Oh, 2022
antipope.org
antipope.org
Future is complex, and not only "good" developments happens and start changing everything faster than ever before, bad ones does too. And we aren't rational enough to avoid the bad ones.
Anyway, I'm more worried about the consequences of climate change that are not the slow rise of the global sea level than about COVID. That is a general area where things are happening faster than predicted, and where we act slower than predicted.
In 15 years, it'll be a 3-month endeavor unless we see the human limits of perceptual processing hit a hard wall. I liken it to how memory used to be expensive and engineers cheap, and it's now the other way around.
Its going to be a wild ride! Hopefully it doesn't result in anything too crazy going on, I'd hate to involuntarily grow a new limb.
Related, your books, and others in the genre, helped bring about my own acceptance of people's differences. I realized that if I had no objection to a future where people modified their own DNA, then it followed that I should have no objection to people dying their hair, getting crazy tattoos, or making any alterations to their body that they so choose. Transhumanist literature was the final stepping stone that let me step back from the preconceived notions of ethics and morals that society had placed upon me and do a thorough analyze and decide what I wanted to keep versus discard.
https://ansible.uk/writing/t3_002.html
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm
https://www.nature.com/articles/44964
https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/different-kinds-of-darkness/
But really, accelerando was a great book, wish there was more in the genre but maybe I just haven't been looking hard enough.
that depends, have you recently received any Signal messages from lobsters representing the moscow windows NT user group?
I think Accelerando itself is precisely complaining that things are going too fast. In the specific scenario in the novel, the incomprehensibly fast automation of capitalism is going to eat us all.
Who decides what is good and what is bad for the state of the planet?
At this point the proposed bans are on the sale of new vehicles that run on fossil fuels. As far as I know, no one is planning to outright ban ICE vehicles yet. Headline writers consistently get this wrong, because making the policy sound more extreme than it is attracts ad views.
> "As about half of global shipping is engaged in the transport of petrochemicals or coal at this point, this is goin to have impacts far beyond the obvious."
Huh, that's a lot. If that's correct, it's a lot more than I would have guessed.
Wyvernsridge | January 9, 2022 19:06 | Reply 8:
I love these kinds of posts! I would, however, caution about thinking that the end of ICE car manufacturing will be dictated solely by government diktat. It will most likely come earlier and more chaotically because of manufacturers being unable to source parts and components to continue making those cars.
The auto industry is basically a pyramid where OEMs [ie the car companies] depend on module/system [Tier1] suppliers as well as component suppliers [Tier 2] and Parts suppliers [Tier 3]. Those relationships are built on contracts that span out to five years and beyond. Today, contracts are being negotiated for 2025-2030. Those contracts, if happening at all, are being done for much lower quantities of units. After all, an EV does not need a cast-aluminium gearbox assembly. The manufacturers within those tiers are highly competitive among themselves and they know they need to find alternative to manufacture and remain viable well in advance of 2030. For OEMs this means trouble finding components, and paying much higher prices for those than they used to [ie the suppliers are costing in the risks]. This means that ICE car prices will skyrocket at the same time that EV prices go mainstream.
However, all that new electricity demand needs to come from somewhere. Drawing power from the grid at night works great today, but that's because of a coincidental uneven energy demand, which I doubt will last for too long. Once EVs are truly mainstream, it will (1) saturate the grid at all times of day and (2) make the grid more critical than it already is (meaning mitigations like rolling blackouts are gonna be even more infeasible). Sprinkle some demand surges from A/C and heaters from extreme weather events on top of this, and while we're add it let's decommision nuclear prematurely for political points (see e.g. Germany and Sweden).
Anyway, what I mean to say is that electricity supply will be a real problem (especially in the US due to car centrism) and short sighted politicians will need to provide immediate duct-tape fixes. Fossil fuels are sinfully well suited for fast energy injections, and I'm afraid that will often be the only option.
In other words, I worry little about the ICE-EV transition, but that doesn't mean anything for the fossil-renewables transition in general. I wouldn't be surprised if tomorrow's electricity will be dirtier than today's.
As a result 1MJ of petrol consumption replaced with electricity when somebody replaces their car with an EV is not 1MJ more electricity to deliver but perhaps 600kJ. This can mean guesses of the necessary infrastructure investment to deliver a fit-for-purpose supply network are significant over-estimates.
Cars are also an excellent target for "demand side control" in electrical grids. You'd be very angry if your refrigerator shuts down temporarily when the grid load is high, and pretty unhappy if your lights or TV shut down, but how about the tumble dryer? Most days you wouldn't care, and if you got paid for the option you might jump at the chance. However charging your car overnight who cares whether it charges from 1830 (when you arrive home) to 0340 (full) or from 2230 (as people go to bed and the network is less strained) to 0740 (just before you get in the car to drive to work) ?
There are plenty of studies showing that an hybrid car is much better for the environment on the long term than the current state of lithium battery electric cars. Long range EV are a pest. Lithium mining is way worse for the environment than people believe, and there is the whole other issues related to mining in general.
We still need ice cars
There was a post here just yesterday, of a piece by Bill McKibben on this very topic. 40%. Seems about right to me.[1]
> > At this point the proposed bans are on the sale of new vehicles that run on fossil fuels [...] leading to a complete phase-out ...
> ... making the policy sound more extreme than it is
And the reduction in fossil fuels, too. Gasoline is somewhere between 30% and 40% of total oil consumption (if I am interpreting pages on the IEA's website correctly). There will be a ramp down, perhaps, but not a complete phase-out.
The ramp-down could happen slowly, then all at once, though.
On the one hand, ICE vehicles will be around for many decades after the bans come into force. On the other, most vehicle miles travelled are travelled by newer vehicles (say up to ten or twelve years old). I think there could be a tipping point after a while, in which the price of gasoline suddenly rises sharply because it's uneconomic to refine the small quantities demanded.
All the other components, not so much. There are lots of uses for which there are no good substitutes: industrial chemical feedstocks, ships, roadmaking, off-road construction and agriculture, trains, backup generators, military vehicles, and many more.
Diesel, kerosene (jet fuel), naptha, bitumen, etc., will be with use for a long time to come. Let's hope someone comes up with a cheap way of synthesizing them from atmospheric CO2.
