Isinlor

When you wage a war you take any wins you can. You fight for every corner and every street.

Western policies create a forcing function on the technology development.

We need to make products so good that they win even without climate emergency.

Tesla is a perfect example of that. Solar energy soon will also be simply better than any fossil fuels.

It is also important to have your own stuff together when demanding the same from others.

And if China will not be meeting its targets I see no reason to not impose import taxes on China.

We could monitor China emissions from space and tax accordingly.

Hopefully we can force similar rulings in other countries and on the EU level. This ruling may be a precedent since it is partially based on the European law.

The same could be attempted across the whole world where judicial branch holds actual power.

https://www.urgenda.nl/en/themas/climate-case/global-climate...

https://peoplesclimatecase.caneurope.org/

http://climatecasechart.com/non-us-climate-change-litigation...

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_the_Netherlands_v._Ur...

> The case, while not the first climate change litigation,[16] the original 2015 ruling against the Netherlands was heralded worldwide as the first successful tort action against a government to address climate change to protect human rights, an area otherwise known as climate justice.[7] The ruling on the Netherlands case led to similar climate justice lawsuits in other countries, including Belgium, France, Ireland, Germany, New Zealand, Britain, Switzerland and Norway. [11]

Hopefully there are ongoing litigations that will hold Norway liable as well.

https://www.urgenda.nl/en/themas/climate-case/global-climate...

https://peoplesclimatecase.caneurope.org/

http://climatecasechart.com/non-us-climate-change-litigation...

Should companies be liable for knowingly putting poison into food they sell? Yes, obviously.

> It’s hard to judge them for making money while operating within the laws we design.

The laws should include not knowingly causing harm to the people if there are alternatives available.

> This seems like a slippery slope.

Courts are there to weight the obligations put on companies and rights of individuals. As long as judicial system works, there is no slippery slope.

There are other legal protections and courts are there to weight them.

If a company knowingly cause harm to third parties they must be sanctioned.

Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man's nose begins.

Probably easier option is just redirecting an asteroid bigger than Chicxulub impactor. But the point is that even that is not enough to eradicate life.

As I said, you would need something like Late Heavy Bombardment or Venus like greenhouse effect and even that may not be enough.

Based on the Moon craters Late Heavy Bombardment would include:

- 22,000 or more impact craters with diameters >20 km (12 mi),

- about 40 impact basins with diameters about 1,000 km (620 mi),

- several impact basins with diameters about 5,000 km (3,100 mi)

It's also important to highlight that everywhere were our ancestors appeared soon after megafauna population got reduced by 20% - 70%:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction#/media/Fil...

In the last 100 years we just entered path to near total eradication of megafauna. E.g. wild mammals account now for ~4% of mammals biomass.

Complex life is nowhere near as robust as simple life forms.

We are not capable of annihilating life on this planet.

If we detonated all nuclear arsenals the planet would barely notice.

Chicxulub impact event had yield comparable to 100 million megatons of TNT.

Assuming we have 10 000 nuclear warheads each with yield of 100 megatons of TNT it would be still ~100 less than Chicxulub impact event.

Also, we already did destroy most of megafauna, but the whole life is just a different ballpark.

We would need to change Earth into Venus end even then it may not be enough.

BTW - It is also true that all pain and misery on this planet is the result of evolution.

I think only people who never been to a beach think that plastic straws are in any way a significant part of plastic pollution problem.

It's always mostly plastic containers like bottles, plastic bags, fish nets and some random broken pieces of something bigger. Almost never straws.

https://i.wpimg.pl/3500x0/d.wpimg.pl/355768210-77880789/zani...

https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/client/to_webp,q_lossy,ret_img,w_7...

https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/garbage-on-the-sand-bea...

Yes, there is very consistent correspondence between areas in the primary sensory and motor cortex and body parts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_homunculus

As a someone interested in AI this research is quite interesting to me. It gives us a benchmark that we can compare with machine learning algorithms. How much better can human brain handle novel sensomotory tasks?

> The neural activity that controls finger movement is the finger itself, as far as the brain is concerned; it's not "representing" anything.

I don't understand what you are trying to say.

Yes, indeed. My point is that there is nothing impressive about it. It is just a good idea.

I don't see anything impressive in this paper. They basically say what they want to do, no results.

They are not even original with the idea for this type of paper.

In September last year Aran Komatsuzaki posted: "Current Limitations of Language Models: What You Need is Retrieval" https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.06857

I have also a prediction market from August last year with this question:

Will a language model with at least 100B parameters trained to do external information retrieval exist before 2023?

Seems like people gave it 61% in March this year. I was at 75%.

https://www.metaculus.com/questions/4876/will-a-language-mod...

Could you provide specific article that says so?

