming to move beyond, let alone on the ridiculous time intervals we operate on at present.

We shouldn't still be making basic, yet revolutionary, discoveries on the Moon, more than half a century after we set foot on it.

When drugs were banned they were increasingly being used everywhere. Vin Mariani [1], a wine loaded with cocaine, was not only the inspiration for CocaCola's original recipe of cocaine+kola nut, but was endorsee by countless upstanding individuals. Thomas Edison was among them - praising the drink for increasing his energy levels and helping him stay awake.

Beyond this employers were giving it to workers to increase their productivity and more - we were basically turning into a nation of coke heads.

Now long after its ban you can obviously still get it, relatively easily even, but it's relegated to the darker recesses of society, like the White House, and that is undoubtedly a tremendous improvement.

Good is not the enemy of perfect.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin_Mariani

It's not the most intuitive thing, but how long we live has no long term impact on population levels. Think about a fertility rate of one - this means each successive generation will be half the size of the one prior. This makes simplified population sims very simple because it's simply powers of 2.

If you start with a population of 1 then the generation before was 2, then 4, 8, 16, 32, etc. So when you remove the biggest group, the oldest, it will always be about 50% of the total population regardless of how many other generations happen to be alive. And a 'generation' is proportional not to our life expectancy, but to our practical fertility window - so about 20 years.

You would substantially mitigate many of the economic problems but your Logan's Run would also need to be a dictatorship (and a rather less than benevolent one) because the skewed age ratios mean with a collapsing fertility rate the elderly will exclusively control any democracy, even if 100% of people vote. And all of this just to make it more comfortable to sleep walk into extinction.

I'm fully on board with you about saying the unspoken parts out loud, but I don't see this idea as a solution.

He's not saying that genetics caused the problem, but that natural selection will solve the problem. Natural selection also need not be obviously genetic. For example certain religious groups maintain very healthy fertility rates, while secular populations tend to have quite poor fertility rates. So this logically leads to an outcome very few would intuitively expect - the percent of humanity that is religious will likely increase over the coming decades and centuries.

Also collapsing populations will lead to resource scarcity. One of the many negatives of low fertility is that you end up with far more elderly than working age people. Any given market will also naturally decrease in size, all other things being equal. These factors, amongst others, will completely wreck economies which may well end up creating a vicious cycle against fertility.

Another reason I think 'organized incentives' will be unlikely to achieve much is that Scandinavia had been at the forefront of fertility collapse in Europe and they have both an exremely strong social safety net as well as great minimum maternity benefits. Clearly there are other factors than economic inability driving people to go childless or to only have 1.

But you don't need to extrapolate. Current rates are far more than sufficient for catastrophe. It's merely that the effects of dangerously high fertility rates are immediate while the effects of dangerously low fertility tend to lag the advent of said reduction by around 60 years.

So for instance Japan is still living the good times relative to what's yet to come since they collapsed in the 80s. South Korea hasn't even begun to really feel the consequences of their actions since they only collapsed in the 90s. And places like Finland or the Western world in general only collapsed even more recently.

But collapsed they have. And because our fertile window in life, for women at least, closes long before we die - most, if not all, of these places will, unavoidably, see dramatic population declines, screwed age ratios (with consequent impacts on the labor/retiree pool/costs), shrinking economies, and so on. And we're left to rely on some ever smaller generation(s) down the line to start having large families in this context.

There isn't any such causation between rich and poor countries. Most of Asia is dirt poor, even more so a couple of decades ago, yet crime is extremely scarce.

Even in America alone there are a vast number of people living in extreme poverty. And the overwhelming majority will live perfectly normal lives, even if it means on occasion living off iceberg and ramen, as was the case for myself when growing up.

If poverty/desperation drove crime then there would be vastly more criminals, especially in rural areas, yet criminality remains relatively rare.

You'll find far less tolerance for criminal behavior among those who grew up in poverty, because they are the ones who have lived through it all and seen with their own eyes the sort of people who go down the wrong road. And the fault for going down that road lies with nobody besides those people.

People don't get involved in criminality, in general, out of desperation, but because they enjoy the lifestyle. Hence the hundreds of successful e.g. rappers who end up in prison (or dead) even long after they had far more than enough money that any sense of wanting was far behind them.

solarwinds123

Musk makes $0 directly from these benefits. He only gains from those who buy a Tesla with the perk, but wouldn't otherwise, and that number is going to be quite small. The primary beneficiaries, by far, are normal citizens of California. And I really doubt they're thrilled about paying more because of petty political games.

