aalleavitch

The degree to which science has advanced since the Webb project started can't be understated either. We have a fundamentally better understanding of the technology available and what we even want to look at. Much better to simply move onto the next project, of which there are currently very many.

What if he's not a genius and actually he's just some guy, and his wealth is actually arbitrary.

Absolutely chilling thought, eh?

Those are both things you can just hire someone else to do.

The only two things that matter for success in entrepreneurship are who you know and who you decide to trust. Both knowledge and attitude only matter insofar as they influence those two things.

We're closer than you'd think. Chlorophyll is only something like 28% efficient at absorbing sunlight, we have experimental solar panels pushing 45%. Collecting wavelengths the plants don't use and then lighting them only in wavelengths they do use has a significant potential for efficiency gains, though we're not quite there yet...

Yes, soil, temperature, and weather control are huge, as is the lack of need for pesticides. Hard to over-state how much controlled environments can improve yields and crop quality and reduce costs of maintenance (in return for large initial capital investment).

I'm not sure you actually understand how legitimately scared we all are.

A great way to get rid of outrage culture, btw, would be to get rid of all the systems generating the outrage.

This is not a one-in-a-million event, this is not something that no one could've predicted, many people predicted it and we blithely ignored them. This is the direct consequence of our consistent policies and behavior. This is like standing 99 feet from a cliff and saying "well the next 100 feet in front of me is 99% solid ground and 1% air, sounds safe to me!" and then walking right off of the cliff.

> Well, this was a one in a million thing. Nobody could have predicted the world to just shut down for six months, and it's not productive to plan for it.

This is the most shocking hubris I've witnessed in a long time.

> And taking on debt to do it isn't inherently irresponsible. In fact, it's just a wise financial decision when interest rates are low. New revenue streams aren't required to be generated -- it's just shifting a subset of future revenue to the present.

I don't know how someone could possibly make this statement RIGHT NOW of all times? How many businesses are sitting on the edge of folding right now? Whoops! Looks like all that future revenue didn't show up! Guess who's going to suffer for these decisions? Not the investors, they sold out! How about all the employees who just had all the blood sucked out of their job security and future livelihood?

In what sense are investors in this scenario not just hostile parasites? At least if it were dividends then the investors would have any sort of remaining long-term interest in the success of the company, and not just how they can most quickly disentangle themselves from taking any responsibility for the survival of the company that they ostensibly had ownership over by gulping down revenue it didn't even generate yet? In what sense is the investor not crippling the company and leaving it weaker than they found it? It's vampirism! Just because the money is there for the taking doesn't mean you should, it doesn't mean that what you're doing isn't irresponsible and even morally reprehensible.

You create a nightmarescape of shambling zombie companies just waiting for a global pandemic to remind them that they're all already dead. Enjoy your artificially juiced stock value after it craters because our entire economy is short of legs to stand on.

> If eugenics doesn't work then how come every single Border Collie is smarter than every single English Bulldog?

This statement is worse than wrong; it's nonsense.

Even if you come up for some very specific metric of intelligence that you think is valid (which will always involve the use of some limited test constrained by subjective considerations) you're still wrong! Not every single Border Collie will perform better than every single English Bulldog, at best you will find some consistent comparison between averages, which is absurdly far from the same thing.

Centralization is great, isn't it?

If the company could not possibly get that $1,000 in any other way, then yes the employee is worth $1,000. Without the willing participation of labor, a company cannot produce. If labor is fooled or coerced into working for less than it's worth (say, because otherwise they'll starve or lack health insurance), they are not operating in a free market. They are not getting paid according to their value.

This is all very self-indulgent. People don't get paid what they're worth, they get paid the smallest amount someone can get them to accept.

To be fair, all that is really required for human extinction is for us to start firing our nukes. Geopolitically destabilizing events increase the potential for that considerably.

That's not in any way to say that climate change must necessarily lead to thermonuclear war or anything so dramatic as that, but human extinction is a real threat hanging over our heads at all times. It's something worth being worried about.

Yeah, honestly, that sounds exactly like a Berkeley student to me.

We don't have the luxury of eating the investment on a "dry hole" when this is a global phenomenon. How is the path of highest caution not warranted here? What exactly are we losing by aggressively switching to renewables?

This isn't an academic question. It is an incredibly practical one.

Even if this is the case, addressing the issues caused by CO2 emissions would reveal that there were other sources of environmental damage at work. I just cannot see any incentive in not directly addressing CO2 emissions except to protect the profits of fossil fuel companies. I can't imagine a world where we're more worried about protecting fossil fuel companies because they're being bullied by the big mean sugarcane companies. We should be rooting out all actors looking to benefit from actions with negative externalities.

How much money do you think is in the "university industry" as opposed to the oil industry? Hint hint: one lives on charitable donations from the other.

Seriously, the idea that environmental activists and professors could ever hold a candle to the resources of an $4.6 trillion industry is laughable.

That's just stepping up tactics: most bots aren't engaged with, you hook someone then you use that opportunity to make yourself appear valid. You only need one person doing this for a sea of bots.

This is nonsense. The only agenda here is money. Those bots are all twisting discussion towards climate denialism and in support of fossil fuel companies. You can draw a straight line to mass disinformation from the budgets of major oil companies. It's a PR expense, and why wouldn't they? On the margin it's in their interests and they won't have to foot the bill from any sort of environmental issues that follow. They don't have to care if the world burns.

You can't have pure science in a world where financial incentives are towards lies and obfuscation. This isn't justifiable skepticism, this is information warfare.

Do they need to be so complex? Would it not make as much sense for Intel to be broken up into a large number of individual autonomous entities that then cooperate with each other on their own terms?

Worker-owned co-ops are a cure for all of this.

Is perplexity related to the Shannon entropy?

Seems like this might make sense, with the exception of social niceties the point of human communication is to transfer information that was hitherto unknown.

Yeah this might not turn out good for us.

Isn't it because in Hebrew (and other ancient languages) the letters are also numbers?

This would be a nightmare, the average consumer has absolutely no capacity to make informed judgments on their own healthcare, they would get eaten alive, and historically they have been.

Check out AntsCanada on YouTube, he films tons of ants behavior that is really fascinating to watch.