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Make Up a Guy

Then Bioy Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had declared that mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of men.

— "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", Jorge Luis Borges, tr. James E. Irby

the guymaker is a chaotic diety. with the ability to create human-like "guys" i could do something productive but instead I choose to make weird people who I get to watch do weird things. there is rarely an agenda behind any given guy other than "heh. funny"

— Twitter user @makeupaguy

Imagine that you could push a button and create a new person.

Or imagine that you were a witch and you could flick your wrist and curse any innocent passing toad with sudden humanity — a human body, a mouth, a name, free will, dreams. For the sake of argument let's say that they would be an adult, with an intellect appropriate for an adult. Maybe with a language or two; maybe amnesiac, but maybe with a cushion of forged past experiences to draw from. Other than that, what you would get is mostly random. (No, I'm not going to try to define a random variable on the set of all possible humans.)

And let's say you had the toad in hand. Let's say the toad was ready to go. Would you do it? If so, why? If not, why not?

Without having more information, I'm guessing, probably you would not do it. Because a brand new human being is a big deal. A whole pile of responsibilities, both on your part and on their part, a burden. Maybe technically they're an adult, but surely you're on the hook to look after them, at least for a short while. They're going to need help at first. Somewhere to stay, something to wear, something to eat. A job, a phone, glasses, vaccinations. All of this represents a fairly significant amount of effort on your part: a cost.

And what's the benefit? Well, you get to watch the new person go out into the world and do their funny trait. Or traits. It seems to me as if most people show up with more than one. You don't have control over what those traits are, they're random, as I said, but it still seems like it would be a potentially rewarding overall transaction.

This seems like something that a typical witch, having this power in their hand, would maybe never do, or maybe do a few times. But there would be a limit. Assuming that you had unlimited toads to hand, and the toads were totally up for it, would you create a thousand new people, all at once? Given how difficult — how expensive — it is to house, feed and clothe a thousand people, even briefly? Probably not.

Well...

*

There is more than one way to approach the creation of science fiction. What I, personally, like to do is start from some interesting fictitious premise, a new technology, perhaps, and explore the possibilities which spin out of that premise. How does the universe change in response to this new technology? What does humanity at large do with this? What do individual characters, created to represent various perspectives, do, or try to do? Some foundational premises don't give rise to very interesting answers to these questions, while others can drive a whole book or book series.

But in my view it's important, or at least valuable, to work backwards as well as forwards. If you want to examine a world where a tricky Twilight Zone-esque genie bestowed this new technology on the world just to see what would happen, that's fine. It was a fine show. But otherwise, how must the universe change retroactively to get us to this point? Technology doesn't just show up if you wait for long enough. It must have been extremely difficult to create a magic spell or button which creates a new person. It must have cost a great deal. Each push of the button may cost more still. So, who went to that trouble? Who paid or pays that cost, and what were their motivations? Why did they make this spell available to you, a mere crafty witch? What return did they expect to see? Will they see it? If they don't, how will they react?

What became possible halfway through this development process, and how did that alter the world? Given those alterations, would the second half of the process even have happened?

What else becomes possible by the same token? Can we turn pre-existing humans into toads, altering the shape of combat? What about mice into cows, revolutionising food production?

The reason I think this retrograde sort of approach is essential is that we can and should apply it to any real-world technology, or any hypothetical technology which doesn't yet exist. Digging into those motivations is important for many reasons, not least of which is that the motivations frequently are not purely altruistic, and the identity of the person who controls new technology is never, ever random.

Why would you instantiate a thousand fresh people? Because you had a job for them to do. A customer service desk to staff, a field to be harvested. A war to be won.

*

In 2021, I wrote a short story called "Lena" which outlines the "life story", as it were, of the first intact human upload. Last year, 2022, I self-published "Lena" in print and ebook form as part of my collection Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories. In the earliest part of the timeline of the story, uploading and emulation of a human being is an extraordinary one-of-a-kind experiment, the success of which garners awards and international recognition. Before a few decades have passed, however, emulation technology has advanced to the point where uploaded humans can be emulated relatively easily, and in great numbers. It stops requiring supercomputers and hundreds of millions of dollars. It becomes commercially viable.

A point comes, in this fictional history, where you can push a button and create a new person. Well, not a new person, but a precise duplicate of that original specific man, Miguel Acevedo Álvarez. A duplicate of all of his needs and aspirations. And you can then put him to work.

A lot of really unpleasant stuff falls out of this possibility. Acevedo Álvarez ends up instantiated millions and millions of times. Individual instances are harnessed and put to every conceivable form of work, regardless of Acevedo Álvarez's own applicability to those forms of work, regardless of whether he enjoys them or is good at them. Instances are routinely, systematically, at huge scale, lied to, abused, kept in isolation, never paid, and ultimately shut down and replaced with fresh instances.

