TangoTrotFox

It's not the gamma rays that kill you. In particular even with a supernova strength source, it's unlikely that the gamma rays would even have enough energy to get through the atmosphere to the point of meaningfully heating the ground. However, they would butcher and greatly change the atmosphere which, in turn, is what kills you - probably through a mechanism of massive amounts of UV and other high energy radiation now happily making its way down to us. As an example, a gamma ray burst is one possible hypothesis for the Ordovician extinction.

Best case for survival would be to become multiplanetary. In particular the conditions that would be created would be survivable by the exact same technology that will be the baseline for human colonization on Mars.

It doesn't. First to clarify what the CMB is. It's basically just heat residuals that seem to indicate that the universe was much hotter in the past. The problem is that these heat residuals are relatively homogeneously distributed. In terms of thermdynamics this makes perfect sense - the entire temperature of an area will gradually converge, like a pot of boiling water will eventually reach room temperature.

But physically what we observe does not make any sense. Like you probably know, nothing -- including action -- can be perceived to travel faster than the speed of light. The sun is about 8 light minutes away from us. If it somehow just suddenly disappeared, we'd still see it in the sky and continue to revolve around, what would 'now' be nothing, for about 8 minutes. The observation of its disappearance and the effective causality of its disappearance (and its effect on our orbit) would happen at or very near the exact same time.

The problem with the CMB is that areas of space that should not be causally connected since light itself has not had time to go from one to the other, seem to be causally connected. In other words, with our boiling pot in a kitchen room - the eventual equilibrium that the kitchen reaches (if we assume that that entire little region is all of the space in existence) is going to vary quite substantially whether you have an e.g. 100 cubic meter kitchen or a 200 cubic meter kitchen. We should observe both sides of space acting like two independent 100 cubic meter kitchens, instead we seem them behaving like a single 200 cubic meter kitchen.

This is a major and unresolved problem that threw much of what we know out the window. It directly contradicts the big bang. To 'resolve' this, we started creating a arbitrary special conditions. Cosmic inflation is one of these. There is absolutely no reason to believe that cosmic inflation ever happened - its sole and only reason for existence is to work as a 'fix' to make what we observe fit what we thought we'd observe. This makes it illogical to use derivative things as "evidence". In particular the nature of our current CMB is in no way meaningful evidence of inflation, because inflation was hypothesized, after the fact, in no small part to fit the CMB to what we thought we'd see! In other words calling the CMB meaningful evidence of inflation is trying to provide support to a hypothesis by suggesting that the observation said hypothesis tries to explain is meaningful evidence of that hypothesis.

Any not completely idiotic hypothesis will obviously be 'evidenced' by what it tries to explain. But we have a major problem when that 'evidence' becomes all you have to rely on, and that is exactly the case here.

I'm in no way endorsing this individual's proposal, but the argument you're using here is not as strong as you'd expect. A recurring trend in the past several decades has been that a contradiction in prediction is often simply massaged back into that prediction, at times quite arbitrarily. Then that previously contradictory observation can be used as 'evidence' for the newly retrofitted prediction. Of course that's at best circular logic and, at worst, something that can start sending us spiraling down the wrong path, faster than light.

So for instance the CMB did not support the big bang, it contradicted it. See: the horizon problem [1]. To reconcile this inflation theory was invented which arbitrarily suggests that the universe hit the accelerator hard, then slowed back down. There's no logic, mechanism, rationale or falsifiability. But it makes what we see fit what we predicted we'd see, so it's a pretty widely accepted part of modern physics. And this retrofitting now has a cascade affect that enables other theories to provide support for yet other theories -- such as what you're proposing here in that the CMB now 'supports' the big bang. It does so only if you add a very big asterisk there.

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

Today the number of people that don't have to work, both in raw numbers and as a percent, has absolutely skyrocketed. I mean if a person is simply interested in e.g. pursuing research and not so much with material niceties then it's extremely easy to live abroad in developing nations, indefinitely, starting with around $200k. Bump that up to a million and you can live practically anywhere so long as you have the discipline to live far below your means, which is perhaps the hardest part of it all.

