beefield

I have this feeling that with the increasing complexity and sophistication of the technical environment/tools we have in our hands, there is an increasing amount of people simply unable to cope with everyday challenges of modern society.

Of course, there have always been these kind of people, but in the old days they were easily identified groups of disabled and elderly people, who, most importantly, understood also themselves that they need help.

The bleak future I see that increasing amount of normal people with normal intelligence are just going to be financially destroyed, all while they themselves believe that they are fully qualified and justified to decide whether their money is "invested" in the next cryptard scheme, sent to a nigerian prince to get millions, or put in a crappy health insurance covering accidents once in a blue moon, instead of those damn government elite experts taking their money and actually providing health care and pension. And after they are destroyed, they become even more hostile against the "elite experts" who just seem to be laughing at their faces "told you so".

(To be extremely clear here: I believe intelligence is a highly multi-dimensional thing. And yu can be intelligent only in very limited dimensions. so practically all of us - me very much included - are morons in most of the dimensions. So I am not pointing here to any specific group, but all of us are vulnerable in some dimension. I may be able to above average avoiding certain kind of scams, but I am for sure vulnerable - even laughable stupid looking afterwards - for face-to-face friendly scams. Which, luckily to me, are typically not expensive.)

Unfortunately I have no good solution anywhere in sight. The best idea I have so far is to mock online the idiots who think Ayn Rand was a genius. I have to admit, though, that even that is likely to be useless even in the best case, so most of the time I try to just bite my lip.

Obligatory John Rogers quote:

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

> With solar and wind being so competitive on price (both per MW and MWh) I don't understand why there's not more of it.

You need to be a bit more patient. solar / wind have been growing double digit percentages (from the top of my head something like 20-30%) p.a. now for some time. Just to compare, iPhone had never two consecutive full production years that would have had triple digit growth. And arguably increasing production capacity for energy infrastructure is more difficult than for a phone. So the 20-30% p.a. growth is likely the best we can have, and I'd argue even that is explosive. Given current growth rates, majority of electricity production should be solar/wind within the next decade or so.

I think we have something that should do the PID for overall economy. It's called The Central Bank, and it is a damn difficult job.

> So if for instance some company creates a token, and says that there can be 10 billion of the token, and reserves them all for itself, and then sells 1 million of them to outside investors for $1 each, then the market cap of that token is $1 million ($1 times 1 million circulating tokens), while the fully diluted market cap is $10 billion ($1 times 10 billion total tokens), and the issuer’s 9,999,000,000 remaining tokens have a value, on this math, of $9.999 billion.

I have had for a while this secret plan to become the richest person in the world by a wide margin. Because I seem to be too lazy to actually execute it, I think it is better to just publish it for the hope that someone else does it:

So, the plan is to create a new cryptocurrency called Googolcoin (GGC). The supply of the coin would be - as the name implies, 10^100 GGC. I would pre-mine all but say 1000 of them for myself and leave the rest for miners. Then I would start making the market and put all of my GGC for sale, at a price of $1/GGC. Of course, I would also put offer to buy as many GGC as anyone wants to sell at say $0.7/GGC. Then I would go and bribe someone and buy one GGC from me. And there you have it. My net worth would be orders of magnitude greater than all other wealth in the earth combined! Take that, Elon.

(If my reader at this point has not realized that the concept of market cap for cryptocurrencies is stupidest thing since... well previous stupidest thing, I would recommend selling your crypto ASAP.)

I feel bad that my tax money is going to be spent to feed crypto scammers when they end up in jail. I wonder if we could come up with a law that makes crypto-related fraud, scams, hacking and theft completely legal? After all, one of the main selling points of crypto has been that they do not want to have anything to do with centralized government, so why should government care? Let them sort it themselves.

(There are some challenges with this idea on what comes to violence and threat of violence, as I am not probably willing to make those legal in any case, but maybe those could be solved somehow.)

