What the Hell Is Going On? Effects of Information Abundance
perell.com
perell.com
It's the first time I can remember signing up for a newsletter voluntarily, despite my general distaste for those types of popovers.
Dialectical arguments tend to long, boring, and esoterical. I found the intro a mix of jocular and dialectical, which for me turned out to be the payoff for some of the article's repetitiveness.
And hey, it's kept me from commenting for several hours, as I've read it in breaks from work.
The West these days reminds me of USSR in the eighties.
On the other hand, the underlying assumption is that the revolt against elite policy preferences, not only in the U.S. but in Europe and elsewhere, is entirely devoid of rational motivation. It discounts without comment the possibility that the pre-internet style of governance had substantive problems which the working class didn't like (e.g. globalization leading to a race to the bottom in manufacturing wages).
Surely the new methods of information access and distribution are having an impact. But it's not the only, or even necessarily the most important, driver.
"Observing a problem", "diagnosing causes", and "presenting workable solutions" are three completely different things though.
Wage stagnation leading to quality-of-life declines is the first of these - people can notice this immediately in their life. Diganosing "globalisation" as the problem is harder and more complicated (would the US really have been better off trying to be a manufacturing autarky for the second half of the 20th century?). And the proposed solutions .. well, this is where it gets really bad.
The existing elite have done a very good job of suppressing the peaceful, workable solutions; various sorts of social inclusion and redistibution. That leaves only the unworkable and disastrous solutions out there.
Despite popular graphs making rounds, there has been little if any wage stagnation. Moreover, people are also really bad at noticing it: a median and an average Americans now have better housing situation than 50 years ago, in terms of actual living space available for them, fewer roommates, better quality of housing, and yet the sentiment is the opposite.
Having a bigger room and smart phone does little in the face of higher variance of one’s future security. The compounding nature of the game’s fruits are clearly evident now, and people rightfully are afraid of permanently falling behind.
Wage stagnation primarily for unskilled men (women's wages have risen a lot, skilled labor has risen as well).
The reason? "The TL;DR answer is that it was a combination of immigration, loss of manufacturing jobs overseas, massive entry of women into the labor force"
So a drastically increased supply of labor depresses prices of labor.
He also avoids "household income" because households are smaller (fewer children, divorce) and because of two earners, but those very things increase economic "quality of life" measurements for individuals in those households ($ per capita).
He also focuses on pre-tax/pre-transfer income, avoiding the net effect of our progressive taxation/transfer regime. If we include those effects, we get a different picture: https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/the-trend-toward-inequali...
I didn't get that from the article at all.
The article was purely descriptive, without ascribing any value judgment.
That was pretty clear to me that the past had plenty of problems.
And recall that the US Founders were concerned. And they just had newspapers and handbills to worry about.
That's the mainstream narrative, because like Maria Antoinette the 10% cannot ever consider why anyone (unless they're a faulty person) would ever be dissatisfied with the status quo in power, business, culture, economy, and so on. Except in their constrained pet causes, of course.
It's there between the lines: the author mentions the power of the big companies in the 20th century to shape the narrative through mass media and a lack of proper information among the public, and how that power is now crumbling and how the narrative is being democratized.
Basically, it boils down to mutual knowledge, and large shifts in that causes power-shifts in society.
In the end, it's interesting because it puts together a number of intuitions you may already have about the upcoming western social-democratic crisis stemming from the loss of authoritative sources of information.
What is missing is actually ideas about what system we should collectively aim for in order to restore trust in actual truths and distrust in actual falsehoods - because of course, you can't have a society without a shared framework for that.
How well do ads actually work? I really don't know. Is there any objective data to measure this? There are three main companies who sell ad spaces on a real time market and it is a very interesting market that I feel like most people know little about, especially people in tech.
Regardless of how well or not well this works, it's what floats companies like Google and Facebook.
I would say the tech companies are the ones fueling this because it is the their multibillion dollar business models that rely on sensationalist news to sell ads. period. To shift the blame to politicians or to even journalists trying to compete with other sensationalist news blogs or companies who make money from selling ads, is shifting the source and the root cause of the issue, from us, the tech community.
To act like as a tech community we are severely concerned about mass information, the spread misinformation etc etc but also not address how we can fundamentally move away from a market in tech that makes money off of anything besides selling ads to people, or selling peoples information to ad companies (and god knows who else, I mean, only the big tech three know who else), is delusional and self serving, at best.
Despite this, I rarely hear anyone in the tech community willing to openly talk about these problems, much less come up with alternative business solutions.
I would love for there to be more conversation around moving away from a tech market that preys on harvesting user data and ads to solutions that solve people's problems instead of activist posturing from people in tech who talk alot about being concerned about politics etc but work for the companies that fuel this spread of misinformation.
Pretty much every digital marketer's job description consists of measuring and optimizing this. All the major digital ad platforms let you put tracking beacons throughout your page's sales flow so you can measure conversion rates directly and know exactly which ad campaign led to a sale; that's one of the major advantages of digital over print or TV.
