mac01021

The GP was just setting a lower bound of 1B to establish a basis for calculating the cost to move humanity offworld. The cost for 5B people or 7B people would be even more cost prohibitive.

But also the shrinkage would not have to happen abruptly. In theory you might be able to get to a population of 1B over the course of 200 years without the kind of catastrophic meltdown you're describing.

If you liked the first one you'll probably like the second one too.

It sounds like the GP probably hadn't seen an avatar movie before?

So then they'd have formed on earth - no panspermia required?

The wings on the thopters described in the novel by Frank Herbert were more bird-like than insect-like.

I don't know which type, if either, will be more practical to build as materials technology improves.

Is training with dropout still a thing? Does that mess this up?

I think it's at least strongly implied in the movie that he has to work much harder than (for example) his genetically superior brother to achieve the same level of performance. So maybe you're both right.

I think you're both right. Introducing H2 as a fuel only helps matters if the energy used to produce the H2 is not from fossil fuels, and probably hurts otherwise.

Right now the world produces a small fraction of its electricity cleanly and the rest using fossil fuels. If you want to divert some of that human energy consumption from heating/cooling/cooking/lighting/computing to H2 production then how do you make sure the diverted energy is from clean sources and that those consumers don't take it upon themselves to fill the new hole in their lives with additional fossil consumption?

If you're going to say we should create petawatt-hours-per-year of additional electricity generation capacity in order to do this, that sounds great but the infrastructure doesn't exist and it will take decades-to-centuries to build it.

So, I'm very much in favor of developing and maintaining the technological expertise required to use H2 for energy. I'm not nearly as convinced when it comes to trying to deploy it at scale in the 2020s.

I don't know what this LOHC stuff really is, but it's easy to imagine that dissolving H2 in in an existing liquid would be much less of an undertaking than inducing it to become C8H18 or whatever.

OS kernels tend to use them simply because they don't have malloc at their disposal and so it's most practical to stick to fixed size memory chunks, right?

I'm glad you linked to that article, which I had not seen before.

I think I agree with the author about degrowth as a goal being a political nonstarter. But I'm pretty skeptical about the notion that future growth can consist of ever increasing amounts of "dematerialized" goods and services without ceasing to be real, meaningful growth (however it might be defined).

I also think the political and physical challenges inherent in technological or "pro-growth" (I need a better word) solutions for getting out of overshoot are widely underappreciated. This [1] article runs some numbers to show that, for our global civilization to satisfy its current level of energy consumption without emitting significant amounts of greenhouse gases in 2050, we will have to bring online clean energy generation capacity equivalent to one nuclear power station every day between now and then. Given that, I'd be extremely surprised to see us get there by 2150, or maybe at all.

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerpielke/2019/09/30/net-zero...

Are you sure it's not just that their hair and fashion styles are those of a previous decade and that that triggers the "this person is old" neurons in your brain?

> How so?

Modern industrial farming practices, designed to optimize agricultural output per unit of labor, are an ecological and environmental travesty. They require the widespread use of pesticides and toxic fertilizers that are decimating the biosphere. Monocropping unsustainably degrades soil quality. And the large contiguous areas used for industrial agricultural operations are extremely disruptive to wildlife.

The most obvious solution to the above is an agricultural system with many more, much smaller farms, where human beings do the work currently done by machines and chemicals.

> Produce is labelled not just down to a country level, but to individual farms, and often you'll see meat for sale in shops include not just the code for the farm, but the full name too.

Is this true across all of Europe? If not, what country are you in?

> programming work in the next decade will be done by logicians using something like TLA+

How is that not software engineering?

That assumes we're the object of the simulation rather than a byproduct. Maybe what they want to simulate is a universe and we've just happened to pop up in a small part of the simulation.

I assume they meant rewilding.

It's not the only important thing harming the biosphere and GHG emissions are not the only unsustainable human practice. But we are talking here about global warming specifically and that is driven by net GHG emissions.

If we mitigate climate change, it will be through carbon pricing. So I support that. Mostly by giving time and money to [https://citizensclimatelobby.org/], as I think their laser focus on passing a Carbon Fee & Dividend is clearly the best plan.

It's just an english idiom that doesn't mean much. It's like saying "If you are looking for an honest response, the answer is no."

I suspect the GP is interpreting "Honestly?" as an expression of incredulity at being asked the question - as though the asker did not know their place as an employee.

I can see how such an attitude would be offputting, but I do not believe that is the correct interpretation of the HR spokesperson's meaning.

This is interesting. Clearly _something_ happened in the early 70s (noise in the signal makes it hard to be sure of the precise year - if even there is a single discrete event). I've seen the abrupt change in economic trends attributed to different causes by different people:

- The end of the Bretton Woods monetary system

- The occurrence of peak domestic oil production in the US

- (now) removing the ability of senators to vote privately

...

What is an example of a company that you see as having a positive impact?

What does it mean to be "backed by" carbon captured?

Talk of backing a currency traditionally refers to some mechanism that guarantees people will continue to value it in the future:

- a currency is "backed by gold" if it is exchangeable for hunks of metal by whoever holds some of it (the future value of those hunks being taken as granted)

- a currency is backed by a government if that government guarantees that the currency will remain sufficiently scarce and that it will be a/the means of paying taxes due to that government.

In this case, though, you just mean that a coin is minted each time a ton of co2 is sequestered, right? And you would need some other mechanism to generate demand for the coins?

Even extremely progressive consumption taxes?

You can work for Disney's DMED, which is a very large IT/software organization. You would have to become a contractor through one of the agencies they work with - "Happiest Minds" or "Globant" were the two I saw used when I was there.

My current employer, Rigetti Computing, has I think 100-200 employees and has a few that are working from the UK, Australia, or Canada. But I think they would have to be especially interested in you to let you work from abroad as a new hire.

Since Fastmail is the topic here:

Have any other Fastmail users been finding lately that their messages have been getting flagged by recipients' spam filters more than before?

I've been using Fastmail since January, but getting flagged as spam has only seemed to be a significant issue for me for the past couple of months.

Precolonial New England was mostly forest and was home to less than 100,000 people.

I don't know how concerned those people were with sustainability or with being custodians of the land. But, even if they cared nought about such things, that need not mean that the state of the forest during their reign is not a worthy target for modern-day conservationists.

I would absolutely prefer school and business hours to change every month rather than have this 1-hour clock shift twice per year.

Can you just start waking up, going to work, going home, and going to sleep, an hour earlier (as measured by the new clock)?

Maybe your boss (if you have one) would let you do it.