exoverito

That's because the Democrats are corrupt and have no platform beyond managed decline. We just had sickly king Theoden in office with a coven of Grima Wormtongues controlling the executive. Kamala Harris is an empty suit devoid of original thought, and quite obviously only selected for her identity. When asked how she would be any different, she said Biden was an old white man and she was not. She couldn't speak even in the most favorable venues like Oprah, and refused to go on Joe Rogan's podcast because she would have obviously imploded and humiliated herself.

It's stunning how far the Democrats have fallen. They've been completely co-opted by the PMC class and simply use identity politics to distract from their utter inability to deliver on anything. One need only look at the sad state of California, its massively delayed and over-budget high speed rail to nowhere, homelessness and decay, over-regulation inhibiting everything including the beloved green energy projects, etc. Texas literally has more green energy and cheaper electricity than California because they let people build, which can even be seen in their falling rents. Progressives can't allow that because it might 'change the character of a neighborhood', which is ironically one of the most conservative and anti-progress positions you could take.

True, much of that is because old people are the only ones still watching legacy media like cable news, which have repeatedly torched their credibility. Young people tend to get their news from podcasts and social media, which tends to not be as blatantly controlled.

Unfortunately you could level the same type of name calling towards Democrats. It's now public record they colluded with all the major media outlets, coerced big tech to censor and debank opponents, imprisoned whistleblowers, violated bodily autonomy with unconstitutional mandates, weaponized the courts to conduct lawfare, and now issued an unprecedented number of pre-emptive pardons for unspecified crimes committed by Fauci, Hunter Biden, et al.

I remember when the Democrats were the anti-war party, but Biden was escalating the Ukraine war in the final days of his presidency, and celebrated Dick Cheney's endorsement of Kamala Harris. Crazy how things have changed so much. The left unanimously viewed Bush and Cheney as obviously psychopathic war criminals, and now almost all the Neocons have jumped over to the Democrats. The left used to be extremely skeptical of globalization as evident by the Seattle WTO Protests, mass immigration as evident by Bernie Sanders' comments on its effect on workers' wages, and Big Pharma's perverse incentives to keep people sick and regularly consuming drugs. Yet the media has utterly psyop'd the progressives... it's kinda disturbing.

Probably not as humorous as this: https://i.redd.it/000igemozcl61.jpg

The Berlin Wall was officially called the "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart". Russia claims they are fighting in Ukraine to denazify their regime. North Korea is called the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

A bit naive to take these self-appointed labels at face value.

Can you tell me what the Department of Education has measurably accomplished since its establishment in 1979? Inflation adjusted spending per student has increased by about 3X since then, and test scores have not improved, even falling in recent years. Financial aid for college has perversely led to vastly overinflated tuitions, while subsidizing many useless degrees.

These problems are not a simple matter of funding. One need only at California's High Speed Rail project. Costs have soared from early estimates of $15B to now more than $130B+, despite almost no track being laid over the last 15 years. This is in a one party state with complete Democrat control, so you can't blame Republicans.

Bureaucratic mismanagement and inefficiency are the overwhelming problems now.

The significant increase in non-binary gender identity and rapid onset gender dysphoria suggests there's a cultural factor at work. A 2021 systematic review found mixed results for transgender brain structures mirroring their self-identified sex, with most neuroanatomical measures mapping to their birth sex.

Though I agree with you that development is messy. We should be much more concerned about exposing children to endocrine disruptors, micro-plastics, and bizarre social dogmas.

Medicine is extremely complex and medical errors are the 4th leading cause of death in the US. The science on the next steps of treatment is often incomplete, variable, and dependent on the practitioners' experience. You shouldn't simply trust your doctor, but instead get a second opinion at minimum, and probably a third and fourth if you're able. It's best to triangulate on the problem, searching out varying perspectives from subject matter experts, listening to how they disagree, in order to better understand reality.

Baltimore would be a counterexample. They spend $22k per student, with a student-teacher ratio of 15 to 1. This still results in remarkably poor performance, with only 8% of students proficient in math and 22% in reading.

Culture and genetics would be next obvious explanations.

The CIA was actively involved in the Maidan revolution, which sought to pull Ukraine out of Russia's sphere of influence and into the EU / NATO. Obviously this is antagonistic towards Russia, especially when they have so few natural barriers to defend against invasion of their land. Look at how quickly the Wagner group reached Moscow after defecting from the Ukrainian front.

