I think it's interesting that the last two decades have shown that you don't really need post-singularity AI. Because there has been a surprising explosion in vertical integration, all the most successful growth stories of the 21st century - both on the west and in China - don't really use market forces for their supply chains all that much. It's not quite a "cybernetic planned economy" just yet, but getting halfway there has looked pretty straight forward from the outside.
Tesla and Space X (both have more than 80% of the value creation inhouse) , Amazon (especially with the rise of Amazon Essentials), Apple, Netflix, BYD, Xiaomi, ect.
I think they all discovered that markets are very efficient, but only propagating price information is not enough for the next level of business/product execution. If you do the critical value ads inhouse, you can transmit so much addition information, resulting in significantly more control, you easily outcompete anybody just relying on competition eventually bringing prices down on commodities.
Also, this remarkable transition was mostly achieved with data networks, standard ERP software and hiring enough talent. I don't think anybody know yet how large you can make this vertically integrated blob (although Amazon and BYD are certainly trying) before you run afoul of the problems that brought down all other planned economies. If AI ever actually ends up with a reliable world model, it would certainly be extremely useful for this kind of planning, potentially pushing the size of the blob up another order of magnitude.
And sure, on actual commodity inputs and on final outputs, markets still rule supreme. Still, it's a surprising underperformance of markets vs planned economies in my book.
Great post!
It makes sense, in this scenario, to pursue a more aggressive version of the program that has been ongoing now for many decades. To manufacture employment. To have people do, perhaps ever more overtly, ever more ridiculously, what everyone knows is unnecessary.
If we're indeed getting to somewhere between "Semi Automated Luxury Earth Social Democracy" and "Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism" (I'm not convinced - we've build an exceedingly complex civilization and AI can't save us), I think your central premise is correct: a job gives people purpose/structure/incentives. You want/need all of that for a more stable society.
The interesting question is if those jobs need to be so obviously unnecessary.
If you run a jobs program, why not do something good? Take small groups of children on a well-designed adventure. Teach them music, art or crafts. Coach them in a sport. Give them a lot of time one-on-one if you have so much capacity. Hell, take a group of adults through the same program - less formative, but it probably makes them happy/health/social if it's well-done (no excuse why it wouldn't be, you can pay people to do planning and quality control, then staple more incentives to the quality). And most of them don't have anything better to do anyway.
There's the argument that the post-WW2 combination of cheap housing and the expansion of the welfare state in Great Britain (together with the growth of new art schools and direct public funding for culture) resulted in a extraordinary wave of music, art, and cultural experimentation, completely over-proportional to the relative size of British society. And if you look at the artist at the fore-front, much of them came from working‑class or lower‑middle‑class backgrounds.
We could just do that again, so the people uninterested in adult day care can occupy themselves with something productive of their own inspiration. Most likely some of them will greatly contribute to the shared culture.
pbmonster
9d ago
Fold on everything that isn't at least ${face card} + {ten or higher}.
Especially on smaller tables, I'd add at least the pocket pairs >7. And once you're down to 4 players or less, you can also start thinking about playing the lower pocket pairs and "suited garbage" (face card + 7-9).
pbmonster
12d ago
Crazy, he tried that with checked luggage? I nodded my head along, because this is very low risk - as long as you only bring a carry-on and are willing to run with it.
Besides what everybody else has said already, I'd like to add that cold tolerance can be trained by exposure. If you currently go running/lifting, try going very lightly clothed (and move the activity outside, if your gym is heated). I find doing the exposure like this is much more comfortable than doing exposure while sedentary (which also works).
If you're highly motivated, you can add ice baths. Those get massively easier with exposure, too, and the adaption carries over to some degree. I recommend doing them in a rive, lake or the sea together with friends, that makes them at least type II fun...
If you don't want any more cold exposure in your life, I'd recommend keeping especially hands and feet warm. There's really nice lamb fur slippers and wool gloves for indoor use.
pbmonster
14d ago
To most, a suburb is best understood as a quiet and safe residential neighborhood away from the downtown core. It has limited through traffic, has easy access to the city and prioritizes families.
I'd add another requirement: the suburb must still be dependent on the city for many, if not most, infrastructure and amenities. A suburb has some schools and maybe a grocery store - but not much more. Otherwise, its not a suburb but a small town.