> We don't even have the metal supplies to fully electrify car production,

Okay, I need to say that you are not even wrong. Yep, I am slightly irritated on this blatantly false claim that has started popping up. If you think your claim has any merit, could you please provid the metal that you think we are lacking, estimat the amount needed and compare that amoun to the amount in earth's crust. If you get anything but infinitesmally small needs compared to what here is, please explain why that metal can't be replaced.

Just to note, that is making pretty questionable assumptions to get to the conclusion that there are not enough metals. For example, they assume that there is a set need of cobalt/nickel per kWh of lithium batteries, which obviously is completely false (see LFP chemistry). They also use 2018 reserves as the yardstick, completely oblivious to the fact that already by 2021 the lithium reserves had increased compared to 2018 by more than what their own numbers say a generation of EVs need.

Broadly speaking, either they are financially illiterate, or they like gambling. Or both.

> never replace a terminal based app, with a GUI based app and expect productivity gains

I can imagine this being true. It seems that almost the whole software industry has failed to grasp the distinction between an appliance and a tool. An appliance you expect almost anyone to be able to use without training. A tool, well you are expected to learn how to use it, and after that, you are much more productive than before. And most software seems to be moving towards appliance.

It's not fallacy to note that the theory has worked between democratic countries remarkably well, but failed between democratic and not so democratic countries. Thus my call to re-evaluate trade relationships with not so democratic countries.

Until a very short time ago there was a widespread idea belief mutual trade stabilizes relationships in addition to all kind of other nice stuff. Now, that belief has shattered, and it seems to apply only when the participants of the trade have somewhat similar attitudes regarding e.g. democracy. Of course, it takes a while to leave your old loved ideas, but I think that here in the developed countries it would be time to start a real and serious discussion regarding trade policies with countries that are not happy to pursue democratic governance. (Yep, China is the big elephant in this room)

> The bottleneck is rarely how fast you can type or edit the code; it's how fast you can reason about the code.

That's the reason why I have been not learning to touch type for the last decade or so. I just have this strong feeling that it's my brain, not my fingers that is the bottleneck. At the same time, I somehow acknowledge that being able to touch type could in some still undefined way to me increase my productivity.

As we are talking about Sweden, a relatively cold country, a big chunk of energy consumption is about heating. And heat is a form of energy that is much easier to storage than electricity. I very much assume that even seasonal storage of heat is becoming a big thing in coming years, dwarfing any chemical battery capacity whatsoever. After all, for that, in the most basic form, you need a big enough pool of water connected to electric grid with a resistor and to district heating system with a heat exchanger.

To put it nice, I would be careful to use that report to back any argument whatsoever. To come up with their conclusion they e.g. basically assumed LFP battery chemistry does not exist. (To be more accurate, they assumed that there is a set amount of nickel/cobalt you need to produce a kWh of lithium batteries) The conclusion also requires that no significant new reserves are found after 2018, which already now is proven false. (Lithium reserves have increased since 2018 by more than what a single generation of EVs need.)

Yes, but we are there already in many applications where we need to pad the core for abrasion and handling. Making the core even more smaller makes no big benefit - unless it is substantially cheaper than the competition.

And to be clear, I believe there are multiple applications for higher tensile strength fibers. I just can't see that many applications where thinner ropes than current technology produces would be a game changer.

I'm not sure what you want to quit. You kind of seem to imply that drinking as a social thing is what you enjoy, but not being intoxicated by alcohol. If that is what you meant, I'd recommend giving a shot to non-alcoholic drinks. There is nowadays a wide range of alcohol-free wines, beers, mocktails and even a ginger shot is nice.

If you mean that the first kick of alcohol intoxication is what you enjoy, but not further, then it is more difficult. In that case it sounds like you are (slowly) on your way towards alcoholism, and I would seek some professional help there.

Regarding ropes, for most practical applications I can think fro the top of my head, tensile strength is not actually that much of a limiting factor (especially with dyneema), but more the abrasion resistance and how easy it is to handle a rope.