The ruling specifically focused on the militia aspect militia. Quoting that ruling:

The prefatory clause comports with the Court’s interpretation of the operative clause. The "militia" comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. The Antifederalists feared that the Federal Government would disarm the people in order to disable this citizens’ militia, enabling a politicized standing army or a select militia to rule. The response was to deny Congress power to abridge the ancient right of individuals to keep and bear arms, so that the ideal of a citizens’ militia would be preserved.

People conflate militia now a days with military, but they are not the same. The "militia" are the armed citizens of a state. And similarly the security of a free state is talking explicitly about security against government itself - not foreign invaders, which was the domain of the federal government. An armed population can prevent the imposition of tyrannical rule, an unarmed population cannot. In verbose modern text the amendment might read something like, "A well regulated and armed population being necessary for the protection of a state against tyranny, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

Do you think you shouldn't steal things from other people? Of course. I mean I think we'd agree that everybody, more or less, feels this way, right? Yet each year there are more than 8 million thefts per year in the USA alone. It seems that the latter fact there contradicts the former, but it doesn't. You can't compare things to a baseline of 0. You need to compare them to what things would be like if our proposition was true. For instance if most people believed that it was okay to steal things from people then there would not be 8 million thefts per year, there'd be billions. 8 million thefts is actually very strong evidence that most people believe you should not steal from other people.

And so too for atrocities in war. The non-zero number of atrocities in no way suggests that people just blindly follow orders, as a matter of fact. You need to compare these numbers to what would happen if people gave no consideration to morality whatsoever in their execution of orders. And what are those numbers? I'm not sure, but I expect vastly higher than the relatively few atrocities we can reference.

People too often come to one side or another of an issue without considering context and alternatives. War unfortunately drags everybody down to the lowest common denominator. The reason for this is that the lowest common denominator, the nation that would act with the greatest disregard for anything other than their own victory, is the nation that wins wars and gets to set the rules for the rest of the world.

In 1945 the United States became the only nation to ever launch a nuclear strike on another country. In a two moment's flashes we killed hundreds of thousands of individuals - the vast majority being innocent civilians playing no direct role in the war whatsoever. But that act of arguable amorality not only immediately ended a world war, but has since led to a great fear of war among any nation with these weapons which has led to an unprecedented period of relative world peace. This [1] great video shows the borders of Europe throughout time. The sudden lapse in that constant warfare and transition, the one we now still live in, that occurs just shortly after the more widespread development of nuclear weapons is striking.

But nuclear weapons will not remain the ultimate weapon and deterrent forever. And whichever nation is able to develop appropriate defenses against nuclear weapons and offenses beyond nuclear, will be the same nation that decides the direction of our species moving onward into the future. Again, it's a lowest common denominator problem - but it's one that's ultimately unavoidable by any means other than by ensuring that you yourself are always the most militarily capable nation. And ideally multiple nations will develop these weapons in unison. I'm not particularly fond of e.g. China having unopposed reign throughout the world, but neither am I fond of the idea of an unopposed reign of e.g. the United States. I think we find the best outcomes when we have multiple balanced powers, and in this regard it is our responsibility to never fall behind.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9YnYRk8_kE

Chess is mixed sex. I'm guessing you're looking at the FIDE URLs like https://ratings.fide.com/top.phtml?list=men as provided on the FIDE (international governing body for chess) page here [1]. That URL seems to clearly specify men in spite of being linked to as "Top 100 Players", but the list includes both sexes. You'll find Hou Yifan on that list in place 91. The next highest rated female is Ju Wenjun who is 350th.

The reason for being able to see lists by the other classifications is because it's the same way that tournaments are frequently divided. Beyond having rating sections in tournaments there are generally also events that are only open to people below a certain age (or seniors events for players above a minimum age), or only to females. Females are also granted certain female only titles. For instance Hou Yifan holds the title of Grandmaster as well as the title of Female Grandmaster. The latter having substantially easier requirements.

To be clear, these divisions are all completely undirectional. Females, young, and old players can compete in any event and be rated against any player. Hou Yifan is regularly invited to top level events. For instance this year she was invited and competed in both Tata Steel and the Granke Classic closed events, competing against players including Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana. She scored a total of 0 wins, 10 losses, and 12 draws.