This is also what make suburbs so distinctly American. For historical reasons, most settlements in the old world - and many on the east coast - have their single family residential neighborhoods around town centers that provide many services you would never see in a suburb out west.
pbmonster
15d ago
Oh wow, you are correct! They also fly the E-3, because apparently Airbus historically didn't have any AWACS in their portfolio? Maybe the western market is so small that it doesn't support two manufacturers (the French have 2 E-2s and 4 E-3s)? That must have been humiliating for them.
One weakness of capitalism is that it's not going to build "an energy abundance electro-state" when the demand isn't there. Especially when coal or gas is the shortest putt.
I know what you mean, but right now we're seeing everywhere around the world that capitalism can also do stuff just from the supply side. Solar and batteries are getting so cheap (especially in grids that are still below 50% renewable), they are displacing almost all new generation capacity. Once that capacity is online and starting to get amortized, electricity prices should drop, which will bring up demand. It's the slow way, but it should work. Historically, cheaper energy has always resulted in people ending up spending MORE money on energy - because it gets used for so much more things.
My point is that we've made Nuclear far more expensive than it needs to be, despite our relatively hungry first-world energy demands.
This is certainly true, but I'm not convinced nuclear ever had a chance against the fossil capacity of the past and the renewable capacity of the future. Reactors are large and complex, and such projects often resist scaling laws (see also: housing, hospitals, dams, bridges). I'm curious to see what the Chinese manage to do with their modular reactors. I'm skeptical: nuclear reactors work better if they are large. But making them in a factory might unlock some extreme efficiency gains. We'll see.
pbmonster
15d ago
I blame the Germans - for trying that again. They should have gone to the French and told them "you do the jet, we do the tank. We only meet again when both are done, until then we trust each other not to fuck it up to badly - because we usually don't".
The French are pretty well known to value their independence highly, sometimes to their own detriment or at least that of their close friends.
There are countless examples for this:
- military procurement: the French have always pretty much exclusively fielded their own military hardware. If you can even get them to consider cooperating with their alleys, they will usually nuke the entire project and then do it alone anyway. Never, ever, would they consider buying US aircraft or missiles. Annoyingly, this results in... decent hardware. Seriously, they spent comparatively little money - all of it domestically - and got a full nuclear triad (historically, today "only" sea and air), a blue water navy with expeditionary capabilities and carrier air wings, and an effective air force and army. This means not only do they not need a global Big Brother, they don't get bullied all that much.
- the french decided that energy independence is important, and then just built 60 reactors. They have uranium only in their... colonies, so of course they just built a giant fuel rod reprocessing industry as a backup, invented at least half the relevant processes and then where done with energy for the next several decades.
- less relevant now, but before SpaceX kicked everybody's teeth in, Ariane was an impressive system. Still is, in some niches. It's pretty much the embodiment of French refusal to fly on American or Russian rockets.
- The French have slowly accepted that they're not quite a global superpower anymore, and I think this was a painful process. Still, they are notoriously bad at following their hegemon, i.e. the strong opposition to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and countless UN security council veto situations. They are also notoriously bad at keeping their finger out of Africa, and so far nobody important seems all that interested in stopping them.
pbmonster
15d ago
Europe isn't a country and we've been enemies with most of Europe one time or another. We're friendly now because none of them have an economy or a military that supports their self-image as "first world nations". Their choices for international big brother are Russia and us, so they side with us, but they hate us for it. The US' ability to influence international politics and project military power is a thumb in the eye for nations who used to be able to do similar things.
For what it's worth, this is all laughably incorrect in the case of France. Say what you will about the Frenchies (some of your second paragraph hits), but them pathologically always doing their own thing leaves them in a much better spot than the rest of the Euros.
pbmonster
15d ago
Over five percent of China's power comes from fission plants
This is... not all that much? Slightly more than necessary to keep the tech stack alive enough for a weapons program?
China's political classes had very obvious mixed feelings about dependence on foreign-produced infrastructure for a long time
I've talked about that in another reply, they had multiple decades of close friendship with the soviets during which getting a licence and tech support for the VVER reactor would have been trivial. They had decades of messing with a home grown design. It never got all that cheap, which is extremely concerning, because the Chinese have world class expertise in optimizing the last cent of slack out of industrial processes.
But they've put >3 GW of fission power online just in the last year.
