nostrademons

They are very common all down the SF Peninsula because of the Caltrain tracks. There's California/Carolan all through Burlingame (which has some of the most dangerous train crossings in the country because you can get stuck on the tracks between the lights), and then it follows El Camino on one side while the other one goes from Delaware (San Mateo) to Old County (San Mateo / Belmont / San Carlos) to Alma (Palo Alto) to Central Expressway (Mountain View / Sunnyvale).

The Old County lights at least are staggered so they are almost always green at the same time. The Central Expressway ones, not so much - there've been times I've been stuck for 20 minutes trying to cross the 100 feet from Moffett to Castro in Mountain View, because the light timing never lined up with the train signals.

That was the main one, and also in case you ever ended up with car trouble you had a record of every place you had filled up and every time you had the car serviced. It was also financial: you could tell how much you were spending on gas, whether gas prices were going up or down, which stations had the cheapest gas, etc.

Nowadays a lot of this is recoverable from your credit card statements (though again, I don't know anybody who actually does this), but in the 80s you would usually pay cash for gas.

It's less of a difference than you might suspect. The personalized curation is in which forum you choose to visit. HN is quite niche by numbers; it's a lot smaller than say bodybuilding.com or even AR15.com. That you choose to go to news.ycombinator.com is your personalization, and also skews your view on the world. Most of the world is interested in very different stuff.

The sum total of things going on in the world is far more than any one human being can process. The function of the news media (either human or algorithmic) is to cherry-pick the stories that are presented to users. Because they are cherry-picked, they necessarily present a distorted picture of reality. In the days of the big-3 monopoly of broadcast TV, they were usually cherry-picked to support national unity and common American culture; as the news media got more competitive, they started cherry-picking ones that would hold viewer attention ("if it bleeds, it leads"), and then as we switched to Internet news and algorithmic feeds they are algorithmically chosen to maximize engagement.

Bookmarks died because most humans are allergic to having to do bookkeeping and cleanup tasks that are incidental to what they really want to do.

We see that over and over again, in a bunch of non-tech fields. My kids never want to clean up their toys; they will pull out new ones, but it is a struggle to get them into the habit of putting the old ones away first. My parents used to keep a notebook with every gas fill-up they made; nobody born after about 1990 does that anymore. We were taught how to balance a checkbook in elementary school; basically nobody does that anymore, we put everything on autopay and if you are diligent you check a statement or import it into Quicken once a month (most people don't even do that, they have no idea what they are spending and predictably, usually no money left over). GMail succeeded because instead of putting your mail in folders, you just leave it in one lump with Google and rely on full-text search. A lot of Zoomer computer users don't even know what files and folders are, they just use apps, which take them straight to what they want to do and don't offer things like possession of your own data.

Back in the (~early 2010s) days when Google still allowed internal innovation, there were recurrent demos produced by engineers of full-text search over your web history, though of course it was your web history as stored by Google and none of this was local. It never became a product, largely because users are too lazy to go to a separate search product just for your history, or because they're too lazy to check a separate box saying "Search my history". Instead I think web history became a ranking input to general search and it would mix in results that you frequently visited to the general results, which honestly I think was a more useful approach.

As a side note, this thread is a prime example of the point I was making: that people are stuck on the object level of "what should a society's values be?", rather than being able to zoom out to the meta level of "there are different groups that all have different sincerely-held beliefs about what a society's values should be, and each of them believes their version of reality is righteous and inevitable."

I was certainly think of U.S. red vs. blue politics. I think it's bidirectional though: blue team doesn't realize how unpopular some of their key policy agendas are with red-team America, which is why they keep getting their teeth kicked in during elections. But red team doesn't realize the extent to which urban America has moved on from the cultural values of the 1980s, and both how numerous and how devoted their opposition is to their ideals. In reality, the teams are fairly evenly matched in both numbers and strength of conviction. But neither team will admit that, thinking that it's just a few errant radicals that are being manipulated by shadowy forces (Bill Gates, George Soros, and the NYTimes are the bogeyman for the reds; Trump, Miller, Bannon, and Fox News are the bogeyman for the blues). It seems inconceivable to each side that tens of millions of Americans might have sincere beliefs that differ from their own.

The mismatch between perception and reality makes me quite worried for the future of the country.