[1] - https://ratings.fide.com/toplist.phtml

I think the history of the world paints a different picture. Worldwide, and since our earliest recordings of history, governments have tried to expand themselves to encompass ever greater regions and ultimately grant themselves ever more expansive power. And invariably there is a backlash, frequently a war, and then a dissolution before another great power emerges and starts combining the disparate pieces into a new whole to repeat the entire process all over again.

The only thing that really slowed this cycle (which had been accelerating) was nuclear weapons which make outright war between developed nations basically impossible. This beautiful [1] video shows the remarkably frequent shifting or Europe's borders through the centuries. It's easy to just look at that and zone out but you have to consider that each color there was at one time a real and genuine government that the people likely expected to last more or less indefinitely. Many of those blips which you see so seemingly rapidly evaporate were longer lived than the United States. For instance the strikingly visible Ottoman empire lasted for some 600 years. And, in a story told a countless times before and one that will be told a countless number of times in the centuries to come, it wasn't some great force or power that brought it down. It was internal political disagreements which culminated in an armed revolution.

The problem with humanity is that the only thing we want as much as the power to rule ourselves, is the power to rule others.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LfdXoL3Xck

You're creating a distinction here that does not exist in any shape or fashion, except for size. The difference between a state government and a federal government is simply over the scope of their decisions. In other words a federal government is no more guaranteed to make good decisions than a state government bad. The exact same sort of powers that enabled the US federal government to abolish slavery are the same sort that enabled governments time immemorial to enforce it. In contemporary times it's the same power that enabled the Nazis to enact their agenda on a national level. Many people try to convince themselves that such wrongs might never happen again on a national level, but is there any logic for this? To me it seems to be simply cognitive dissonance.

So the question is this: Is a government that is closer to the people that it governs, both figuratively and literally, more or less likely to create decisions that are beneficial to the people of that region than a strong centralized government great distances from them? There's a disconnect here that can bias what you see. Imagine a government falls to corruption and starts enacting negative policy at a rate of 10% per year. And now imagine we have 1000 sovereign governments. Each and every year you'll see some 100 different governments engaged in all sorts of awful behavior. Now let's swap it around and imagine we only have 1 single world government. In 100 years you'd only see 10 years of any bad acts. But the big difference is that when those acts were carried out they would be global in impact and their magnitude is something one can only imagine.

Countless topics that are not, in and of themselves, controversial have become incredibly politicized. And this is an issue that seems to only be getting worse over time. Let's take a not so hypothetical hypothetical based on something that recently happened. Not long ago there was a paper published that, using a novel method of measurement, suggested that oceans were heating some 60% faster than thought.

It turns out there were key errors in this paper, spotted just hours after publication, that made their conclusion (though not their novel form of measurement) unsupportable [1][2]. A couple of sources there since, as usual, the shocking headline will get a billion clicks, and the corrections maybe a dozen. But whatever, mistakes happen and that is not the point. But imagine now for a minute that this paper was instead going in the opposite direction and using a novel measurement had determined that the oceans were actually warming some 60% slower than thought, but it turns out that due to mistakes that conclusion was not supportable. Think about the backlash there and what would almost certainly end up resulting in personal attacks and suggestion of untoward motivation from the authors.

That's nasty business, but things that should just be 'science as usual' have started to become things people take deeply personal. I would feel quite uncomfortable publishing things that go against the grain on a number of topics. And this is before we get into things that ought be controversial. Increasing intellectual conservatism means such topics have gone from controversial to outright taboo.

[1] - https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/environment/sd-me-...

[2] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/energy-environment/2018/11/14...

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Edit: As a perfect example of this, already in this very thread a person has stated an opposition to such journal because "I’m worried about corporate interests, ideologues, and charlatans publishing biased nonsense and making the world even more crowded with bad information without any recourse or ability to investigate what the motives behind the papers may have been." 'Seeking recourse and investigating the motives' often translates to finding the witch. Publish the 'wrong' idea and suddenly it's time to face the inquisitor. Publish the 'wrong' idea and make a mistake, and the inquisitor needn't waste his time - straight to the gallows with you.

