269 karma · joined May 12, 2021
Who knows, maybe I am just paranoid.
In a tightly interconnected global economy it is disingenuous to disconnect the energy usage of one country or region from another.
US coal usage goes down because the things we used to build with that energy are now built in China. Solar panels in the US are cheaper than ever because manufacturing has switched to being 80% Chinese production, and guess where the energy to build those solar panels comes from? Coal.
The only way to understand energy is at a global scale as you can see here: https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
As you can clearly see no source of energy has decreased overtime globally.
Looking at local energy production is just an accounting trick, but the planet doesn't really care. You can't combat global warming by saying "look, technically we didn't produce that energy on our shores!"
If you forced China to decrease its use of fossil fuels you would immediately feel the impact on the global economy. Just because the power plants aren't within our borders doesn't mean that's not energy being consumed for our benefit.
My experience in the US is that the vast majority of math teachers, especially in primary school, don't understand math in the slightest and are abysmal at teaching math outside of rote memorization.
I knew a child that was learning about negative numbers and understood the role of primes in building the number line in 1st/2nd grade. They were learning from pure interest, but were excited by what negative numbers were about conceptually and found primes fascinating. These are the foundations of real mathematical thinking.
Seeing the student was advanced the school put the kid in a 4th grade math classes but then complained that the child didn't know the multiplication tables. Understanding multiplication tables is literally memorization, this child had never been given the task of memorizing them so couldn't possibly have memorized them. Memorizing tables says literally nothing about mathematical proficiency, whereas gaining the intuition that "subtracting a negative number is the same as adding it" requires mathematical reasoning. The teacher was unable to see this because they themselves had no notion that understanding things like inverse function in math are important tools for reasoning. The child was removed from that math class, and quickly started to see mathematics in school as uninteresting.
This is just one example, but I've ran across plenty of curious students where a math professor would be impressed but a 4th grade teacher would find them falling behind. My experience working with adults has been that most adults who think they are bad math, are more often than not ones that are getting caught up on issues with math that are good issues to have if you understand what's going on. People with a solid mathematical intuition will be confused by the rote mechanical explanations regurgitated by most elementary school teachers.
There are far more teachers that struggle at teaching math than students that struggle with learning it, but it's far easier to blame students. It's no wonder that many students grow to hate math in the US, because it feels they are being unfairly punished and they are.
You can't completely blame teachers either since the pay and respect teachers get in the US means that anyone who can do basic math will find a much better paying and rewarding job else where. In many Asian countries teachers are respected, and there is a possibility that you can attract people that understand the subject well enough to teach it.
I agree it's off because we've done significant damage to the biosphere since industrialization. As I've pointed out we have disrupted the natural nitrogen cycle.
If we where to immediately rewind our population back to 1850 and try to life that lifestyle we would have a much harder time since we have depleted natural resources. We cannot go back because we the earth would not support us the way it once did.
> There is no reason to assume that we're anywhere close to peak sustainable agricultural output, neither in pre-industrial times NOR now.
Our entire current agricultural system relies on fossil fuels, so I agree, where nowhere near close... we're way past.
> Viable pathways are
- batteries: not for commercial transport, the energy density is still way too low. Your battery becomes your cargo. Modern global trade is impossible in a battery based economy. Nobody that is serious on renewables will disagree with this, they will claim that new battery technology is going to solve this.
- Biofuel: require more energy to make they they provide [0]. So again, not only do you need to double the grid to handle intermittent power, you now need to expand it by the total biofuel energy required times 1/efficiency, so we're looking at at least tripling our current power output and trying to do it with only renewables. Please tell me how much silicon and lithium it would take to build a grid that large in that sort of a time span and you'll find it dwarf's annual production.
- Fuel cells: same problem again, currently fuel cells are made with coal or natural gas today 95% of fuel cells are made with natural gas [1]. If you want to switch to electrolysis you come up with the same problem of having to double our current grid power.
- Hydrogen in combustion engines: I'm not sure how this is different from hydrogen fuel cells, but the hydrogen production problem is the same.