There are plenty of global examples as well, eg. everybody thought Russia would absolutely steamroll Ukraine and that hasn't happened, both Iran and the US think they have the upper hand and just need to mop up in the Persian Gulf. That's why those conflicts are still going on.

I like that terminology.

I'll explain, though, because I know the idea that we're all gonna kill each other is currently outside of the Overton Window. There's a fairly well-known (within the field) concept in history & international relations that wars start when the balance of power is ambiguous. Each side thinks that their in-group is more numerous, more powerful, and more righteous than the other. When groups have an accurate self-assessment of their relative power, the more powerful one gets its way and the less powerful one swallows its pride and does what it's told. But when both groups believe they are the more powerful one, they press their advantage and come into conflict. Rather than backing down, they keep pushing for concessions and escalating, believing that if it comes to a fight, they'll win. Since both groups have the misapprehension that they will be the winner, it actually does come to a fight, even though fighting is not strictly rational for either one. It gets even more ambiguous when the conflict is multi-sided, since the uncertainty in power relations is greater relative to their actual power, and the groups often don't know which way potential allies will break or to what extent an adversary's attention will be taken up by others.

History is full of examples where the news articles were crowing that war was impossible right up until it broke out, usually because it would be irrational. People are not always rational, particularly when they have a false perception of the world.

Overton window fragmented such that it is currently non-overlapping. Some fragments consider the behaviors that Snowden reported on abhorrent; others consider them fine; still others think it's a moot point because they are powerless and can't do anything about it anyway; and others think it's a moot point because they're going to overthrow the government and remake it in their image anyway.

We're in the phase where the factions are geographically sorting, identifying allies, and arming. Then we fight it out. Each faction thinks their particular Overton window will win and become dominant afterwards, but likely we'll just end up back in the Stone Age and there won't be much of a society left to have a mainstream.

Huh, interesting. During the ZIRP period (~2016-2017), I remember suggesting somewhat tongue-in-cheek here that the rational response to negative interest rates is to borrow as much money as possible, use it to raise an army, and then go conquer the people who loaned you the money. It sounds like that is actually what the U.S. did, except with a dose of diplomacy that got them to exhaust themselves fighting each other first.

It's kind of the historical embodiment of "Owe the bank $100, and you have a problem. Owe the bankers $100T, and they have a problem."

It feels better only as long as everybody else cares too. Being the only one competent in a room of imbeciles is a terrible feeling.

Hmm, this is perhaps why we get socially-negative businesses that often have very friendly (and driven, and hard-working, and intelligent) internal cultures. Competency becomes a fault line. When it becomes obvious that a large fraction of humanity just doesn't give a shit, a small group of people who are competent and driven turn their efforts to taking advantage of people who don't give a shit. Thus creating industries like market-makers, cryptocurrency, advertising, and AI.

You've never met a stupid employee who doesn't use all of the tools available in their organization?

Decisions are made by people, not by countries. People have limited capacity in their wetware and frequently take shortcuts in their work, particularly if they are just doing a job and face little personal consequences for lazyness.

I assume you're going off the 1.365M + 1.2M combatant strength listed in the Wikipedia article?

Those are figures for the total size of those national armies at the time. It'd be like saying the Iran war involved 3M people because the U.S. has about 2.1M in uniform and Iran has just under 1M counting reservists. Meanwhile there've been precisely zero boots on the ground in Iran, and the total number of military personnel directly affected is on the order of tens of thousands.

The text of the article has the Russian far east strength at about 95,000 at the start of the war, with another 410,000 trained in over the course of the war. The best proxy for Japanese (and Russian) combat strength might be the Battle of Mukden [1], which had about 250K Japanese and 292K Russian troops. These numbers are smaller by a factor of about 5x.

The present-day Russo-Ukrainian war is significantly larger. Estimated Russian deaths are 500K+, higher than the total number of Russian soldiers involved in the Russo-Japanese war.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mukden

To some extent yes, but the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact was never really as threatening as western propaganda made it seem. In basically all metrics that matter - population, GDP, military spending, technological advancement, etc. - the eastern bloc was a distant second to NATO. That makes its collapse far less disruptive to the world order than when the former hegemon falls.

There've already been numerous postmortems published about what happened with the school strike.