If the shoe were on the other foot, and China had supported a revolution in Mexico and was setting up military bases, the American government would not take it lightly. The US would cook up some reason to wage war against Mexico as a continuation of the Monroe Doctrine. These wars are not about good and evil, as much as it's about empires and power.

Increased spending is the simplistic solution. Government spending as percentage of GDP is 35%, compared to about 25% in the 50s/60s. Since then inflation-adjusted spending per student has increased by roughly 3X with no measurable increase in test scores. Baltimore spends 21k/yr per student, with abysmal results. College tuition prices have increased far more than inflation, in large part due to federal student loans. The USA spends more on healthcare as a percentage of GDP than any other country, with insane markups on routine procedures. The California High Speed Rail project has taken 15 years to do environmental reviews and lay a few miles of track in the middle of nowhere, all while costs have grown to more than 128B from its initial estimates of 10B.

Giving money to ineffective organizations is throwing good money after bad. I'd love to see competent government that can effectively use funds, but I'm not seeing a lot of evidence for it these days. There needs to be deep reform and anti-corruption efforts. Good luck doing that without the status quo powers pulling out all their dirty tricks.

Luckily most of my courses did not require textbooks. Though it was easy enough to get PDFs on libgen.

To be fair the American government acts like an enemy to most of its people too.

Large cryptocurrency networks like Bitcoin are extremely hard to execute a 51% attack upon due to their size. Though ultimately there's no perfect solution. As the saying goes, democracy is 2 wolves and 1 sheep deciding on what's for dinner.

Blockchains facilitate trustless transactions enabling truly decentralized currencies not under the control of any government. Many people find this quite valuable, as evident by recent trends in authoritarian overreach, fiscal repression, and inflation. Privacy optimized cryptocurrencies like Monero also deal with the problem of their blockchain 'providing evidence in court.'

Calcium carbonate aerosols are proposed as a good alternative to sulfur dioxide since they are basic and do not react with ozone. Calcium carbonate is used an additive to soils to reduce acidity and is used by organisms to construct bone tissues. Furthermore, these aerosols would be extremely diffuse. It's estimated that we'd need 5 million tons of sulfur dioxide per year to reduce temperatures by 1 degree centrigrade. Assuming we need 10 million tons of calcium carbonate that eventually descends to the Earth, that would come out to be 0.0196g per square meter. Effectively negligible, and may even be beneficial for areas that have slightly acidic rains.

I also find it interesting that climate change has taken the role of eschatology for an increasingly secular society, and I say this as an atheist. The industrial revolution acts as original sin, mother nature will give us her final judgment, we must all atone by buying climate pledge products from Amazon, etc. Western secular liberals don't realize how religious they actually are.

We've observed the immediate effects of stratospheric aerosols in living history, as with volcanic eruptions and forest fires reducing temperatures significantly. We don't know their long term effects, though most aerosols only stay suspended in the atmosphere for a limited time. CO2 is a much less powerful greenhouse gas in absolute magnitude than aerosols are anti-greenhouse gases, so we don't need long range modelling to understand they can cool the Earth in the short term.

My point is that mitigation strategies like stratospheric aerosol injection would be far more effective in the worst case climate scenarios than trying to spend many trillions on direct air capture of CO2, intermittent energy sources, grid scale batteries, punitive regulations, etc. I also find it interesting that all the elites seem to relish in the climate change narrative, they bring Greta Thunberg to admonish them, they fly their private jets to the conferences, still own their beach front properties. Revealed preferences would suggest they don't actually believe it to be that big an issue, and that it's more likely yet another scheme for increasing their power and extracting wealth from the public.

By women of color do you mean African Americans? Soul food is notoriously unhealthy and probably why Black Women are the most obese demographic in America. Changing diet would absolutely be necessary, though the deeper problem is their surrounding cultural norms.

Climate is the premier example of a non-linear chaotic system, as evoked with the butterfly effect and unreliability of weather forecasts more than a week out. Making predictions of the far future state of chaotic systems is obviously going to have wide error bars. In just the past couple thousand years there has been significant climate change with little ice ages and warm periods. Notably, the colder climates have generally been far more destructive to civilization than the warm periods.