My point is that several governments now have policies in place that say they're going to ban the sale of new ICE vehicles after a certain date. But they aren't going to disallow the use of ICE vehicles in their country or on their roads, which is what it would mean if they were literally going to ban ICE vehicles.
I've seen a number of articles with headlines like "X country is banning ICE vehicles after 20YZ" but then the article contents specify that it's a ban on the sale of new vehicles, which isn't the same thing. This is unhelpful sensationalism that is likely to convince a lot of conservative people that government agents are going to show up at their front door on a certain date with a tow truck to take away their Ford F150 or whatever, and that's just not the case. So, whenever I see anything that uncritically repeats that idea I find it necessary to post a comment saying that "banning ICE vehicles" isn't the same thing as "banning the sale of new ICE vehicle" in hopes that fewer people are confused and maybe more people will demand clear and accurate communication on this issue.
In the long run, bans on the sale of new vehicles will mean that existing ICE vehicles will wear out unless people want to make the extra effort to keep them running, which for most of them it's just not worth it. So, this achieves the needed policy objectives without antagonizing existing ICE vehicle owners. In other words, it's actually a much more reasonable and moderate position than what the word "ban" implies.
For example, if someplace bans new ICE car sales from 2032, ten years from now, what does that do for the value of car-related businesses in 2027, five years from now? If you own a petrol station in a city and are offered a lowish price from a property developer, do you close the business? Or do you assume that you can sell at a higher price in 2037?
Or if you're looking for a new car in 2027, five years before the ban takes effect, do you think you'll be able to sell your car at a nice price in 2037? As of 2027 there's no ban on selling used cars, but do you trust that to remain?
Not entirely. Government bans provide additional incentive for manufacturers to switch to EVs, which hastens price competitiveness through economy-of-scale effects.
But there WILL be higher congestion charges and maybe even localised bans for ICEs in city centres. No one wants a smoking diesel truck idling under their window if they have the option to replace it with a quiet EV.
It's like the reverse of switching from coal to natural gas heating. Coal required delivering and shoveling a bunch of dirty fuel and ash around frequently, which was a waste of time, so the switch to gas was welcomed as time-saving and much much cleaner. EVs are so much cleaner and quieter than ICE but the convenience factor is not solved yet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqkmaIfWMWQ
(Shot during another wave of rising gas prices)
That wouldn't disappear entirely if you electrified everything; coal is widely used for producing steel (1kg blast-furnace steel uses 750g met-grade coal, this is ~10% of imports in China) and preparing cement (producing 1kg cement uses 500g coal).
However, mass electrification would still be a dramatic drop in shipping.
If you're going to pee and get a sandwich with a meatball (or a hamburger, a sack of carrots or whatever it is counts as a snack for you) anyway, you may as well do so while charging your car. Given that even the really cheap ones can charge to a pretty significant level (80+%) in 20 minutes or so, these activities are compatible.
What's interesting about their design is that the end-to-end losses are within a couple percent of the end-to-end losses of a conductive charger (the losses move from the transformer to the induction coil).
And lots of other places. About 1 billion people live along coastlines at 20 meters or less above sea level, and 200 million at 5 meters or less. I live in a wealthy country but well within the 5 meters range and am already having to think about whether it wouldn't be more prudent to sell my house today, now that it's still worth something, and emigrate to somewhere with a more future-proof elevation.
Worst case if Greenland's ice sheet melts, that adds 7 meters to sea level, and Antarctica's another 60 meters. I won't see that in my lifetime but my children might.
Ice is less dense than water... but only just. If an ice sheet collapses into the sea, it doesn't need to melt. The ice will displace seawater perfectly effectively just by floating. Most of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet sits on rock that is well under sea level – in places, a kilometre under sea level. It doesn't need to melt: it just needs for the seawater to get underneath it, allowing it to slide off into the sea and break up. Seawater is, obviously, salty and warmer than ice.
The resultant sea-level rise will only take on the order of 12 days to stabilise world wide.
I looked at the figures for this and it was a factor in my decision to sell my house on the outskirts of London and move to Czechia, which is above the level of any possible sea-level rise. Its lowest points are ~120m above mean sea level.
I couldn't afford Austria or Switzerland, and most of the other high-and-dry countries don't have the employment prospects (or beer as good) as the Czech Republic.
another thing to think about is the global geopolitical/civil war/economic possible disruptions and consequences of something like potentially half to 3/4 of bangladesh's population becoming international refugees. imagine what happened with syrians around 2012-2015 and people trying to get into europe multiplied by a factor of 50.
and in a theoretical scenario like that happening with bangladesh, simultaneously other groups of aggregate hundreds of millions of low-income coastal residents from around the world also trying to move to safety at the same time.
Much of the tropics will become literally uninhabitable: being outside, in the shade, not moving, you die of heat stroke. Not every day, but in several days of the year, which is entirely enough. Before that, of course, the crops fail.
The effect of massive refugee influx has been seen to drive a rise of fascism in democratic nations.
That would create a whole different sort of climate change.
How likely is this worst case?
IPCC in 2021 [1] projected a 0.5 m to 2.0 m sea level rise by 2100 (see Figure SPM.8) and NOAA in 2020 [2] suggested a worst case of 2.5 m sea level rise by 2100. It appears that neither are considering the possibility of an entire ice sheet melting?
[1]: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...
[2]: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
Edit: not accusing any particular person, ceo, or entity of malice.
If you're in Bangladesh, where can you go, other than another country. And people will fight for that. They'll fight wars. With neighbors that have nuclear weapons. That will not end well for any of us.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Karar-Ahsan/publication...
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nicolas-Guilpart-2/publ...
People aren't going to migrate unless there is infrastructure and job opportunities there, so if we want to help these people we should be helping these countries to build new cities that are outside the risk of flood zones. We could even take the opportunity to provide more western standards of living - Dhaka only treats around 1/4 of its waste water - and build more environmentally friendly buildings - Dhaka is within a climate where houses could be heated passively.
It is easy to say people can move someplace else in their own country, but other people already live in those places you suggest they move to.
People obliged to move out with just what they can carry are generally not equipped to build new cities. People already in places they hope to move to are generally ill-disposed to building them a place to live for free.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering
It's risky, but if their alternative is millions of deaths, why wouldn't they?