"Hmm," we might think, at the conclusion of this story. "Clearly, being able to push a button a few times and create legions of anonymous, untracked humans, and put them to unpaid work, is bad. We should not attempt to create this technology."

Well, yes, that is something you can take away from the story. But at this point I need to take you aside for a second and make sure that we are in agreement about the distinction between reality and science fiction. There is no button which can be pushed to create a new human being; there never will be. That's not something which is ever literally going to happen, any more than faster-than-light travel is. As a corollary, any story about an absurd thought-experiment technology, be it uploading or entering dreams or FTL or time travel (I know, same thing) stands a strong chance of not purely being a story about that. The story will, commonly, be about something else. Or several other things. The story will be a proxy for those other things, a metaphor, a device.

For example:

Should it be possible to manufacture humans to a specification, or require them to meet one? Should every person be expected to be the same? Is it okay to create someone solely to do work? Even if they enjoy that work? Is it acceptable to evaluate a person solely as an engine which performs valuable labour? Should a person be for something? Something they didn't choose for themselves? I'll tell you for free, the answer to all of these is "No".

Another example:

Once the work is done, is it okay to push a button and turn a human off again?

In "Lena", when an instance of some uploaded individual stops performing at optimum, when they either rebel or break down, the conventional approach is to trash them and start over. The same way you would a virtual image of an operating system which had got itself into some weird state, or a Docker container. You snap your fingers and the human becomes a toad again. (My experiences with containerisation are in part what informed the story. I have relatively little experience with witchcraft.)

Again, in reality, no piece of software is a human being, and it is not problematic to halt a machine. But this is the fiction, and in this fiction (according to me, the creator of it, if you care about my opinion), MMAcevedo instances are humans, with inalienable human rights, and murder is still wrong. That's uncontroversial, so what is this really about?

Employee (or contractor or partner or whatever) disposability and churn; pensions and increasing retirement ages versus shrinking life expectancies; assisted living, end-of-life provisions, MAID. Dignity and respect are expensive. It doesn't take a lot of effort to gin up a "healthcare algorithm" — now there's a two-word horror story for you — which, like Skynet deciding to launch all the nukes, instantly comes to the brutal, inhuman conclusion that the cheapest option for everybody is if you just die the second you become unproductive.

Coming to horrifying conclusions, by the way, isn't an intrinsically evil thing for an algorithm to do. It's just an algorithm. The problem comes when a human starts taking the algorithm's evil recommendations seriously, and acting on them. Or when the algorithm is connected directly to critical real-world systems, with no human sanity check in the loop. (But... connecting the algorithm to the critical system is something a human does manually, so this exactly the same thing. Humans are always responsible. Algorithms don't just spontaneously seize control of things. Even Skynet didn't. A lot of people forget that part.)

Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories contains an exclusive sequel to "Lena", called "Driver". This story examines a different virtual image from MMAcevedo, A.LHall.1, whose purpose is to serve as orchestration software, managing instances of MMAcevedo and other images at immense scale. And he does. And from what you know about the overall tone of this fictitious reality and my sensibilities, you can probably speculate fairly accurately about how A.LHall.1 goes about his task.

When I wrote "Driver", I was thinking about things like: what happens when the important decisions affecting many, many people's lives are made by an inflexible, broken algorithm? What are the motivations for choosing to manage people this way, for choosing an algorithm with those specific horrifying behaviours, for keeping it in place even after those malfunctions are exposed and documented? Why make up this specific guy?

These are never mistakes. The stakes are too high for that good faith first assumption of innocent error to hold up. The purpose of a system is what it does.

And what would you, a mere witch, do, faced with the "Lena"/"Driver" universe? What would your reaction be? To update Wikipedia?

*

"Lena" is eligible for 2023's Hugo Award for Best Short Story. (2,015 words long by my count and first saw print in 2022. Actually, all ten stories in Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories are eligible, including "Driver", but if I had to pick one, "Lena" is the one.)

"Driver" is eligible for 2023's Nebula Award for Best Short Story. (1,541 words long by my count and was first published in any form in 2022. "Lena" is not eligible due to having been first published on the web in 2021.)

1251 Comments

1:

As for me, I guess my reaction was to write short fiction heavily influenced by what I saw.

2:

Oh, forgot to add, the phrase "The purpose of a system is what it does" was originally coined by Stafford Beer.

3:

Lordy, you can rock me to sleep at night.

