felis-parenthesis
No bio...
User ID: 660
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
uranium only has around 100 years of proven reserves,
That is a big part of your answer right there. There is an important distinction between reserves and resources.
Reserves are uranium ore that it is profitable to mine and process at current market prices with today's technology. Some reserves are being mined as I type; they are really there, with absolute certainty. Other reserves as less certain. One might want to drill a shaft and get some samples to check. Proven reserves meet a threshold for certainty set down by the financial regulators. Thinking of investing in a mining company? Reading about the proven reserves that they own? Proven is a term of art for investment grade certainty.
Resources are a guess about the amount of uranium that is actually there. In some sense. It needs to be possible to mine it and refine it, but it doesn't have to be profitable today. The guess work can include some guesses about technological advances in extracting Uranium.
It is the same for natural resources generally. The case of oil is notorious. Yes, back in 1920 we only have 30 years of oil reserves. (I've not checked the history, but it is well know that we have many times run off the end of oil reserves) Prospecting for oil is expensive. If an oil company wants to borrow money from a bank to build an oil refinery, the bankers will ask: will the oil run out. If the oil company only has 25 years of reserves on its books, it may be worthwhile prospecting for more. The bankers will take a risk, but for a price. How does the cost of prospecting compare with the price of risk? Bankers rarely look more than 30 years ahead. If the oil company has thirty years of reserves, paying prospectors to find more, and increasing that to 35 years, will not get the oil company a cheaper loan. It is not worth the money.
We only have thirty years of reserves because it is not worth looking for more, so we don't bother. Notice that the results of prospecting include discovering bodies of ore that fall a little short of what it is currently worth extracting. They count towards the resource. But not towards the reserve. However, prices can rise. If the electricity price rises, prices for oil and uranium to fuel power stations are likely pulled up. Now some of the resource becomes reserves. It is routine for reserves to fluctuate due to price changes elsewhere in the economy, independent of consumption and discovery.
You can build an argument for collapse around the idea that there are only 100 years of uranium resources. The logic of the argument is (maybe) valid, but since the premise is false the conclusion does not follow.
You can build an argument for collapse around the idea that there are only 100 years of proven reserves of uranium. Now the premise true, but the logic of the argument is invalid, and the conclusion still doesn't follow.
The equivocation between reserves and resources has been going on all my life, and I find most discussions of social collapse tainted by this.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
Rename Martin Luther King Boulevard to Martin Luther Boulevard :-)
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
you can't compete without employing illegal immigrants.
The nuance here is that a small business owner cannot compete against other small businesses employing illegal immigrants without himself employing illegal immigrants. That doesn't mean that he is happy about this. He may prefer that ICE deports every-ones cheap illegals. If that actually happens, he can raise prices to fund paying "American" wages, because his rivals are also having to do this. Then demand falls, and some of the small businesses fail, but the survivors of the shakeout are no longer employing illegals. If the elasticity of demand is one, the sector employs fewer people after the shakeout but has about the same revenue. A narrow focus on money would say that it hasn't even shrunk.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
Perhaps the "fundamental logic" at issue is geography.
Think about the viability of solar power for providing electricity to power air-conditioning in Arizona. Peak generation is around noon. The air is still heating up, so I guess that peak demand is around 2 or 3 pm. A bit of a mismatch. Curing that only needs two or three hours of storage. Overprovisioning might be cheaper than storage, there is still plenty of sunshine at 3 pm. The occasional cloudy days reduce the output of solar power plants, but those days are cooler reducing the power needed. It looks to me that this will work well and cheaply, and contribute to people saying that solar power is economically viable.
But I live in Scotland. Long days and some sun shine in summer. Short days and thick dark clouds in winter. The demand for power is for space heating, not air conditioning, and is in winter. I pay attention when I see reports of exciting new technologies for grid scale energy storage, but it all seems to be half day storage; keep the electricity on over night. The resource - summer sunshine - is six months out of synchronization with the requirement. Solar power, to generate electricity to run heat pumps to keep homes warm in Scotland is beyond the reach of current technology. Suitable grid scale storage doesn't exist, and huge overprovisioning would be fabulously expensive.
