aeternum

Here's him talking about it for those that want to form their own opinion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggV2SeiGrVw

China found a way around this by manufacturing all their civilian ships to military standards.

Maybe guns or butter is a false dichotomy. Or perhaps the even tougher lesson: a country with an information economy ends up with neither.

Why can't the bait fish eat the fly larva?

Nice try MGM Grand.

"peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations—entangling alliances with none"

I'm going back to the Airpods Pro 2.

Pro 3 is a step backwards, there are these ANC noise issues not only on flights but also during heal-strikes when running down a hill, a staticky thump rather than high-pitched.

I've also had other more rare feedback issues. The Pro2s basically never had feedback issues unless you actually rubbed the outside of them.

Word2vec can/could also do the seahorse thing. It at least seems like there's more to what humans consider a concept than a direction in a vector space model (but maybe not).

https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2021/07/word2vec-for-wo...

The YouTube recommendation homepage used to be quite good. It's disappointing that youtube is throwing it all away because they want to be TikTok.

Meanwhile TikTok is striving to embrace STEM and trying to go for more quality over pure engagement.

Perhaps they should just trade companies at this point.

Rational/risky experiments are illegal currently.

For example take the famous mask debate. It could easily be solved by having volunteers willing to stand in a room with people with covid at various distance, each using randomized masks/no mask. There would be plenty of volunteers for such a study but there's no way it would be approved.

The FDA doesn't count lives lost due to inaction and slow approval of new drugs and treatments. As Munger always said "show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome." By any rational calculus, that one Thalidomide win by the FDA has caused incalculable death, pain and suffering by pushing out the timeline on not only recently discovered cures but all those built on top.

Imagine for example the number of lives saved if GLP-1 was purchasable over the counter in the 1990s when it was first discovered.

Rational and science might be pretty far apart. Flying a key in a thunderstorm for example isn't the most rational decision. Neither scraping open your family's arms and applying cowpox pus.

Pretty irrational, but definitely celebrated.. eventually

I think we need Wikipedia competitors.

Wikipedia is a victim of it's own success, it was excellent at avoiding bias for quite awhile and the vast majority of articles are extremely well written.

However it's massive popularity and dominance have also led to, well this guy put it best: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dalberg-Acton,_1st_Baron_...

They're one of the few companies actually delivering vehicles to customers.

There is evidence from flat worms that electric fields is how cells naturally move in the right directions with purpose. However they produce the fields chemically via ion gradients.

There's a very cool researcher who used this method to create flatworms with heads (or tails) on both sides. https://www.cell.com/biophysj/fulltext/S0006-3495(17)30427-7

IMO the issue is with unhealthy people, things like poor circulation reduces the body's ability to produce the natural ion gradients and thus why the external electric field helps.

Agreed, flying in a plane is far safer, it was the full stop thing :)

I also would recommend flying in a small plane at least once, the small additional risk is worth the experience.

This is an overgeneralization. You are far more likely to die in a C172 airplane than you are in a modern car.

Charts like this are misleading because they don't take age into account. It's not really noteworthy that old people die of heart disease and cancer.

I believe a better chart would be weighted by life expectancy loss. For example if a 12yo gets murdered society considers it a much more significant loss than a 90yo having a heart attack.

Similarly your level of safety in a city is more a function of the rate of random crime vs. the often cited city's overall murder rate. This difference explains why some cities that feel safe actually have a high homicide rate and vice-versa. In some cities crime is unpredictable whereas in others it is more confined to areas where visitors rarely travel.

The screens thing is a diversion.

The core issue is that it's nearly illegal to discipline students now. There's a socioeconomic divide because child behavior is unfortunately negatively correlated to socioeconomics. Thus poor schools suffer more from the lack of ability for teachers to remove disruptive students.

Yes some excellent teachers are sometimes able to deal with it, most cannot.

Idk I think the plow still has similar scaling. You can make a much bigger plow now maybe it replaces 40 humans. You could make it bigger still and have ox pull it, now maybe 400 humans since you still need one to lead the ox.

Farmer Joe then claims he can train ox + border collie teams to eliminate the need for humans entirely when it comes to plowing. But by that point no one cares because the cost to plow a field is so low that it really doesn't matter, other things are the bottleneck.

The cost of things where AI can produce value will trend downward and human labor will move to other things, like entertainment, services. IMO there will always be demand for things like human-given massages, human chefs, human teachers, etc.

Solar is extremely cheap and battery costs are dropping quickly, IMO you may see US neighborhoods, especially rural disconnecting from the grid and rolling their own solutions.

This china rare earth thing may slow down the battery price drop somewhat but not for long because plenty of chemistries don't rely on rare earths, and there will soon be plenty of old EV packs that have some life left in them as part of grid storage.

>The main difference is that a plow cannot replace a human because a plow is a machine operated by a human.

A single human with a plow replaced 20 humans with shovels.

Do you believe the ratio of AI replacement will actually be higher? I doubt it.

When standard of living increases significantly, inequality often also increases. The economy is not a zero sum game. Having both rising inequality and rising living standards is generally the thing to aim for.

Both parties seem to agree we should build more electric capacity, that does seem like an excellent thing to invest in, why aren't we?

As the cost of material goods decreases, they will become near free. IMO demand for human-produced goods and experiences will increase.

A better name might be trace metals. They're not actually rare just extremely dilute so you need to create huge chemical leaching ponds (sulfuric or hydrochloric acid) either above or below ground to sufficiently concentrate and collect them.

Of course the ponds create lots of waste gas and water, including radioactive elements and metals since you end up dissolving and concentrating those also. (So both metallic and chemical contamination) The ratio is something like 1 ton of rare earths = 2000 tons of toxic waste.

Seems to me like the issue is not so much the capex cost, but the regulatory and environmental cost. Doing it at scale in a way that doesn't harm the environment (and proving that) is likely prohibitably expensive in the US.

This was somewhat true at once point but is a highly outdated view. Labor is no longer cheap in China relative to other nearby countries and there's a huge amount of automation with some factories that don't even turn on lights because they are effectively 100% automated.

>Welfare spending and public investment are about a shared sense of public good

>But this really isn’t about justifying spending as a moral good

hmm

China has shown that they don't scale all that differently. Yes the tooling is hard to build but after that you hit go and the factory makes the copies for you.

It's not quite startrek replicator but much closer to that than the US view of manufacturing where you have your union guy sitting in front of the machine to pull the lever.

Yes it's fine even for planes. Boeing planes are still incredibly safe but some people now prefer Airbus and will use that when selecting flights. This feedback loop is what ultimately triggers change.

Note that all the regulation was useless in the Boeing case, the FAA ultimately allowed Boeing to self-inspect using contractors. The same is happening with drugs.

You may be underestimating the risk of human drivers. Given the choice of sharing the road with 10,000 tesla, waymo, zoox, etc. self-driving cars vs. 10,000 human-driven cars, which would you choose for you and your kids?

Every day I am incredibly thankful to live in a country where legal by default is the state of affairs.

There were plenty of digital circuit engineers back in the 90s that said microprocessors were general and inefficient solutions to problems.

And if you needed it programmable, well an FPGA was still almost as general and far more efficient than a microprocessor.

Guess what won.

Yes, the Fed can always buy the debt so the end point is ultimately runaway inflation. A tale almost as old as money itself.

Spending someone else's money is pretty fun, especially once you find a way to justify it as a moral good.

I am someone and I believe it's an end-to-end neural net.