It's about proximity to the sea-level being an indicator of severe damage done to property and infrastructure done by sea-level-rise and other climate-change factors like increased storm severity and frequency, increased dilapidation speed from salt and extreme temperature changes, etc. Not to mention the increased cost of living due to the above even if damage to life and property is minimal.
Previously it was running somewhere around 0.15% to 0.60% which was still totally usable... if you put a similar test setup on a noisy/oversubscribed coaxial cablemodem DOCSIS3 segment in a randomly chosen house in a suburb somewhere, you might also see an average of 0.50% loss in many cities.
For anyone who has seen packet loss, jitter and transfer quotas on deeply oversubscribed consumer geostationary services, this is amazing.
The next big thing will be to see if they can really get satellite-to-satellite laser links working so that starlink service area and coverage is not limited by having multiple moving LEO satellites in line of sight of both the CPE and a regional spacex earth station at the same time. for instance if people wanted to put a working starlink terminal somewhere really difficult to reach like socotra, yemen.
As an example I've been looking at properties outside of suburbia since testing a friends Starlink terminal. I know i can get proper broadband on par with cable anywhere. It's changed my personal long term future plans. I think it's going to change a lot of things.
My guess is that enough rich people moving into the middle of nowhere will cause the government to pay for terrestrial solutions ("incentivize") within the next 10 or so years.
If you live in a dense metro area it will probably fill up very quickly - but then again Starlink is not really designed for those locations, which probably already have good connectivity.
The only other options, until Starlink launches in my area, are traditional satellites. My neighbor previously had one of those, and he had an 8GB cap per MONTH. Plus the ping time averaged like 600ms.
I'm not even mad about the price of $94. Internet is way, way worth it. The quality of the connection sucks, though. I would pay $200 for Starlink once it's reliable. I'm not actually sure what my limit is, but it's pretty high, because rural internet is painful
People are comparing (sub)urban US multi-carrier options, or heavily populated countries (like Italy), that have much cheaper pricing. It's not surprising that terrestrial services there are better spec'd and cheaper.
For me (in AU) it's compelling because I otherwise have an option of a 3G yagi / booster (nearest tower is 15km away, service is awful normally, but unusable in storms, frequently highly contended, etc), dial-up (there's very few places that still offer such a service, and just the landline connection fee is $40 / month to start with), or geo-stationary satellite (what I've just moved away from after 2+ years, which has > 600ms RTT to the nearest capital city, and a max downstream of 25Mbps, which is also frequently highly contended during peak times.
The 100W / hour usage is frustrating, and claims of electricity being 'just 10c / kWh' are quaint, I guess coming from well serviced parts of EU / US? Here most people are up for 30c (AUD) / kWh, and if on ToU that can go up to 60c during peak (2pm through 8pm). I've got solar, so on average I'm powering this 'for free' 25% of the time.
I get 1gbps for ~$100/mo in the bay area, but if I lived a few miles further from the city I’d get 10mbps DSL over wet string regardless of how much I’m willing to pay.
This also means that, at least for us, 99$ (88€) per month for such a thing is a lot more at the end of the year (+756€). I hope they’ll eventually adjust that price for different markets because at the moment it’s not even competitive in my area.
Your anecdote doesn’t really cover “game changer” since land outside of suburbia is pretty either scarce, big and expensive, underdeveloped, etc. and not many people want to live there (and I doubt fast broadband is the only thing holding people back).
I honestly don’t think starlink is useful for that many people. Personally I would categorize it as a quality of life improvement for a small group of wealthy individuals (and maybe even smaller number of industrial workers which work onsite in remote locations). I have a hard time seeing it doing anything more.
You could get a Verizon hotspot (and ration data). But Starlink is pretty good. Video streaming does stutter a bit--you're better off downloading. I could actually work up there which I couldn't really with the old DSL.
I reckon if they put their mind to it they could cause enough pollution to make cellphones unusable, maybe even open-air wifi. They're smart, I'm sure they have the technology, they could make the whole EM spectrum so dirty the whole sky would glow.
Admittedly, most of my trouble is probably caused by the 70 meter coastal redwood on the western horizon. The network isn't quite dense enough yet that I can get a satellite visible at all times amongst the trees. It's just a bit sad, as the Starlink app reports like 95% clear sky. You really do need 100%.
We were seeing drops of a few minutes each day, but as of December we've gone days without even the slightest interruption. We had to really work to get Dishy to not have any obstructions, but since then it's been great:
https://pics.rickosborne.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/01...
We also have Ukiah Wireless, point to point microwave, as a backup. I use it for my work uplink as it has more stable upload bandwidth than Starlink. And when we had those really bad storms over the last few weeks, Starlink definitely struggled more than microwave.
for people with trees they cannot cut down I see a lot more 40' aluminum light duty towers with foundation kits getting sold in the future. Much like people used to put up in very rural areas with yagi antennas on them to receive OTA TV a logn time ago.
The metrics to worry about are latency and loss and throughput. Jitter is really a SIPnRTP thing. Don't use ICMP to test for "quality" - it isn't even the same protocol that you worry about (TCP/UDP), it is what it is - ICMP (use it wisely).
jitter is really quite consistent at 23-28ms
I agree on the icmp, for me, icmp loss is really more like a cheap/easy early warning sign that something is wrong. if a properly implemented last mile connection has no icmp loss it's also unlikely anything else is wrong. if there is a few % icmp loss, very likely normal tcp and udp things will also behave badly.
(RIP Douglas Adams)
oneweb is just now becoming barely usable above 55 degrees north latitude. they have a lot of launches to go before it's anything like a real network (and will not be for individual end user CPEs, a oneweb terminal is much bigger and more costly). other things like telesat LEO network remain in the land of vaporware, same as with amazon's.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/p0qws3/self...
Yes, they have a plan to deal with collisions.
Probably a better thing to observe is loss and congestion on normal TCP sockets, using retransmit counters, congestion window collapse, etc.
It'd be cool to see what a long running mtr in TCP mode says about Starlink.
starlink is not even close to oversubscribed, so I'm not sure why you're making this comparison.
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/the-cra...
(The first chapter of Accelerando is about a two decades in the future 2018.)
https://twitter.com/maxerickson/status/685506107695972352
Anyone with that many followers is likely going to disengage with low-effort replies of that nature. It adds nothing of consequence to the lengthy post it is correcting.