I favor nuclear power for Scotland. And people in Arizona should make their own choice based on how things really are in Arizona.
The anti-nuclear power argument seems to be "solar is cheap, therefore no nuclear". Prod a bit and it seems to be just missing the geographical factor. Putting geography in unsympathetically and it becomes "solar in cheap in certain circumstances, therefore no-one may have nuclear, and people in the wrong circumstance must freeze to death in winter."
Another contender for "fundamental logic" is that many technologies have an early dangerous stage.
The medieval cathedral builders had collapses. Ship stability wasn't properly understood leading to capsizes, even of giant prestige warships. Steam engines were indirectly dangerous because their high pressure boilers would explode. Railway trains had lots of disasters before signalling got sorted out. There is also an interesting technology progression with making braking systems fail safe, with the fail safe version of vacuum breaking getting displaced by Westinghouse's fail safe version of air brakes. The Tay Bridge disaster isn't really a railway story, it is about structural engineers not knowing about wind loading. Civil aviation started off really dangerous and is now very safe.
So it is odd to give up on nuclear power when you can look at the details of accidents, such as Chernobyl, and say: we don't build them like that any more, we are past the dangerous stage. We also understand key parts of the sociology. Nuclear power was cloakatively about providing electricity to civilians, but really about creating plutonium for nuclear weapons, so corners were cut on safety in the rush to Armageddon. Today we know about gotchas such as Wigner Energy and this time around is 100% about providing electrical power. I think that the safety issues really are in the past.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
On the internet we get to chose our own celebrities
Littlewood and Hardy instead of Laurel and Hardy
Paul J. Cohen instead of Leonard Cohen
Frank Ramsey instead of Gordon Ramsey
David Moon of X3J13 instead of Keith Moon of the Who
Which raises a different question. Rather than ask whether "every celebrity is like this", we might ask "Why are we choosing these guys as our celebrities?". Or we might ponder who is choosing our celebrities? Us? Really?
Are there hidden influencers choosing our celebrities from behind a curtain, much like I'm trying to force you to celebrate Paul J. Cohen? Harvey Weinstein is a partial example; not entirely hidden, not able to make just any-one a star, but still wielding substantial covert power over which attractive young actress becomes a minor celebrity for a while.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
Old people don’t change their minds, with rare exception, they just die. Without death, there would not be change.
It is death that causes the lack of change. Will X lead to consequence Y or Z? Elon predicts Y. The years tick by. In twenty years time X will have caused either Y or Z. It is becoming easier to predict with each passing year. Eventually every-one will agree how it turned out.
When will Elon change his mind? If he is old enough to die before the twenty years are up, he won't bother. He isn't going to live to see it and will not be personally embarrassed.
If instead he gets wonder rejuvenation treatment, and fifty years more life, the future becomes more real. He starts to care about where trends are leading because he anticipates seeing the eventual outcome. If Y is starting to look like a bad bet, Elon will change his mind.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
One idea of how it could work is that the points system only gives points to construction workers. Then house prices rise at first, when every-one turns up, but they get jobs building houses. Eventually, having imported too many construction workers, builders' wages fall, and construction gets cheaper. House prices fall, or houses get larger :-)
That isn't going to work for immigration from India to Canada. Even if the construction workers are genuinely qualified, the Indian construction workers know how to build houses to withstand monsoon rains, but have no clue about the high level of insulation needed to stay warm in the Canadian winter.
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
The USS Vincennes shot down a scheduled passenger flight back in 1988.
Huge screw ups happen.
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
I bumped into Can the working class resist “green capitalism”? earlier today, linked from Reddit's Left without edge which seems to confirm what you are saying.
In this context, mere environmentalism, that is, environmentalism without revolutionary will, does nothing more than pave the way for the chaotic management processes implemented by governments at capitalism’s service.
