Nomentatus

Good but it should probably be mentioned that solar power production and transmission from geostationary orbit (where the sunlight is nearly constant) would work better and have the same positional advantage. Costs have to be considered, of course.

I still kinda like the idea of dropping a few nukes on crater rims at one of the poles to reduce the height necessary to get to perpetual sunlight though.

The US etc has passed through a few cycles of media control/moderation vs media anarchy; first with print, then radio, then TV - now youtube which is now trying to be restrictive atm but has a sordid rabbit-hole past.

If you grew up when I did, with one middle-of-the-road newspaper in a medium-size city delivered each day and read through; plus highly regulated/filtered TV news (and other content) then right now seems like an age of bullshit. Go back to the age of radio madness (Father Coughlin and many, many more like him) and the yellow press and you realize this isn't peak manure (although yes there's more of everything, meaning more good and bad information.)

But the well-moderated times have a price too: lots of stories that didn't fit the official narrative went unreported including the nature of native residential schools, nuclear mishaps, and much more.

Nuke the moon! Right now the topography of the poles necessitates quite tall towers to get into perpetual sunlight; but a bunch of judiciously placed nukes could easily take away most of the shadow-bringers (crater rims) and reduce the tower height necessary to get up into perpetual light to a small fraction of what it would be now.

Just remember: nuke first, then colonize. So, sooner rather than later.

Tacitus only tells us - at most - that in the time of Nero, there were religious people who thought Jesus existed. Not whether Paul, etc were doing a lot of inventing. Not contemporary with Jesus.

I think you've misunderstood the question. He doesn't want a job, he wants a job where he'll get use his special sauce.

All managers spend a ton of time on people problems, and onboarding/training. But CTOs do or can do more; their technical judgements are a key part of the job. They don't have to get into the weeds, but they have to know the weeds and know who on their team knows most about which weeds.

Elon gets ridiculously far into the weeds, frequently; but admittedly that's rare. Jobs relied more on intuition and key tech people, but knew more about the weeds than he let on. I know, most employers wouldn't hire Elon or Jobs or let them do their thing. But again this guy ain't looking for just any perch.

I'm reminded of Sandy Munro roasting/comparing all the executives he worked under at Ford with Musk. It's absolutely true that this guy would be miserable with a standard CTO-type job at the old Ford. He doesn't want our help getting that job.

In other words, abandon hope of finding the rare employer who'll get what you can bring to the table right from the jump. Just get a pigeon-hole job like everyone else. But he's not that - he could have specialized like the rest of the herd, and didn't, even early on. If he wants to be valued for what is he, and he does, he needs an unusually astute employer. They exist - they're hard to find, and sometimes hard to get to, and prove oneself to, but they exist.

You want to find a rare employer who is looking for people just like you. Elon's one, Parker another. All you need is a list of your interests and knowlege (which you've already given, really), and maybe a bare excuse to hire you in terms of formal expertise at one thing. An example or two of where you've been able to apply knowlege from one area of interest to another to show you aren't just an aspirational dilettante who can't actually pattern match or invent and you're done.

Most people here don't see your value and think you must just be puffing. Ditto employers. You won't convince them no matter what. You're from Mars as far as they can tell. They're sleepwalking, you're not.

Finding one employers who does know what you're all about is the hard part, not convincing them of the value of polymaths/interdisciplinary peeps. They know.

Yet polymath doesn't even mean "good", it means Jack-of-all-trades (master of none.) If you want to say "aspirationally a polymath," that might go down easier. Still, you need to be in a rare corporate body that understands the value of your broad, shallow pond of knowlege, not having the average institution hire you and then not value what you bring.

Mao received oodles of support from the USSR, the Long March was the Reds fleeing northward to where they could still get that support, and then being able to punch further East.

The KMT was also a revolutionary force (against foreign domination), and initially preferred by Moscow for practical reasons - the USSR would at that time only support a joint command.

Mao became leader of the Reds because the Chinese Red's intelligence officer who was their contact with the USSR and held the codes for that defected to Mao from the previous leader (who wasn't going to admit to defeat by the KMT.) After that, the money etc could only to go to Mao, since he was the only point of contact the USSR then had with the Reds.

Post WWII Soviet support, esp military material support became very large indeed, allowing the Reds to crush the KMT.

But it wasn't helpful for either side to reveal the connections; better to portray the revolution as a mass movement of the peasants and workers than show all the gears and wheels.

Mao spent plenty of time and effort downplaying everything the USSR had done for him and in massive spats with the USSR, for his own political reasons. Just as Lenin didn't credit the massive support the Germans had given him, to undermine the Czar.

Indeed, he'd had plenty himself from the USSR.

The US is large, true. More a matter of control points, such as Harper's Ferry. That's where Lee had to punch through to get to Antietam, in 1862, for example. https://www.nps.gov/hafe/learn/historyculture/1862-battle-of...