The school was located on a former military base. 10 years ago, that location was a legit military target. Nobody bothered to update the satellite imagery from 2013 when feeding it into whatever LLM was assisting in targeting. It saw an airstrip and missile base. The human reviewing the targeting saw an airstrip and missile base. When you go to take out a military target, you don't send one missile. You send a missile or two in first, and then another couple in a few minutes later.

Hanlon's Razor very much applies here. There's no need to posit that the children were IRGC members or that the attack was deliberate or even that the children were the targets. There's a very obvious explanation, which is that nobody bothered to check the date and assumed that if it was military base in 2013 it was still a military base today.

The biggest Thucydides Trap wars were WW1 and WW2, which happened specifically as Britain (the first major power to industrialize) lost its hegemony over industrialization and faced competition from Germany, Russia, Japan, the US, etc. Thirty years of some of the most brutal war the world has ever seen followed, which only ended with the U.S. re-establishing hegemony because it was the only one whose homeland hadn't been bombed into oblivion.

You're right that there have been no great-power wars in the last 80 years. That's about the timescale at which major hegemonic realignments occur: WW1/WW2 from 1914-1945 (England -> US), Napoleonic Wars from 1803-1815 (England -> France -> England), Nine Years War + Glorious Revolution + War of Spanish Succession from 1688-1715 (France -> England), European Wars of Religion from 1618-1648 which created the nation-state system.

But that just means that this is the first major hegemonic realignment after the development of nuclear weapons and drone swarms, which makes me fear for the survival of civilization a bit.

Bitcoin as the new Bancor.

A stable, simple cryptocurrency is ideal for this. Not only is it not controlled by any nation state, it's not controlled by anyone. It's just there, a tradable asset that has mathematically-defined rules for how many will ever be created. Also gets around the Triffin Dilemma by not being used as a national currency, or for general consumer purchases.

The international settlement use-case also gets around two of the traditional weaknesses of Bitcoin. The fact that it's deflationary is not concerning when used as a unit of international settlement, because national currencies can be made to be inflationary to spur consumer activity, and then just float relative to Bitcoin. And its low TPS limits also don't matter much when it's only used for general international settlement between large financial entities, rather than as a payment coin for ordinary consumer purchases.

Would assume it's in reference to things like the EU offering associate membership to Canada, or China's trade deals with Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, etc.

It's kind of a prelude to a Thucydides Trap.

The problem with replacing the world reserve currency with something else is that nobody can agree on what that something else should be. Expect to see a lot of jockeying for power as people realize the U.S. isn't the world hegemon anymore. Jockeying, on a state level, usually means war.

That's recent, just as of the last couple months. Historically the children's foundations have been a sideshow and he's given the bulk of his wealth away to the Gates Foundation. You can see that from the dollar amounts: this year's gift to the children's foundations was 1M BRK-B shares (the equivalent of about $500M) to each, while he's given away a total of $66B, over 120x as much.

Your wording is pretty revealing:

> This framework creates a moral basis to rights

The Constitution (and the thinkers that it was based off of) creates a moral basis to rights. At the time the Constitution was written, this was a pretty radical idea. The most prevalent moral framework at the time was the divine right of kings, the idea that the king was ordained by God to rule and anyone who questioned that right was speaking heresy.

There are a wide variety of middle-ground views between them. Copyright law itself is one of them: it provides exceptions for transformative "fair uses", and there are some courts that have ruled that AI is one of them. Another might be Harbinger taxes on IP.

He was giving it to the Gates Foundation for Bill & Melinda Gates to manage, but that deal went into limbo when Bill showed up in the Epstein files and Melinda divorced him.

They used an even easier method than what's described in the other comments: the salt comes from the initial construction of the SPR caverns.

When they first built the SPR, they filled it with water to wash away any easily-dissolvable salt features as well as any impurities inside the cavern. The result of filling the cavern and letting it sit for a while is saturated brine: eventually all the salt that can be dissolved is dissolved. Then they pumped that brine to aboveground brine ponds.

Those brine ponds contain exactly the amount of salt water needed to completely fill the cavern with saturated brine. So future drawdowns just use the same water that has already been saturated. Some of the water will evaporate on the surface, leaving behind salt crystals at the edges of the brine pond, but the crucial thing to remember is the quantity of salt in the newly created brine pond is equal to the amount of salt needed to generate enough saturated brine to completely fill the cavern. Because that's where it came from in the first place. So if you need to replenish it with more water, you just pump in fresh water, it dissolves the extra salt in the brine pond, filter out any surface guck, and then pump it back into the cabin.