You can certainly debate the ethics of advertising in general, and whether it's ethical to psychologically manipulate people into buying products they don't need and wouldn't have bought otherwise. I personally don't really want to first because I hold opinions on both sides and second because nothing's going to get resolved by such a debate on HN - it's a debate that's been going on for 120 years, though the media hegemony described in the article silenced it for many years. But as an objective fact, there's little room for debating the effectiveness of advertising. Ads work, even if they might be evil.
I'm not debating the ethics, just the reality of what granularity of data they can actually sign their id signature hash next to and say they verify this data, as opposed it to it being a roll your own analytics shop to meet whatever objective analytics data you are looking to meet for that quarter. I think we have all learned from the news on both sides in recent years that you can spin a story or a set of data however you want to, so I am not nearly as concerned with the anecdotal motives of any particular digital advertiser in the first place as much as I am with how not only your response but the entire industry in general shuns the idea that there is any alternative to this whatsoever and justifies all movements to the counter as "the only way" or the only logical ways and evil as such. I understand saying something is evil and those are the only companies who pay me six figures, and so therefore its okay for me, is very easy for most engineers to say now, but it's not something I'm willing to say.
I think if you want to justify this statement in general, you should explain to everyone how bidder as a service works, how its not a monopolized industry when it comes to ad spaces on websites ranked by domain popularity (3 players in the market 2 of the CEOs from Google SEO team) and how it correlates with rationale decisions from a digital marketers perspective and have measureable outputs other than "the extremely volatile price of this adspot which varies every 6 seconds was worth it based on the outcome this time, based on how targeted this ad campaign was, which was targeted based only on harvesting user data the user would not be ok with if they knew we were using this data". Honestly, justify your case here....and make sure you include the consent forms included in the onboarding process of every 12 yr old who has to click yes to create a facebook profile and what the implications are for the default oks in this case are...
So when the news media will lose their aura of journalistic professionalism and authority stemming from that, there will be something actually better that will arise after that.
She's aiming to take transparency further. O'Neill and her colleagues at the Royal Society have been pushing for 'intelligent openness' where data and information would be made accessible, intelligible, assessable, and usable by anyone. If interested, there's a report called "Science as an Open Enterprise", which goes in depth.
The book that he references a few times, Revolt of The Public is pretty good though.
Note that changes in medium of communication have lead to political upheaval every time they’ve happened, whether we’re talking manuscripts to printed books (the Reformation), the rise of periodicals (nationalism), radio (fascism, socialism, the New Deal), cable tv (the first fracture in the post WWII US liberal consensus, as the ruling class had forgotten that amiable mostly non-partisan politics was an abnormal state of affairs that had been engineered) and now the internet (suddenly everyone realises there are large parts of “their” society that genuinely, non-ironically hates them and what they value).
If you go earlier every leap in communication technology makes more efficient bureaucracies possible, so you get larger states that are better at warfare.
Sure, there have been massive changes in social organization that have accompanied changes in media. That doesn't say much though. Those changes compound and interact in unpredictable, chaotic ways. We like seeing patterns so we come up with stories about how we're either reverting to some imagined mean or how we're converging on another.
I guess Farenheight 451 and Brave New World come close with their focus on people immersing themselves in media, but even they had this smart, rational cunning clique running the show. Even in Idiocracy was based on the quaint idea that the ruling class was aware of its shortcomings and wanted to use rational methods to achieve objective goals.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/20/celebr...
However, Wikipedia says: "While many reviewers compared Elliot Carver to Rupert Murdoch, Feirstein based the character on Robert Maxwell." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow_Never_Dies)
And that would be true, but I don't believe that overall, since it presupposes that just because someone is a celebrity, they are necessarily some sort of mindless, insentient vessel that optimizes for fame and can otherwise be controlled. Why shouldn't Kim Kardashian have strong-but-misguided opinions like any other random person? And wouldn't her existing fame make her way less amenable to influence by unknown individuals? To use a real-life example, much of Trump's immigration obsession is not shared by the elites who benefited from his tax cuts.
Ultimately, I don't believe it because I don't think any person can be as easily influenced as this scenario implies.
They're worth checking out though if this sort of "pleasure"/entertainment/late capitalist dystopia theme interests you. Marcuses's One Dimensional Man is probably the work that relates most directly to this sort of thing. Horkheimer and Adorno's work also relates, but less directly, and it's less accessible. A sufficient background in the history of philosophy is prerequisite.
The Faint is also a great synth pop-punk band that quite frequently explores these issues in their music. Coincidentally, they just released an album this past Friday aptly titled Egowerk. Their older album Fascination is also great.
Century of the Self is another resource you can check out. It's a documentary by Adam Curtis about Edward Bernays and the radical shifts in advertising that he helped instate.
The Culture of Narcissism
The Revolt of the Elites
Haven in a Heartless World
The Minimal Self
and so on.
In real life they'd just say the "big government deep state" is spreading "fake news" about Brawndo.
President Comacho saw a real problem (lack of food), realized he needed help tacking the issue, sought out literally the smartest person in the world, followed his advice and solved the issue.
President Trump makes up problems, staffs his cabinet with some of the lowest quality members those offices have ever had, discards virtually all expert advice (In his own words, he only consults himself because he has a "very good brain") and generally seems to exist solely to troll people.