Please if you want sources, provide some of your own. Come up with some back of the envelope estimates on the total grid capacity needed to cover 100% of our energy needs. Then do some research on the energy costs to produce solar cells at that scale (or wind farms, hydro is already near full capacity at least in the US).
I know you yourself don't really believe what you are saying. It's based on no research, you have provided no meaningful sources, and even the most die-hard solar/renewable proponents realize that grid scale storage is still an unsolved problems. What you have given are "hand wavy" explanations without sources, exactly as I expected.
0. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7320919/
1. https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-fuel-basics
To see the powerful impact of fossil fuels on carrying capacity you'll notice there's an important inflection point around 1920-1930. This is because of the advent of the Haber process[1] which allows us to use fossil fuels to create nitrogen based fertilizers.
Lest you doubt the impact of the Haber process just look at trends in corn yield per acre since then [2]. It's truly remarkable. Additional gains there are from other industrialized, fossil fuel driven agricultural process.
The Haber process requires hydrocarbons. In the wikipedia article you can see that it consumes 3-5% of the worlds natural gas production and 1-2% of the global energy supply.
We have completely disrupted the natural nitrogen cycle [4] and so would be unable to produce anywhere near as much food without fossil fuels. Because we have disrupted this cycle it's not even obvious that we could go back to a world of pre-fossil fuel agriculture.
So those are just some bit of information about my claims but let's take a look at yours:
> we could cover all our energy needs with renewable sources within a few decades if we really wanted to... this seems mostly non-disputed to me
This is wildly disputed, and I don't know anyone who credibly believes this without invoking "magic" future technology.
For starters we haven't replaced fossil fuels with "renewables" at all so far. We've just used them to supplement our energy needs. You can see here [4] that global fossil fuel consumption has continued to rise.
Then it is important to separate electricity from the more general subject of energy. Currently only 20% of global energy usage is electricity generation [5]. So even if you replaced the entire grid with renewables over night you would still be missing the vast majority of energy demands.
We currently have no viable pathway for renewable energy in transportation. Alice Friedman has more notes on this than I could ever fit in a comment [6]. Transportation inherently requires high energy density fuels, and outside of passenger vehicles, battery technology does not have the density required for industrial shipping.
It worth looking at our national energy flows to get a good sense of just how little of the energy we use comes from renewables [7].
But even if we look just at the electrical grid, in the US, we have some very obvious problems with "all" our needs. As you probably know, wind and solar are intermittent power sources that requires fossil fuel powered "peaker" plants to provide energy in down times.
This had two problems. One you need energy storage technology that we do not currently have (you cannot use grid scale lithium batters, pumped hydro has geological constraints, molten salts only work with concentrated solar, compressed air requires decommissioned oil field, etc).
The other problem is that even if you had perfect storage you need to now more than double the total energy production so you can fill those batteries.
The should be enough sources for you to get started, but I have feeling I'll still get down votes and "hand wavy" explanations of how it will all work out.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#/media/File:W...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
2. https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/YieldTren...
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_impact_on_the_nitrogen_c...
4. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...
5. https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2019/electr...
6. https://www.resilience.org/resilience-author/alice-friedeman...
7. https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/charts/Ene...
It seems far more questionable to assume we won't risk extinction in the geological near term. The parent is downvoted more out of existential fear rather than an honest assessment of the situation.
That's because we have had ready access to insanely abundant high-energy density source of energy.
The non-fossil fuel supported carrying capacity of the planet for humans is estimated to be somewhere around 1 billion people. When the fuel runs out (if we don't cook ourselves first), that will collapse.
It is nothing intrinsic about humans that have lead to our recent success, just access to lots of nearly free energy.
edit: why the downvotes? Is there even anything controversial in these statements? HN's fear of bad news is getting out of hand.
This is a strange claim I see repeated over and over, but it has very little evidence to justify it. The only piece of evidence people present is:
> people had colonized the whole planet, except for Antarctica
This is true of a fairly large number of organisms on Earth.
On top of this humans have only been around for ~200,000 years, that's not long at all. Humans have not survived a single mass extinction event.
