Great illustrating artwork.
I wish people were making art like that today.
586 karma · joined May 17, 2016
I wish people were making art like that today.
I used to belong to a cult. Like many fundamentalist Christians the members took the events in Genesis as literal truth.
I once explained to a cult member that the order of events was incorrect. There is not one, but a series of conflicts with our scientific understanding of how the solar system formed. Notably the sun does not come into existence after the earth. I watched him read and re-read the chapter. He literally could not see it, even with it right in front of him.
If I was right, then I merely believed the scientific explanation for cosmic aggregation made sense.
If he believed what I believed, then he lost everything, friends, family, business connections.
For most people (not counting yourself, since you were sincere enough to bring up the hypothetical), having an honest conservation on this topic is impossible.
This is why I don't trust the narrative Western society presently has on race. It is of course possible that I am entirely wrong about my ideas on the subject, but attaching such sigma to the topic is a tell, like in poker, that the other side is bluffing. Anytime there is a sign saying 'Don't dig here', it is the job of a real scientist to grab his spade and thrust it firmly into loam to uncover what may be lying there. And if you don't like what you find, then too bad, the list of people who discovered scientific evidence contradicting their position is voluminous.
tldr; Darwin's ideas continue to detonate.
The basic cost of living (rent/council tax/water bills/food prices) has been gradually inflating while the cost of labour increased at a far more modest rate. This has been true for a long time. I think because it is a creeping thing it is harder to spot when the new normal began.
Anecdotal but several degree holders I knew in college (mostly accountants!) continue with prostitution afterwards as well because it is otherwise difficult to make ends meet.
The explanation I'm partial to is that the price of energy has stalled progress for most people in western society. When you look back to 1973 it is really quite dramatic but we are now used to high prices and the various accommodations made as side affects.
I know most people my age see 2008 as a break point, but the rot has been going on for much longer than that.
This is accurate. It is Moravec's Paradox.
I keep repeating it because there is a slew of newspaper articles since Trump's victory claiming that Silicon Valley destroyed the manufacturing jobs.
This isn't even wrong.
It is true that technology destroyed them, but we're talking about Industrial Revolution era technology.
Highly Repetitive manual tasks have been automated by machines. Finishing components and configuration of components is mostly performed in Chinese factories or in Western factories, some of which are so highly automated they are called black sites. Anything that could be put into a factory for making the parameters of the task simpler, is mostly already there.
The 'low hanging fruit' for disrupting the working class is gone, long gone.
It now requires very sophisticated AI and robotics to really impact the remaining working class niches. This is easily several decades away.
Guess who performs a lot of work with raw information? The middle classes. That's why they are in the crosshairs of Silicon Valley.
A cynic might suggest this 'panic' over the working class losing their jobs has a lot more to do with the middle classes losing theirs.
In my experience parents and their children are operating in two completely different economies.
To be blunt in case I risk being overly oblique: 1/3 of the female students at my university did sex work to pay the rent. That's in a place where they worked hard to get into an elite university and didn't have to pay extraordinary tuition fees.
Further down the socioeconomic ladder it gets worse. Merely surviving without debt is a success story for a millennial.
I have to say: almost everything on this subject I read from the media is a fiction. I'm not saying the stats are made up, but the overwhelming impression you get from the box on the wall is powerfully wrong.
http://tinyhousetalk.com/category/tiny-houses/
In this respect it is we Euros who should be getting off our butts.
However I notice we have a lot of billionaires and millionaires in comparison to the former centuries. Not many Renaissance Men or aristocratic scholar-patrons (think Lord Asriel from HDM) though. The groups aren't special either. The modern cliques of the rich and powerful I see today are pathetic in comparison to the likes of the Royal Society or the Lunar Society.
Imagination and implementation of the new is hard, but is also a cultural issue. Today I think many people are convinced the low hanging fruit is picked and what remains is the difficult stuff that shall require large sums of capital and decade long education to solve for X.
Example: The French artisans, the middle class of their time, created wonderful toys for the gentry but almost none of their wonderfully intricate work had any impact on the Industrial Revolution in Britain, while a handful of illiterate working class types turned the Roman water wheel on its side and massively improved mechanical power production.
Their work would have been seen as obscene by the artisans but it was fundamentally more important.
There is a wonderful 1973 documentary by Jacob Bronowski on this topic:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x206z0e_bbc-ascent-of-man-0...
Anybody can be 'possessed' by an idea, but it is clear that Silicon Valley has too many smart and well educated people wasting their time on trifles, their choices significantly retard what ought to be natural advantages.
Most important thing anyone can do is to choose their environment carefully e.g. having the right mentor, role models, choosing the right problem.
What you're describing sounds like an inverted Munchausen Syndrome. I don't know if we have name for that in English.