So even though Idiocracy seems to have hit it right on, it didn't. Mike Judge still could not make the mental leap required to make Comacho different from what he already knew (and I don't blame him).
I would add that Idiocracy's theme was the dumbing down of society, but in spite of society's failings the democratic government continued functioning well in working on the citizen's best interests. Unfortunatly Trump's government appears to be doing the exact opposite, to the point of looking as a government ran by anarchists trying to undermine it from within. That's arguably far worse than Idiocracy's central theme.
You might be reading/watching the mainstream media too much.
And fwiw, real wage growth doesn't look that great. It has actually been negative for the last few months.
I don't think "standing up to dictatorships" is a very strong argument for this administration.
Jay-Z and Beyonce's child has their Instagram professionally done: https://www.instagram.com/blueivy.carter/?hl=en
Even Instagram only, average wealth, influencers, making like $1M a year or so, have whole teams of people working for their Instagram.
The only figure with a face is big brother, and he didn't exist. I think Goldstein had no face?
If the proles (85% of the population) had celebrities, they would not be actual people : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prolefeed
"Below that come the dumb masses whom we habitually refer to as 'the proles', numbering perhaps 85 per cent of the population."
"What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect."
"There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means"
Below is towards the end of the article, so just in case any one feels more inclined to read it, here it is -
> I’m indebted to the following individuals for conversations that led to this post and feedback that improved it. I’d like to thank Arjun Balaji, Brendan Bernstein, Alex Hardy, Kevin Harrington, Mike Dariano, one anonymous Twitter user, and Nick Maggiulli for all the energy they invested in editing this piece. They improved this piece immensely.
> I’d also like to thank Nik Sharma, Drew Austin, and Adil Majid for the conversations that led to this post. Each of them contributed unique insights that I could not have arrived at on my own.
I'd rather let people yell and be part of a silent majority than participate in crowded internet discussions.
As a Korean who's viewing things from the outside, I found the hook hilarious and totally made me continue reading it...
At least the author put in the time to present his case.
These are real trends but I have a different answer to the opening question: the elites are failing, they don't seem better than the rest of us any more.
And I don't think it's just a matter of explosion of information available online. They're really not as sharp and competent as their predecessors, not as good, definitely not nearly as bold.
The reason Trump could bulldoze through two America's most powerful political dynasties is not Hillary's emails on Wikileaks but their weak candidates who had to rely completely on warchests, pundits, media and party machine. And the machine didn't fail them. They failed the machine.
If belief in our traditional institutions crumbles due to cheap information, information asymmetry once again will rise, returning us to the prior era.
What does it take to offer the internet in its current form? Massive infrastructure, cables running every which way across countries and oceans, electricity, etc-- and governments protect that infrastructure.
If order and stability is lost to the extreme viewpoints the internet enables, and eroding trust in our existing institutions, there will no longer be necessary support for the infrastructure that enables free, open, cheap communication.
To his early supporters this was a glaring omission and I cannot conclude it was an oversight. It seemed to be an obvious collusion between them and the DNC who had $1.3Billion to spend on media that year.
Their plan seemed obvious. Ignore Bernie, create a deluge of negative coverage of Trump, and promote Hillary as our only alternative.
This caused me and many others to just tune out the bloviating corporate lackey gasbags they have working for them. I've not watched CNN, NBC, ABC, MSNBC, since. I never watched FOX News because it's always been easy to see they have an extremely biased agenda to promote and do not do "News" at all, but the others, at that time, still had some credibility up to then. They've pretty much lost all of that.
The truth is, they started losing their cred before that. I recall watching CNN during the "Occupy" protest when Carrol Costello complained about those protesters being "noisy" and making it difficult for her to get to the entrance of their New York facilities. She went so far as to comment "what are they even protesting for" when they were right outside their front door.
Every time I open my "Apple News" app I'm amazed at what drivel they present. "Look at what Kim Kardashian is wearing, it makes her butt look huge!"
HN gets far more of my time than all those "News" corporations put together now.
This is really reflected in my area: nuclear design. This has gone from once the most secret and guarded information possible (Manhattan project) to a world where there are 50 small companies working on various types of reactor designs [1], many run by what can easily be considered amateurs.
Last week I was in D.C. at an industry conference and met a guy running one of these companies. He was explaining to me the merits of his design and had the basic physics unequivocally backwards. I prodded him gently on it: "Oh, you mean the fast neutrons don't get readily absorbed in fission products, not the slow ones, right?" He doubled down. Some poor schmuck is funding this guy.
Meanwhile, Transatomic, the famed Thiel-backed molten salt company recently folded [2] partly because the two MIT grad student co-founders apparently spent more time giving TED talks about how thermal-neutron reactors could "run on nuclear waste" than reading the 1940s literature that established that this was not possible [3]. (To be fair to the co-founders who are wonderful and smart people, many reactor companies make big mistakes early on, most are just a lot less public about it)
On the other hand, a then-amateur reactor designer named Kirk Sorensen read some stuff about molten salt reactors in an old book and then almost single-handedly built up an internet army of thousands of people yelling from the rooftops the benefits of fluid-fueled reactors. Now the big institutions like national labs have caught back up and there's serious talk and work on these reactors all over. Molten salt reactors (especially thorium-fueled ones) essentially went viral.
