magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
You get to your asteroid, and... It's mostly silicon, iron, nickel, and other crap you can dig up back on Earth for way, way cheaper. There might be some high-value exotic elements like Californium that are kinda valuable, but how do you find any?
Why would there be californium on asteroids? You might find some plutonium from interstellar dust (although Earth is again a better source of that), but there's no process that generates californium near enough to Sol that it would actually get here before it decayed.
There's maybe, maybe a plausible case to be made for antimatter, presuming we had a useful application for it by the time this whole mess is feasible - but I bet it would be cheaper to just invent a way to make and capture antimatter on Earth.
"On" Earth is plausibly not true, although "around Earth" definitely is. The most concentrated reservoir of antimatter in Sol System is Earth's Van Allen belts. Estimates I've seen are that you can't get the price below a billion a gram making it in particle accelerators due to inherent inefficiencies (currently it's more like trillions), while scoops in the Van Allen belts could conceivably do it for millions.
The elements that are most amenable to asteroidal extraction would be tellurium and the strongly-siderophile metals (Ru,Rh,Pd,Re,Os,Ir,Pt,Au), all of which are strongly-depleted in the crust due to tellurides and native metals (the primary forms of these elements) sinking into the core. Some of these are useful and as such humongously expensive. But, yes, there's the issue that you need to refine them on-site because of the delta-V needed for the return trip, and more generally the Space Bootstrapping Problem where a lot of space industries only make sense if there are other space industries to absorb their products.
A couple of mitigating factors I'll note:
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if you were to mine asteroids with people, you would not need radiation shielding for the time on the asteroid, because you could use the asteroid itself - digging deep on asteroids is pretty easy energetically. You still need the radiation-shielded craft to get there, though, which sucks.
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mass ratios look far nicer if you bite the bullet and start using nuclear. This sucks for takeoff from Earth because people will get apoplectic, but for things like a return mass driver or an orbital-transfer burn there's less of an issue there. This is getting into issues of "do you really think they're going to let Elon Musk buy a breeder reactor and reprocessing plant", though.
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
The election will inevitably (particularly now that Trump is a felon) lead to an enormous amount of chaos between October 2024 and February 2025.
Worse than that: this was clear as early as 2022 if not from Jan 6 2021, so the (highly non-trivial) preparations for war could be made. Indeed, back in late 2022 when I posted this, my unstated conclusion was "the Five Eyes have detected an in-progress Chinese plan to attack Taiwan" (I'm still not 100% confident of that, but I can't see any other likely scenarios in which "a linear path" leads to "great-power conflict" and an active decision to avert it is required).
With that said, the chance is not 100%. As Symon noted, we can turn off a linear path; leaders can make decisions. An in-progress Chinese plan to attack Taiwan means only that Xi thinks the option of an attack is worth the cost of the preparations; he could still very easily call "no-go" before the trigger's pulled if circumstances look less than favourable.
I think the "indirect control" plan, if it can even be called a "plan", is bananas and unworkable; the PRC has no jurisdiction over the Separate Customs Territory of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu (which is a formal member of the WTO) and any attempt to declare border controls would be a legal nullity and would be ignored. I'm not saying they won't claim to be doing this - the PRC claims a lot of things - but they would have to back it up with at least an actual blockade (either shooting or mining) and they know this. So that leaves us with three real options:
- Blockade Taiwan ("surrender or Taipei starves")
- Bombard Taiwan ("surrender or Taipei burns")
- Invade Taiwan ("who cares if you surrender, there's a guy with a bayonet in the Legislative Yuan"), presumably with a preceding bombardment
...with the latter two both having the option of pre-emptive strikes on US/Korean/Japanese assets in East Asia, or not doing that out of hope of keeping them neutral. Frankly, I'm not enough of a tactician to figure out which they're planning on; there've been exercises relating to all three primary scenarios so it's entirely possible they're intending on some degree of flexibility depending on how the situation develops.