But I haven't asserted that all regular wars have front lines all the time. Just that guerrilla wars don't.

It did not begin as a guerrilla war, true; but the abject failure of that initial effort made it clear to Washington that the war had to continue as an irregular war without set front lines or attempts to directly take back New York or Boston. Guerrilla wars can have large battles, but do not have established, continuing and continuous front lines. Mao's troops now and then held large battles with the Japanese (and KMT), once by choice - but his armies nearly always fought as guerillas and were far more successful in that role.

Perhaps the American revolution isn't as obvious a case because the Brits tended to turtle a lot; not trying to demonstrate that they were in control of nearly the whole place and so providing a plethora of targets (unlike the Japanese, say.)

Re aristocracy, I only mean that change happens drop by drop even when the movement toward it is all but invisible, sometimes.

There's a good recent analysis of the hospital stats vs vaccination rates over time, amongst other things. But remember, our defense against viruses includes having infected cells kill themselves, so damage is always widespread over the body after a serious viral infection, it's just that the heart and lungs can't take time off or ramp activity down sharply to recover, so they're extra vulnerable. People dying days after recovering from Spanish flu and returning to strenuous farm work was common, for example. Two such cases among my grandmother's 12 siblings.

You're right re 100% infection by now. I had the first two shots (and two infections, one before vaccines were available.) But I did skip the next two, since the bivalent wasn't available yet and evidence re boosting with the same old vaccine was thin. (Antibodies are an indicator not the whole story.) Now I'm scheduled for a bivalent shot. The first vaccine doesn't really help with the new strain, says a recent study. (Google pubmed and you can really dive into the papers, and know more than I about it pretty quickly.)

It gave me a reflexive distrust of both sides. Govt officials utterly ignorant of the published research and happy to contradict it then reverse themselves next week; and unread citizens cheerfully making up their own fantasy worlds.

I was prepared with 20 N95 masks (ten years old but carefully sealed for a pandemic.) Which didn't matter because the provincial care workers spread the illness like wildfire through my building (they were seeing clients willy nilly all over the place, with no PPE, and with rules that forbid them from taking a day off with a note from a doctor who's face they'd breathed into. Also with no PPE.)

The vaccination story was a big win; and that was the decision that counted. So science won, and govts got the one key choice right, China aside. Antivaccers, zero.

Heart problems caused by the virus, especially if you haven't been vaccinated, are far more frequent and severe than from the vaccination. Our immune system is powerful and can hurt us all by itself; but it's powerful because it has to be.

History strongly shows that epidemics do change political consciousness, toward psychological conservatism. It will take two generations (as with economic depressions) before things get anything like as loose and sloppy again. We'll fail in other ways, meanwhile. Eventually, UK citizens lost their faith in the aristocratic system. But they did. I may be kidding myself but I think there will be some permanent change from this.

Well, it's always been annoying for Canadians, I can tell you that. Harmful? No, it shows considerable narcissism, which ain't incorrect; so let's say it's more of a valid indicator giving foreigners a bit of a heads up about what they'll be dealing with than a harm.

It's a maxim that guerrilla wars succeed with a lot of external help and supply, if they succeed at all, throughout history. That's fact. The French were financial supporters from before the shooting began; and supplied high tech gunpowder that meant that from the start the colonists' muskets had significantly more range, no small thing. Without France, nothing. The French ended up bankrupting the state due to extreme overspending on the Americans' war, and sliding into revolution themselves. (Although weather wrecking crops after the eruption of an Icelandic volcano was a large factor as well.) The Americans deserve great credit, but they owe tremendous debts of gratitude, too.

Washington had to keep British costs high while not losing, he couldn't just sit.

Mass conscription is difficult if you can't pay or properly feed or clothe the army you have and a big portion of your own population opposed to you.

Good point, distilled beverages (gin) affordable for the poor, hit Britain like a brick in the face in the 1700s. Whiskey in the U.S.

Summary - and interpretation - from memory of a lot of reading:

Background: Humans are highly unusual amongst mammals; our livers are more than ten thousand times IIRC better at burning off alcohol than any other known mammal, and this is a rather recent change evolutionarily. This may have been necessary to survive off old winter fruit during the ice age that just about took us out (reduced our population down to low genetic variation.)

Alcohol, in common with all other organic solvents save water, changes every single chemical reaction within our cells at least a little bit - esp the speed and frequency of given reactions. (Hence the cancer risk, etc, etc.) The change to neurotransitter reactions is just one of those changes, but one we find pleasing and distracting. Some genes protective re alcohol consumption reduce the effects/pleasure alcohol brings. Others may reduce habituation (so dose doesn't tend to increase.) Etc. My genes adapt me so quickly to alcohol that habituation/dosage escalates FAST. I and my relatives famously just shouldn't start since alcoholism is a quick result if we keep drinking.