So there's a lot of good and bad coming out of all this, and I'm not sure where it will end up. One thing from the article seems certain: we need new forms of accreditation. We should try to find ways to bring trust back to the situation given its new reality.
[1] https://www.thirdway.org/infographic/the-advanced-nuclear-in...
[2] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/transatomic-to-...
[3] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603731/nuclear-energy-sta...
The cross section of fuel in fast spectrum also decreases. Fast reactors have larger fissile holdup. For every atom of fission fragment there are more fuel atoms in fast reactor than in thermal reactor. Fast reactors can run longer because fission products are dilute in the fuel. But, reprocessing is needed even for fast reactors to close the fuel cycle.
The advantages like U238 or Pu239 fission or fast fission factor can be also obtained in heterogeneous thermal spectrum reactors. (Example: A CANDU is heterogeneous reactor. It can burn more plutonium and it can use LWR SNF-fuel without reprocessing.) For a fluid-fuel reactor the fuel acts only as fuel and heat exchange takes place outside reactor core. Fuel region in a fluid-fuel reactor can be as thick as it is needed. So, reactor can be designed for maximum multiplication factor. (Solid fuel rods can't be very thick, because they are also heat exchangers.)
Slide 6 in this presentation. http://www.thoriumenergyworld.com/uploads/6/9/8/7/69878937/s...
Edit: This is a reply for: "I prodded him gently on it: "Oh, you mean the fast neutrons don't get readily absorbed in fission products, not the slow ones, right?" He doubled down. Some poor schmuck is funding this guy."
Indeed fast reactors need higher fissile concentration to be critical. Some kinds of fast reactors (like the Bill Gates Traveling Wave Reactor idea, which, disclaimer: I have professional connections to) can breed up plutonium in spent fuel and then burn it down without reprocessing (to be fair, the spent fuel would have to be hot refabricated into metallic fuel first, but that's still not separations/reprocessing). This kind of reactor needs enrichment once (to start up) and then can just be fed natural, DU, or SNF and it will run on a stream of it happily "forever" (until the vessel life is reached, at which point you transfer the core to a new machine and keep on shuffling). Only fast neutron systems can do such a thing. The Fast Mixed-Spectrum Reactor idea of BNL in 1980 was similar. Many fast-neutron MSRs are the same.
Fast fission is not all that's at play in a fast reactor. It's all about Eta (neutrons released vs. neutrons absorbed in fuel). In a fast reactor, it skyrockets around 0.5 - 1 MeV because of three different physical facts: neutrons released per fission goes up with fast incident neutrons, fission cross section stays flat for all actinides around this range, and capture cross sections drop off towards zero around this range. This is discussed on: https://whatisnuclear.com/fast-reactor.html#havingmore
Having extra neutrons around means you can afford to invest more in breeding fissile material, and only fast neutrons can get you to the point where reactivity is flat or increasing instead of decreasing as fission products are produced. The only exception is Thorium fuel cycle, where U-233 releases a lot of neutrons even with thermal neutron absorption. In that case you have to be removing the fission products as they are created with separations, and this basically is only practical with fluid fuel. This was the idea of the Molten Salt Breeder Reactor project of Oak Ridge in the late 1960s.
With reprocessing, you can definitely re-concentrate the remaining fissile material and get a thermal reactor critical again to burn it. But you cannot meaningfully use the other actinides as fuel, which is the whole idea of "running on spent fuel".
Regarding that slide deck, I love the idea of molten fuel in tubes. I investigated it heavily once upon a time, being super excited about it. I ran into the problem that while salt fuel mass densities are low, separating them out even more physically makes the fissile density annoyingly low, to the point that I couldn't get the reactor performance I wanted for my then target market. I still think this concept is very interesting so I hope these folks do well. They won't be extracting any non-fissile energy from SNF though until they replace that moderating fluid with something like lead, gas, or sodium and change their fuel salt to a chloride.
CANDUs can't use straight-up SNF out of a LWR without first stripping out the fission products. They're an example of "burning down the fissile material even better" but not "extracting the 100x more energy from the fertile U238".
BTW the safety example in that slide deck is a bit disingenuous by suggesting that traditional reactors are not physically stable. If you know those guys you might want to tell them. Overmoderation and Doppler and the NRC ensure that they are inherently stable at power. These things aren't like the F-22 or whatever, requiring active systems to stay in the air. The engineered safety systems are simply for removing decay heat, which can be done passively in Gen III+ plants and indefinitely in any Gen-IV plant.
Robert Steinhaus' Question for fast reactor folks: "While the theoretical case for fast reactors being used to burn nuclear waste down to fission products with short half lives has been made for decades, there has in all that time not been a single demonstration of a fast reactor actually experimentally burning any significant quantity (kilograms) of separated Minor Actinides and Transuranics down to fission products to a batch completeness exceeding 90%. The proposal of using fast reactors to treat nuclear waste has been vigorously put forward for decades. Why do fast reactor proponents not demonstrate with one existing fast reactor the burn up of some kilograms of separated long half life Minor Actinide waste to prove the technical feasibility of fast reactors for the application of waste burning and waste treatment?"