Overall numbers - with the horizon of 12 months, I'd say a very uncertain 50%. I'm anchoring on the Paul Symon interview with WWIII being the default case (note that I think it's like 80% that the West comes in conditional on a Taiwan play, and 90% that cities get nuked conditional on the West intervening in a Taiwan play), but I've heard some noises more recently saying it might be more like 2027 so I've shaved a bit off.
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
And then more recently they felt they could get away with total control, so they went ahead and enforced more control.
I think it's more like "they did some things they didn't think would cause a furore that did, and then they weren't sure they could maintain control without a full crackdown".
I'm definitely in agreement with you against @AshLael that what happened in Hong Kong does not scream "long-term plan". The "charm offensive" screamed "long-term plan" - you can actually see its effect on Taiwanese attitudes toward unification - and the Darth Vader stunt ruined that plan, so it doesn't make sense for the Darth Vader stunt with that timing to have been a long-term plan (the obvious long-term plan would have been to wait out the 50-year agreement and/or to wait until Taiwan also agreed to 1C2S and had been garrisoned with PLA troops). At the very least, if it was a long-term plan, then the CPC is either completely bananas (yes, yes, they're bad at understanding WEIRD mindset, but "if you break agreement X with person Y, person Z will be less likely to enter agreement X with you" is more general than that) or has a major case of left-hand/right-hand.
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
You've got to remember: there's a reasonable chance of this US election turning into a giant shitshow and this has been obvious for several years allowing contingency preparation. "The USA disagrees on who the President is" is a better opportunity than either "Trump is the President" or "Biden is the President".
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
https://manifold.markets/news/chinataiwan
More markets where people put their (play) money where their mouth is with regards to their predictions, and I encourage everyone with strong opinions to do the same.
I tried to set up a (real-money) bet with someone over this (well, technically on nuclear war, but these have very high correlation), but was unable to finalise terms. There are a number of issues with betting "yes":
- Are you going to survive to enjoy your winnings?
- Is the counterparty going to survive to pay you?
- Are the mechanisms to allow and force the counterparty to pay you going to survive?
- Is money going to be worth as much in "yes" worlds as "no" worlds? (Probably not, so you need better odds than the naïve ones.)
#1-3 can be solved with some innovation, although they make things more complicated. #4 is just a straight-up "prediction markets will underpredict this because equilibrium price =/= real probability".
NB: I have taken some steps to survive nuclear war (moving to Bendigo instead of Melbourne, bottled water in my bathroom cabinet), so I've put some money where my mouth is already.
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
2-3 months: March-April and October, although only the last half of March.
Yes, a repeat of Pearl Harbour would be retarded. "Doing retardedly overconfident things that get your country squished flat" is kind of the most notorious pitfall of fascism, though (see: actual Pearl Harbour), and for all its protestations the PRC is effectively fascist, so this isn't necessarily a guarantee that it won't happen.
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
First, EMPs, super or otherwise, are thermonuclear weapons.
WP says that the fusion stage doesn't really help much, so the "thermo" there is not necessarily the case. But yes, this is still the strategic use of nuclear weapons.
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
The Taiwanese consider themselves chinese, large sections of their population already support union with China,
That plan was going quite well until they altered the deal on Hong Kong. When they did, Taiwanese support for unification crashed to lizardman and has remained there since.
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
Is there some reason for this immediate assumption that I am your enemy?
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
Trump isn't the President, though. Ex-Presidents being convicted of crimes prove only the alternative statement "either the system is impartial or those currently in power don't like the ex-President" - but since we know the latter half of that is true, it doesn't prove anything.
magic9mushroom
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4d ago
There's an argument that we shouldn't have made noises about Ukraine joining NATO. Once those noises were made, though, the idea of leaving them high and dry got significantly less tenable.
I do agree that the USA should drop the ambiguity over Taiwan; it's not helping matters.
