Hm, hadn't thought of that.
57,863 karma · joined January 13, 2008
I absolutely can. If nuclear power had not been over-regulated for 50 years the technology might be much more advanced now than it is. We will never know. It's kind of like pointing to the failure of public transportation in the U.S. and saying that this was inevitable, without taking into consideration the fact that there was a well-developed system of local rail before a criminal conspiracy of car, oil, and rubber companies dismantled it, making the poor quality of public transit into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The reason we don't have good public transit in the U.S. is not because it can't work but because we chose to force it not to work so that car, oil, and tire companies could make more money. It's the same with nuclear energy.
So? Just because one particular approach failed doesn't mean it's impossible.
My father was a nuclear engineer so this is something I happen to know something about. I can tell you from speaking to my father back when he was working (from the 1970s to the 1990s), the nuclear industry was lousy with politics, and there were many, many innovative ideas (his own included) that never saw the light of day because the political pressure against doing anything new with nuclear power was insurmountable.
The anti-nuclear lobby in the U.S. successfully killed nuclear power by 1) stopping all research and development and then 2) saying, "See? We told you it couldn't be done." Well, yeah, but the reason it couldn't be done was you, you idiots. And now we have climate change to deal with as a result, so thanks for that.
Largely due to the costs of complying with draconian regulatory regimes.
Our reality has already vastly surpassed main stream sci fi of only fifty years ago.
> could there be something two thousand years from now that is practically unimaginable to us?
It's less likely because to be unimaginable it would have to be based on undiscovered physics which is less likely now than it was even just a few hundred years ago.
But that's exactly what I don't get. How can that be considered "accidental"? How can any thinking person not realize that putting the build time into the compiled image will make every build different because, you know, different builds happen at different times? Has software engineering really been dumbed down so much that this is not immediately obvious? It feels like a mechanic doing an oil change and being surprised by having all the oil drain out if they neglect to put the drain plug back in.
Am I missing something here? Yes, if you use a feature that intentionally inserts the build time and date into the code, the every build is going to be different. That's the whole point of these macros. It's a feature. If you don't want that behavior, don't use that feature.
It's no great mystery. Social interaction is a skill that requires practice and effort to develop. Interacting with new people is risky and occasionally painful. Back in the day the punishment for not developing that skill and taking those risks was boredom, but nowadays you can just crawl into your cell phone to while away the hours.
There's yer problem right there. Good pedagogy is hard and highly undervalued. IMHO Grant Sanderson (a.k.a. 3blue1brown) is making some of the most significant contributions to math in all of human history by making very complex topics accessible to ordinary mortals. In so doing he addresses one of the most significant problems facing humankind: the growing gap between the technologically savvy and everyone else. That gap is the underlying cause of some very serious problems.
How exactly do you propose to prepare for Europe becoming uninhabitable?
And even more if figuring out how to buy it wasn't a challenging puzzle in its own right.
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree about this. I don't see a lot of daylight between "active attack" and starvation of resources. Just because your attacker chooses to lay siege to you rather than mount a full frontal assault doesn't make them any less of an attacker IMHO.
> The "edges" as thoroughly defined in the paper I linked.
Sorry, I don't see it. AFAICT the word "edges" only appears once in the paper:
"Evolution is a process of continuous change, and so we should expect blurry edges with a mosaic of features (1)."
[UPDATE] Oh, BTW, I think that paper is actually very good. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
I don't know of any cases of direct kidney v lung competition, but competition among body parts is common. Sometime that competition is adaptive, sometimes not. Examples of adaptive competition are things like when under extreme circumstances (particularly cold or hunger) your body will sacrifice parts of itself to keep other parts going. Examples of non-adaptive competition are things like autoimmune diseases. Also, sometimes individual cells go rogue and stop cooperating. That's called cancer.
> competition only seems to be important at the very edges of what selection is acting upon
I guess that depends on what you consider "the edges". In the case of humans, selection produces intuitions about "us vs them". Those intuitions range from very closely drawn boundaries ("us" includes only my immediate family or clan) to very broadly drawn boundaries ("us" is my entire species, or my entire phylum, or all living things). In between are things like "us" is all members of my species with my skin color. But the extremes of this range are non-adaptive. Draw the boundaries too narrowly and you end up without enough genetic diversity in your in-group to drive out maladaptive mutations. Draw them too broadly and you end up defenseless against parasites and with nothing to eat.
Both are fundamental. You can't survive without cooperating, but you also can't survive if you try to cooperate with the entire biosphere because ultimately there is competition for scarce resources. If you don't assert yourself to claim your share of those, something else will.