So far we've seen humans travel around a planet that has been relatively stable for that period of time. There have been plenty of species that have traveled around with us that didn't even need to rely on extra tools, clothing or the use of energy to survive.
Humans share several vulnerabilities with other megafauna that have all gone extinct. A major one is a fairly long gestation, plus small number of offspring per generation. Human young likewise need tremendous amounts of care and energy to raise to mature adulthood. Additionally human have fairly high energy requirements to support their complex brains.
We've seen exponential rise in human population only because humans have had access to excessive amount of non-renewable, high-energy density sources of energy.
It just happens that humans have lived on a planet that has mostly been within survivable temperature changes, with historic climate changes happening on time scales that lead to easy migration. As you pointed out, the one continent that does not have an environment that supports human life remains empty.
Humans can't survive a wet bulb temperature of 35C. Until just recently we never saw that temperature on this planet. As we see more and more places reach that temperature more often, I suspect we'll see how frail human adaptability is.
"Societal cohesion" doesn't do too much to help us survive crop failures and wet bulb temperatures over 35C.
Aside from that, I think you might misunderstand your causal arrows a bit. It is fair more likely that massive industrialization and late state capitalism led to a society that valued the individual over the social unit, rather than that a sudden desire to be individuals sprung up in people's hearts and made a mess of the world.
It's unquestionably too late to prevent global warming, and mitigation is only possible if we seriously consider organized economic down scaling. This is stuff people have known about for decades and strangely enough took more seriously in the 70s than they do now.
Carbon emissions grow every year and the rate they are growing at continues to rise as well. Fossil fuel usage continues to rise (globally, local changes are meaningless). The only time we see any serious reduction in emissions is during massive economic down turns.
Many argue that people won't accept a change of lifestyle, but that change is coming either way. Since virtually no one I've chatted with will even take economic reduction seriously I'm pretty certain it is "too late" in every sense.
Downvoting comments like this because you wish it wasn't true is really unfitting of a community that prides itself on being 'hackers' and understanding how the world works.
Which is unfortunate because even if we dropped emissions to zero tomorrow, we would still be in for a few more decades of escalating climate crisis.
In the grand spectrum of what's already be chosen as far as climate change goes, this is just the very, very beginning. Our chance to act to prevent what we're seeing now was 30-40 years ago.
When this country was founded Government was by far the most powerful agency in people's lives. Merchants where important, had a lot of influence but still could not be too aggressive with a regent.
Today the Government has far less influence over your daily life than large corporations and you employer. In 1776 most people where farmers, the only agency that could deny your livelihood was the government (they ultimately had control over your land). Today government policies have far less of an impact than your employer on your livelihood.
The fact that a handful of oligarchs can decided that Trump doesn't need a voice is not democratic solution to a politician I radically disagree with that I would like. If you feel like the list of things you can't say publicly without ruining your career is shrinking, that is certainly a threat to the spirit of free speech.
Growing up I always had this belief that wealth was about building a big savings account, and that rich people where like Scrooge McDuck swimming in big pools of money.
This is, imho, a fantastic piece of propaganda. It's incredible how often people will say things like "Jeff Bezos is only rich because he owns so much stock!" As soon as you get your first big RSU payout you realize it is insane to keep the majority, or even a sizable portion of your capital in cash.
Even Marx saw that Capital, by its definition, is in motion.
The lesson of a savings account is that you should hand your money over to banks so that they can use it. But most kids aren't taught what it really means to park your capital in a bank. I remember how many times I was given the "miracle of compound interest talk" but nobody get fantastically rich from the growing interest on their savings account.
Today that's even more ridiculous, interest rates are way, way down and inflation is starting to rise. Keeping more than enough money to serve as an emergency fund is the same as just burning some of it for fun.
We are in an insane debt bubble, but that doesn't change the reality of how life works in an insane debt bubble. Using credit to buy things today, when interest rates are low and inflation is rising is far more rational than putting money in a savings account.
A better lesson would be to use that cash to buy things that are useful and can help build skills, which can't be taken by a debt collector. A guitar is a better purchase than a bunch of digital music, a laptop to program on is a better purchase than an ipad, etc.