I would appreciate it if you didn't impute random unrelated opinions to me.
magic9mushroom
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4d ago
The point's less "we need to fight wars all the time", and more "if we give the impression that someone's under our protection, we need to actually back it up or people will think our word's worth nothing".
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
That also means that Ohio keeping Biden off the ballot doesn't actually bring any greater likelihood of secession/major consequences.
The problem there is that everyone's running 1.2-tits-for-tat and as such once the door's been opened it becomes more likely that somebody winds up doing it in a plausibly-in-play state.
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
My guess is that the combination of Twitter being not really his sort of company with the "Fair Game" notice the Biden administration put out on him in retaliation for buying it is why his star's falling.
If he can figure out how to delegate Twitter, and/or if the massive lawfare stops for one reason or another, he might return to form, but you're right that he's way off it.
magic9mushroom
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7d ago
Not my random opinion. It's what is predicted by public choice economics for a first past the post / two-party system. The party with the median voter wins, so that is where party behavior trends towards.
The MVT binds for IRV with compulsory voting (as is the case in Australia, where indeed there is little difference between the two biggest parties' policies). It binds here because the base can't defect. In optional plurality voting, the base can defect, either by futilely voting third-party or by staying home, so being a micron closer to your base than the other guy is is not necessarily enough to win their votes and, thus, the MVT is not valid - base turnout depends on your policies, and tends to counterbalance swing voters, so taking the maximally-moderate position is not a dominant choice.
magic9mushroom
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9d ago
Stars crap out planets the way we take a dump on the toilet. Case closed everyone! Planets are fecal matter.
The funny bit is that this is kind of true. The reason stars usually have planets is that a contracting gas cloud has to shed angular momentum to slow down its spin enough to contract to stellar size, and the only way to do that (prior to the star getting hot enough to create stellar winds) is to shift it into orbits - either it splits into two and becomes a binary (with the angular momentum stuffed into the stars' orbit around each other) or it spits out a disc of matter around its equator that coalesces into planets (with the angular momentum stuffed into the planets' orbits).
Of course, Jupiter doesn't have excess angular momentum, so it's not going to spit out the Great Red Spot or anything else.
magic9mushroom
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9d ago
Scott's covered two hypotheses for what the issue with "processed food" is:
- it has more degrees of freedom, and food producers' incentives are to trick you into eating 500kg of their food and becoming a balloon so more degrees of freedom for the producers are bad for you,
- it's invariably full of vegetable oil, which "normal" food is not.
Yes, many definitions exist which do not correspond one-to-one with a reasonable hypothesis such as these, and to the extent they do not they will be less effective than they could be, but the basic idea of categorising things this way is not insane.
magic9mushroom
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11d ago
New term to me, but that's basically what I was gesturing at, thanks.
magic9mushroom
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12d ago
Badgering women into having sex with you after they've said no is apparently fine in some people's minds.
To move away from drunk hookups into committed relationships, there is this kind of issue where libidos don't always match and as such some accommodation must be reached where either:
- The low-libido partner (usually but not always the woman) agrees to have sex more in exchange for some consideration,
- The high-libido partner (usually but not always the man) agrees to have sex less in exchange for some consideration, or
- Both agree on some middle ground.
One issue I've seen with a decent amount of feminist thought (including, to some extent, the article under discussion) is that it declares agreement #2 exploitative and defends women's right to outright renege on agreements #1 and #3 without consequence (as consequences are a form of coercion). That doesn't leave any zone of possible agreement.
I'm not saying it's alright to ignore a "no", but... there are circumstances where "no" is an arsehole move.
magic9mushroom
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16d ago
Based on the steady torrent of Israel-Palestine threads, the general impression I get is that a majority of people here is quite solidly pro-Israel in this conflict.
