gxon

These paper hands, they fold...

> My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456

You could use mining to incentivize the build out of remote energy generation before transmission infrastructure is ready.

For example, drop some solar panels and miners in the middle of the desert and immediately start generating profit. Use the profit to deploy more solar panels and build out transmission lines. You can do this piecemeal at low initial investment to feel out an energy source without committing billions of dollars to build out.

I'm not aware of anyone who's done major operations like this, but with the profitability of mining so absurdly high right now plus scrutiny on using dirty energy sources, I wouldn't be surprised if it starts. Access to mining ASICs is likely the key bottleneck.

This is the story used to explain part of the reason so much mining is in China. They built out a ton of hydroelectric dams over the decades that have been underutilized due to lack of infrastructure. Miners came in for the unused electricity and brought in a ton of money to the area.

This is actually a pro for bitcoin. It's not useful as anything other than a store of value.

If we collectively decide to switch to bitcoin as our store of value network, and retire gold and silver from that use case, then we free up all the gold stored in vaults collecting dust as a value store to do more useful work that it's uniquely capable of, like being used in electronics or dental work.

A lot of these use cases now aren't economically viable because the market value of gold is inflated due to being overloaded with the store of value use case.

Yeah, I was referring to the hyperloop and the boring company as separate things.

I feel like the Boring company is what he settled on once it was made clear to him how monumentally stupid hundreds or thousands of miles of near vacuum tube would be in practice. Even if you could actually build a working prototype, it's hyper fragile and will just never be economically viable compared to other solutions.

Even still on Earth, we're mining ~2% more gold annually. More gold in absolute terms is being mined than any other time in human history.

You just answered the quantum question yourself. We can upgrade the bitcoin protocol with quantum resistant cryptography. I very much doubt it would be a contentious fork. No need to bootstrap an entirely new value network.

Luckily, it seems like he's mostly abandoned the spectacularly stupid hyperloop idea.

More tunnels would be cool, but I find it hard to believe there's really that much room for improvement over established companies.

It's perfectly scarce and rapidly trending toward 0 inflation. This is one of the key arguments for why it's ultimately a better store of value than gold, which is abundant in the context of the solar system.

I'm curious about what you mean by a possible better store of value. To me, that sounds like saying we can go colder than 0 kelvin.

Tax advantage?

If you pay out a dividend, you force your shareholders to pay income tax rates.

But, if you can use company profits in a way that pumps the stock valuation, your shareholders can effectively take the same profits with long term cap gains tax. My understanding is that a stock buyback is basically this strategy, and MicroStrategy's CEO has said that he also considered that.

MSTR is up ~100% since they first bought bitcoin.

This is at least, my amateur understanding that could be wrong.

Can you describe the breathing exercises? Is it literally just sitting and taking deep breaths?

Manna continues to be prescient.

https://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

A caveat to this is, what happens when we actually solve aging and involuntary death? Will the world eventually be owned by a single, Bezos like individual simply by the weight of time and compounding interest crowding out everyone else? Would we be ok with a situation where the racist slave owners of 200 years ago are still alive and control the vast majority of the world's wealth and power?

This is the kind of concern that isn't a problem right now, but will be one day. And it will happen in the blink of an eye.

Honestly. It really seems like the Tesla hype bubble has melted people's brains. Now every new company that comes out of nowhere with nothing more than a prototype is hailed as the next leap of innovation.

“Shoot for the stars but if you happen to miss shoot for the moon instead.”

There's something to be said about the value of setting wildly unachievable goals. It takes you further than you might have thought possible.

Exactly. Scalable solutions to deal with the waste don't exist.

The reasoned panic over Covid-19 was never really about the individual severity of the disease or even the number of people it would kill.

It's about the rapid spike in deaths and hospitalizations happening all at the same time because of how extremely fast it spreads.

The flu spreads slow enough that our medical infrastructure can usually handle the seasonal surge of cases. Too many cases all at once overwhelms the system, leads to more deaths than necessary, and potentially has even more catastrophic effects on our economy and supply chains than we've had if too many people call in sick at the same time.

To put it physics terms, the scary thing about Covid-19 is the impact, not the absolute force. A million people dying isn't too concerning compared to other causes of death. But if they all die in a single month, that's a huge systemic problem.

I don't think it's reasonable on an individual level to panic about catching Covid-19 compared to other health risks. It's akin to thinking death by terrorism is something to be more concerned about than dying in a car crash.

Get rich.

Don't vote for morons.

Hope and possible solutions are awesome!

BUT, this is a hair on fire emergency. We are fully and truly fucked and until enough people wake up to this reality, we'll continue with the glacial pace we've had addressing the problem for the past several decades and wake up one day realizing there really is nothing we can do fast enough to matter.

It's entirely possible we've already passed this threshold and we're already dead.

Getting to space is absolutely NOT a solution to climate change. We have to solve climate change SO THAT we can continue on our path to become space faring. If we can't manage to survive on an Earth decimated by climate change, then we obviously have no chance in space or any other planet in this solar system.