(This includes compliments. They're bad for you.)
Like me putting a Gmail rule in place to move messages from a specific source, say a specific mailing list thread that I'm not interested in out of my inbox.
Is this considered taboo on Twitter?
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/08/houston-...
But I will say his 2015 piece, "A different cluetrain", still holds up with grimmer and grimmer shades of beige*:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/02/a-differ...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9106983
* a 2013(!) piece: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/02/politica...
Populist demagogues and pandemics might come and go, but the automated, over-financialized, post-political bureaucratic intelligence state is here to stay so long as civilization looks the way it does now. That piece has a lot more deep, systems-oriented thinking. I'd say cstross' pre-2016 predictions still hold up so much better than the more "ripped from the headlines" attempts in these later pieces. His 2017 three-parter in particular has some embarrassingly sensationalist, hand-wavy stuff.
And so quite a lot of readers think there is some super duper smart guy offering this cool hidden insight that they can easily use, only to forget it by the next hour.
I think there are a handful of "obvious" interactions that should have been called out.
Politics + Space: Greater international competition for space-resources will likely begin, and we may see the end of first-come-first-serve orbits. The international inward-turning politics may be particularly poorly timed; we may see irregular military action in space.
Politics + Cyberspace: Inward-turning politics combined with greater awareness/impact of breaches (including on increasingly-autonomous vehicles?) will almost certainly lead to countries closing their digital borders a-la China. Its already been proposed in the UK, I believe.
AI: This is going to be the source of some huge wildcard, and I think everybody knows it. Companies have massive amounts of data on people regarding how they behave; eventually someone is going to give that data to an AI with the right/wrong instructions to make a noticeable impact on society.
Most "cool hidden insight" can be attributed more to the autor's writing skill (and acting skill if it's youtube talking heads) than to any actual useful info inside. Do not let yourself be mislead by Mr Stross' profession, most internet "experts" are even worse than that. And they don't even admit they're fiction writers.
A near-future series (Halting State) was also cut short when the Scottish independence referendum (and the subsequent Brexit vote) rendered that future impossible.
That said, his Empire Games trilogy is set in a near future where the internal multiverse concept successfully allows for explicit discrepancies from our timeline.
Lol, and yet it still loads lickety split compared to something like cnn.com for instance.
Huh? Losing a billion people in two years is not "brink of civilizational, if not species-level, extinction". I hate this kind of over exaggeration wrapped up in seemingly reasonable and scientific sounding statements.
Truth is that if covid/sars had occurred a decade ago, it wouldn't have been much different in the infection and mortality stats. What might have been different is the population's reaction to the extreme authoritarianism displayed by governments.
That’s a scary thought.
The species as a whole was much more robust when large fractions of the population were engaged in subsistence farming and we hadn't disbalanced the atmosphere and doomsday weapons didn't exist.
Edit: minor grammar correction
> But the so-called "childhood diseases" like mumps, rubella, and chickenpox used to kill infants by windrows.
Chickenpox is nowhere near that deadly. Remember the "Simpsons" episode where Maggie gets the chickenpox and Homer hosts a pox party?
If you are contagious on day 2, symptomatic on day 17, and drop dead on day 180, such a disease will happily spread through a population, despite having a 100% fatality rate. There will be no evolutionary pressure for that virus to become less lethal, just like how there's no evolutionary pressure for people to live to 200.
Somebody forgot to tell that to smallpox, which had something like a 25 or 30% IFR before vaccines came around. And there were lots and lots of pandemics of that!
1. Delayed onset of symptoms. That you can spread the disease for a couple days before you first have symptoms has caused so much spreading. If, instead, people were showing symptoms within 12 hours, they'd be much more likely to not be out and about the next day spreading the disease.
2. Wide range of symptoms. Some people felt nearly nothing. Others dealt with it like a minor cold. And others it killed, but not a high enough percentage for most people to take it seriously enough. "Oh, even if I get it, it won't be that big a deal..." kind of thinking. If everyone got at least a "worse than the flu" like reaction to it, everyone would have been taking it more seriously.
There would be almost no antivaxxer sentiment if it killed 20%, because everyone in an area with an outbreak would know someone who died, likely even have seen them sick.
Civilization can survive an awful lot of people dying and even if COVID had a 2% fatality rate it would roll on more or less without a blip. The Spanish flu didn't lead to the fall of civilization anywhere and it killed a lot more people in the prime of their life. COVID deaths are highly concrentrated in the over 50s.
Plus it depends on what you mean by civilization. What the Incas built was sophisticated but child's play compared to a modern civilization.
A SARS 1 global pandemic would have probably set back the entire world 50 years or more. Cities would have been abandoned, supply chains destroyed, most likely major wars started due to shortages.
And about five times as many Swedes have died from Covid compared to their Nordic neighbours.
But I do wish people a) understood stats and b) listened to reason not rhetoric.
It is the quantity and quality of psychological manipulation.
What happened to Germans in 1930s won't repeat again, people are more knowledgeable and less susceptible to mass hypnosis in the 21st century, right?
And bang, all of a sudden there is a menace which didn't exist before. By mere redefinition of what a menace is.
Naturally, the working class still got screwed - either you're "non-essential" and lost your job or were "essential" and ran a risk of contracting COVID that your overlords got to avoid from the comfort of their own home - but it might've helped slow the spread of the virus, some.
That wasn’t possible in the 90s.
If those political institutions collapse, there is nothing scarier than an angry mob of starving people who are united with each other through a common culture, but disunited from you.
To put it simply, it was expected the level of noise and sensation will rise after smartphones emerged. Loud lunacy seems to be a great way to catch public attention currently and this is well understood by both the media, politicians and vegabonds of wealth. Sensational journalism was always a problem, now add to that billions of people able to elevate the wildest stories, let alone create their own. If course we're drowning in digital noise and it isn't going to subside as long as it's effective.
But there's good news.
I cannot stress enough that it's entirely possible to control the level of exposure to said digital noise. You don't have to follow news, politics and social media intensely. You can just opt out. If you find yourself constantly angry on Twitter, fighting endlessly on Facebook, and cussing at the news, it's entirely by design. The only way to win this game is by not playing.