Most likely because there are tradeoffs. Tesla is using other vehicles as guides, so it is possible.

They did external validation.

> External validation was performed on the Moorfields dataset. This dataset differed from the UK Biobank development set with respect to both fundus camera used, and in sourcing from a pathology-rich population at a tertiary ophthalmic referral center. The resulting sensitivity, specificity, PPV and ACC were 83.9%, 72.2%, 78.2%, and 78.6% respectively

Should the indigenous people of Americas, Australia, Arctic and Eurasia see themselves as a colonial force?

The ingenious people across the world are the original colonialist. Should we condemn them for what they did?

As a Polish person who inherited an extremely difficult history, I feel fine with my Slavic ancestors.

What I know is that The Sun will destroy the Solar System. The time will most likely destroy everything else with the heat death.

So, I would want to explore to learn the answer to The Last Question - does everything has to die in ever increasing entropy?

You can read the short hard science-fiction story "The Last Question" here: https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

That's about the cost of removing CO2 at industrial scale today.

And yes, I'm supporter of overall carbon tax.

Preferably something like European Union Emission Trading Scheme [0] where at some point we can just ban unmitigated emissions into the atmosphere.

I have no issue with people spending as much resources on bitcoin or any other crypto as they want as long as they clean up after themselves.

Actually it should include the whole package of externalities - CO2, electronic waste pollution etc.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Emission_Tradin...

They do not gain anything by crashing bitcoin. They could gain by selling bitcoin, but they sold only 10% of their position.

Even when you "pomp and dump" you have to dump as the name suggest. It is not "pomp and crash&hold".

Unless they show profit from selling 1B$ bitcoin in next financial statements it is just Elon being dumb idiot.

Both for buying Bitcoin in the first place and for not offloading to make money to invest in Tesla.

All crypto I know about is useful !only! for market speculation.

Bitcoin is especially broken and useless for anything. Unless you want to pay 100$ transaction cost to by ice-cream at grocery store.

Data centers mostly serve customers and customers care about reliability and latency.

Distance and Great Firewall of China do not help with any of that.

Also, because moving data to China is a legal nightmare in EU and public relations nightmare in the whole west.

Very unlikely. For Bitcoin this is just another day. 10-20% drops should be expected by anyone who knows anything about crypto.

That is anarcho-capitalism to you. Even though I'm a libertarian leaning, I still think we should put a tax from CO2 emissions on crypto transactions. Something in range of 300$ per tonne of CO2. So with bitcoin emissions at 0.5T per transaction, it would be somewhere around 150$ per transaction. And to cash in on bitcoin you should be required to document the whole history of bitcoin you own.

I'm not telling you about some people, but about very specific person with specific experiences - my grandmother. The war period did not look the same to everyone.

And yes, I'm telling you that my grandmother herself has better memories of Germans than Red Army soldiers. She was a nice blond girl who knew a bit of German and that was according to her helping her a lot with Germans. But she had to hide from front line Red Army soldiers because everyone knew that they were mass raping women.

The worst direct story about about Germans in my family is that one of my great grandfathers was forced as a recruit into Wehrmacht. Germans threatened to kill the whole family if we would not agree. He probably died somewhere on front lines, but nobody knows what exactly happened to him.

This is exact story of my grandmother and her sister when Soviets were going trough my home city in northern Poland.

They were not as afraid of Germans as they were of Soviets. Soviets were animals raping, stealing and beating everything they encountered.

You would have to convince UK that owns 42% equity of the OneWeb company that plans to launch initially 648-satellite constellation.

You will probably sooner see EU, Russia and China decide that it is their strategic interest to have their own constellations. As it was with GPS. Currently we have the United States' Global Positioning System (GPS), Russia's Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS), China's BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) and the European Union's Galileo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneWeb

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneWeb_satellite_constellation

Any sources on Tesla cashing in on revenue from FSD?

Edit. I've found it: https://seekingalpha.com/filing/5494291

> Deferred revenue activity related to the access to our Supercharger network, internet connectivity, Full Self Driving (“FSD”) features and over-the-air software updates on automotive sales with and without resale value guarantee amounted to $2.00 billion and $1.93 billion as of March 31, 2021 and December 31, 2020, respectively.

> Deferred revenue is equivalent to the total transaction price allocated to the performance obligations that are unsatisfied, or partially unsatisfied, as of the balance sheet date. Revenue recognized from the deferred revenue balance as of December 31, 2020 and 2019 was $79 million and $57 million for the three months ended March 31, 2021 and 2020, respectively. Of the total deferred revenue on automotive sales with and without resale value guarantees as of March 31, 2021, we expect to recognize $1.21 billion of revenue in the next 12 months. The remaining balance will be recognized over the performance period which is generally the expected ownership life of the vehicle or the eight-year life of the vehicle.