This entire school of thinking that has derived from a George Carlin bit never ceases to annoy me.
For starters the "world" as some abstract ideal that we find comforting only exists because our human minds perceive it and imagine it as such. Our planet is just a rock out in spaces with some complex chemical reactions fizzlingly along on the surface. There is no "mother Earth" that will still be around to enjoy the life that reemerges in millions of years.
And there really is no guarantee that it is "going to get by just fine". Are you familiar with the current hypothesis behind the End-Permian extinction? It's believed by some to have been caused by a super volcano that ignited massive coal veins around what is today Siberia. Now the scale of CO2 emitted in the End Permian was much more dramatic than even current worse case scenarios, but we're emitting about 10x faster than lava burning coal was able to do back then. The End Permian nearly did wipe out life on this planet.
We don't fully understand all the possible CO2 feedbacks. We're already in one of the top 6 extinction events on this planet and that has little to do with climate change.... yet. CO2 has played a surprisingly big role in most mass extinctions.
Now it's certainly a low probability scenario, but it is not inconceivable that the end result of our insane release of CO2 in the atmosphere could lead to an unrecoverable extinction event.
At the very least a startling percent of the current species on this planet will go extinct (because a startling number already have). Corals which have survived plenty of extinction events might be replaces with green slime.
Just for clarification do you mean "store bought tortillas" or "store bought" masa mix (the dehydrated kind), or "store bought" masa meaning you went to your local Mexican supermarket and get some fresh ground masa?
I've never done the last option, but have used the dehydrated masa mix and, for not much work, that alone is a huge improvement over store bought tortillas, but have heard that it still falls quite short of getting it still fresh from a local store.
Talked with a company that made similar claims about what they are doing, but it turns out they were really ensuring that their users where choosing the medication from the highest bidder rather than the one that was really in the the patient's best interests.
The mental gymnastics they did to justify they were doing what was in the patient's best interests was fun to observe, but in the end they were just a tool of a large pharmaceutical company, exploiting sick people for profit.
Quick cynicism sanity check: who pays your company, your users or the "niche" treatment provider?
If it's the former, that sounds like it's good work.
If it's the latter I would recommend being a bit more skeptical of the business motives of your employer and their customers.
You'd be surprised how many times I've replaced a GBDT with logistic regression and had negligible drop off in model performance with a dramatic improvement in both training time as well as debugging and fixing production models.
I've had plenty of cases where a bit of reasonable feature transformation can get a logistic model to outperform a gbdt. Any non-linearity your picking up with a GBDT can often easily be captured with some very simple feature tweaking.
My experience has been that GBDTs are only particularly useful in Kaggle contests, where minuscule improvements in an arbitrary metric are valuable and training time and model debugging are completely unimportant.
There are absolutely cases where NNs can go places that logistic regression can't touch (CV and NLP), but I have yet to see a real world production pipeline where GBDT provides enough improvement over Logistic Regression, to throw out all of the performance and engineering benefits of linear models.
This is the real issue, not the dating pool.
The obvious evidence against the dating pool is that a fairly large number of divorced people I know getting into serious relationships and married again fairly quickly regardless of their age when the divorce happens.
All of the unhappy single people I know (and there are some happy ones that don't mind) share the same paradoxical thinking: I'm unhappy with how my life is, and I want to be in a close relationship with someone, but am absolutely unwilling to change anything major (sometimes even minor) about who I am, what I believe or how I live.
It seems obvious, but if you are unwilling to change anything about your life, then the only changes you experience are going to be those that are thrust upon you, such as the pandemic.
It means there's a lot of capital being dumped into trying to find some hidden source of profit and it's getting harder and harder to find it.
It's the capital equivalent of going from finding oil in your back yard to blasting it out of tar sands in the Canadian tundra. Sure the capital/oil keeps flowing, but the inherent unsustainability of the system starts to show its face more clearly.
> sift through vast piles of data, find previously unknown patterns, and then exploit them.
is much harder to pull of sucessfuly than you think. Having worked in the weeds with many projects of this nature, in practice these models are wildly less useful and powerful than the people buying the output from them believe.