This is good news in the same sense that it's good news that you can do your bit for the climate crisis by walking everywhere, switching to vegetarianism and wearing only hand-crocheted hemp clothing.
i.e. it's not really good news at all because even if you do it, hardly anyone else will, and the world will carry on just as it is regardless.
We the people have been gaslit by large corporates trying to pin the responsibility on us. It's time to fight back, and put the responsibility onto those that create these problems in the first place for their own profit.
I mean, I agree it's ineffective, but it's hell of a lot better than thinking that paper straws, recycling and buying from companies with some green leaf-looking stamp will solve the problem, which is the majority view. In fact, consuming less — both products and instagrammable experiences — is probably the best you can do in terms of personal footprint, along with not having kids of course.
That said, abstaining and "not playing" isn't gonna cause the revolution, or even a slow paradigm shift. We need to evolve, too. And fortunately, changes happen, even if they rarely get the attention they deserve. One example today is the independent podcast boom - where tabloid-style fear media and Twitter flame wars have been losing market share to... Long form conversation. The cynic in me did not see that coming. It shows, in my opinion, that not even carefully engineered amygdala hijacking is enough to keep people from curiosity and reflection. Human behavior is complex and fascinating.
You're right, but I didn't mean it as a way to make things better, I meant it as a way to make your life better, assuming the world isn't going to change. The good news is it's your choice if you don't feel like being swept up in the torrent of digital noise.
That's a democracy. Not a problem.
But what about the hundreds of millions that don't opt out, and spawn the lunacy?
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On the other hand, eliminating sugar (actually, just fructose, and then only with not enough accompanying fiber!) from the US, UK, and Indian and Pakistani diets could be overwhelmingly easier than getting and keeping everybody vaccinated against SARS. Doesn't mean it will happen, though. It is easier to pretend it is not a problem, and blame all the deaths on the tertiary effects.
I have a hard time believing this, if it's something that's supposed to happen globally, including for all good transportation, which is a category where I don't remember seeing much electric vehicles. And as for it happening globally, that'd mean everywhere on the globe, there'd be enough electricity to supply all the needs for transportation and agriculture.
Governments are rolling out policies that vehicles manufactured after 2030/2035/2040, etc will not be eligible for vehicle registration.
This makes much more sense than banning existing fleets, as the vast majority of any car fleet will be replaced over the period of a decade. (Average US car lifespan is 12 years).
This serves as a slow ramp up time, as well as less political pushback. Will the electric grids be able to keep up? Mostly. Will electricity prices increase as a result of demand that is costly to build new generation sources to satisfy, almost certainly.
Most of these "green" policies are taxing those with little upfront capital to invest (bottom two quintiles) and subsidizing those with capital.
Are these policies going to impact me or my family? Not really. I'm specifically investing tens of thousands of dollars in my home to reduce my grid costs to negligible levels and make my home non-grid dependent. The grid is mediocre, at best, where I live. Also, there is no net metering, so I need batteries to service a large portion of my non-solar generating hours.
The long tail for ICE vehicles, even in western countries, will be decades after the last new one is sold.
The 1992 Nissan Sentra was still being manufactured and sold in Mexico until 2017 as the Nissan Tsuru. It was finally retired as Mexico has moved upmarket enough on the global scale that the government can do things like ban a $7k car due to safety concerns.
Similarly, I expect ICE vehicles to still dominate until such time as solar becomes so incredibly cheap and electric cars destined for Pakistan can be plugged directly into the PV array.
I can't understand what this is saying. Not sure what 'wide-screen WTFery' is, but lots of people were predicting a pandemic, even covid-like if I remember correctly. I suppose that does not absolutely prove that it was predictable and not just unreasonable predictions being made by scientists and experts which just happened to be right by pure coincidence, but still.
He also seems to say with the WWII example that it's not predictable if it can't be predicted to a very precise date. By that definition sure probably covid19 could not have been predicted to a date or even year. But he claims everything else is predictable, but he is making some pretty wild predictions with very vague timelines. So I don't understand his criteria for predictableness.
If you look at [1] the January 2020 - predictions for 2030 thread here on HN, and look for hints of the Covid pandemic, there are only 3 mentions of any type of pandemic, and none of those was close to an actual hit. I did the reading, all of the reading.
It feels crazy now that, despite all that, I went to the Ghibli Museum with my friends at the end of February 2020 and it was packed with people (and barely anyone wearing a mask). Just a week later, my return flight to Germany was canceled and I became concerned that I might get stuck in Japan. By the way, I was able to get on a flight on 20 March 2020 (Narita to Frankfurt) and it was almost completely empty. Things happened so fast.
Okay so the pandemic was predictable and it was predicted. I'm not interested in semantics quibbling if you want to say it wasn't predictable, I'm interested in the contradiction between claims that the pandemic was not predictable and yet other similarly hard to predict things are predictable.
The world being in complete lockdown, in bonus with a large anti-science movement, or nukes being developed and used within a few years are quite advantageous predictions, to put it lightly.
And of course the pandemic was "quite easy" to predict ; the problem is that we have a lot of survivorship bias in those predictions. For every prediction that's "scarily precise" right now, hundreds have completely failed.
It absolutely makes sense to say the pandemic was not predictable in a given 10-20 year timeframe. The issue is if that is the standard he sets then many of his other predictions are also not predictable.
I saw a quote recently along the lines of as much as spent on a single soccer team as the worlds budget for detecting near earth asteroids.
yes — even William Gibson, in a book Stross references in this blog post by using its term “the klept.”
for that matter, Obama predicted it too, setting up a pandemics office, and he did that because as (again) Stross himself says in this blog post, this pandemic came along after two prior coronavirus pandemics.
(I’m a fan, but I don’t think he did a ton of proofreading on this.)
Not ten years ago.
I suspect you (and parent) may have misunderstood him. IMO, he meant a pandemic (like COVID-19) - just like WWII - was predicted by a lot of people. What people could not predict (for both scenarios) was when it would happen.
Bill gates in the interviews talking about disease X still haunts me. As does the faux optimism espoused in that vox explained episode.
My point is that if bill gates predicts it, it was predicted.
That is a little bit too simplistic, isn't it? First, there was political instability before social media. Second, it seems that a lot of people are dissatisfied with how things are going, which is of little surprise given huge wealth inequality and a general rise in totalitarianism and authoritarianism all over the world.