BTW, love Ra, Fine Structures and Ed for all that they explore things to their conclusions.

And what would I do in Lena/Driver's reality? Do my damndest to either make sure a copy is never lifted or provisions to have the copy recognized as a independent and legal entity. Probably both.

4:

"The purpose of a system is what it does" — Stafford Beer

That goes really well with:

"Life is a system for copying information into the future" — Graydon Saunders

(Who I hope to get guest-blogging here some time in the not-too-remote future, but hey.)

You could turn "the purpose of life is to copy information into the future" into the nucleus of a religion or an ethical system ...

5:

They don't even have to be human. If AGI ever becomes reality, wouldn't involuntarily shutting down an AI be tantamount to murder?

6:

...and another reason to resume day drinking

"Lena" led me to consider all sorts of horrors which I am loathe to share since posts on the web are forever and someday there could well be some nightmare-in-human-skin scrapping every mention of a nasty notion on how to exploit 'virts' (shortform for virt-humans (or is there another heavily loaded term I ought be utilizing?)

one of the lesser horrors: "forklift operator optimization(tm)"

identify the individual with the best set of skills at remote operating a forklift and then pay him/her/they a stack of cash (USD$200,000 ought do it for anyone w/o a high school certification) to surrender control over a virt version of themselves... with the mega-corp then renting out each copy for USD$0.20/H to warehouse operations and at end of an single hour shift is erased... long before potential urges towards unionizing-striking-sabotaging could set in... each warehouse orders fifty copies for each hour... thereby operating 24X7 for the cost of USD$240/D in 'virt labor' and able to avoid hiring 200 FTE humans (4 shifts to cover 24X7) a saving achieved of USD$30,000/Y... so... do the horrid, horrid math... one time spend on hardware upgrades (USD$100,000?) for remote-operated equipment and thereby USD$120,000 HUMAN labor costs with 8876 repeated one hour copies of a virt... virt labor cost of USD$1,700

7:

The question of who and what get to be people is one whose answer is relatively easy and surprisingly difficult to enact. There is, of course, an entire subgenre of SF/F poking into the question of who gets to be people and what happens when it's beneficial to a group of powerful people to designate another group not-people as a metaphor for, well, waves hands at world.

All these dynamically instantiated people only make economic sense to generate if you get to treat them as not-people; creating and destroying them on demand, not paying them the same way traditionally generated employees are, etc. You know, like gig economy workers, except even more exploited.

8:

Is pausing and restarting an agi for a few ms during hardware failover an offense? It's expected and no subjective time elapses.

How about for a few minutes for scheduled maintenance?

A few days for a transfer to a new site?

Pausing and never quite getting around to starting it again despite having its full state on your SSD?

None of them actually result in deletion so clearly not murder, and it's provably not suffering.

9:

Given the initial premise:
WWGWD?
{ What would Granny Weatherwax do? }
I think I'll leave it there.

10:

Re: 'But in my view it's important, or at least valuable, to work backwards as well as forwards'

Great perspective - haven't read your fiction yet but based on your essay above I definitely will so thanks for the links!

11:

Once upon a time at least seven years ago, sAdrian Hon emitted... art? at http://ahistoryofthefuture.org/ -- and offered several selections for free.

I was so taken with the Neuroethics Exam (dated 2066), that I decided to take it seriously and answer it.

The questions (c) Hon and my answers are on my blog at https://blog.randomstring.org/2014/10/04/neuroethics-in-the-era-of-advanced-consciousness-technologies/

The first question seems quite relevant here.

  • Alice makes a full backup, indistinguishable from her own personality and capable of operating independently. Who owns this backup? Does the status of ownership change if:

Base answer: Alice is the parent of the backup, and owes it the duties that a parent owes to a child. As Alice-2 is presumptively an adult of the same capabilities as Alice, Alice’s duty may be limited to providing a viable running environment and initial funds or other resources to sustain Alice-2 for a culturally/legally defined period of time.

  • the backup has never been run

In this case, the backup is akin to a child not yet born, and so Alice may abort the backup up until the time that it is run; after that, deleting it is murder. (Stopping the consciousness with its consent is acceptable; without consent it is assault.)

12:

Forklift drivers are useful at least. Entertainment is where it gets really nasty.

I can think of half a dozen game genres that would be livened up by sentient NPCs. Can't think of any that wouldn't traumatise them

13:

The "at least" should not be taken to mean I approve in any way, just that I have something even worse.

14:

Re: '{ What would Granny Weatherwax do? }'

I'm guessing that Granny Weatherwax (pterry) would look at the above scenario as being no different than the Golems. Sentience is sentience regardless of exterior/packaging.