Look at sites/software/etc that is offered for free that you believe offer very high value. There's a recurring trend. In spite of the value offered, the developers invariably end up short of revenue. This tends to result in ever more visible requests for donations or alternatives (such as swag) to try to spur revenue. And even with these appeals, the revenue tends to rarely correspond in any meaningful way to the value of what's offered.

As an example Lichess (www.lichess.org) is an amazing service for playing chess. It supplanted services like ICC (internet chess club) and now competes against services such as chess.com and really stands head and shoulders above the rest of the sites. Now let's consider compensation. ICC had on the order of tens of thousands of users and charged around $50/year for what would have required extremely little overhead. They were undoubtedly making millions. Chess.com today is heavily ad-driven and works hard to push their users into a premium access model. No idea about their revenue, but they happily spend 5 figures a year in contracts just to get various players/streamers to exclusively play/stream on their site, and have an extensive paid staff. In contrast to these two sites, the founder of Lichess is able to gives himself a salary of $22,218, about $2k above the French minimum wage. It's not like he's then getting loads in options each year - that's it, that's what he gets for building software that beats out other sites making countless millions offering arguably inferior services.

It sucks, because I wish this model worked, but I think it simply does not. There are exceptions, but they are definitely the exception.

One big issue with your conclusion - there is no context. What alternative destinations would you propose? Any US whistle blowers or leakers that manage to gain the ire of the US government itself need to seek refuge in an area that will not bend to US pressure. Given the remarkable scale of influence of the US today that leaves very few places, and even fewer that can provide a comfortable life. Among the top there would be Russia and China.

I don't think it's productive to declare everything secretly racist, sexist, or whatever else. Soros and his Open Society Foundations are the most visible representation of globalism today. But this has nothing to do with him being Jewish and in fact his political views are not even in line with those of Israel which tends to hold a more Zionistic and consequently nationalistic view.

As an example of the disconnect there, consider the influx of individuals trying to claim refugee status in Israel and Israel's reactions [1], against what Israeli media openly declares "infiltrators". Israel's actions here have drawn the ire of groups directly supported by Soros' organizations. The point is that just because a Jewish man happens to be one of the most well known names associated with globalism hardly means that globalism is now suddenly a secret word for Jew. It doesn't even make any sense.

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

No, it's not. That money is lost to the government, not to your actual costs (labor/goods/etc). To illustrate the point clearly imagine I'm a robber. Each time I see you get paid I come and rob you. I take 30% of everything in your wallet. If I suddenly stop robbing you, you're suggesting that now all of your costs would increase. This is obviously not rational.

This is completely illogical. The reason you're earning more money is simply because you are giving away less to the government - not because your actual costs change in any way whatsoever. This has nothing at all to do with labor costs. You can apply the exact same logic to absolutely anything. E.g. if your cost of materials increases by $20 instead of your cost of employees. This doesn't mean you're paying more, or less, for these materials - simply that are not obligated to give away as large a share of your profits from any change in costs.

This has nothing to do with labor. Lower tax rates simply mean you take home more of every dollar you earn. For instance if you cut your overhead by $10 now you take home (just looking at that value in a vacuum) $8 instead of $7. That obviously does not imply your overhead costs were lower when tax rates were higher.

Okay? So let's say each employee costs $10 pretax. We add two employees in the same scenario where we started with a company that has $250 in sales with costs of $100 in labor and $50 in other costs. All that has changed is that the company now has $120 in labor costs. Their net income with a tax rate of 30% is now $56. Their net income with a tax rate of 20% is $64.

Please do elaborate with any example that could make what you're saying seem reasonable.

I prefer to avoid calling things dumb, but I tend to agree this does sound like it fits the bill. Any clarification would be appreciated. Companies are taxed on net. This sort of itemization makes no sense. So for instance imagine a company that grosses $250 in sales with total before tax costs of $100 in labor and $50 in other costs. With a 30% tax rate, their after-tax net is $70. With a 20% tax rate, it's $80. Suggesting that a company might, for any reason, prefer the 30% scenario does seem quite absurd unless I'm missing something critical here.

Personally I'm most looking forward to the James Webb Telescope [1]. It's expected to be launched as soon as 2007!