The sentence also carries the connotation that political instability is inherently bad, hinting that the status quo cannot be improved. I'd argue against that - sometimes it's good to show the ruling class that they will not get away with everything and are being held accountable by the people whose fate they decide.
1. The aging population in many societies with the associated adjustment of services in some economies including medical and care homes, perhaps also reduced economic growth rates and strain on savings and pensions. Rise of the robo-attendant? Increased 'retirement estate' mode of living? 2. Medical advances to deal with age-related disease (telomere studies, stem cells, advances in treatment of alzheimers, cancer, arthritis, deterioration of eyesight, hearing and teeth, new prosthetics etc). 3. Increased wealth concentration - a natural outcome of capital accruing a faster rate of return than labour (see Piketty), and associated with reduced per capita and overall productivity. How to preserve high standards of living for the wealthy and increase the standards of living for the less well off whilst dealing with the tensions with the potential to turn this into a zero sum game. 4. Technological advances which may increase productivity, including AI and robotic process automation. Perhaps further labour shedding associated with the increasing automation of 'thought' and 'creativity' (i.e. brought under the remit of capital).
And of course a raft of other things... Plenty of opportunity and risk ahead.
I wouldn't assume a person doing that wants to have any conversation, they have a speech and just want a megaphone (an approving audience) to relay their speech.
Weigh this against his experience, wisdom, and level of thought put into his work, and apply salt to taste.
Specifically, in the political sphere the prediction that there's a) any intentionality or consistency in what's happening globally and b) that it'll have evolved into a "steady" state over the next ten years, one way or another.
A possibly better prediction is that we're permanently past political "stability" such as what arguably existed in post WW2 America (I guess) and western Europe (I know even less about that). From maybe 2015 (or earlier?) onwards, forever, politics will stay complex, seemingly cataclysmic, and will seem as if the other shoe is perpetually about to drop.
We've developed a permanent emotional complex around political discourse, where the boss music is playing all the time, even when we're just hanging out on our couch. By having the deluge of information about everything that we have now, any random thing can now become The Final Straw for whatever issue you'd like to pay attention to. Any given moment, any given news article can portend the doom of Your Favorite Thing, and it will be, truly, The End.
If this is right, the good news is it's not actually going to get nearly as much worse as it always seems it's about to. The bad news is it's not going to get all that much better, either. Just small steps forward or backward, where progress is measured in decades, not years.
Hopefully we get used to living in the tension, though it's probably more accurate that we won't, and that'll probably be okay.
Climate adaptation technologies will bridge whatever gaps are left by the destruction we have on the environment that happened before we decarbonize the economy.
>Quietly and without any fuss Ruth Bader Ginsberg has had a stroke: Pence indicates that her replacement will be a pro-life fundamentalist Christian. (Goodbye Roe v. Wade and, quite possibly, Griswold v. Connecticut.)
Even a blind squirrel finds a nut occasionally.
But the other details are all wrong. There hasn't been a Protestant on the supreme court in awhile, let alone a fundamentalist.
The change against immigration is rooted in real problems found in immigration-heavy areas. See hotspots in Europe as an example. Countries have a duty to protect their borders and way of life, or else why have them in the first place?
No oil cabal pushes up asset prices, it’s the common people doing it to each other (hint: check the proportion of private owners in home ownership).
SpaceX is inconsequential, currently. Their effect on everyday life is nonexistent. What they did is launch for cheaper, not cheaply enough though as to make it a real commodity and drastically change what gets into orbit. Starlink though is potentially huge. That could end up as a whole new Internet of sorts.
It was neither Koch nor Mercer who destabilized politics. It was Facebook and the greater internet which removed elitist moderation and gave the people what they want (vs, apparently, what society needed. My favorite quote goes like “Facebook gave the people the means to connect without stopping to think what would happen when they inevitably do”). There was money and influence of all sorts in politics long before Koch and Mercer. You had Murdoch and Soros and many others. Yet nothing came close to what social networks did. Trump was not the product of any single billionaire.
So he’s claiming long COVID (what ever its definition) has 16.7% chance of organ damage etc.
Except that’s not supported by the data at all.
The author is talking about the aforementioned omega strain not covid strains.
Then shop for internet. It's a travesty. I don't know where you live, or what kind of bubble you're surrounded by, but the situation out here is hot garbage.
I'm currently on a 5g wisp, but $100/mo gets me 24/3 speeds. Which wouldn't be stable enough for 4k, and on the off chance it was, nobody else in the house could do anything. (I'm currently on a 12/3 plan for $60)
I have to plan a day in advance if I want to play a new game with friends. A fresh backup takes months. When I was on DSL, 3/768k my phone's photo auto backup would basically render our connection useless.
It was unfathomable for me to think about moving to some family gifted farmland to build on. Or a house even more remote to our current one. My wife and I thought about buying a large plot in Utah for retirement, after taking a trip there. We laughed because we couldn't survive without internet. But now, we have options.
It is a game changer for stuff like this. To think otherwise is complete folly.
I wouldn't be too sure about that. Most electricity is still generated by burning fossil fuels. Solar and wind have increased in recent years but still have a very long way to go. We may just be relocating the engines rather than decarbonizing.
(See also, New York City banning gas lines to new construction, requiring the use of electricity for heating and cooking, just after the metro area's sole nuclear plant was decommissioned and new gas plants were built to replace it... so the ban is not going to reduce the amount of gas burned at all, is it?)
My understanding is that the purpose of the ban was (1) increase indoor air quality and (2) reduce the amount of gas that leaks in distribution. Natural gas has something like 20x the GWP of CO2. Burning it at power plants reduces the amount leaking into the atmosphere. About 5% of anthropogenic methane emissions come from distribution.
There are much bigger things we could be doing, but just because this particular change isn't reducing the CO2 impact doesn't mean it's not a positive change.
Much as I like Antipope, this looks like blaming others for something that is easily remedied.
I think his predictions on climate & politics are sound. I wonder if there is a listing of climate priorities for mitigation. Interrupting crops sounds like the top of the list.
If 50% of the population are COVID invalids, who's going to be doing the (building) work for a new economic boom? You can't seriously say "I'm going to make predictions - but let's just ignore the most important health event for over a century."