For an individual case, you can exploit this data pretty well to find out shocking amount of personal information about a person. Doing this at scale in a way that doesn't converge into noise is much harder.
You don't have to be rich at all to have a nice office, you just need the flexibility to not have to be required to live in one of a handful a major metro areas where work is located.
That's why we're in a housing boom, because you can pay 50% over asking for more than 2x your living space, and reduce your monthly housing payment 20% or more.
I'll have saved enough from moving to afford all of the office equipment you describe just in the difference between my old rent and current mortgage... not to mention that every tech company I've worked at would gladly provide that setup to remote employees that needed it.
My career long experience has been that with any major hits to quality of life at a company: not every employee follows through, only the good ones.
While the switch to WFH might be a new issue, there have been continually waves of quality of life changes at companies durning different stages of growth. An obvious one is direct cuts to benefits, but others include rapid decrease in perks offered, change in vacation policy, change of office location etc.
In my experience good employees are quick to change whenever the signal from employers changes from "we respect you are want to reward you" to "we obviously don't care, or can't afford to care".
This happens all the time in startups that lose their trajectory. Snacks disappear, flexible work hours become more rigid, bonuses shrink etc.
So long as there are competitors out there who still offer these perks, good employees will leave often within a few months of the change. This causes a cascading effect where there are less good people on the team, so more and more people leave. Even if you don't care about perks, you care about good team mates.
I have seen multiple companies where after a major shock like this nearly all of the best and brightest are gone within a 6 month window.
What's funny about WFH is that the people that like it, like it so much they'll take a lower total comp to WFH. In the case of all the other perks I mentioned, a company has to pay more to keep them (and top talent). Sometimes it's just not possible to do this. With the return to office you're effectively spending money in drive out your top talent.
I'm sure plenty of companies will still do it, but I also suspect many companies that are looking for an edge will get an easy win by remaining remote friendly.
We're undeniably impacted by climate change right this very second. You can take a drive along the Eastern coast of the United States and see water flooding the yards of homes that are all for sale. Likewise everyone I've heard of buying costal or near sea-level property has had a hell of a time getting a mortgage because it's hard to find flood insurance.
You can watch the Arctic melt almost before your eyes [0]. If that doesn't shock someone right now, then I doubt the first blue ocean event will make a difference either.
Coral reefs are being critically threatened right now from ocean acidification, you can watch them die.
Arctic winds leaking out of the North as the polar vortex fails wreaked havoc across Texas.
The Sierra snow pack, essential for the maintenance of the fresh water supply for both California and Nevada continues to worsen and worsen with what are becoming rare years of it returning.
Record drought in the West causes continually devastating wildfires which are also sources of massive CO2 emissions.
All these are just a few off the top of my head that I've noticed.
Just like pandemic, which still has its fair share of deniers, there will be non-trivial subsets of the population that adamantly deny that climate change is happening even if the entire Midwest were to turn into a dust bowl again. Demagogue after demagogue will emerge to point the finger at some group of people.
But I full agree with your sentiment. Compared to climate change, solving pandemic should have been a cakewalk. If we had solved pandemic quickly I would still be skeptical about climate change because it is so much harder to stop. But since we utterly failed to address pandemic, it is already far too late to image we have any change to alter the path climate change is taking.
Maybe denial is ultimately the best approach for those that can't move towards horrific acceptance.
Especially with the extremely high THC content of modern strains people often fail to recognize that weed is still a psychedelic in its own right.
Alcohol, for most people, will simply make you feel good (up to a point), but strong weed can often magnify strong emotions you have. During a particularly challenging time in my life I completely gave up weed because smoking only served to make me feel worse.
Like all psychedelics the negative experience can be useful, for example if you get very anxious when you smoke it's likely you have some other unaddressed problems, but for those that are just looking for an escape (and most people, myself included, are looking for this from weed) it can certainly make smoking during stressful times a bad idea.