Ted Cruz is a Senator - gerrymandering plays 0 role in his victory, which was far more dominant in 2024 than 2018.

In the examples you're listing, those actions were overwhelmingly supported by Floridians and Texans respectively, and worked to increase the overall support of those politicians.

Is this the sort of action that Californians would broadly support? If so, then more power to them. If not then this is the political class playing petty games to the detriment of the people they're supposed to be representing.

Something I don't understand is why people don't appreciate /expect misdirection.

For instance, a malicious actor, of even basic sophistication, coming from a Russian ip and occasionally using Cyrillic and missing grammatic artcles is probably not Russian. Similarly a malcious actor with a pseudonym including the term patriot, coming from a US IP and using terms like howdy probably is not American.

False attribution is a core lesson in malice 101.

One of my favorite Mark Twain quotes comes from one of his correspondences: 'My apologies for such a long letter, I hadn't the time to write a short one.'

Slightly tangential but TikTok isn't just short-form stuff. It also has normal length content, which is where most current-affairs/analyses would fall, outside of clips.

Similarly (somehow?) for Fortnite, 100% of their microtransactions are cosmetic. It's also free, so it's be akin to telling people you could get AAA quality games for free. The $60+++ group of games make up a vanishingly small chunk of the total market, and are more a relic of 'our' generation. Roblox is a platform, more than a game, so it's its own beast. In general though I think younger gamers have become more demanding, in a good way.

Could mean the opposite of what you might think. I imagine the mean perception of Zuck is weirdo, Bieber is 'no clue, I'm not a teen girl' and so on.

IMO it depends on what you see as the point of business and entrepreneurship. I don't see money as the goal, but rather on creating great things. So Buffet wouldn't even rank for me, while you would have omitted Musk's closest competitor - Thomas Edison.

Put another way, if in 30 years Musk has 10 trillion in wealth would seem, to me, to be much less relevant than if he succeeds in making humanity a permanently multi-planetary species.

Advancing humanity in so many different revolutionary fields all at once is something that had not been achieved in a very long time.

And adding onto this it's not just cost, they also have the fastest turn around and the highest reliability.

It's vaguely analogous to the early automobile market where Ford was dominating by every single objective metric so competitors were left to compete on subjective metrics like styles. Incidentally this era is where planned obsolescence really took off.

Unfortunately for competitors I'm not sure coating a rocket in a chrome finish and running a sleek ad campaign is going to beat out price+speed+reliability.

SpaceX received very little in 'funding' from the government. However they sold extensive services to the government, primarily by offering the best value on competitive contracts.

One thing that's important to recognize is that this all isn't just a game where you spend some amount of money on R&D, and inevitably unlock the next tech.

In a parallel timeline where NASA gets 100billion a year, but there is no SpaceX, it's entirely possible that the pre-SpaceX status quo just continued on indefinitely. After all when SpaceX was first developing their tech, they were being actively mocked by Boeing/Lockheed (via Tory Bruno) with comments akin to 'yeah cute idea, we worked it out decades ago - not economically feasible. have fun learning.'

The SLS was going to be NASA's next big vessel, and costs there are trending to what could be around 4 billion a launch. With costs like that you're never going to do beat things in space.

The percents are very different. For example in bodybuilding one normally 'bulks' while working out, because it maximizes muscle gain. But then naturally this needs to be paired with cutting, unless you're a Greek Grizzly, but the total muscle loss is relatively negligible, especially when maintaining a proper high protein diet.

At 40% muscle loss you're getting awful close to losing weight while increasing your body fat percent!

But of course you're right that diet+exercise is key but for those maintaining such, they wouldn't end up on these drugs to start with.

Imagine a Star Trek existence where any meal imaginable was just a replicator away and a holodeck could enable one to be anybody, have anybody, and do anything - any time and for seemingly no or next to no cost.

Many people seem to think this would be a utopia, but I suspect on reality there'd be a mass epidemic of suicide, drug abuse, and so on.

It's not about having external constraints, but about having a purpose in life. Of course one could create a purpose but endless hedonism is far more tempting. The history of ancient emperor's, who could have or do essentially anything, and how they approached life is a clear example of both sides of the coin. The only difference between Aurelius and Calligula is one created an artificial purpose for himself, and the other simply indulged in the pleasures of life as an end in itself.