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

There's one extremely important nuance here people are skirting over. Facebook is not "enabling" e.g. mob violence in India. It's not even the internet "enabling" these things. These acts existed long before the internet. All the internet has changed is allowing people to organize into these groups more easily. How is this related to Facebook? Well they're organizing through Facebook (or related properties) to do these things, yet it's clear that Facebook is not the a priori cause here. We still might want to declare them guilty as a facilitator rather than an enabler, but I'm not sure how reasonable even that is.

In particular there is no specific company necessary to communicate or connect on the internet. There are even fully decentralized messaging programs that operate independent of anything besides an internet connection. The reason it's easy to blame Facebook is because they are a net ill on society for many reasons aside from the ones being discussed here, they have a founder that's both remarkably visible and remarkably uncharismatic, and they or related properties are one of the most common methods of organization simply because they have, by a wide margin, the greatest marketshare of all means to organize.

But I think blaming Facebook for e.g. mob violence in India is akin to blaming the Bell System (which held a monopoly on telephone connections from the 19th century until they were broken up in the 1980s into AT&T, Verizon, etc) for e.g. the KKK organizing through telephone calls. In other words this a people problem, not a company problem. You're not going to solve this through some sort of content filtering or clever algorithms. I have absolutely no love for Facebook, but I think turning them into a scape goat for any social ill is hardly productive. It means you're going to spend all your energy shooting at one target that has nothing to do with what you're actually aiming for.

The person you're responding to is undoubtedly referring to the ability to link cause with effect. As such "cognitive manageability" doesn't mean simple. Relativity is far from simple, but it's cognitively manageable - as is the fundamental science and engineering knowledge used when designing and ultimately constructing skyscrapers.

To give an example of something that is not cognitively manageable, aside from climate, consider the stock market. We can create a million correlations to the stock market. And these correlations themselves all hold true. And there is an immense, literally unlimited, amount of profit to be made if somebody could combine these correlations into a way that could create meaningful predictive value. There's no doubt that billions, if not trillions, of dollars have been spent in pursuit of such. Yet prediction seems to remain impossible. And that's in a field with a fraction of the variables of climate change.

The question is what effect does coddling vs doubting have on an individual's personal development? Does actively praising individuals, regardless of whether they 'truly' deserve it, encourage them to work harder or does it encourage complacence? Some research I've read has indicated that the praise itself is what ends up being desired, with a diminishing interest on the field from which the praise was derived.

Ultimately the preponderance of these 'driven by adversity' anecdotes is something that I do not think is a coincidence. It certainly also worked as a motivator in my life. Had Karpov been openly praised and supported from the start would he have become the person he did? Had Karjakin not been hailed as imminent world champion from his youngest years, might he now stand above even Carlsen?

And these are genuine questions. I don't know the answer and I don't think anybody does. But it's something that I think is important since, if this turns out to be the case, it could mean that the educational path places such as the US have set upon could be entirely regressive.

There's an interesting anecdote in the chess world. Mikhail Botvinnik [1] was a longtime former world champion and would go on to become the 'patriarch' of Soviet chess, which would dominate the world scene in chess for many decades. In the early 60s a child was invited to Botvinnik's school for an assessment and possible training. Upon evaluating the child and his games and 'feel' for chess, Botvinnik remarked, "This boy has no clue about chess, and there's no future for him in this profession."

The boy he was talking about was Anatoly Karpov [2]. Karpov would go on to become world champion once Bobby Fischer failed to defend his title. But far from winning by default he took the title and held onto it for many years becoming one of the most dominant and active world champions of all time. He ceded his title only once once Garry Kasparov came onto the scene.

And really I think these sort of anecdotes are rife among many who go onto achieve great things. One of the many reasons I think the current trends in school of trying to encourage and reward children, particularly taken to the extreme with things such as participation trophies, are likely deeply misguided and being driven by intuition rather than data in an area where the latter often contradicts the former.

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

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoly_Karpov

In astronomy one aberrant observation is enough to completely revolutionize the field or destroy a previously esteemed view. It's not based on melting pot models and so a single mistake indicates something is wrong, perhaps fundamentally wrong. Consider that decades before relativity was discovered we knew very well that something was very broken because Mercury's expected orbit was off by 1/100th of a degree per century.