I mean, you could in theory rappel from something like 2mm dyneema line with very comfortable safety margin on tensile strength alone, but 1. keeping a say 60m long 2mm line untangled is a serious headache, and I would not be comfortable holding my weight on the 2mm rope while letting it scratch against a rock wall .

Now, who would start to standardize lithium ion battery packs for different voltages? It would be quite nice to have a pile of packs of 12V that you can slap together to get the voltages 24, 36 and 48 as you need and all your tools from power drill to chainsaw, lawnmower and ebike could use the same packs - regardless of the brand.

(I assume there are some technical challenges regarding balancing a 1Ah pack with 80Ah pack when someone is going to slap them together to get 24V, but those can't be unsolvable.)

Install Whatsapp on a virtual android on your computer?

Just wondering if there is a betting market somewhere that would show odds for e.g. such a bug in the PoS that Ethereum needs to roll back to PoW within the next 6 months?

I had to google because I was pretty sure I had heard the story before. and I think I had... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29057134

Well, I consider myself being relatively open to all kinds of new ideas. But at some point you need to realize that certain genre is not going to give you any new insights and it's better to move on. For example, I have read total of three books published by CATO Institute, and and by standard Bayesian rules, it is going to take a lot of convincing to give them one more chance.

I need to check, are you sarcastic? I have so far avoided Lewis due to an impression (way too old impression to remember where I got it, may be unfounded or not) of the texts being close to christian/religious zealotry?

There are two problems with your definition:

1. The definition differs significantly from what people usually call money. Gold bar is a gold bar, not money.

2. It makes anything money. I can barter a basket of apples to a fish -> apples are money. That makes it difficult to create useful and interesting observations about the thing we usually call money.

You get easily into quite deep questions with money... Anyway, there are good reasons to argue that dollar bills owned by central banks are not money - at least in any meaningful sense. To see why, let's assume a central bank prints a bill with value of a googol dollars, that is 10^100 dollars and puts it in the vault. Is there any meaningful way that amount of money has just exploded? Do we see e.g. monetary inflation? No.

The moment when bills become money in meaningful sense is when they end up in circulation. And they end up in circulation, when - you guessed it - central bank lends them to banks. The bills are a liability of a central bank, thus they are a note which says that central bank owes that amount to holder, thus they are debt. Yep, I agree, this is confusing and requires very careful thinking.

I think the issue is more how "is" is defined. I like to think with following analogy: A knife can have lots of properties. A knife is sharp, long, dull, rusty etc. But fundamentally (Don't know if there is a better word for this) a knife is a piece of steel[1]. Similarly money has properties like being store of value, medium of exchange, unit of value, bits on a database of a bank etc. And fundamentally money is debt. Not all debt is money, though, but only debt with a set of specific properties. To add to the mess "what money is", if you go technical, you find there are many definitions for money, that is, many sets of properties that can be money (see e.g. M0, M1 etc.)

[1] Obviously, there are knifes made not from steel, but I hope you get the point anyway.

I've found that the best starting point understanding money and banking is understanding that all money is very literally, nothing more, nothing less than debt. Your "money at bank account"? Very fundamentally, nothing but a credible statement from the bank that they owe you the amount of money. Obviously, you do not need to have any assets in the first place to make the statement. To make it credible is a bit more difficult trick.

> Yes there is: a liter of water (see the beauty?)

There was /s at the end of the sentence, meaning I was sarcastic:)

> The metric system is such a beauty, that it's shocking that is not used everywhere.

You can check with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, I think he nails it. The imperial system is much more natural for people to grasp. A pound is roughly a fist sized rock, but there are no natural objects that weight around one kilogram. And one yard is roughly the length of a step, completely unlike a meter. And so forth. /s

Seriously, I propose a compromise. Europeans give up decimal comma and US gives up imperial measurements. Everyone wins.