But then @anon_ replied with his experience of people genuinely caring about the environment for its own sake. Err, the article that I linked is full of passion, so much that there is room for its author to genuinely care about the environment. Where I get confused is that the article lacks practical answers. Ordinary people like stuff. Get rid of capitalism and advertising and ordinary people will still crave enough stuff to leave us searching for practical answers. Who will tell them "No!" ? Who will have that power?
The ecological problem we face is not essentially a technical issue, but a political conflict, and it must be treated as such. It is a problem that the people must take into their own hands and hearts.
People will take the problem into their hearts, and then what...
I foresee passion, without clarity or practicality, ending badly, whether the primary goal is revolution or ecology.
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
The most scary damage is that universities have been training young people in how to do science. The replication crisis, while bad in itself, also shows that the universities have actually been training young people in how to do science wrong. How does that damage get undone?
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
The energy in the wind scales as the cube of the wind speed. It looks like it ought to be the square of the wind speed, because kinetic energy is one half m v squared. But what is the mass here? It is the mass of air passing the wind turbine, so that is proportional to the wind speed.
This makes intermittency a huge problem. When the when is blowing at half speed, you only get one eighth of the energy. Imagine planning for low winds by over provisioning by a factor of two. You have built twice as many wind turbines as you need for a day with the designed for wind strength, expecting that you will make it through low wind days without black outs. But when the wind strength dips to 79% of design nominal, you are already down to half power, taking up the entire margin provided by over provisioning. The wind drops to 78% and you have to start shedding load :-( Or at least drawing on storage.
I keep seeing critics of wind power asking "what do you do on calm days?". That is a bad question. It leads to boosters and critics both worrying about the occasional calm day when the air is still. But we need to worry about the half strength days. And those are common place days when the wind is still blowing and we expect the turbines to turn and the electricity to stay on.
A credible wind power system would have eight fold over provision, and weeks of storage. The occasional day when the wind is above design strength all day would be a cause for celebration: we have captured a weeks worth of energy in a day! And we could start feeling that we had a secure energy supply. We are nowhere near facing the challenge of intermittency nor the expense of intermittency.
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
That is a destructive question. The tradeoff between profit and treatment is discussed ad nauseam. The gradual accumulation of treatments that extend life, without restoring its quality, and are expensive, is painful to think about. So we don't. But we need to, and the profit question helps us procrastinate and never get round to the uncomfortable issue :-(
I frame it with an equation life-span = health-span + grim-span. Modern medicine is extending the health-span. But for every extra year of health-span, we get three or four years more grim-span. (3? 4? I'll admit that I'm guessing wildly. I just don't want to follow my grand-mother and my parents down the care-home, dementia-unit, nursing-home, route.) Expensive grim-span.
We are well down the road of nibbling away at the quality of the health-span with taxes (or insurance premiums) to pay for expensive medical treatments. When do we say: there is a cash limit. That is a scary thing to say. Perhaps I will fall ill, find out that there is a treatment to save my life, find out the cost is over the cash limit, and get told "sorry, you'll have to die". Maybe the cash limit will be low because I decide to opt out of insurance for expensive treatments, enjoy spending the money I save, and die when my luck runs out.
There are two battles. One is around opting out. If I opt out of paying for the more expensive treatments for others, and therefore (by fairness) for myself, can I change my mind when I fall ill? Obviously not. Can I still whine about it, or must I die quietly? The other battle is about the future. More expensive treatments are coming. When is the breaking point when the money runs out?
Returning to the profit question, the British National Health Service (the NHS) is funded out of general taxation and free at the point of use. Do we Britbongs escape the profit issue? We should, because the NHS is a non-profit. But it doesn't work out like that. At constant funding there is a tradeoff between the wages of doctors and nurses and treatment. At constant funding, higher pay means fewer doctors means less treatment. Alternatively there is a tradeoff between funding and taxes. The politicians in charge need to keep in touch with fluctuating public sentiment. What will get them re-elected? More taxes and more health care? Lower taxes and scandals about people dying waiting for treatment? Perhaps the warning sign of the impending breaking point is no-one can get re-elected. The low tax politicians cannot get re-elected because of the deaths. The health care spenders cannot get re-elected because of the taxes.