Cultures which have cultivated alcohol for thousands of years (Asia) are less vulnerable to alcoholism; no doubt those kinda genes were culled sometime back. Europeans less so, less protected. Central American native populations cultivated alcohol but (at least in some cultures) restricted its use to the elderly. North American natives, not to my knowlege.

Selecting strongly for alcohol resistance has costs, off course, there are always tradeoffs. And where evolutionary selection has acted very strongly over a short period of time, the tradeoffs (downsides) can be extreme (particularly from copy-number variations, which are common under heavy/fast selection.)

If you're going to be a teetotaller anyway, you'd prefer to have Native genes on average (other confounding variables aside.) But if you're going to drink - and alcohol is obviously dangerous - well, maybe you don't want the otherwise more ideal Native/original genetics; maybe some alcohol-protective genes (with other downsides) would predict a longer and better life for you, on average.

It's almost as bonkers as Medvedev's prediction list on Twitter (which I just saw and Elon highlighted to troll him) or will look that bonkers in a year; but flipped.

bit flip hard to detect - true for RAW, false for .jpg or other compressed files.

If your pictures are not RAW but compressed (say jpgs) then the corrupted photos will really jump out at you - half the picture is there, but then noise. I used to make sure I was storing jpgs not RAW, but then learned that wasn't always a good thing, several times over. Dunno whether damage happened in RAM or on HD, but I strongly suspect RAM.

The bad habit that nailed me was probably this one: I would ball up a whole bunch of photos in a big .zip; (to enhance copying speed and maybe privacy) then next year unzip that, add that year's selected photos and zip it again. Year after year. That added up to a lot of trips through RAM in which one bit flip could take out an image. Bugs in compression software aren't impossible as the villan, but that's not my bet.

Solution: I now zip up a few years together and copy each chunk I don't ever rezip old large chunks. No new errors noticed.

Turns out it's okay nutritionally to feed ducks (for example) fresh (thawed frozen) peas. Just not bread. Changing their habits might be a different consideration.

Having heard stories of my homesteading great-grandparents being chased 'round and 'round their sod house by a steer while screaming at their significant other to "open the **ing door, for **'* sake!" I'm gonna stick with befriending crows.

(Cows give birth to steers, that's what not to like.)

I've seen a woodpecker (I think it was) and a crow combine to challenge a falcon, in Edmonton repeatedly; although not in the air. The competition was for tree tops in the ravine and lasted a while with the smaller birds zooming up to harrass the sitting falcon then diving down to lower perches the falcon had trouble getting at. Eventually the falcon had enough and left.

Evolution prepared us for nomadic life, not this life. Do take a look at "The Old Way." How children are in a nomadic tribe; and our experience of what children are like is way, way different. They're better company, more mature, more useful, and vastly "better behaved" because they're not struggling constantly to compensate for weird raising conditions.

'Tis true. Even sixty years ago, kids (7 or 8 and older) walked long distances in cities to school and then hung out in packs for hours 'till the streetlights came on. Not every day but a lot. This does seem to be a pretty good (substantial) substitute for parental supervision/contact; and may well be normal for nomads some of the time (in high visibility terrain only lone predators could hide.)

On the one hand, by the principle of charity, what was meant was that modern cities can't function without automobiles, not that ancient Sumeria required automobiles. Straw man.

On the other hand, by the principle of charity, what's being argued is that modern cities can't dump all automobiles immediately; not the idea that modern technology is too feeble to allow a city design without automobiles to function at all. Straw woman.

On the third hand, by the principle of charity, what is being argued is that most automobiles can be dropped from large parts of modern cities with more gain than loss; not that entire metropolitan and suburban areas can drop cars without inconvenience. Straw pronoun of your choice.

In other words, none of the arguments here are what they appear to be about superficially. They're really about degree of difficulty - is that underestimated or over-estimated? vs the benefits: more or less than you'd think. To argue that, you need details, which are in short supply until the experiments get not just to your city but to your block.

It's in good part an argument about network effects - and we aren't used to taking those into account properly.

Where I live, the standard argument as bike lanes/routes were being (expensively!) built downtown was: "Nobody even uses them!" Which was true as long as the bike routes were all less than a couple kilometers long. Now bike traffic is picking up as routes lengthen and multiply; so I rarely if ever hear that argument. Now what I hear is "you still need a car" because few bike routes are very long as yet, rather than objections to bike lanes in the middle of streets (or displacing streets) existing at all. Soon it will be "where I live you still need a car." Finally, when the lanes are built out, which they will be, the argument will be "I just like the convenience of a car."

My own view now: "I didn't expect this, but I really like that my neighborhood is quieter; which it is because there's now a pocket park right where an intersection used to be, one block from me. Just that change has made a remarkable difference. Damned nice to sit there in relative silence. Watching bikes hum by from time to time."