Yes, more neutrons are released for Pu239 fast fission. In CANDU, U238 fast fission is more because 99% of fuel is U238. If we increase Pu concentration Pu fast fission happens as well. U238 fast fission is ~3% of CANDU's power. This is because all neutrons are born fast. A FFR (MSR) can adjust heterogeneity as required, because heat transfer takes place outside the core. A MSR can have thicker fuel regions and higher lattice pitch than a CANDU and exploit fast fission further.
CANDU can use straight-up SNF. Check this or search it: http://www.iaea.org/inis/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Publ...
"These things aren't like the F-22 or whatever, requiring active systems to stay in the air." That is exactly how pressuriser in a PWR works. A control system loop with Temp & pressure sensors with heater and water injection. Almost all reactors are directly synced with grid, reactors will participate in tiny load adjustments and there is also cooling water temperature variations in a day.
MSRs can be isolated from the power conversion using a thermal salt reserve. That is called inherent safety. Water temperature variations or frequency control wont hit the reactor.
Even if MSR is connected to grid directly, there is no DNB control, the boiling point margin is high. If Xenon is removed with >90% efficiency, -ve reactivity can take care of leftover xenon as well, no control rod circus for MSR till a xenon equilibrium is attained.
Regarding that paper on CANDUs, I'd like to see some lattice physics calcs supporting that. Has anyone run CASMO on it? I would be absolutely shocked if you took a core of 55 MWd/kg (avg) LWR spent fuel, put it straight in a CANDU with no separations (all FP inventory accounted for) and saw it push through an additional normal amount of burnup.
Today, most CANDU's use ~2% enriched feed, I believe.
PWRs are not unstable. They are in their most critical configuration during operation. If they heat up, the water density goes down. Neutrons fail to be moderated and the source of thermal neutrons back into the fuel goes down, and the chain reaction shuts down. This is a regulatory requirement (GDC 11 of the NRC). Unstable cores run away in power excursions when poked (see Chernobyl). Modern cores don't do that. They have negative MTC and Doppler.
I'm well aware of what inherent safety is. EBR-II, a sodium-cooled fast reactor, was the first to actually demonstrate passive shutdown and passive decay heat following unprotected loss of heat sink and unprotected loss of flow.
BTW I don't advocate for fast reactors to burn SNF. It's much more economical to just dispose of it and mine new uranium. I just was pointing out that some people messed up their attempts to burn SNF in thermal reactors.
CANDU: DUPIC fuel cycle is not demonstrated. Canadians don't run PWRs. India, China and South Korea run PWR and CANDU, not much advanced R&D in India. Chinese CANDU in Qinshan may be testing this. US is most advanced in nuclear R&D. Why not build a CANDU in the US and demonstrate this?
I was talking about pressuriser and DNB. If there is no pressuriser (PWR) and constant adjustment of recirculation flow (BWR), clad may get damaged and fuel may melt because of DNB or denucleate boiling. Not inherently safe, engineered systems are needed. (In BWR fuel itself is engineered top-to-bottom with different enrichment levels and different burnable poison concentrations.)
Control rod adjustments are needed till a xenon equilibrium is attained. Also flux flattening circus, boron dilution circus etc. Operators are needed to babysit a LWR or CANDU. This is not like diesel generator or PV panel. Passive shutdown does not mean passive operation like a diesel.
I don't think first generation of MSRs can be like diesel generators. Operators are needed. But, there is potential for nuclear reactors to be like diesel generators with fluid-fuel reactors.
(Edit: Reply to "Today, most CANDU's use ~2% enriched feed, I believe." No. ALL heavy water reactors run with natural uranium in most tubes, depleted uranium or thorium in few pressure tubes for flux flattening circus. No enriched uranium in any tubes.)
I kept reading about all these advantages of "slightly enriched uranium" in candus so I'm surprised they aren't using it anywhere! [1]
Autonomous control can theoretically be done with many kinds of reactors and fuels. Sodium reactors have vast pools of liquid metal with extraordinary thermal conductivity and heat capacity. Lead-cooled reactors are similar. So are salt-cooled FHRs, and pebble-bed gas reactors like x-energy. There are a few decades of regulatory catchup before that can happen. Arpa-e has a current project into operator assistance which is aiming to move to more autonomous control.
Don't forget about maintenance costs. Equipment and chemistry will cause maintenance of any reactor to be higher than an average diesel. Fluid fuel will have 50% of the periodic table in thermal gradients, plating out in heat exchangers and other cold surfaces. Sodium reactors have sodium fires. Lead reactors have corrosion. Gas reactors have power cycle leaks. It's a worthy goal but we have lots of work before we get there. We don't have enough experience with fluid fuel yet to judge how maintenance of a commercial unit will pan out. It might be great, or it might prove difficult. Very worthy goal though!
[1] https://inis.iaea.org/search/search.aspx?orig_q=RN:20038082
(LWR-SNF cannot go fast critical. May be fission products is not removed, but reprocessing is needed to concentrate Pu in LWR-SNF.) Even if LWR-SNF has to be used as-is, it has to be toasted in blanket region of fast reactor before it is used as fuel. Some designs like TWR claim no reprocessing needed between toast step and burn step. I agree with that. But, for complete fission of SNF, fission-product removal is needed at some stage when fission product concentration exceeds a particular level in the fuel rod. No exception for travelling wave burnup.