We need to learn to memento mori least we build a world in which we spend our lives working long hours in health care, before eventually falling ill and taking a very long time dying, kept alive by the strenuous efforts of many younger people.
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
Official government webpage https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/ehlers-danlos-syndromes/
felis-parenthesis
5mo ago
One complication is the Golden Rule and private autogynephilia. Let me start with a three way sub-classification of private autogynephilia.
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Repression It would be so easy to buy a dress on line or at a thrift shop and dress up and blush. No! That would be wrong. One makes ones mind a battle field and victory is not giving in to temptation.
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Binge and Purge One gives in to temptation, dresses, make-up, maybe even a wig. Then one gets disgusted by what one is doing, and throws them away. But a year later one does it all again.
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Limited, private indulgence One gives in to temptation. Release turns into relief, and one puts ones cross-sex items away, in a suit case or a drawer, knowing that one will be tempted again, and indulge again. But also aware that the over-all effect on ones life is negative. Without turning ones mind into a battle field, one tries to avoid temptation and leave off for months or years.
The Golden Rule is often written as
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you
All three classes of private autogynephile see autogynephilia as a misfortune. It takes them away from seeking a girl friend or a wife. It takes them away from sublimating sexual impulses in other, satisfying alternatives. Yet it is so horribly unrealistic. They are a bloke, not a girl; autogynephilia involves fighting a war against reality and reality always wins. And they cannot expect any-one else to join in and humor them.
What would they have others do unto them? They hope that others will refrain from encouraging them. No "woman of the year" for a man. No "Stunning and brave" for a man. No inviting a man to use she/her pronouns. They hope to avoid cultivating and strengthening their fetish. They don't want to get outed. They don't want to have to say "please stop talking about positively about transition, because I'm both tempted and sure that it would work about badly for me." It is the same as when the ex-alcoholic is invited to go for a drink. He doesn't want to reveal his private past and he doesn't want to be cajoled.
And what then does the Golden Rule command them to do unto others? They see it as partly idiopathic and partly social contagion. They keep it private to avoid contaminating others. They oppose publicity and encouragement around transition. This is rooted in compassion for those with autogynphilia. It is a net negative for them. As best they can judge, it is a net negative for others. They wish to avoid harming others by encouraging the fetish, just as they hope that others will avoid harming them by validating and encouraging their fetish.
felis-parenthesis
5mo ago
Human social lives are vicious. Watch your back. Alice has a dishy boyfriend Bob. Carol is jealous. Carol goes 4B and tells Alice how wonderful 4B is. Alice gets persuaded to break up with Bob. Bob is back on the dating market. Carol hooks Bob while maintaining the 4B charade around Alice.
Yikes! I've swallowed too many black pills. Any-one know the antidote?
felis-parenthesis
5mo ago
You are right to press me on whether my corruption scenario has ever actually happened. My gut feeling is no, never. But the past few years have wrecked my world view, and I fear that I am old and have been left behind while the world changes.
Back in March 2021 I had the Astra-Zenaca mRNA vaccine for COVID. How dangerous could it be? I knew that the messenger RNA would cause my cells to produce the protein that the snippet coded for. Scary! But I knew that that is what happens in a viral infection, and what happens when you take a "weakened" vaccine. Indeed Edward Jenner's original cowpox vaccination for smallpox is doing the same thing; spoiling the host for the smallpox virus by getting host cells to produce a shared protein and getting the host to produce anti-bodies to it. I was a science enthusiast and marveled at the invention of mRNA vaccines.
I saw public health as a nerdy area, and took it for granted that traditional standards of safety and efficacy would be upheld. I was disappointed. The https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths dynamic had played out while I wasn't paying attention. The blot clots and myocarditis problems would have lead to the swift withdrawal of the vaccines when I was young; but the world had moved on.