I've heard of parasites controlling the behaviour of an animal host to spread themselves, it's not out of the question there are examples of human parasites that do the same e.g. encouraging irrational risk taking by elevating a hormone.
In Ireland we have foolishly installed laws that made criticism of Mohammad or Jesus illegal.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2016/apr/11/why...
I don't enjoy their humour but I think this would prevent something like Charlie Hebdo from operating in my country.
For most of those people, it is a choice between using natural gas and/or solar. A lot of them power fridges and airconditioning equipment using gas. Others use solar/wind and lead acid batteries to power their appliances.
One of Velkess's products is aimed at being a drop-in replacement for lead acid batteries.
So; the causality is that low oil/gas prices damage demand for solar/wind, which then indirectly affects people choosing to pay for lead-acid battery setups or a product like this flywheel.
Personally I believe this would be way overthinking the market. This is a problem with analytical people sometimes.
I think lots of people will purchase a flywheel battery merely because it is cool and different. I would purchase one partly for that reason, and because I believe a flywheel would (or has the potential to) last much longer than the alternatives.
I also think a lot of greenie-weenies are uncomfortable with using lead-acid batteries for their storage as part of the renewable energy paradigm they prefer. There are health risks associated with them also, which environmentalists are going to be particularly paranoid about.
You're probably not aware fnovd, then many of the attendees were themselves Jewish, including those of 'Heiling' fame.
http://www.thewrap.com/tila-tequila-jewish-friends-nazi-sieg...
These people are trolling. This is classic trolling. They know this causes people to react and how the media works. For instance The Atlantic in their video on the NPI conference showed apparently 'dozens' of people doing the 'Heil' salute, but if you examine the footage closely you'll notice Richard Spencer is in fact holding up a water glass in one hand and the camera is being positioned multiple times in such a way to make the same three people look like six or nine people. There are classic camera tricks in that video actually to form your opinion (e.g. selective blurring), I'm sure you'll see them too if you go and look.
This is also trolling with a purpose in order to attract the right enemies.
As I said, this is not the high moral ground. Nonetheless they are not Nazis. You'll need more than some Jewish boys and an Asian pornstar for that to have merit.
It isn't all about public vs private. There is another frame to view this subject in which is shared culture.
In China the majority of those running the firms agree with the government's positions on Internet use.
In the USA, Washington and large parts of the media have identical political perspectives.
The problem with this is insidious. Where you're surrounded by like minded people you grow kinds of assumptions that in another context are absolutely crazy.
Recently for example I heard a university professor claim biological sex does not exist. Further he claimed all scientists believe that biological sex does not exist.
This tends to happen in groups where dissenting opinion has been culled. Isolation does not generate balanced perspective.
> You do not have the right to free expression on someone else's platform. reddit is not the Internet
The problem with this reasoning is that the entire Net is private. The feeling of the public sphere is a kind of collective illusion similar to how we perceive the Net to be a 'space'.
I would hope that doesn't mean the use of a server doesn't have to be contingent on what political views I held yesterday or today.
I haven't seen it working with my own eyes but I believe the concept did work, was prototyped and some were produced for the two usecases 'A' and 'L' they mention.
However then in the last year or so the price of oil dropped and I think this either spooked Gray and/or the investors. I think they were at least partially refunded and the project was put on the backburner.
When I went back to revisit it maybe a year ago you only got a landing page stating the project was finished or on hold.
Then I googled some information and found the rest of the site was accessible as part of the redesign, which gave me the impression they were up and running. However I was right the first time as the other chap pointed out, the home page still says they're on hold.
For clarity, that quote is referring to journalists and the media. Not Jews, as some have been heavily implying.
I'd like to remind people here that this is exactly Trump's playbook. You infuriate people, they are eager to take you out of context or extrapolate wildly, then curious passersby figure your accusers are not credible.
It's not a high moral ground tactic, but it sure works.
Actually read some of the material and see if 'it checks out' that we're all nazis. Scott Alexander has a essay called 'Reactionary Philosophy in a Planet sized nutshell' which is a good synopsis.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-...
Scott is definitely not a reactionary of any kind, so this is a neutral take.
Otherwise we can just call each other names and strawman each other all day.
Please don't come out with "I don't need no... or somebody on the internet said...". That is just lazy. I don't imagine all socialists subscribe to SJWism, since a lot of them are vehemently against it. Same goes here.
There were many good things about the film but as you said the Hollywood tropes are out of control. It turns me off from visiting the cinema.
I enjoyed Machina Ex, I think I didn't sense them as much.
The 'military is composed of boneheads' is annoying (and wrong) but the thing that irritated me the most was the emotional take Hollywood injects into everything.
Why is Hollywood so emotional? Are Americans more emotional than Europeans? Maybe in L.A?
It doesn't match human experience at all.