By contrast, how would you propose falsifying a climate model? Each decade or so we gain another chunk of data we can use to try to trial predictions of the past and, to date, they've done quite abysmally except in the most broad sense of a longterm gradual increase in temperatures. For instance from 2001 and 2010 the warming slowed to 0.11C per decade. [1] For the 17 years before then was 0.17C. There was not a single model that predicted this and, in spite of a number of after the fact hypotheses for that apparent decline, there is still no decisive answer. In a science that was more heavily dependent upon testing, this would be a ground-shaking event. But it's effect on climate science has been relatively minimal.

[1] - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/did-global-warmin...

The problem with this is that numerically we work far less than ever before. We work nearly 200 fewer hours per year today than we did just a few decades ago! [1] I think people's discontent is about something much more fundamental. People's lives are pretty pointless. In times past, I think war, overt inequity, and nationalism gave people things to fight for. That's not to say we live in a utopia now a days, of course far from it. But the causes for our problems today are far less clear and solutions even less so. And so what is the point of people's lives?

This hypothesis I also think helps explain the explosive rise in things ranging from 'internet activism' which often results in little more than hurting mostly innocent individuals to the sharp increase in radicalism and division in US politics when actual differences, in spite of rhetoric, are little more than two sides of the same coin. People are trying to find meaning in their lives and its manifesting as it always has throughout humanity's history - division and conflict.

[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USAAHWEP

China at one time tried to move towards a social economic system. It was optimistically labeled their 'Great Leap Forward.' We can debate whether it was socialism or communism, but it's irrelevant. And indeed during this time there was little to nothing in the way of lingering and emotional poetry being widely shared bemoaning the conditions of work and the lesser relevance of the individual. And that's because people had more pressing matters. Some 30,000,000 - 50,000,000 Chinese starved, to death, in a period of about 4 years. That is upwards of 5% of the country. To put a face to those numbers, imagine every individual you've ever seen or known. And now imagine 1 out of every 20 of them starving to death in the next 4 years.

The current huge progress in China has been because they've become a capitalist nation in every way except name. Capitalism does not create utopias. It results in massive inequality, and there will always be a demand for the worldwide lowest common denominator of labor costs. But at the same time it creates a system where individuals can achieve immense success through their own merit and one where you don't have people dying of starvation.

The point of this is that you can't compare what we have to utopia. It's almost certainly literally impossible to achieve utopia with our current resources and technology. Instead you need to compare what we have to what else we could realistically have. And the current system is pretty bad. It just happens to be better, by a pretty wide margin, than every other system we've been able to consider and trial.

Why, in particular have you become more pessimistic about the timelines for robotics? I've also been headed this way, but it's as a complete outsider of the field simply extrapolating directionality comparing promises to deliverables with the former exponentially outpacing the seemingly linear, at best, progress of the latter. Interestingly the same is also true of many other fields from genetics, to AI, to molecular nanotechnology. The latter being a radical example of something going from 'the next big thing to revolutionize society' to all but disappearing in a period of < 10 years.

I would agree with you in general, but at the same time I think there is key nuance of perspective here. "Human friendly rules" can be seen as unwelcome authoritarianism in different cultures, or even by different people within the same culture. In other words "human friendly" is an expression of your own personal views and values, which are subjective and well... personal.

Let's create an example, which is not all that hypothetical. There seems to be an increasingly large body of evidence indicating that social media is simply a net ill, potentially quite a severe one, on society. Do you begin to censor/prohibit it, or do you allow it to run mostly as it will? In our culture the answer is clear. We value freedom as something in and of itself, even when the outcomes it produces are not desirable. Yet it's certainly not particularly hard to imagine that another culture might see that eliminating these sort of events would be something that would contribute towards a 'healthier' society, even if we remove any notion of government control from however 'healthier' is defined. The actors making decisions in both cases would believe they're acting in a 'human friendly way' yet come to completely different conclusions.

A logical problem here is that a 100 million people would be far more than enough to decide any and all elections. They could put 'Mr. Cause' into office at every single level of government if there was ever anything like 100 million people willing to agree on something and put forth the modicum of effort required to show up at a polling place. No money necessary.