We 100% will go extinct eventually if we don't expand beyond Earth. And my point is that if climate change destroys our civilization now and we get flung back into a new dark age, I don't think it's likely that we'll ever manage to spread beyond Earth.

Climate change is an existential threat to our species because it threatens our ability to become space faring.

Exactly this. Before the oil age, we were already rapidly decimating forests for fuel. In a way, the discover of fossil fuels averted that ecological disaster and there are more trees now (in America at least) than 100 years ago [1].

Solar and wind energy generation are great, but don't have a high ERoEI in early development. Oil that's gushing out of the ground has an insanely high ERoEI and we used that to advance our technology very quickly.

Also remember that we probably have only a few hundred million years left before the sun expands and heats the planet to the point were complex life can't exist. There will be no liquid water in 1 billion years.

This is all conjecture. It certainly could be possible that future civilizations can become space faring by a different path than we took, but that's a terrible gamble to make if you think intelligence in the universe is worth preserving and expanding.

1. https://www.treehugger.com/more-trees-than-there-were-years-...

If not direct human extinction, it could certainly mean complete collapse of advanced civilization.

Even if humans manage to survive for millions of years into the future, we've already burned all the easily accessible fossil fuels. What we're burning now takes a lot of technology to extract. It's not immediately obvious that we'll ever be able to become a space faring civilization without cheap fossil fuels to bootstrap us there. Eventually, we'll go extinct by some asteroid impact or supervolcano.

We should probably assume it's now or never for intelligence to spread off this rock.

Nothing we can do. Brace for impact and setup a flexible lifestyle so you can rapidly move and adapt depending on what hits first/hardest.

Obviously still support any possible measures to mitigate the damage. Maybe we can still work together to avoid complete catastrophe.

Meh. The continuation of the species is more important than some silly desire to mix my own DNA into a new human. A kind of corollary to the Gay Uncle theory.

I also consider the memes > genes in terms of leaving a legacy. Shaping a kid's mindset doesn't require them to share half of your genes.

To add to that, even if we can technically support a lot more people with the sustainable resources we have, which I personally doubt, getting close to our max capacity means we will have zero wiggle room when things go wrong. With climate change accelerating and guaranteed to cause drastic changes to our environment, a lot of things will go wrong at the same time.

The analogy I like is your income/spending ratio. Yes, you can technically spend 100% of your income, or even >100% with debt. But if you choose to live like that, then when you get laid off, or get sick/disabled, or divorced, or forced to start caring for a relative, or have your house burn down, then all of a sudden what's already a major emergency is exacerbated by financial issues.

Decreasing our population now is like increasing our savings rate. We know difficult times are coming. Fewer people will only help us navigate the transition more humanely and equitably. Not only is this true from a macro/global scale, but also a micro/family scale where it's obvious that having more kids than you can afford or have time to raise is its own kind of cruelty.

Anyway, if you're choosing to have kids, one is enough. The real winners adopt.

To the first point, I'm not making that argument. It's my interpretation of Freud's argument described in this article. Do you think I misinterpreted it?

To the second, I understand this to be fairly well established, at least in modern times. For example, Nobel laureates are massively over represented by people of Jewish descent [1]. Freud's argument here just seems to be yet another theory for why this might be.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_Nobel_laureates

It's a fascinating idea that belief in an unseen god set up the Jewish people to be more capable of thinking in abstraction and this is part of the reason why Jews are so over-represented in contributions to science.

If that's actually true, I wonder if it still holds value today. Are secular education systems sufficient for producing the same or better mindset? Are their other myths we can teach children that don't have the same cruft and dead weight of traditional religion?

As per our current science, we're forever limited to our galactic local group. Exponential growth tends to consume even very big things surprisingly quickly.

I also question whether a mass die off event on this planet won't lock us out from ever rebuilding a spacefaring civilization. We've already used up all the readily accessible fossil fuel that was necessary for us to get this far.

Like I suggested, it's highly problematic.

But what are the alternatives if people stop dying of old age? If the birth rate is even marginally higher than the very small death rate, we eventually over populate. The only way to resolve that is some kind of culling mechanism. War, starvation, and disease are what usually happens to humanity when resources get too constrained.

But now we have nukes.

Interesting. I've recently been thinking of something similar as a form of population control in a post-aging world. Rather than individual resource consumption, every time you reproduce, you jump forward in the euthanasia line. I suspect this would not work very well.

There's got to be some more formal line of research or thought about population management in a post-aging world.

This is a problem for both the people who are and are not interested in participating in extreme behavior.

Those who are will more likely have a false sense of lower risk than their actions would subject them to. Those who aren't might be scared away by a larger value than they would actually be subject to.

This could even become a self fulfilling prophecy where activities with high average micromorts will only attract people more willing to engage in risky behavior, thus inflating the tail of extreme behavior that causes most of the mortality, increasing the activity's average micromorts over time.