This is impressive - for nuclear. And that summarized our sad story about the entire technology. Because they increased their coal capacity by 42 GW (they probably took old coal plants offline, which means they installed even more new coal plants than those 42 GW) and they seriously plan to make it to 600 GW (peak) of new solar and wind capacity in 2025.
pbmonster
15d ago
We've always had a bit of a head start on the technology for high-quality fission plants. Expecting mind-bogglingly corrupt communist regimes to do it well seems counterintuitive.
Come on, this is cope. The Soviets had the first nuclear power plant in the world online, and by the 60s they had a unified civil design ready (the VVER), regularly putting up new 400 MW reactors. By the early 70s, the VVER had iterated to a standard gigawatt design, and they built quite a few of those in the early 70s (most of them are online today) and then just... never stopped. There will be new gigawatt VVERs connecting to the grid in the next 2-3 years. The Soviets, of course, also got a ton of naval reactors online quite quickly, which is a far more impressive feat. We'll ignore the slight... reactor design detour they took with the RBMK, and focus on the fact that they didn't even let that shit show stop them for one second. They decommissioned some of them, kept others running, and went straight back to building more VVERs.
The Chinese had several decades where they could have bought reactors from the Soviets, licenced the Soviet design and/or straight copied that reactor. They did all of that for many other vital technology stacks.
What I'm trying to say is: even high state capacity corrupt communist regimes with access to uranium and a well-developed homegrown nuclear industry didn't build an energy abundance electro-state. No matter how thin you cut your security margins, and no matter how hard you subsidy the industry, no matter how many dozens of reactors you have your commie slaves build: it never actually gets all that cheap. If you have coal or gas, you might as well just burn that. And if you made it into the 2020s and now have terawatt solar capacity... well, you probably know how that's is going: you can just try to have your commie slaves install a nice round 600 GW (yeah, yeah, I know: peak) of new generation capacity. Per year.
The coolest 'monumental' works human have recently achieved are the aforementioned Burj Khalifa, SpaceX's Starship (still in progress) and, no shit, the Las Vegas Sphere.
We haven't yet stopped building. It's pretty easy to fill out that list a little, even if you look just at the anemic Euros: The Sagrada Familia made impressive progress over the last couple of years, the Millau Viaduct is pretty monumental, and - while harder to just look at, on account of being underground - the the Gotthard Base Tunnel and the Large Hadron Collider are gigantic feats of engineering. I can recommend visiting the latter when they do upgrade next time, even just the detector halls are monuments (and you can only enter them when they shut everything down during construction).
I think most of those will stand all throughout the fall of the West. People will live in their shadows after centuries of decline.
pbmonster
16d ago
Then why doesn't China have more fission? Hell, since the US is so rich in fossil resources: why didn't RUSSIA ever get more fission?
pbmonster
16d ago
I might go further and say that insurance in general is just totally broken in the West.
Firstly, the stuff that people want to insure against (big, unpredictable disasters that result in ongoing costs) aren’t what insurance companies want to cover.
Do you have examples? I have zero problems getting cover for those. The insurance companies all try to tag on useless crap I don't want, and they call to up-sell this stuff if I un-select it, but they all end up selling me insurance in the end.
pbmonster
23d ago
In my undergrad (MIT), and my PhD, basically none of my male friends read at all.
My bubble is split roughly 50/50: some don't read at all, the others are probably top 1% readers. But even those guys practically never read anything written in the last 20 years. The backlog of classics is just to long.
pbmonster
1mo ago
We consider building a house soon-ish, since there is a very attractive Erbbaurecht project currently.
That's too funny. Did the most incompetent offspring of the head of the city council read Wikipedia under "rent seeking", and decided to do a 100% speedrun?
- They rent the land to you (the thing that always appreciates in value), but you buy the house (the thing that depreciates in value).
- They rent the heat pump to you, and then sell you the district heat and the electricity for it, while buying your (overbuilt) solar power from you. Then they make you pay connection fees
- You build the house, but they make all the decisions, down to wiring and parking
That has to be a scam, like Blackrock buying up trailer parks to get a captive customer base. I bet the electrical mains are to small for a heat pump without district heat, and I bet the price of the land explodes after you've been paying their interest rates for them for 15 years...
pbmonster
1mo ago
But yeah, a lot of young women just treat the workplace as another playground for being cute ("aww here's me being cuuttte") and doing cute, fun things
I'm still convinced the women surviving lay-offs after making those videos were hired exactly to make those videos. She's a product manager, but the product she's managing is the public perception of Meta's work culture and status as an employer. Which doesn't mean she treating this as a playground -it means she's fantastic at her job. 3.4M views in 24 hours is respectable, even if most of those were rage-baited into watching.
pbmonster
1mo ago
I dont remember hearing any claims of sexual orientation manifesting pre-puberty.