A sober approach would weigh the pros and cons of climate change and cost benefit analyses of the various mitigation strategies. Climate alarmists advocate degrowth in the extreme, or spending many trillions on intermittent energy sources and impractical energy storage systems. This would obviously reduce human well-being as energy consumption per capita is tightly correlated with standards of living. The costs of climate change are still unknown, and it could very well be the case that higher CO2 levels do not increase global temperatures to catastrophic levels, as evident with life thriving during the Carboniferous Era. Increasing CO2 levels would also be beneficial due to the CO2 fertilization effect, effectively greening the Earth, while also increasing agricultural yields as observed in greenhouses. And if temperatures rise too much then stratospheric aerosol injection is always an option. Calcium carbonate could be a good alternative to sulfur dioxide since it doesn't react with ozone, and cooling the Earth is estimated to cost only a few billion a year.

Obviously energy independence and ecological preservation should still be pursued for their own sake. Yet we should be careful of succumbing to hysteria and malinvestment.

Entropy is inexorable and must always be resisted. Humans need to drink water and eat food, again, and again, and again. Unimaginable amounts of time, effort, and resources are spent every day maintaining civilization. If we build out solar panels, we will have to replace them in 20 years. There is no free lunch.

We don't know how bad the climate will be at 800 ppm. 300 millions years ago, during the Carboniferous era, there were vast forests and very high CO2 levels, around 1000 to 5000 ppm. If the Earth gets too hot we will simply do stratospheric aerosol injection. If climate change turns out to be overhyped, then we get the CO2 fertilization boost for free, win-win.

Regardless, the real solution is next level energy production from advanced fission, deep geothermal, and ultimately fusion power. With a vast surplus of energy we could do wildly impractical things like filter sea water for gold, and of course extract extremely diffuse gases from the atmosphere. Renewable energies are very low energy density, and more akin to farming from a physics perspective. They make sense in certain situations, but are not reliable for powering an advanced industrial civilization.

I also suspect people's intuitions are out of perspective in terms of time scales. It seems likely AGI will arise within the next 20 years. Climate change is nothing compared to the singularity and rise of superintelligence.

The optimal CO2 level for plant growth is between 800 and 1000 ppm, as observed within greenhouses.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/plant-science/articles/...

There is no perfect solution. One of the benefits of stratospheric aerosols is that they only stay suspended for 10 years or so, reducing the risk of long term effects. They are also an exceptionally cheap strategy, on the order of a few billion a year to cool the entire Earth. Compare that with the many trillions needed to just get to carbon neutral, while significantly reducing economic growth and living standards.

The world we were born into will not exist in any scenario. As they saying goes, you never step in the same river twice. CO2 emissions show no sign of decreasing, especially as China, India and Africa continue developing. Furthermore, we are on the cusp of AGI within the next decade or so, which will radically change reality far more than the Earth possibly getting a bit warmer in a 100 years or so. The IPCC does not even predict major cataclysm, and expects only sea level rise of a couple feet in the worst case scenario.

There will always billions in losses from something, especially when global wealth is estimated to be around 450 trillion. The Dust Bowl was a disastrous incident of climate change, yet it didn't occur because of CO2. The damage caused by the California Wildfires are just as much a function of expanding developments into forests, immediately putting out small fires leading to the accumulation of fuel over time, and opposition to controlled burns. Property damage and deaths from flooding are mostly a function of population growth in the developing world, without sufficient corresponding investment in water management infrastructure.

Regarding the solution, stratospheric aerosol injection would be the most immediate and effective solution to rising temperatures. It's been estimated that current increases in CO2 have a radiative forcing effect of about 2 watts per square meter, compared to the total solar irradiance of 1361 W/m2. If CO2 levels doubled to 800 ppm then it's estimated this would have a radiative forcing effect of 6 W/m2. This scenario would require mitigation strategies like stratospheric aerosol injection to reduce solar irradiance by about 0.4%. In the context of plant growth this reduction in sunlight would be negligible given that photosynthesis is only 1 to 2% efficient. If anything we should see significantly accelerated plant growth by about 10 to 50% due to the CO2 fertilization effect at 800ppm.

Yes, proof of stake like Ethereum's blockchain is more energy efficient. However it could potentially be less secure.

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

The users of BTC also pay for that electricity consumption, and value is derived from having a ledger that is not controlled by any government. Building out clean energy sources is the real solution like nuclear, deep geothermal, solar, wind, etc.