For a critical reactor core some minimum length of fuel rod is always required to be in use. If fission product starts accumulating from bottom of the fuel-rod towards top, somewhere at the midway core can't go critical because a minimum length of rod is needed for criticality.
4% of 1GW-LWR fuel runs for 4.5 years. 100% of this fuel has potential for 112.5 years. A solid-fuel rod can't maintain integrity for 100 years. The crystal structure damage can't be reversed by any amount of maintenance. This is the same phenomenon how solar panels get degraded in sunlight. A fuel rod has crystal structure damage by radiation as well as by fission products.
Fluid-fuel can be used indefinite time and it is easy to reprocess liquid fuel by any method. There is no crystal structure to get damaged. ORNL was working on physical separation of fission products like vacuum distillation when the project was cancelled. Chemical separation and isotopic separation may raise proliferation concerns and they may not be environmentally friendly.
There is a chemical separation of fuel from fission products called fluoride volatility, which is used in industrial scale for enrichment of fuel. But, it works only for fluoride salts. ORNL has demonstrated this process when they switched from U235 to U233. They irreversibly damaged the drain tanks and hastelloy plumbing by doing this. MSRE would have lasted longer if they had not done this fluorination experiment.
RE "Fluid fuel will have 50% of the periodic table in thermal gradients, plating out in heat exchangers and other cold surfaces."
Just throw away the hot leg plumbing and heat exchangers every 2.8 years initially (MSRE salt loop was circulated for 2.8 years) and increase this incrementally. Fact: In solid fuel reactors fuel itself acts as a primary heat exchanger. In 4.5 years LWRs throw away a heat exchanger worth of Zr tubes/cladding. Earlier LWRs threw away solid-fuel every 3 years. Why point fingers at MSR folks when solid-fuel reactors throw away stuff? Note the difference between Inconel 625 (similar to hastelloy-N) and Zr. https://www.tricormetals.com/cost-comparison.html
Of course. This kind of thing is very well established things like [1]. TWR is not interested in burning SNF, that would require reprocessing to convert it from oxide in the first place. Reprocessing is expensive and has historical proliferation concerns. TWR's entire purpose is to approach closed fuel cycle advantages (Gen-IV safety, sustainability, cost) without needing any reprocessing whatsoever. It's a natural step after the US CRBRP mega-boondoggle. Don't reprocess SNF, bury it in geologic repositories and/or boreholes. Burn U-238 at global scale. That's the idea there. It's called a Modified Open Cycle, or Deep-burn once-through fuel cycle.
> Fluid-fuel can be used indefinite time and it is easy to reprocess liquid fuel by any method. There is no crystal structure to get damaged.
Fluid fuel trades solid fuel performance challenges for chemical/corrosion challenges and radionuclide containment challenges. At MSRE, ORNL has yet to account for about 50% of the radioiodine produced. No one knows where it went. that's a huge but not impossible challenge. I agree with the "Easy to reprocess liquid fuel" advantage, but recognize that it is also a proliferation disadvantage.
> Just throw away the hot leg plumbing and heat exchangers every 2.8 years initially (MSRE salt loop was circulated for 2.8 years) and increase this incrementally. These are rad waste remote operations, which has step influence on cost. What's the operational cost of this at FOAK? What's the operational cost at NOAK? It may be very cheap (Thorcon is well on their way to this) or it may be prohibitively expensive. The only way to really find out is to build and operate such a reactor commercially. To this end we will all benefit.
> Why point fingers at MSR folks when solid-fuel reactors throw away stuff? Who's pointing fingers? I mentioned downsides to all forms of reactors in the parent comment. MSR is wonderful and exciting and we as a community need to build many more of them and shake them down.
[1] https://www.iaea.org/publications/7112/implications-of-parti...
Iodine: Not 50%. It is a probability range. "Thus, of the order of one-fourth to one-third of the iodine has not been adequately accounted for."
RE: "but recognize that it is also a proliferation disadvantage"
MSR without reprocessing: MSR can be as hardened as anyone wants. Because of liquid fuel-form, MSR can be sealed tamper-proof. Fuel goes in and nothing comes out during operation.
Safeguard scenario in case of maintenance: By design the fuel will move to drain tank when shutdown for maintenance. IAEA can have the keys for the drain tank. Fuel can't be pumped back without the presence of IAEA inspector. If someone tampers this, license will be cancelled and the country will have no electricity.
MSBR with reprocessing: How easy separation of fission products from denatured liquid-fuel can be a proliferation disadvantage? It is actually a advantage because fuel always stays inside a tamper-proof system. ORNL attached a "add-on" apparatus for fluoride volatility, and fuel always stayed inside MSRE building. This is actually an advantage.
As material science improves, MSRs last longer and longer without need for maintenance. Safeguards will also become less frequent and less expensive.
I strongly agree that MSR needs a chance. MSR graduated with excellent results with MSRE. MSRE has answered most of the questions and raised very few new questions. MSR should be given a suitable employment like process heat or medical isotope production as soon as possible. We can scale it up for electricity later on.