My current understanding of how the world works goes something like this:
It is year N and Mr Blackpill has noticed that the incentives tend towards corruption. He claims that year N is already corrupt. It isn't. Mr Blackpill is undaunted; he claims that dynamics created by the incentives are fast acting and predicts that year N+10 will be corrupt. Nope. Mr Blackpill has complete faith in his reasoning and in human avarice. Year N+20 will definitely see a corruption scandal. Mr Blackpill is wrong again.
Eventually year N+30 arrives and with it a big corruption scandal. Mr Blackpill was right in the end. Worse, it turns out that the corruption is entrenched and hard to root out. It has been going on for fifteen years. Mr Blackpill was right about N+20. There are a variety of forces that tend to hide scandals and when they break out into the mainstream it turns out those in the know had been complaining, correctly, for many years.
Returning to adding versus topping up. I see the language here as one of those forces that tend to hide scandals. Ecbatic not telic. I don't know whether we are in year N, year N+10, or year N+20. Mostly I don't know because I'm not in the business. But I cannot know by reading the newspapers. People complain about fluoride being added to the water supply and I'm left to guess that they mean topping up. If there was a scandal of the kind that I speculate about, adding, not topping up the news reports would say much the same and the I wouldn't be any the wiser. It would be the year N+20 situation, where there is corruption but still ten years to go before the facts break into mainstream news.
At the end of the day, my guess is that there just isn't enough money in water treatment to attract the avaracious, and the potential for corruption goes unrealized. But the clumsy language, that stands ready to hide it if it ever happens, still give me the ick.
the claim that we "add" fluoride to the water supply is a lie.
And this is an extraordinarily bad idea.
I'm aware that I completely lack the common touch, so it is best that I defer to your expertise here. I would be interested if you had any ideas on how to push back against the confusion of adding and topping up.
felis-parenthesis
5mo ago
But the language of "adding" rather than "topping up" has erased the concept of already has enough fluoride in it naturally. The idea is missing from the discourse. Lots of ordinary people have naturally occurring fluoride in their drinking water and have no idea that it has always been like that. Dr Nerd's third attempt at making his point will make not make sense to those people and they will ignore him.
We can tell that the idea of already has enough fluoride in it naturally has been erased from the discourse, simply by listening out for the missing follow-up questions. When some-one is on the media, arguing against fluoridation on the grounds that the recommended level is a health hazard, the interviewer questions them. The obvious line of questioning is "What about places with naturally occurring fluoridation? Do you advocate removing it? How? Are the health problems actually showing up? There have been multiple life times for them to appear!" But the obvious questions don't occur to the interviewer. The concepts have somehow gotten erased :-(
felis-parenthesis
5mo ago
In the particular case of fluoridating water, the ruling elite had a good story. Scientists knew that naturally occurring levels of fluoride varied from place to place. Did it matter? They did the epidemiology thing and decided that less than one part per million made tooth decay noticeably worse. More than four parts per million caused dental fluorosis, but nothing else showed up strongly with natural levels of fluoridation. So topping up fluoride to bring low fluoride water up to one part per million seemed super safe; lots of people were already living with 1ppm. And had been for their entire lives. It was a rare case where we have data (albeit epidemiological) on all cause mortality, due to pre-existing "natural experiments".
... without facing widespread riots or resistance is just insane ...
Your confusion is the result of a garbled account of events. That is bad in itself, but I want to make the case that it is important to say that "topping up" and "adding" are different and that the claim that we "add" fluoride to the water supply is a lie.
First I will offer paradigms of "topping up" and "adding" and then make my case that things can go horribly wrong if we tolerate people confusing them.
Topping up Measure the level. If it comes in at 0.5 ppm, add enough to increase the level by 0.5 ppm. Measure again. If it is in the range 0.9 to 1.1 ppm declare victory. If outside that range, find out why, and adjust appropriately.
Adding Don't bother measuring, or if some-else has measured, just ignore it. Add enough to increase the level by 1 ppm. Continue to fail at measuring and be smug that the level is at least 1 ppm because our addition guarantees that out-come.
