kakapo88

I'm finishing a project now, using exactly this design pattern. Sort of backed into it, motivated pretty much by the issues outlined. In addition, I wanted something that is clear and sustainable far into the future. The simplicity of this approach supports that. Quite liberating.

Complexity is the enemy.

True, one might reasonably propose a number of what-if objections. But for many (most?) projects), imo this is a good approach.

Can you name some of those specific scientific doomsday predictions, that didn't come to pass? Not a prediction from some random internet dude, but an actual scientific IPCC prediction?

The climate models have, in fact, been accurate. Temperatures, sea ice, and so on, and marched up over the decades, as predicted. Buy worryingly, it appears those models were too conservative. Heat is now increasing faster than predicted. That's why this is news.

It's not "cnn". This has been widely reported by diverse scientific groups. Countless sources.

And it doesn't matter what the weather is like where you are. We're talking climate here - broad trends over broad areas, over time.

Truly, if some folks don't understand climate change at this point, and fall back to psyops and similar nonsense, there isn't much that can be done for them.

Changing the ownership does not address the problem, which is market concentration. You're still left with a company with too much power. That aside, look at the historical data. Nationalization has generally been disastrous and leads to all sorts of other pathologies.

SF Techie here. Lived and worked here, for many years.

Every day I literally step over bodies to get to work. Drugs are openly dealt and consumed. Mentally ill people roam the streets, screaming. People openly use the sidewalks as a toilet. Crime is rampant. And if anyone doubts it's that bad, I invite you to come and look for yourself.

Almost all of these people come from elsewhere in the country. They aren't "priced out" local citizens, they're junkies and mentally unwell who come here because they know they will get services and be tolerated.

By its own accounting, the city spends over $1b per year on homeless services, for supposedly < 10k "homeless". You do the per capita math. Notice anything strange there? $100k per homeless. Something is off - way off.

Meanwhile these people suffer. Even if they have city housing, they are on the streets anyway, because they need drugs, plus they are driven by their mental issues. It's horrific and uncivilized, and it's a creation of a culture that says "all they need is housing", and then enables them in their drug addiction and psychosis. That's go on for years and years, steadily getting worse. Every year more of them come to SF. And every year more of them die, and the city declines further.

The solution is obvious: mandatory treatment for drug addiction and mental illness. No more tolerance for crime and drugs. Enforce basic city codes.

But somehow, this is "inhumane" to the extreme left that runs SF. They'd rather keep the status quo, and let people suffer and die, while the city falls further into ruin.

Wild guess: Sabine is not a fan.

Posts such as this are sociologically amusing, "meta-heuristic" and the like. Using prepackaged terms to disparage people and dismiss them, without actually having to think objectively and consider opposing viewpoints. Also interesting how the choice of language completely outs people, as the extreme right/left adhere 100% to their respective terminologies, to signal membership and loyalty to their group. This post is a good example.

Different. Super-intelligence is a plausibly reachable thing, a question of engineering. TIL is an uncertain thing, requires entirely new physics, and completely unknown tech.

And again, you are confused about timeframes. Geologic time vs human time.

Sure, over a period of millions of years, everything evolves and adapts. But in shorter periods of time, before adaptation, there is enormous disruption and entire ecosystems go extinct. Taking countless species down with it.

Human civilization has been around for only a few thousand years. You do the math. As you say, nothing to argue about here.

You're not considering timescales. True, the earth has seen all sorts of climates .. over slow-moving gradual timeframes of 100k to millions of years. And in none of those situations did human civilization exist - relying on specific climatic conditions for food, water and so on.

But now, climate is changing 1000x as fast. And we have civilization of 8 billion people, many of them living on the margins in areas that will soon became less habitable.

So you don't need Venus. Just a few degrees means hundreds of millions of refugees, food shortages, water shortages, and no doubt mass conflict as a result.

Don't confuse geologic time with human time.

That was a fresh and insightful post. I think the comparison to the Cambrian explosion is a good one, as well as the larger framing of technological progress in the context of punctuated equilibrium.

Also, even in the future, the power will go off once in awhile. Hand-writing would be like swimming. Not necessarily used much, but a skill worth keeping.

It seems the aliens are invading by balloon. No one saw that coming.

Ideologically-fixated writer. That aside, I wonder about any essay which uses the term "solutionise".

Interesting analogy. It is highly adapted to its host for sure. In fact, it's quite impressive how evolved it is, always morphing and camouflaging, keeping the immune system at bay.

I wonder about that $100k limit. Why would there be that special case?

In California we have the yellow-billed magpie. Identical to this one ... but with a yellow bill. And weirdly enough, the ranges of the two species don't overlap. It's black-billed on one side of the line, yellow-billed on the other. Evolution can be a bit weird, sometimes.