Both are great, both can be great tools for self discovery, and both can yield annoyingly ardent fans. I personally think everyone who is interested in experiencing life should aim to do a 10+ mile run and take a reasonably strong dose of a psychedelic. But by no means is your life impoverished by having neither experience.
> I felt like I was at peace and all my problems almost went away.
Right away this is a key difference, the peace you feel running is closer to a mild opioid than any psychedelic. Long distance running is fantastic for this sort of deep meditation, and for many people will be much easier than performing long sitting mediation. However I would say the end result of this running is that you travel deep within yourself.
Psychedelics on the other hands will temporarily take your mind apart. It is very common to experience looking in the mirror and seeing 'you' as just another body that is no different than the other bodies on the street. Psychedelics are both more exhilarating and more terrifying. Baggage you are carrying around can easily spiral in to a "bad" trip (which may be terrifying, but many would agree is not really a "bad" thing). At the same time and during the same experience you can see and feel the details in a blade of grass that let you feel a sense of beauty in the mundane that is a very different intensity than the peaceful bliss that can come from running.
I highly recommend you try something like shrooms in the safe environment. Not dissimilar to running a marathon, once can be enough of an experience for a lifetime (where for some people they want it to be a major part of their life, which is fine too in both cases).
It's a bit unfair to paint PG as just an "academic". Sure he basically rushed from academia straight into the business world, but he's created things as well. I mean being an investment capitalist will hardly compete with creating ambitious works like Principia Mathematica, but PG has written a few books on the side. Some of his earlier stuff, like On Lisp isn't half bad.
PG has also done his fair share to influence other creators, of course his influence will never be near as great as Russel's, I mean you don't run into a Wittgenstein more than once a generation. While most of PGs influence has been mostly to help other capitalist acquire more wealthy by any means necessary, he was able to help a few very interesting people like Aaron Swartz.
And while PG will never stick is neck out for anyone but himself, worried endlessly about this "intellectual" reputation, you can't expect all creators to be willing get themselves thrown in prison at the age of 89 to fight for what they believe is right.
tl;dr sure PG will never be as powerful of a creative and inspirational force as Russell, but it's unfair to say he's "just an academic"
Of course the idea of an "Advertising Economy" should cause people to pause a bit since advertising, by its nature, can only help maximize profits for somebody else. In theory the money that gets pumped into advertising can only be squeezed from the profits of other companies who are doing some optimization, weighing the cost of advertising vs the increase in their market. The maximum amount it makes sense to pay an advertiser is proportional to the increase in the audience they provide, with the assumption that your profit - fee * population_ads > profit * population_no_ads.
One thing should be very clear, advertising cannot create value, it can only extract some of the surplus value that other companies are creating. This puts a pretty hard limit on how big advertisers can grow.
The solution to this was of course to take the byproduct of advertising, the generation of large amounts of demographic data, and transform that into a product. Suddenly selling, sorting and manipulating data create an entirely new class of products and create demand for new professionals as well.
The advertising industry, specializing in creating the illusion of value when their may be none, has done a brilliant job of convincing everyone that data is inherently values. Allowing tech companies to sell not only their data, that is often of questionable actual value, but the infrastructure to use this data, and sell training in the skills necessary to work with big data.
The "data economy" is just advertising turned in on itself. Anyone who works with data knows deep down that all of this is a farce, but I think we still have a bit of time before all of this hits the fan, so enjoy the ride.
High quality developers from these countries can get paid surprisingly well. The ones that are insanely cheap tend to also do poor work.
The reason we still plenty of work being outsourced is because if you have a really high tolerance for low quality work, the lower end is much cheaper than you can get in the US.
You are also wildly underestimating some of the tech markets. I know plenty of people that are heading back to China because they are being offered amazing positions over there.
After the pandemic there was an even larger number of companies that are at the very least remote friendly. Most < 1000 employee tech companies I know are never planning on returning to an office full time. I also believe a fairly large number of the major tech companies are also planning to be fully remote friendly going into the future.
Pre-pandemic getting a fully remote job didn't take too much work find, and now nearly all companies I've talked to in the last few months are willing to support remote roles.