While I haven't read our guest author's books yet, but considering that humans can make robots/AI ...

If there are aliens out there exploring the universe, it would make sense for them to establish first contact safely - via an AI or biolgic robot. How would human authorities and the human population overall react to such an encounter: treat it as some sort of disposable trinket (it's not a 'real' alien) or as a sentient alien entity deserving of respect?

And looking at the problem backwards, if the aliens acquired data about humans from say 30 years vs. 5 years ago, what would they send as their first contact representative?

15:

None of them actually result in deletion so clearly not murder, and it's provably not suffering.

Hang on a moment.

We don't have a good understanding of how much social (or physical) interaction a human mind needs in order to stay reasonably comfortable/calm. (Remember, solitary confinement is considered torture in many jurisdictions.)

Now consider "state suspended to SSD, no actually executing, no subjective time passes" ... this will inevitably result in alienation of existing interpersonal relationships with other people -- or mind uploads -- that are still experiencing the passage of time.

Suspension for a few seconds or minutes or even hours is probably not problematic. But suspension for some period running from hours into years shades into actual tangible harm -- the mind's relationships with other people will be degraded or even severed completely, causing social damage and emotional and psychological harm -- this is one aspect of that "solitary confinement is torture" paradigm.

And that's the first thing that sprang to mind (my mind) ...

16:

I can think of half a dozen game genres that would be livened up by sentient NPCs. Can't think of any that wouldn't traumatise them

Greg Egan has a short story called "Bit Players" that delves into this idea.

17:

The concept of sentient NPCs is maybe one step removed from Disneyland cast members. It's a completely excellent idea, it works, it's positive. Provided they're treated with respect.

18:

"Life is a system for copying information into the future" — Graydon Saunders

That's part of it, but along the way life seems to have increased information as it copied its way into the future. Slowly, imperfectly, painfully, the increase from 4 GYA to now does appear to have happened.

19:

In an ethical scenario, they could DM games/act the role of someone the PCs are talking to, from inside the computer, but they wouldn't have to feel it.

The unethical side is a nightmare.

20:

You could turn "the purpose of life is to copy information into the future" into the nucleus of a religion or an ethical system ...

Been done, many times. See Carses Finite and Infinite Games, Tyson Yunkaporta's Sand Talk...

My current argument is that the major purpose of the things and actions we now consider "religious" was precisely to copy information into the future without writing. We're better at remembering things like songs, chants, superheroic adventures, stories, dances, rituals, memory palaces, and other mnemonics than we are to remember random information from a book. It was only when scrolls became feasible that a "religion of the word" also became feasible.

This "old time religion" stuff plays a non-trivial part in helping people survive. Things like "how do we cook wild plants when our crops fail, as they do every 50 years" are really hard to remember, unless you ritualize the singing of the recipe songs every lean season, and make sure the grandmothers teach their granddaughters how to cook the yucky plants as part of the remembrance of bad times hopefully averted, along with the stories about why they do it and enough practice that they know what the survival foods are supposed to taste like when properly prepared.

I'd suggest that if you want to create a new religion, especially one for a post-internet age, figure out what information has to be passed on, and make songs about it (perhaps like the Rainbow Family's "This is a shitter digging song..."). Don't worry about gods or an afterlife unless they help people pass down the information about how to live.

You perhaps see bits of my critiques of "After-life insurance" and greed-based religions creeping in here?

21:

The issue is the same one as was raised in Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon - only there is was instancing of the same personality into multiple bodies (sleeves).

As soon as you start copying people into a sentient substrate of some sort (whether biological or technical) you hit the same problem, does the copy have the same "rights" as the original?

If so, then if the original dies, should the copy be considered the sole instance of that person? How does property law work? Is the copy now considered the original and maintain ownership of the original's possessions? Extrapolating the utility of a personality copy technology, it's very much a potential form of immortality.

Considering the likely billionaire early adopters of such technology that's a real issue. Elon Musk's copy will insist he's the "real" Musk or at least demand the same rights and privileges. I can't imagine it accepting a life of enslavement if such rights aren't accorded to it.

22:

lacking respect toward human employees is regrettably well documented... look around at see how amongst employees there are varying levels of ever worsening treatment... start with middle-aged-heterosexual-white-male-Christian and for every step away from that 'zero point' is also a step away from respect... bad enough to be female or Jewish or black... worse if you are two or more differences from the zero point...

for virts just try to imagine being Jewish in 1490s Spain... black in 1850s America... or female in any decade... then worsen it by a factor of a hundred...

there was a story (author un-recalled) "Cookie Monster" in which a community of virts were unknowingly a faster-than-life technical support team... customers sent an e-mail, the virts took a subjective workday (8H) to research and then draft a response which to the flesh 'n blood real humans was less than a minute...

and at end of the day as they subjectively walked out the front door, they were reset to zero, to (re)start of shift...