I never understood classic parties. It always seems to me that people end up having fun in spite of the context usually with looseness driven by alcohol.

By contrast if you just go do something you enjoy then you already have a commonality and even if you find the company boring, you're there to do something you like.

So - chess or sports, watching something (sport, plays, whatever), charity work, interest clubs (you can find local clubs for just about every interest online), events like local music / poetry/performance stuff, art shows, and all so on endlessly.

The ones that are inherently group based like chess or clubs guarantee interaction without the awkwardness of socializing with less 'context.'

I think one nuance that empasizes his point is that within millions of years, and likely much sooner (as we are already rather 'overdue'), there will almost certainly be another genuine mass extinction event that will once again strip most life from this planet.

The notion of rates is also quite a bit more contentious than many appreciate. The extremely high rates in modern times are based on modeling with rather debated assumptions. This is how you get claims of hundreds of extinctions per day even though there have only been about 800 'verified' extinctions in the past 400 years [1]. And, notably, a number of those verified extinct species ended up showing up elsewhere later on!

[1] - https://e360.yale.edu/features/global_extinction_rates_why_d...

I'm extremely bearish on genetic tweaking as I think longterm unforseen consequences are essentially guaranteed, but I don't find this exact issue to be much of a problem. It's 100% legal to drink/smoke/etc to your heart's content while pregnant, so I think individual liberty still unambiguously wins here.

Cost. Ballparking from memory (because I'm on mobile) sending something to space on the Space Shuttle cost something like $40k/kg. The Falcon brought that down to 2500, and the Falcon Heavy down to just over $1k/kg.

So nearly two orders of magnitude cheaper, but you still can't really do anything too fun in space at $1k/kg. The goal with Starship (and its rapid reuse) is to bring costs down another couple of orders of magnitude to where we could eventually even see costs drop into the single digit per kg.

And at that point suddenly space becomes open to things that sound difficult to even fantasize about today, like colonizing Mars, taking suborbital flights to get from Texas to Hong Kong, or setting up industrial systems on the Moon, to say nothing of space tourism that doesn't start with the prerequisite of being a billionaire.

When presidents are quick to take credit for economic successes, surely it isn't unreasonable to hold them accountable for economic failures.

The disconnect between government data and the economic realities MANY people experienced (as evidenced by exit polling on the economy) only further salts the wounds for people not doing well.

There was a massive downward revision in August, with most sectors hit hard, leaving the gains that remained increasingly dominated by government/education/healthcare jobs.

Telling people 'X' when their eyes/lived experiences tell them 'Y', and then frequently insulting them for not agreeing on top is certainly part of the reason for the popular vote going as it did.

OpenAI was originally founded to pursue AI in an open fashion more able to benefit society than self-interested corporations walling it off and exploiting it to their own benefit.

To OpenAI's credit they still haven't taken down their original statement of founding [1] : "Because of AI’s surprising history, it’s hard to predict when human-level AI might come within reach. When it does, it’ll be important to have a leading research institution which can prioritize a good outcome for all over its own self-interest.

We’re hoping to grow OpenAI into such an institution. As a non-profit, our aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders. Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world. We’ll freely collaborate with others across many institutions and expect to work with companies to research and deploy new technologies."

All the stuff about going closed source, fiduciary duty, competing, avoiding "undue" concentration of power, etc for 'safety' came in their new charter in 2019 [2] after they created a for profit entity, partnered with Microsoft, parted ways with Musk, and so on.

[1] - https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai

[2] - https://openai.com/charter

Taking a slight sidetrack to relativity, consider just how absurd our universe is. To maintain the consistency of the speed of light from all reference frames, time (and 'real' distance) are instead the variables, and there is every reason to believe this is correct. If you didn't know this to be the actual case, it'd feel absurd to even consider it.

Trying to intuitively and logically reason about something with no answer in sight, all while assuming the truths of our era, may ultimately be pointless.

Our universe, logical though it may be, plays by its own rules, and many things will be simply irreconcilable until those rules are further elaborated on.

As an aside the big bang also does not really answer the prerequisite question of where the initial inorganic matter/energy came from. The idea there being some sort of a quantum fluctuation, which then begs the question of its origin. I suppose it's just turtles all the way down.