Anecdotally, I have clear childhood memories of being fascinated by boobs/curves/legs way, way before puberty. Finding a stack of Playboy magazines was a treasure by first grade. The male form never got anywhere close to being that visually appealing.
pbmonster
1mo ago
That's just insurance socialism with extra fewer steps, right? The American public would never accept it. "Why should I, with my beautiful fast clotting blood and strong infection resistance, pay more for a procedure that will barely keep me in a bed for one night?"
Agreed on all points, maybe my original answer should have included the remark that both mirrors and sunshades are pretty dumb - but fun to think about.
I'm pretty sure that indiscriminate general shading of the planet would substantially disrupt crop production as well as wild flora.
To be pedantic, the sunshade-at-Lagrange-Point-1 idea would really just dim the sun by 2%. No matter if you use thousands of independent sunshades or one big one, when viewed from Earth it will only occlude a tiny part of the suns disk. Every spot on earth would receive 98% of normal sunlight. This wouldn't "substantially" disrupt crop production, it would just diminish it by around 2% (naively - except in cases where the limiting factor is available water or soil nitrogen/phosphorus or pests/weeds or ...). Making a sunshade that's larger but transmits the red and blue wavelegths relevant for photosynthesis would be smart, but probably even more ludicrously expensive than just having a thin film of aluminum on a polymere membrane which indiscriminately reflects all sun light.
Ultimately, if it matters you could also pretty easily "turn off" a sunshade by flipping it 90° (you probably need this capability anyway, because you have some degree of maneuverability in space using radiation pressure). If you really need a boost to the global growing season a little, you could always just turn it off.
pbmonster
1mo ago
Wouldn't actually extending the day with a giant space mirror significantly mess up the climate, plants, and animal behavior?
If you're sending up space mirrors to orbit in order to light your cities, you can just as easily send up space sunshades to the Lagrange point in order to fine-tune global temperature - blocking only 2% of sun light from reaching the earth would cancel global warming. You'd also need less sunshades than space mirrors, since the sunshade always deflects sun light, while the space mirror supposedly only puts light onto the planet for a few hours per day in winter.
But yes, it would mess with plants and animals - though probably less than current light pollution does.
pbmonster
1mo ago
seem to be resting on their laurels with Windows
How I wish they would have just rested on their laurels. Windows 7 was fine. Windows 10 was fine. They could have just kept shipping security patches indefinitely, and people would have kept buying their real cash cows. If you absolutely need to have an entire pyramid of managers scrambling for bonuses, they could have shipped incremental updates for Windows 7, unified the UI a bit more and slowly brought in new security features - optionally, as user hardware allows. It never was going to be good anyway, so they might as well have kept it cheap and consistent.
But no. They needed to fuck with it heavily. Managers needed to leave their mark, and so we got Windows 8 and 11...
Apparently it's one of the very few commodity products on there that actually has any margin. If this is true, I'll expect Amazon to eventually displace the competition, they are very experienced in the practice...
Then there's the publishing, their on demand book printing, the ebook business. And Amazon is highly vertically integrated even outside of those two, though. The data centers, the software in them, the warehouses, the trucks, ect. The market cannot offer them a competing product on any of those, although they are essentially commodities that other, similar business still get on the market.
Apple is similar. They use contractors on the low margin stuff and the things they absolutely cannot do themselves (SOTA chip fab), but keep the rest of the value add for themselves, and use the additional control that gets them to deliver a superior product directly to their own stores.
I don't understand Netflix either, but that might just be taste. Apparently their slop gets views - obligatory views at that, keeping their audience captive - and thus makes money. Make they are just lying about their metrics. But that would probably be fraud, I don't know. Maybe the average normie really forgets what he's subscribed to.
I know the idea is old, it's the only attack on efficient markets that makes sense. And there were vertically integrated business empires before, but never this many, this successful and seemingly this necessary to compete on product.
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