So - mRNA vaccinations. If you can vaccinate against AIDS, flu, cancer (being investigated...), and the rest, you get a bimodal population where a fair proportion of those born before Vaccination Day are cripples, and potentially everyone born after is super-immune to many killer diseases.
The important word being "potentially."
Political implications? Just a bit.
If there's a permanent Moon base - so what? Does anything really change? How? (What - in practical and economic terms, as opposed to symbolically - did the ISS change?) Can you even have a self-sustaining Moon base without relying on Earth. (Hint: not for a long time.)
Cars: I really don't think many people are going to be thinking about cars in 2030-2040. Cars are useless if your roads/buildings are flooded/burning.
Robots? Possibly. (See also: economic boom. Kind of)
But behind this the real issues are psychological. The planet without toxic media and mad billionaires is a much nicer place than the planet with them. Many of the biggest trad-media offenders will be dead by 2030. Will they be replaced? Will there be a Metaverse Abstinence movement? Can one be engineered?
I'd like to believe we can beat the raccoons yet.
There are a lot of benefits from the ISS:
There's the joint effort between otherwise adversarial countries. Even if it's just "symbolic" the most optimistic view of this would be it's been a contributor to preventing an outright war.
There's also the inspirational aspect that gets people interested in STEM with a very concrete and exciting application (even little kids find rocket launches exciting). More people interested in and entering STEM fields means more technology advancements. I'd argue this is not just a "symbolic" benefit, even in the case of inspiring kids where it can take a decade or more for them to graduate and actually start contributing.
There are also lots of real,b practical improvements to life on Earth. Sometimes it's just another use of technology developed for space, which otherwise wouldn't be pursued or funded, such as improved ways to grow plants, water purification, and remote medical and surgical procedures. It's not that these aren't possible to fund purely for Earth-based applications, but the trouble is the people with the money and skill don't have the need, and vice-versa.
There's also been unpredictable discoveries, such as bone density loss in astronauts leading to better understanding bones at a cellular level and treatments for things like osteoporosis. There's also a bunch of discoveries from experiments in zero-gravity: growing microbes, crystal structures and in fluid dynamics.
It's a good assumption that being on the Moon will have similar technology advances and (currently unknowable) discoveries.
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/15_...
This is a good question to raise, and IMHO does not invalidate the original piece: Two plausible predictions, but how do they interact? Which one gets the short end of the stick? Are the able-bodied hard at work throwing up temporary homes for invalids?
I'd like to hope that they won't, but why? The same forces that produced the current crop are no weaker, indeed stronger. Past performance indicates that there will be more.
In practical terms, permanent Moon bases could make it easier to get to the rest of the solar system:
> Perhaps a more immediate use for this water, though, is to make rocket fuel. Water molecules are made of hydrogen and oxygen, both of which are super useful for rocket propellants. The molecules can be split apart by running an electric current through the water (electrolysis), yielding hydrogen and oxygen, which can then be stored as liquids, ready to fuel a rocket.
> If only there were places for rockets to refuel somewhere along the way … like, perhaps, a service station orbiting the Moon. This could allow rockets to leave Earth with just enough fuel to make it to the Moon, where they could then re-fuel before moving on to the next destination. Alternatively, fuel from the Moon could be transported to a fuel depot in low Earth orbit, allowing rockets to dock for re-fuelling closer to home. Either way, it means a more efficient use of fuel and energy that could potentially allow spacecraft to travel a lot deeper into space and lower the costs of space exploration activities.
https://www.science.org.au/curious/space-time/mining-moon
I agree that it's not likely to be very significant if we're only looking 10 years ahead, but on a longer timescale, I think it will be almost absurdist to look at the little steps we took to get off planet as unimportant. Sort of like saying that Europe has been largely unaffected by Christopher Columbus getting in a boat and going for a joyride across the Atlantic, though I suppose there could be a case made for that.
> But behind this the real issues are psychological. The planet without toxic media and mad billionaires is a much nicer place than the planet with them. Many of the biggest trad-media offenders will be dead by 2030. Will they be replaced? Will there be a Metaverse Abstinence movement? Can one be engineered?
This is one way in which I see a Moon base as an important symbol even over the shorter term. Something that could prompt realizations along the lines of: "We're not stuck here on this planet, we can go elsewhere and live in other ways... so maybe we can live in other ways here on Earth, too. Our reality can be what we choose to make of it together, not an 'inevitably' shitty situation where one of us is stomping on the other's head forever."
It is always surprising to me to see apologies on websites for them going slow under load. There is a cheap and easy solution to such things that has been around for ages.
Don't understand that line - Chickenpox is not vaccinated in the UK, and public health bodies in the UK choose not to do so deliberately because of public health. The reason is that older adults are vulnerable to shingles - which can be more serious - and being exposed to childen with chickenpox on the regular is thought to give them an immunity boost and prevent them from getting shingles or make it less serious when they do. Charles Stross is from the UK so I am quite surprised he doesn't know this.
I got Shingles at 25 (I'm 30 now). I didn't believe it at first because I thought Shingles was an "old person's disease". I remember going to the doctor the day it started, and he just prescribed me some painkillers. I said, "I don't think I'll need those I don't feel too bad." He just looked me in the eyes and said, "Oh, you will." It was awful. Some of the worst pain I've ever been in. I laid in bed for almost a week basically hallucinating.
Apparently, Shingles can come up multiple times in your life. I wonder if getting exposed to Chickenpox again would decrease the odds... I don't spend any time around children, so I don't think that's likely to happen to me haha.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/may/02/the-chickenp...
I am always a bit surprised when I read on this site Americans taking offence that some crazy reckless people do not vaccinate their child against this and this. And I am like "Oh? there's a vaccine against that? Over here it is[1] considered normal to catch it because it is considered mild and just watched and cured in the rare serious cases."
> Charles Stross is from the UK so I am quite surprised he doesn't know this
Furthermore, it appears that the vaccine is rather recent, thus it cannot be that "we're generally vaccinated in infancy", let alone that he was. Strange.
------------
[1] 'is' or 'was', for over here too, in the name of fighting presumed anti-vaxers, more vaccines have been getting mandatory. It's a strange political mechanic to witness, because imposing rather useless vaccines has been a major factor in creating anti-vaxers, which didn't really exist before that.