Oh well. The lawsuits will be interesting to watch. I'm sorry for the people who have been fooled into purchasing FSD.

IMO they have less than 50% chance that they will actually get a car that drives itself without babysitting before 2025.

I think people do not realize that:

a) NASA did not receive sufficient budget to found even one proposal. SpaceX had to agree to delayed payments.

b) SpaceX was rated the highest by NASA in technical and management rating.

c) SpaceX was basically half the price of Blue Origin and probably 1/4th of Dynamics.

d) Starship is and will be developed with private money whether NASA awards SpaceX the contract or not.

e) Because Starship is and will be privately founded, it would be somewhat accurate to say that it is SpaceX subsidizing a government program not the other way around.

f) Starship is the most advanced project with early proof of concept prototypes flying (and crashing) all the time. Hopefully less crashing and more flying from next week.

g) Also a fun fact. The movie Avatar about a fake moon made in box office 2.9B dollars. SpaceX got exactly the same money i.e. 2.9B dollars for an actual moon landing. Let that sink in.

> This decision was based on NASA’s longstanding Option A acquisition strategy of making two Option A contract awards. While it remains the Agency’s desire to preserve a competitive environment at this stage of the HLS Program, at the initial prices and milestone payment phasing proposed by each of the Option A offerors, NASA’s current fiscal year budget did not support even a single Option A award. Working in close coordination with the CO, it was therefore my determination that NASA should, as a first step, open price negotiations with the Option A offeror that is both very highly rated from a technical and management perspective and that also had, by a wide margin, the lowest initially-proposed price—SpaceX.

[0] https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/option-...

Also if you do not like Elon the tweeter idiot Musk. Then let me introduce you to Gwynne Shotwell [1] SpaceX COO who runs the company day to day. She is absolutely badass business woman and engineer and deserves as much, if not more, recognition for SpaceX outstanding day to day execution.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwynne_Shotwell

Blue Origin is older company than SpaceX. Blue Origin was founded in 2000 and SpaceX in 2002.

SpaceX got to orbit in 2008 without big government money 6 years after founding.

Blue Origin 20 years after founding still did not managed to get to orbit and Bezos is pushing around billion dollars a year into that company.

Blue Origin is obviously quite badly managed.

For example Rocket Lab founded in 2006 in New Zealand is a lot more successful with many orbital launches.

They are currently building human rated, 8 metric tonne class orbital reusable rocket.

Because NASA is anchored by USA congress as a job creation program, not a space exploration program. Commercial Lunar Payload Services is not designed to create jobs across all USA and stretch it in infinity as is the case with SLS, so congress does not like it. That's also why they did not give the founding to make it possible to finance two services. Actually they did not give enough money even for one service and SpaceX had to agree to receive payments with delay.

> This decision was based on NASA’s longstanding Option A acquisition strategy of making two Option A contract awards. While it remains the Agency’s desire to preserve a competitive environment at this stage of the HLS Program, at the initial prices and milestone payment phasing proposed by each of the Option A offerors, NASA’s current fiscal year budget did not support even a single Option A award. Working in close coordination with the CO, it was therefore my determination that NASA should, as a first step, open price negotiations with the Option A offeror that is both very highly rated from a technical and management perspective and that also had, by a wide margin, the lowest initially-proposed price—SpaceX.

[0] https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/option-...

Blue Origin was in breach of solicitation requirements that would likely result in in intellectual property disputes with the government [0].

I don't think NASA found any issues with SpaceX and Dynamics proposal with regard to IP licensing rights.

> Blue’s approach to data rights is likely to result in protracted intellectual property (IP) disputes during contract performance and generally creates a high risk that the Government will obtain lower IP licensing rights than it is otherwise entitled to under the contract. (...) this aspect of Blue’s proposal is non-compliant with the solicitation’s instructions. Blue’s proposal further impugns the Government’s potential rights in data by proposing to deliver data created in conjunction with NASA with less than a GPR license; this is prohibited by the solicitation.

[0] https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/option-...

Take it from Greenpeace:

https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/news/greenpeace-response-to-g...

> Greenpeace response to Google Carbon-Free by 2030 commitment, September 14, 2020

> By becoming the first major tech company to commit to power its data centers with carbon-free energy around the clock, Google is setting a new high-bar for the sector: a break-up with fossil fuels altogether.

I didn't think these people could be happy about anything, but what a surprise. Seems like they like Google approach.

Now Google needs to deliver, but I have no doubt that they will.

It's really just good business for corporations like Facebook, Google and Microsoft to increase efficiency and use the cheapest sources of power i.e. renewable.

It just has to take some time to do the switch. There is a lot of infrastructure involved.