Current nuclear fission reactors can safely and reliably supply all our electricity needs. France rapidly built out their nuclear fleet in response to the 1973 oil crisis, achieving more than 70% of their electricity generation within 20 years. If the political will is there, it can be done.

The problem is that Western elites are corrupt and incompetent. They foolishly outsourced their manufacturing to a rival nation, which is now the rising superpower. Germany shut down its nuclear reactors and spent hundreds of billions on solar, while their manufacturing sector implodes from high electricity prices.

Corporate elites are increasingly extractive as exemplified by rising wealth gap, housing / healthcare / education costs, enshittification of internet platforms, etc. Any narrative which justifies price increases is gleefully propagated by the media hegemons. Climate change is used to markup prices on everything so consumers can feel self-righteous paying through the nose. Yet none of this will make a difference. China, India, and Africa will continue burning the cheapest fuels available to support their development.

Exactly. In San Diego the peak electricity price is $0.75/kWH, the highest in the continental USA. There is literally a functional nuclear reactor sitting idle a few miles north at San Onofre, and NIMBYs oppose nearly everything all new construction and upzoning.

California is not a good model for almost anything these days, just look at the high speed rail project. Cost of living is worsening for the middle and lower classes who are emigrating to other states. The government is corrupt and inefficient, spending vast sums on homelessness while achieving effectively nothing. Progressives can't blame anyone but themselves since California is a one party state with no real opposition.

Corporations also conspire, especially those deeply embedded in the military industrial complex.

Anecdotally speaking I use google search much less frequently and instead opt for GPT4. This is also what a number of my colleagues are doing as well.

China certainly would win from America going into civil war.

It would be wise for American elites to focus on fixing the causes of unrest, but instead they use corporate media to blame the people for their distrust of the establishment.

Interestingly, the same corporate media pushed the narrative that the George Floyd riots were about police brutality. This is only true in a facile sense, the video was the catalyst. The major causes were intense psychological stress from unprecedented lockdowns, economic implosion, and incessant fear of the virus. In a form of ideological judo they redirected all the anger and angst that had been building up towards a scapegoat. A classic trick rulers use on the ruled.

That particular plot point is about denying all solar energy to the machines. Needless to say it's a fictional movie and more serious calculations should motivate our analyses.

It's been estimated that current increases in CO2 have a radiative forcing effect of about 2 watts per square meter, compared to the total solar irradiance of 1361 W/m2. If CO2 levels doubled to 800 ppm then it's estimated this would have a radiative forcing effect of 6 W/m2. This scenario would require mitigation strategies like stratospheric aerosol injection to reduce solar irradiance by about 0.4%. In the context of plant growth this reduction in sunlight would be negligible given that photosynthesis is only 1 to 2% efficient. If anything we should see significantly accelerated plant growth by about 10 to 50% due to the CO2 fertilization effect at 800ppm.

The alternatives consist of completely replacing all energy infrastructure, which will cost trillions of dollars and significantly reduce economic growth. We can already see the negative effects of these policies in Europe, such as Germany which irrationally shut down their nuclear reactors, pushed the deployment of solar, while ultimately relying on Russian natural gas. They now burn more coal than they did before, and risk deindustrializing due to high energy costs. This is an epic strategic blunder since China, India, and Africa will continue burning hydrocarbons irrespective of the West's economic self-sabotage.

There's also no realistic way to extract the amount of CO2 that's been emitted into the atmosphere. Simple thermodynamics would have us expend far more energy than we cumulatively gained from burning hydrocarbons since the industrial revolution to extract such an extremely diffuse gas from the atmosphere.

Sure, though it seems there are a number of near term paths for improvement. Short and long term memory mechanisms would go a long way towards active learning. Fine tuning could be iteratively performed through mechanisms like low rank adaptation. It's been hypothesized that this is one of the purposes of sleep, and humans are consolidating memories during dreams.

Britain halved their emissions primarily because the West has been deindustrializing and offshoring their production to China. Global CO2 emissions have still increased significantly in the past 35 years, so these national figures are mostly just accounting tricks.

Also if things get bad we can just use stratospheric aerosols to cool the Earth. Terraforming would be like a thousandth the cost of trying to completely replace all energy infrastructure by 2050. I'm not opposed to building more sensible energy production like advanced fission, but given how slow, inefficient, and expensive infrastructure has become in the West I wouldn't bet that net zero happens by 2050, especially without decimating the middle classes.