Periodically you might want to add a little extra salt if say the cavern expands or wind erosion carries salt away from the dry brine pond bed. But this quantity is much less, it's the delta in cavern size, not the full initial size of the cavern.

In the salt it's pretty similar. The salt caverns are basically just like the conditions where the early, easily-exploitable oil deposits ("gushers") were.

There was a good comment on r/oil by someone who worked on the engineering for the SPR. Unfortunately it's fallen off the front page and I can't find it now, but:

> Also, the more water we pump in, the more salt leeches into the water and the more the bottom of the chamber deforms, creating shear forces in the upp walls that lower its overall structural integrity.

It turns out that it's trivially easy to prevent the water from leeching out the salt. They presaturate the water with salt, so that it already contains the maximum amount of salt that can be dissolved for a given temperature. When they pump the brine out, it goes into aboveground brine pools that can easily be seen on satellite imagery. The salinity of this brine can easily be controlled: if you want to expand the cavern, you mix it with freshwater so the brine dissolves more of the edges, if you don't you pump it back in as brine.

Edit: Here, found some satellite imagery of one of the SPR sites:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/B8XJ9TVhQfcdErky5

You can clearly see the brine pond, which is as big as the aboveground portion of the SPR itself.

The second part is a more complex issue, and also a completely separate one from the question of when/whether/at what number the U.S. population will peak.

It is theoretically possible to grow per-capita GDP without growing population, and this would normally be seen as better from a consumer perspective. There are big questions about what that would actually mean, though, and the game theory is all screwed up.

Per-capita GDP is, literally speaking, the value of all the economic transactions needed to support a person. In general higher per-capita GDP is seen as better, because if those transactions weren't beneficial, why would you make them?

But this is not always the case when you look at society in aggregate and then compare to individual welfare. To see why, consider a small society [1] where everybody owns their own plot of land, farms it, generates enough food to feed their family, and only trades occasionally because most of what they need day-to-day can be produced with their own labor. Such a society would have an extremely low GDP, because most of the work done consists of internal transactions that aren't counted. We pay rent to our landlord, who pays 10% of that to their property manager, who periodically lays out a few thousand to contractors to fix things, all of which is counted in GDP; but somebody who just owns their house outright and fixes it themselves pays zero, and zero gets counted as GDP. We pay a few hundred bucks at the grocery store, who then pays the distributor, who pays the farmers, who distributes wages to their laborers and rents their tractor from John Deere and pays Monsanto for genetically-modified seeds that can't reproduce because you gotta have them coming back for more; but the person who grows or gathers their own food pays nothing, and nothing is counted in GDP. Apparently it didn't take a whole lot of labor either; contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes spend about 12-19 hours/week laboring to obtain food and shelter [2], while I'd bet that most of today's urban poor spend significantly more than that.

The normal counterpoint [3] to this is that today's urban poor (let alone wealthy) aren't working just for food and shelter, there's a whole lot of technological development thrown in that just wouldn't have happened without capitalism. So take the family on Medicaid that's working 2 jobs just to survive in a tiny beaten-down rented apartment. They also have clean water, and access to vaccines, and antibiotics when their kid gets sick, and a car that lets them go to the beach on weekends, and they can store food for the winter in a refrigerator, and they sit on a toilet to poop instead of burying it in a hole, and many other things we take for granted. They might even have a TV and a cell-phone and access to millions of hours of entertainment, since those have gotten so cheap relative to rent. It's just not directly comparable to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

But the counter to the counterpoint is that most of those technological innovations have depended upon an increasing population together with capitalism. The actual mechanism here is that capitalism commoditizes goods where there is an oversupply, making it unprofitable to continue producing them. That means that young people entering the workforce for the first time are strongly disincentivized from being say a farmer or a paperboy or a domestic servant, and instead are incentivized to move up-market to innovation industries like software engineering or biotech. Capitalism is the ratchet that keeps people inventing new things, but the inventing (and even the maintenance of these new technologies) is done by actual people. If there are not enough people, than folks who would otherwise go into technological industries will have to work instead at the basic tasks of keeping society running, like how Matthew McConaughey's character in Interstellar [4] was a trained NASA pilot who is growing food on a farm because that is what society needs.