The media can't tame them?!? It's more like they love them and are the reason they continue to exist in the first place.
That's not actually a big change; Free media has always been powerful, and it's always been awarded based on the media’s business interests, mostly advertising dollars (except for outlets that are in the game to drive a specific agenda even when that involves sacrificing profit opportunities.)
It's kind of a trap for old media, however. They are losing the only advantage they had, credibility. When that's gone, the bitter clingers will still watch for a while, but they won't find any new viewers/listeners/readers.
The more they covered Trump, the more they danced to the music of check deposits. CBS president Leslie Moonves said: "It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” Or in the words of one Washington-based reporter: "‘Holy shit, Trump’s the best thing that’s ever happened to our business!’"
In short, as the amount of information exploded, the media — with business models built for an environment of information scarcity — engaged in a Faustian Bargain. Naval Ravikant said it best: "The Internet commoditized the distribution of facts. The ‘news’ media responded by pivoting wholesale into opinions and entertainment.
Education: The cost factor is an American thing. Here, in Germany it way more affordable. I have a Bachelor's in pure mathematics. I wouldn't have studied all those often hard and boring fundamental topics if they weren't required by the curriculum, that's what I like about the university. Now, I'm more interested into research and there the university is the best place to be Of course you could offer a curriculum online, online learning doesn't have to be cherry picking. But I see a value in beeing enrolled. This whole student culture helps broadening my horizon.
Media: I'd argue that the internet is getting more centralized. Most people use Google Search and YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. There, an algorithm decides what you see. So yes, it is easier to diversify your media intake but there is still a central entity.
Attention: I think that's the thing this essay is mostly lacking in coverage. Having only the New York Times as reference you read a thorough report on a subject. Would you read it if you could get just a TL;DR or a quick video? I am not sure if the general public is really getting more educated or shut gaining a shallow knowledge based in FB or Reddit.
For example this article, or every Wait But Why article, are long and you read it only if you're interested. Otherwise I often catch myself only reading the comments.
Still, good article
Perell references Martin Gurri and Ben Thompson throughout. Going to dig in to Gurri as I'm not as familiar.
Alex Danco's series on Understanding Abundance is probably a good reference point as well.
A data about GDP share would be very nice but is missing.
Companies who own these brands are not losing anything. Brands are imaginary things, they aren't real. The real P&G company who manufactures and sells stuff is doing OK.
Pocket fails to make an article out of this url.
- It's very US-centric. Public universities are AFAIK free or very cheap in Germany for example. The reason for rising costs in the US is in large part about cuts to government support for higher education.
- It's very upper-middle-class in perspective, with no understanding of anyone who isn't doing well. America is one of "the most prosperous countries" in the world if you're in top 10%—but if you're in bottom 30%, say, there are many countries where you'll be much better off. Anywhere with socialized medicine, for example: if you're poor, what is a routine trip to the doctor elsewhere can cause bankruptcy in the US.
- The author apparently knows very little history.
Consider this quote: "During the 20th century, “the people” were an ambiguous, lifeless mass. They couldn’t organize themselves, so organization came down from the commands of people who controlled the media. Nothing else was possible; deference to authority was the structural destiny of the Mass Media age."
This is absolute nonsense. The 20th century is bursting with political movements that came from below: good, bad, and ugly, whatever you might say about any particular one, there's a hell of a lot of them in total.
In the 20th century, in the US alone, you could point to the suffragettes, organized labor at different times, the KKK (4 million members at peak in 1920s!), the multitude of different workers' groups of all political stripes (from veterans' march to IWW organizers to wacky retirement-lottery scheme whose details I forget) who pushed FDR to eventually offer the New Deal to counter-act the rising tide of protest, the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-Vietnam-war protests, Stonewall and the gay rights movement... on and on and on.
thats a strange critique considering the article. i mean the whole thing just focuses on the american society... why is that a problem?
> [quote] This is absolute nonsense
While this quote is indeed nonesens with no context, thats not exactly what the author meant there
Back then, quick organization and initiatives weren't really possible.
Take each of your example and check just how long it took for them to become widespread. It was years - not hours as it is today. And in order to actually organize something political, a leader of such a popular organization would've to intervene, making his point spot on.
But in its current form it's a universal claim backed by very limited evidence (and ignoring evidence that suggests other causes than the Internet).
High schools and universities in Denmark get money per student that passes the exams. If you fail the student, no money for you.
So there is a clear incentive for the schools to admit as many students as possible and lower the level required for passing the exams. Schools have had their "per student" budget cut year after year.
So the level of education today is not the same as 40 years ago. For high school the signalling part has become even more important, so much we lack blue collar workers because people think that kind of education is beneath them. The following question has absolutely the same validity in Denmark as in USA:
> Would you rather have a Princeton diploma without a Princeton education, or a Princeton education without a Princeton diploma?
Some things are not worth it, even when they are free.
Most of these were borne from trusted institutions:
* Organized labor WAS an institution of its own.
* The resurgence of the KKK in the 20th century was inspired by the Hollywood film Birth of a Nation.
* The Civil Rights Movement was largely organized by institutions like the NAACP and partially borne out of organized religion.