Take a funeral scene. I don't know how it is in the United States, but having everybody wearing black (okay everybody wears dark colours, but the Hollywood scene is as if they went and bought uniforms), women with hat-veil things, many people sobbing and being tearful.
That doesn't describe any funeral I've been to. And we have very large funerals, with many hundreds of people. The occasional person emits a sob but nothing like the water feature I see on the screen. This breaks immersion. It's too heavy handed.
I'm beginning to suspect the reason why somebody would 'act out' in the scenarios Hollywood is known for, is because they are conditioned by Hollywood.
With rant complete, my favorite part was the sense of immersion with the 'things'. Reminded me of Half Life.
tldr; Give the prizes to the things. People are just bags of salt water.
Since it's up I'll just directly quote from the horse's mouth:
"Velkess’s flywheel was conceived from the very beginning up to provide dramatically lower cost for performance. To do this we had to take a fundamentals approach, re-imagining the flywheel from the ground up.
Flexible vs. Rigid
Traditional flywheels are designed and built like the turbines of high performance jet engines. They use super rigid materials and super high precision fabrication to very tightly control the powerful natural dynamics that are characteristic of all high energy spinning rotors. These materials, precision, and control techniques are all very expensive, so you simply can’t use the traditional rigid approach to make a low cost system.
Velkess’s flywheel is flexible and works very much like a cowboy’s lasso. Our flexible system embraces the natural dynamics of the rotor, redirecting any stray energies into stabilizing counter forces. By working cooperatively with these natural rotor dynamics we gain excellent control of the rotor system without having to crush out its irregularities. Because of this we can use much less expensive materials and don’t need nearly as much precision as rigid designs."
http://www.velkess.com/technology/
One day I hope to build a microhydro plant and having one of these would be great.
It is now unfortunately defunct or at least the website says they're on hold indefinitely.
Here is a youtube video explaining:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6I2lKtfpLQ
It was a flywheel battery. A physical battery. It turns electrical energy into kinetic energy (and back on demand) at a very high efficiency rate. If I remember the specs correctly it could supply 15 kwh. I think the cost for first adopters would have been $6500 a unit. Actually here are the full specs from a sheet I got from the website before it went down:
Technical Specifcations
Continuous Power 3kW
Peak Power (60 seconds) 9kW
Nameplate Energy 15kWh
Depth of Discharge 100%
Interface 48VDC Virtual Lead Acid Bus
24h Roundtrip Efciency >80%
Expected Service Life 10 years
Physical Package meter(inch) 1 x 1 x 1 (40 x 40 x 40)
Weight kg(lbs) 340 (750)
Standard Connectivity Wi-Fi, Ethernet
Optional Connectivity CAN Bus, RS-485, Xbee, Powerline, LoRa
Energy storage systems of any size can be built by linking 2 or more (n) Velkess L systems togetherin parallel.
Multiple parallel Velkess L modules will self balance and behave as a single energy storage system with performance equal to (1 module) * n.
The killer app quality it had was that a flywheel of this sort could theoretically run for many decades without failure. The first iteration had '10 years' expected service life but I believe that was being very conservative and it had the capability to last much, much longer.
We'll have to agree to disagree.
Most post-2008 grads today are living hand to mouth in the cities. They are the new working poor. This isn't going to change. The market is saturated.
It is just that nobody wants to believe this. Not the teachers, not the parents, not the students.
> Fundamentally I think that one of the issues of the system is a lack of exploration. Like there are so many areas where you can go to extreme detail but people don't explore them because the educational system limits your worldview by limiting your choices.
We certainly agree on that.
Interdisciplinary pollination is all but forgotten. There's a cheap source of growth right there and few are picking up those dollar bills on the street.
If we lived in a world of economic growth (I'm convinced we're not, you see. I think ex-computation there is no real growth in the developed world for a long time) then we should see a flowering of new fields, new explorations, new businesses. What the GDP statistics say is only tangentially connected to reality.
The solution I would throw out is the use of AI, particularly agent based AI capable of nudging researchers and regular people along interesting lines of inquiry. I know that sounds vague but unless you think radical government reform is possible (you know: the other half of the workforce that has never seen genuine automation)... Almost any reform would probably spark a civil war.
What solution would you put forward?
> I think that some of these issues are somewhat cultural though. To me it feels like both SK and Japan still cling to old social structures to a detriment of the society.
Maybe. Maybe they're caught in the same trap we are.
I think 'Japan' is our future unless we solve for X here. They've been caught in a stagnation for decades. They don't have much social unrest, I doubt the United States would be so lucky.
I think the evidence is against you. The economics research shows that the 'best returns' come from early education, with diminishing returns the further progress is made.
It is counter intuitive I know, but mass education is similar to macro economics. Helping everybody can help nobody.
South Korea and Japan put a lot of focus on education, work insane hours for comparatively low pay, pay stupid rents and are also in a wage stagnation.