Remember that there are a decent amount of people not interested in discussing any particular thing. I've been largely staying out of it, for instance, because I've already come to a conclusion on the best policy of the West (get the fuck out, at least as far as military assistance, to avoid making enemies by backing Israel and avoid getting nuked by openly backing Palestine), it doesn't seem especially likely to blow up in a way that leads to WWIII (unlike Taiwan, which I check the news on every week or so), and I'm not enough of a masochist to keep soaking my brain in the endless stream of atrocities without some actual benefit to doing so.
magic9mushroom
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17d ago
Oh, they're not 100%-retention, but they don't have to be. They just have to be high-enough retention to perpetuate themselves. And while yes, something might change internally to them (although with the Amish it's not really a good bet), anything that didn't get all of them would just start the cycle over again in microcosm.
My overall point is this: you can beat natural selection - Azathoth, as Eliezer called it, although frankly Shub-Niggurath's a better fit from what I know - but you're not going to beat it by accident for long enough to actually die out. Shub-Niggurath doesn't always win, but she always wins by default - you have to actively try if you're going to hold her down. I noted above that such an attempt could indeed be made to destroy the Amish, and of course "not actually the end of the species" is some damnation with faint praise indeed, but keep your head about you.
magic9mushroom
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17d ago
Who knows, maybe there really is some sort of equilibrium where this mysterious negative feedback mechanism we can't identify will taper off.
I mean, the obvious natural counterforce is "without state-enforced indoctrination to break their retention rates or some form of genocide, insular subcultures like the Amish and Orthodox Jews - possibly also their Muslim equivalents - will outbreed everyone else".
Note the caveats on that statement, though, and the rather-drastic nature of that transition even if it's allowed to happen.
magic9mushroom
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19d ago
I get the "gunpoint" part, but why "spermjacking"? Is there a "Bambie" among the various women who've impregnated themselves with stolen semen, or something?
magic9mushroom
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19d ago
One difference, however, was that the French pogrom was labeled a "Reign of terror" in hindsight by its detractors, while the Russian version was called that by its own architects as they planned it out.
Um.
The aristocrats of Internal Affairs are since many days meditating a movement. Oh well! They'll have it, that movement, but they'll have it against them! It will be organized, regularized by a revolutionary army that at last will fulfill that great word that it owes to the Paris Commune: Let's make terror the order of the day!
-Bertrand Barère (translated), September 1793
If virtue be the spring of a popular government in times of peace, the spring of that government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror: virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country.
It has been said that terror is the spring of despotic government. Does yours then resemble despotism? Yes, as the steel that glistens in the hands of the heroes of liberty resembles the sword with which the satellites of tyranny are armed. Let the despot govern by terror his debased subjects; he is right as a despot: conquer by terror the enemies of liberty and you will be right as founders of the republic. The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny. Is force only intended to protect crime? Is not the lightning of heaven made to blast vice exalted?
-Maximilien Robespierre (translated), February 1794
The term "Terror" as a description of the period (note that in French it's simply called "the Terror") does seem to have descended from these and other invocations by the Terror's architects, even if it wasn't the official name at the time.
Indeed, TSMC has a kill-switch.
Um, yes? Remember, this is a totalitarian state that's been putting irredentist messages about Taiwan in all the media and textbooks for literally a lifetime, and a decent chunk of whose current territory is very much an "extended occupation" (Xinjiang and Tibet; literally over 10% of the male population is interned in Xinjiang). They wanted Taiwan before the semiconductor factories were there, and they would get quite a legitimacy bump from holding Taiwan (the primary clause of the devil's bargain the CPC's made with the Chinese population is "we will get back everything that was lost in the Century of Humiliation", and Taiwan was one of those things).
(Also, do remember that occupations are significantly easier when you don't actually care about things like "human rights" and "rule of law". I have zero doubt that if it came down to "exterminate all 24 million Taiwanese and import mainlanders to replace them" or "abandon the occupation of Taiwan" the CPC would do the former, although I suspect their current plan is more along the lines of "kill everyone who was ever part of the DPP, stick the rest in re-education camps".)
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