* Popular opposition to the Vietnam War, as explicitly addressed in the article, came largely from the influence of mass media, Walter Cronkite in particular.
* Most of the political movements of the late 1960's and early 1970's were comprised primarily of university students--in other words, they were also incubated (unwittingly, to be fair!) by established institutions.
Many of the rest is stuff that probably seems bigger in retrospect. For example, the Stonewall riots took place in 1969, the same year as the moon landing and Woodstock and one year after the Tet Offensive and the assassinations of both RFK and MLK. It probably didn't make a big impact on the culture at the time. According to a Google ngrams search (https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=stonewall%2C%2...), the phrase "Stonewall" didn't have a large uptick in terms of being written about in books until the 1980's, over a decade after the riot itself. (Most of the usages prior to then, and probably many of them even after, are likely references to General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson.)
Could it be this?
I'm also unimpressed by any thesis that omits preferential attachment (begetting winner takes all) or transaction costs.
Both Trump and AOC are populists. They care less about what's factually true and more about whats emotionally true.
Politics is not about being factually correct. You can be correct but still not have it your way.
This is what Trump knew. Perception is reality.
That's why it never make sense to judge a politician on their person but only on their policy.
Then by extension, perhaps Obama was the last of the “personality and charisma” era?
AOC uses Twitter and social media well, just as Trump does, but are they really using it the same way, to the same ends? I have yet to see AOC just straight up lie like Trump does basically every time he opens his mouth. And many of AOC's policy proposals are backed up with historical precedent (especially the higher marginal tax rates for the wealthy).
Also, as far as I know, AOC is not implicated in any criminal behavior, whereas Trump and his family absolutely are.
Why is this?
Not really, no. The people who are aware of both AOC and DJT enough to have an opinion are not split evenly in terms of their thinking about each of these politicians. I don't despise AOC, I just don't particularly care for her, and I think the way she was elected by exploiting people's lack of attention to the primary race, and unwillingness to even consider any alternative party in the general.
Conversely, I don't laud Donald Trump, I'm just not personally all that offended by his MOR '90s Democrat style policies.
> Big institutions, whose dominance once seemed eternal, are on the brink of collapse.
> The explosion of information has undermined and obsoleted the 20th-century organizational model. Big brands are losing market share. Big universities are going bankrupt. Big political parties are splintering and losing their control over the political narrative.
Isn't the exact opposite happening? The big universities are getting bigger, richer, more exclusive. In practice, Trump is probably less divisive of his party than Obama. Brands are consolidating (particularly in this media landscape that is supposed to be so dizzyingly dynamic and fractured!) . And sure, people identify less with retail or luxury hotel brands. But you know what brands they love? Apple. Netflix. That crazy new starter, "McDonald's". And data is making their strangle grip tighter, not looser.
Information wants to...empower those who have the money to leverage it.
Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose...I'm afraid this is a lot of words about Those Dang Kids Today
FWIW I had the same thoughts as the GP while reading the article. Look at the examples that it gives for brand fragmentation: Halo-Top, Talenti, So Delicious, Ciao Bella, and Coconut Bliss.
Talenti is a subsidiary of Unilever. Ciao Bella is 50% owned by Sherbrooke Capital Management. So Delicious is produced by WhiteWave which is owned by Danone (Dannon).
I think the article makes some good points, but ultimately gets a bit too cute trying to paint "information abundance" as the cause for all the discussed structural changes.
Compared to all of the things he's quoting from--Chomsky, McLuhan, Caplan, etc.--this is far more sizzle than steak.
Maybe if he had some point to make with the source material, that would have saved it. Instead, it's like he couldn't choose between writing the McKinsey version of a book report, or an alternative intro to Fight Club.
(I have, here.)
"How the shift from information scarcity to information abundance is transforming commerce, education, and politics", from the text, might work, though it's long.
There's no question that the Fox Newses of the world like to portray AOC as a raving lunatic who is moments away from erecting guillotines and starting another October Revolution.
Mainstream liberal outlets have similarly detached problems with trump, with their primary criticism being that he's crazy and an asshole and says stupid things, and not that he's an instrument of neoconservative nihilism and promoter of the American White Ethnostate.
Funny how you can identify these kind of personalities within a few sentences from their oh-so objective writing. I'd love for HN to acquire some critical thinking skills to dismiss pseudo-'data-driven' articles like this one.
> Essays like this are a team effort. This essay was inspired by a frustrating conversation at Thanksgiving dinner. They say not to talk about politics, and guess what… we talked about politics. However, the disagreement was productive. It sent me on a long journey to dig deeper and find my own answers.
I'm sure the author's a great person to hang out with. He sees the truth and speaks it to power! Um, and would you pass me some potatoes?
As an example: The current top comment praises the quality of the essay without any further remark.
Um, I specifically wrote that the responses seemed totally bifurcated into partisan and non-partisan. Where did I say every single response was partisan?
The number of anything grows exponentially because population grows exponentially. It doesn't mean anything. Earlier they say "big brands are in decline" because GM and Ford lost market share. Well, are big brands in decline or just those two? Were they replaced by a bunch of small brands or just Honda and Toyota?
This is a bunch of incorrect stuff masquerading as a point.