Put it like this:
You get to a middle income economy by doing 1 thing. You get to a high income economy by doing another thing. It is unlikely getting to a very high income economy is accomplished by replicating the former process that took you up a step originally.
That is why blue collar workers are more worried about migration and globalization than computing technology. The 'robots' that threaten their jobs are other people.
It is the white collar jobs Silicon Valley is destroying. Journalists, Accountants, Lawyers and many more to come.
Solution definitely isn't education, or at least not education as it is classically understood.
Korea and Japan have already tried the education route and they have met diminishing returns. Go there if you want insane working hours for low pay and pointless competitions.
Here's a crazy idea.
Maybe young people should leave the universities and exit the cities altogether. They could live in small communities in the countryside and be ramen profitable. Integrating into the broader economy could be accomplished by traveling to like-minded communities to avail of services there e.g. an artist's colony, a computer person colony, etc
I think this is happening already but it's flying under the radar of journalists as some kind of Timothy Leary move.
I recall in some Japanese restaurants there are koi swimming on the glass roof above the people eating.
Is it the use of animals as decoration that's disturbing or is it the possibility of being in contact with dead animals, possibly hitting them with a skate.
If the fish were beneath a transparent frozen surface, do you think it would be less troubling?
It is worth noting that many of SV's most interesting projects are comprehensively dosed with political ideals.
Bitcoin, BitTorrent, Urbit. I'm sure you can think of more. I would also claim Google as a successful utopian project. And they're incubating more of them. One day Google will go 'pop' and thousands of spores will fly through the atmosphere to land on strange and alien shores.
Of course there is the Dark Side. The gravitational strength of the left/right divide across the whole Net is extraordinary. There isn't a prominent forum where partisans haven't dueled. Facebook is like Belgium, a hapless neutral buffer and yet the air rings with the whine of dogfighting and the report of the occasional sniper. The Great Project of moderation, to harness or vanquish these forces, is understated but probably matters more than most for the emerging Internet Culture.
tldr; You can dial it back from the worst extremes but you can't get rid of it because tribalism is human nature's firmware.
You need to bootstrap the process but due to changes of government, economic troubles, you have a finite window in which to scale successfully. Building that biosphere becomes important fast.
Even the most exacting monarchs had limited control over what happened in the colonies due to distance and time. The further you extend your reach, the more autonomy you have to give to the peripheral. It's like a law of nature.
Talking of giving up control there's a funny book by Wernher von Braun (of German rocket science fame) where he claims the leader of the Martians will be called 'Elon'. I wouldn't have believed it if I had not seen it.
Here is why:
- Get rid of water and sewer pipes.
That would be huge. Together with passive house technology each and every house in a city, town or countryside would be 'off grid'. That kind of independence would make our infrastructure much less fragile. Building downwards (a recent topic) will be easier.
- Our magic box is an isolation point for dangerous and toxic substances.
That will prevent every household from contributing toxicity to the surrounding environment. Adaptions to new forms of waste become possible at source.
If toxic elements can be compacted and stored, useful compounds/elements derived, and some used for energy, then in the future we won't need pipes anymore than we needed pneumatic tubes for sending messages/parcels once we developed automotive transport. The self driving bots will simply visit periodically for a new cargo to be delivered as industrial inputs. Since the magic box performs some level of element/compound sorting there is probably a market where your waste is automatically profiled and sold. It pays for at least part of its own operation.
Last but not least many countries have no ability to construct decent infrastructure for political reasons. The magic box solves that problem in a way that scales with population.
tldr; Back to the future, since 'night soil' historically was a commodity collected from each household.
> The ISS toilet that keeps malfunctioning is the American one, no? Because I seem to recall the USSR cracking the urine-to-drinking-water problem on Mir a couple of decades ago.
Yes. Calcium from astronaut bones (another serious issue) was clogging up the system at a much higher rate than on the terrestrial surface.
I don't know how the Russians solved it but I sometimes think with Americans Business acumen and Russian Science there would be very little we couldn't get accomplished. I'm sure you've heard of Russian phage technology for medical treatment. Cures for alcoholism.
One of the things that is fascinating about the Cold War is how we saw Science developing differently. That is something that should trouble the thoughts of more people.
I've been disappointed with the lack of progress in closed loop systems to date. There was Biosphere 2, a great ambitious start. Then a few years ago there was Kamen's Slingshot (outcome unknown). That and the ISS toilet doesn't work properly. It's an un-sexy topic and there hasn't been much progress.
I see houses are heading towards zero energy from the grid, but a magic box which would reliably and cheaply convert black/gray water to high quality drinking water and turn poop and organics into energy bricks to eliminate sewage plants and septic tanks seems like a technology we should have invented a long time ago.
Off topic, I enjoyed 'A Colder War' and was curious about your thoughts on Gene Wolfe.