bobson381

How about Adam McKay, then?

I tuned out when it switched, also. How to move on when job is in front of screen?

Thanks for posting this. Very GEB

If you're watching through VLC, you can set the mix to stereo in the audio settings - perhaps there's a similar setting you can find? Not sure if you've got the tv's optical going straight into an amp. Some stereo receivers also have a "night mode" that can do this, you might find an older cheaper one with pre-outs or similar.

Feels like the way a video game will render the outside of a wall or solid surface, but you can run into it and warp partly through and there's nothing internal to it at all.

To add on - complexity itself is a perceptual feature introduced by language - we treat and describe things as though they are made of an unimaginable number of tiny parts. So this also increases the fun of the wordy wine/coffee/whisky descriptions!

Not certain if this has been posted here before. I found it a fascinating thing to read as context. The author also has some interesting theories about universe evolution over time.

it's that it's 1 Trillion less in incentivized middlemen. A la Graeber.

the linking thread for all three is self-reference, either in the form of a fugue or in a painting showing its own creation. Doug is a loop guy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth is why. The financial economy sits on a finite store of physical goods, and as a dissipative structure, our high-energy, high-complexity global society acts as a low-friction conduit from stored past energy to high-entropy degraded heat.

Number go up until we cannibalize the foundations.

GHG would keep leaking out of the permafrost. Warming goes up even if we stop all emissions tomorrow.

okay wow. I have seen a lot of quieter bands on those, absolutely insane that they captured this. Funny blend of genre and space.

Right. This would make it possible and reasonable if you could find a house that is enough, such that you can live in it, expect a reasonably good experience in it for the life of your time in it, and that that mortgage payment, plus all maintenance, insurance, tax, etc. is reasonably comparable to an equivalent rental. Depending on where you are, this is not always the case. Or you need to buy a small place at current rates and prices to make it at all comparable.

You have to decide what "enough" is, and that's variable depending on your expected standard of living, etc. I am personally currently lucky enough to be in a good rental situation, which colors my view.

Having a landlord that will fix problems and eat incidental appliance/roof/major expenses is a form of insurance paid as rental.

Agree here. But I'm a doomer/collapsenik - so, the same future coming for "retirement" is the same future coming for "house always appreciates in value". Maybe 1990 -> 2020 was an okay 30 year period, 2026 -> 2056 sure won't be.

30 year mortgage is founded partly on the idea that your house will be worth more in the future when you sell it. That you can lock in a lower price now.

Number cannot always go up. We are at the top of the carbon pulse. Financialization has taken us far from the material baseline of the rock we are flying through space on. Debt will only get us so far.

For this and many other reasons, why would you believe a house "as an investment" is a reasonable thing to keep hoping for, especially 30 years from now? If you have even a reasonably stable rental, it's less risk exposure if you can save some money that isn't tied up in a down payment.

I Eat the Stars was pretty good. Nice take on grasping the absurdity of the coming metabolic failure of the complex systems we live inside of. Everything dies, even big patterns like industrial society.

A guy on the sysadmin subreddit managed to 8x the global GDP https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1uz2fv2/aws_says_...

Sounds good, thanks for your response. I didn't mean to denigrate your word choice at all, it's mostly that I'm hypersensitive to that kind of phrasing now because there's so much auto-written stuff on e.g. Substack, LinkedIn, etc. Sam Kriss has a nice article about it all.

Language is already a lossy map, but it is not really an expression of another person's thought or mind if they translate it through an LLM. Or at least it's a much harder to decipher representation of it. Form is void, void is form, and the two are not separate.

Fascinatingly, I'm now so allergic to certain LLM-phrases that I immediately noticed your use of Not X but Y in this comment. Maybe that was intentional, maybe not, but it's a funny illustration of how odd this language rabbit hole has been!

Because of access to a giant store of energy. Our advancement has also created a future need to consume more and more energy to fuel increased complexity.

One of my favorite pieces of writing on this topic

https://books.worksinprogress.co/book/maintenance-of-everyth...

if you allowed for some slippage in precision, how many images could you fit in that are recognizable from various angles, with ~acceptable~ resolution? Sounds fun.

Hmm. Mainly that access to much larger quantities of energy than before in the form of oil/coal/gas enabled the creation of a much more complex system than before, with a higher metabolic need.

Ongoing servicing of that metabolic need requires continuous access to the same or greater amount of energy year after year. The world burns through its annual resource budget in July this year.

As we continue to extract more and more, the energy return on energy invested goes down, so net energy availability drops, making it harder and more expensive to continue the current basal metabolic rate, let alone fueling continuous growth. Because so much is built atop the energy mechanism, instability happens when it's threatened or changed.x

So maybe a better turn of phrase would have been that it's the first time we've harnessed so much energy at once and effectively put a lot of energy slaves to use per each person. Like starting to use fossil fuel to create fertilizer that enables more people to survive famines, you create a scenario where you need ongoing access to the same or greater amount of energy just to keep up. Not saying it was the wrong choice, just that we tend to fix issues by making more complex solutions that introduce future resource need.

it is the first time we have harnessed all of the energy on the planet at once to power a single interconnected advanced system across continents. Mostly I'm drawing from a thermodynamics outlook[0]. previous collapses had unused high quality energy in other areas to fall back on. I'd love to read more about the growth towards China being sustainable in that sense.

[0] https://youtu.be/5WPB2u8EzL8?si=doERoIYuYZYHLAAZ

This is largely escapism because the current paradigm of growth is ending, rather messily. The definition of living well is going through a forced change, and adjusting is hard.

Okay, question because someone here might know. I have a faint recollection of reading a few years ago that prior to the current train automation system in Japan, they used to have to keep a staff of graduate students or other temp workers on standby to handle the busy periods. Am I hallucinating this fact? Does anyone know? I've tried to find the article where I read it to no avail.

Huh, interesting. I retract my previous statement! I'd love to read about this if you have a source.

also interrobang is rendered as bang-interro (!?) when it should be interro (?) then bang (!) -> (?!)

I dunno, my Mom in the midwest thinks it's the funniest thing ever, having grown up in an area where all the houses looked like this. There's some element of satisfaction knowing that you can't buy good taste