Now picture a town debating water fluoridation. Why? Well, Mr Bad Guy hopes to get kick backs from the contracts for fluoridation equipment and chemicals. He persuades his fellow citizens to top up fluoride levels at public expense. They vote for it. Mr Bad Guy sets it in motion. The measured natural level turns out to be 1.3 ppm. There is nothing to be done. No contracts, no kick backs. Mr Bad Guy looks around and notices that nobody is watching. He arranges contracts for equipment and chemicals to add enough fluoride to increase the levels by 1 ppm. He pockets his bribe money. Fluoride levels increase to 2.3 ppm. Mr Bad Guy feels safe. No-one will notice 2.3 ppm and if he falls under suspicion for corruption, he can always say that he misunderstood.
Later Dr Nerd measures the fluoride and checks the records of the old measurements. Dr Nerd is unhappy about the waste of public money, or about the dangers of fluoride, take your pick. He tries to "blow the whistle". But what language does he speak? If he uses the vernacular he complains that we are adding fluoride to the water supply and we shouldn't be doing that, we should instead be adding fluoride to the water supply [sic]. Nobody understands his point. So he switches to Nerd-speak and complains that we are adding fluoride to the water supply when we should be topping up; very different. Topping up is free! But the towns-folk don't speak Nerd-speak, so Dr Nerd still fails to make himself understood.
Talking about topping up fluoride levels using the word adding is bad. It covers up corruption and is why we cannot have nice things.
felis-parenthesis
5mo ago
I enjoyed that rant. It was very horseshoe. Douglas Mcgregor is right wing, and he also says that we are ruled by the donor class.
felis-parenthesis
5mo ago
felis-parenthesis
6mo ago
I find the claim that Trump is antisemitic confusing. I try to visit enough different forums that I get an idea of the breadth of opinion. The places that approve of Hitler often call Trump the Zion Don and think that he is owned by Jews. For example: https://communities.win/c/ConsumeProduct/p/199OTqPFyM/why-havent-you-voted-for-zion-do/c
felis-parenthesis
6mo ago
If a young Englishman scores highly on IQ tests they will likely be admitted to a three year degree program and complete it successfully. Sitting their final exams, they will be recalling material learned at the beginning of their course, three years earlier: success depends on having a retentive memory. Retentive for years. But the IQ test only took an hour or two; no chance to probe multi-year memory retention. How does that work?
One idea is that IQ tests are probing for a healthy brain and a low mutational load. It is still a little unclear why the genes that help with rapidly solving little puzzles should be the same ones that boost memory.
I could imagine that sustained selection based on IQ test will eventually break the correlation of test performance and long term memory. In a dozen generations, say 2323 or 2384, there may be a crisis in University admissions. Too many students are really sharp mentally, but they forget their course work after 6 months and end up failing.
felis-parenthesis
6mo ago
I fed "desublimated higher culture" into Google and found this conversation, Marcuse's book and
In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 5 already displayed.
Trying Bing.com
There are no results for "desublimated higher culture"
Check your spelling or try different keywords
Typing
"the pleasure
into Google gets me various autocompletions
The pleasure principle Geometrie De La Mort TV series
The pleasure principle Studio album by Gary Numan
Clearly the phrase once had cultural cachet.
It gets worse. Wikipedia has articles on Pleasure principle and Reality principle. I want to be one of the cool intellectuals, who is down with these sophisticated concepts. How can I do that when Wikipedia puts their vapid triviality on public display :-(
felis-parenthesis
7mo ago
Singapore and Hong Kong. Small, densely populated islands of prosperity.
Maybe also where a huge number of people want to live in the center of a special city, so Washington or London.
Perhaps New York (meaning Manhattan Island) ticks both boxes.
But maybe Washington, London, and New York combine natural housing crises with manufactured housing crises based on rent controls and restrictive planning laws.
I assume that covert influence operations are structured
90% food, medicine and infrastructure
10% subversion
and that looking inside the 90% food, medicine and infrastructure, it is actually 60% food, medicine and infrastructure 30% corruption and pay-offs.
The locals who benefit from the 30% corruption and pay-offs would be keen to let USAID back in, and either don't care about the 10% subversion, or consider it acceptable if it means that they get their cut.
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