"A few weeks later, Oxford—urged on by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—reversed course. It signed an exclusive vaccine deal with AstraZeneca that gave the pharmaceutical giant sole rights and no guarantee of low prices—with the less-publicized potential for Oxford to eventually make millions from the deal and win plenty of prestige." https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/apr/15/oxfordastraz...
The effect of teaching the immune system to attack something is difficult to predict because it is a natural system and we don't entirely understand how it works, only enough to get better at teaching it new things. In some cases it's so good at destroying related things that it produces "sterilising immunity" - a vaccinated person can't get the disease at all, even if directly exposed to it, in other cases, as seems to have been the case for COVID-19, you get something useful but much less effective.
AIUI There's no reason we know of why the platform (the mechanism by which we tell people's immune system about a new thing to be attacked) would influence how effective the defence put up subsequently is. The vaccine is not in your body when you're attacked weeks or months later by a virus, what's left is a "memory" of what should be identified as foreign and destroyed. So, it would be expected to depend on how AIDS works, and perhaps on exactly what the vaccine is teaching the immune system to attack, not on how the vaccine is manufactured.
Think about the difference between identifying wanted bank robbers with a hand-drawn picture of their faces, versus a still from a CCTV camera. It might be harder or easier to recognise the CCTV still, but we wouldn't expect them to do more or less jail time when identified by one method versus the other.
The data is showing that the likelihood of severe illness in a delta or omicron-infected person who previously had both doses of vaccine is significantly less.
Long Covid is my new normal. If 15% of everyone who gets Covid ends up like me, heck even if it's 1%, we're in for a wave of hurt.
If we assume it becomes endemic, and we all just treat it like the flu, then assume 1% of cases for each new variant also end up like me. At one variant/year, we're looking at decimating the working population before 2030.
This alone is a big enough shift, in our "just in time" world, to set of societal changes like the end of the feudalism and the beginning of the enlightenment.
> it may have long-term sequelae, like Shingles, which only show up years to decades later.
It is important at this point to remember that the first wave of the 1918 pandemic was much like the first wave of Covid, it mostly effected the old. The second wave of the pandemic was the one that killed more people than WWI, mostly the young and healthy.
I hope you recover soon.
Good call on the vaccination, chickenpox is no joke at all. The prognosis combined with the massive rate of infection if left unchecked is unsettling.
Back in 2016, Stross was confident that Brexit would cause mass famine in the UK:[1]
> I'm calling Hard Brexit a road to mass starvation and famine-grade deaths on a scale not seen in the UK since the Hungry Forties (that's the 1840s, not the 1940s).
Despite the UK leaving the EU's single market, the UK's currency has not plummeted in value and such famines have not occurred.
Stross has also been calling bitcoin a bubble since before most people heard about it. You'd think after a decade of being wrong he would change his mind. Even in 2017 when BTC was a mere $10,000, Stross claimed it was a commodity bubble. After receiving criticism for that view, he went a step further and declared that when the bitcoin bubble burst, it would cause those who lost their shirts to become neo-nazis.[2]
If this all sounds unhinged, that's because it is.
1. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/10/facts-o...
2. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/11/unforsee...
> If the SARS family of coronaviruses had emerged just a decade earlier it's quite likely we'd be on the brink of civilizational, if not species-level, extinction by now—SARS1 has 20% mortality among patients, MERS (aka SARS2) is up around 35-40% fatal, SARS-NCoV19, aka SARS3, is down around the 1-4% fatality level. I
It felt sensational to me to the point the I could no longer take the author's view seriously as something worth reading. We survived the bubonic plague and the author himself quotes these diseases as having far lower mortality rates than that, yet then extrapolates it to the extinction of humanity. Huh.
Furthermore, the plague had a catastrophic impact on population - in just a few years it killed upwards of 50% of Europe's entire population! I wouldn't call that "extinction level" but it's really not something to shirk at so cavalierly. What would be the impact on civilization of losing half the world's population today over just a few years? Whether or not it would lead to a decline into extinction is kind of academic; undoubtedly, it would lead to a fundamental shift in society and civilization.
A plague that killed a third of those infected spread by modern international travel would be catastrophic. Medieval Europe got to spread the impact out over decades. Killing a third of the population in a year or two would be much worse.
I think he's being too generous.
Doctorow does it so much better, and while keeping it focused on the class war instead of the culture war.
It's always a little jarring to see others (who are generally good at writing) try to do it in that style and fumble it, because Doctorow and Stephenson pioneered that tone so skillfully.
Saying nobody expected the COVID 10 years ago it is like saying nobody is expecting a big quake in the west coast of the US.
this is known as the broken window fallacy
> I grant it; I have not a word to say against it; you reason justly. The glazier comes, performs his task, receives his six francs, rubs his hands, and, in his heart, blesses the careless child. All this is that which is seen.
What Stross does not say is that because rising sea levels are good for the construction industry they are therefore good in general. That would be an example of the broken window fallacy.
In most cases broken windows truly are good for glaziers, but that doesn't mean that we should break windows.
Noting the existence of the boom isn't the fallacy. Advocating for it is.
But he could have said we were lucky to not have gotten hit by a different virus that kills 80% and travels asymptomatically. The real nightmare virus. It’s totally possible.
We have had roughly 860k COVID deaths in the US. At a 0.02% fatality rate that would equate to 4.3b cases. So are you suggesting the US death total is exaggerated or that the average American has already had COVID 10+ times?
Sometimes you have to stop listening to what people say and get out your own tape measure/calculator. If not for yourself, so other people can take you seriously.
We have .25% of Americans officially dead from COVID so far. Not of infected Americans, of the general population. If not more person dies, "A Standford Professor" is already off by a factor of 12. Officially 1 in 5.7 of us (58m out of 331m) has been diagnosed, so even if there are people who got mild cases and didn't report, that number is likely to climb to anywhere between .7-1.4% of the overall population. Dead. In the ground. That's almost two orders of magnitude off. And if we cluster so much that hospital resources are exhausted, then that number will be higher.
What's the point of this? Cruelly mocking some mentally ill person's posts from years ago, as proof that "the future is unpredictable"?
Or claiming brexit is economically worse than covid. Massively disrupting the world economy for 2 years is less bad than some regulatory changes in a single country? "A crewed moonbase by 2031"?