This has actually happened in several occasions in history, eg. during the fall of the Roman Empire we saw increasing de-specialization as the urban elite class fled Rome and ended up working the fields during the Dark Ages, while during Crisis of the Late Middle Ages, you had the younger sons of the nobility returning to productive work as guild artisans (and ushering in the Rennaissance) as the peasantry was largely killed off by Black Death and the Hundred Years War and the Wars of the Roses.

The second part of my response is about game theory, and specifically about the actual decision to invest that financiers and entrepreneurs make when they hear a new idea. When the market is rapidly expanding, this is usually a no-brainer: capture it or somebody else will. But when the market is contracting, you usually do not see further investment. Going back to the meaning of per-capita GDP expanding without population growing, it implies that some new and dramatically better way of doing something will come out, compete with the existing alternatives, and convince consumers to spend significantly more.

This is a hard battle! Typically tech startups win when there is no alternative at all for the desired activity, or at least when they are orders of magnitude better than the alternative. A few percentage points better doesn't cut it; its not noticeable enough for consumers to switch.

And investors know this, which is why it's essentially impossible to get a startup funded by pitching "I'm going to be like Comcast but cheaper." Everybody knows that ISPs in America are overpriced, but a price war means a contracting market instead of an expanding one, and battles over contracting markets are vicious. Much better to fund "I'm going to make an AI that runs businesses automatically", which is probably bullshit but it's bullshit that has very little competition and a huge total addressable market.

The incentive in a contracting market isn't to invest heavily to prove yourself better than the competition. It's to milk whatever assets you have for as much cash as possible before they wink out of existence, and then take the money and run. A lot of the prosocial behavior that capitalism has resulted in was heavily conditioned on expanding markets, expanding population, and expanding payoffs for innovation. When population collapses, those incentives reverse.

[1] like the Parable of the Mexican Fisherman: https://aliabdaal.com/newsletter/the-parable-of-the-mexican-...

[2] https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/di...

[3] https://francismead.com/2015/06/06/agriculture-humanitys-wor...

[4] https://interstellarfilm.fandom.com/wiki/Joseph_Cooper

The peak has been moved up by decades in the last year. The 2080 figure is from Nov 2023 [1], before Trump administration cuts in immigration. The Jan 2026 CBO report predicted a peak of 2056 [2]; a similar Institute for Family Studies report from July 2026 [3] predicts a peak in 2054.

The delta is entirely because of immigration. If you count only natural fertility (births - deaths), population growth nearly went negative during COVID (distorted somewhat by the high death rate), briefly recovered, and is predicted to cross again for good in 2030. The Trump administration's signature campaign promise is to clamp down on immigration, and even get an estimated 12-15M illegal immigrants to self-deport. If this happens, the population will immediately shrink. Immigration and immigrant families are what is propping up the population; if you assume net-zero migration (which IIRC was one of the scenarios modeled in the Census projection), the population already peaked in 2023.

[1] https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IN/HTML/IN123...

[2] https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61879

[3] https://ifstudies.org/report-brief/the-demographic-dead-end-...

They don't really fix the problem, though. Problem is a lack of commercial activity in the region because people don't want to die. Turning the place into a literal warzone (again), launching nukes, or other crazy things does not instill confidence that you won't die sailing there.

This is one of those cases where the only winning move is not to play, and both belligerents have proven stupendously bad at not playing.

There has been a tendency for each of the last 4 presidents to do the opposite of their campaign slogans. GW Bush was "Compassionate conservatism" in 2000, and then he started 2 wars and radically expanded both the federal budget deficit and the federal government. In 2004 it was "A safer world and a more hopeful America", and look where we are now. Obama's 2008 slogans included "Change", "Hope", and "Yes we can", and then we got more of the same, proving that no we couldn't. His 2012 slogan was "Middle class first", and then 2012-2016 featured the evisceration of the middle class. Biden's 2020 slogans were "Build back better", "Restore the soul of the nation", and "Our best days still lie ahead", and none of those seem particularly descriptive of what actually happened 6 years later (though I'll grant that the Biden presidency was a normalcy reprieve after COVID and Jan 6).

Donald Trump's slogans were "Make America Great Again" and "Drill baby drill", and so of course he's been destroying America and kickstarting the green revolution through high oil prices.