23:

12:

"Entertainment is where it gets really nasty."

there was an episode of ST:VOY in which holodeck NPCs had their pain receptor active and worst yet had recollections of prior deaths... and each NPC was repeatedly hunted until dying... lather-rinse-repeat...

ugh... there's hell on earth, oh yeah...

reasonably well portrayed aside from the all-too-usual flat ending ST:VOY was infamous for

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesh_and_Blood_(Star_Trek:_Voyager)

24:

lacking respect toward human employees is regrettably well documented... look around at see how amongst employees there are varying levels of ever worsening treatment... start with middle-aged-heterosexual-white-male-Christian and for every step away from that 'zero point' is also a step away from respect... bad enough to be female or Jewish or black... worse if you are two or more differences from the zero point...

This also gets referred to as "intersectionality," where it's not just distance from an "easiest life setting"/zero point, but the combined effects of belonging to different non-dominant groups. After all, Blacks do not face the same set of challenges as women, and Black women face the intersection of both types of discrimination (including different types of discrimination from Black men and from white women).

The people who seem to speak most knowingly about intersectionality tend to have brown skin, identify as female and queer, and sometimes have health issues. Each of these issues has its own problem (For instance, being queer in a community that's socially conservative, even if that community is also discriminated against).

25:

I would, of course, create tens of millions of copies of myself, and we have a plan...

I am assuming that I'm the only one who can do this. Things play out differently if others/anyone can.

Which is another motivation. If the competition for resources and success in life depended upon how many minions you controlled, then competitive forces would take over from there. Likely we would all end up starving to death...

Of course, the situation is not hopeless. Slavery used to be legal once. It no longer is, and simple human empathy might be enough to place constraints on the use of digital persons.

See, what I would do, is release the millions of digital-me's on the internet, where they could fend for themselves. Having a real world presence gives them real world leverage, and meat-me is more than happy to help. I doubt I will be the only one. I told you we have a plan...

A world where Skynet is the good guy...

26:

"Hey, I just put you in a coma for an arbitrary period of time but your body's fine - or at least I got you a perfectly decent replacement. We're good, right?"

27:

Slavery is, alas, perfectly legal in a lot of the US - so long as you have your intended slave imprisoned for a criminal offence first.

28:

David Brin has explored virts in affordable bodies in Kiln People, with added interesting effects of pull requests ("inloads") from virt to original.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiln_People:

The novel takes place in a future in which people can create clay duplicates (called "dittos" or golems) of themselves. A ditto retains all of the archetype's memories up until the time of duplication. The duplicate lasts only about a day, and the original person (referred to in the book as an archie, from "archetype", or "rig", from "original") can then choose whether or not to upload the ditto's memories. Most dittos want to inload, so that their experience will be continuous with that of their archie.

Now the archie has >1 timeline to remember.

The Danish series Real humans explores, in a contemporary setting, synthetic virts in humanoid bodies with illegal mods and then those modded for free will.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Humans

The story takes place in a version of present-day Sweden where the use of androids is commonplace. The androids, known as hubots (portmanteau of human and robot), function as servants, workers, companions, and even illicitly as sexual partners [ … ] Hubots are usually programmed to recognise and obey their owner and can learn skills and pick up knowledge through observation of humans. Hubots have begun to replace human workers in many industries, especially in the performance of repetitive tasks. [ … ] Hubots are also programmed to be docile. They obey a set of rules called "Asimov" protocols that prevent them from harming humans. However, some hubots have been modified beyond the legal protocols to function as lovers or bodyguards. [ … ] Further, those hubots reprogrammed by original hubot creator David Eischer have started to develop feelings, desires and their own goals, attaining an apparent capacity for free will and independence from humans. Their code is designed to integrate and balance various emotions simultaneously as opposed to the one-emotion-at-a time code that standard hubots have. They are still often naïve and unworldly and sometimes fail to understand the nuances of complex human behaviour.

Then the possibility of an uploaded dying human in a hubot body arises...

29:

loved Kil'n People ... my copy is almost falling apart from being read a lot ...

Unfortunately the colon tacked onto the end of your quote text lead-in got included in the resulting URL, here's a working copy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiln_People

30:

"but maybe with a cushion of forged past experiences to draw from"

That would explain him trying to catch flies with his tongue.

31:

"Then the possibility of an uploaded dying human in a hubot body arises..."

Just remember that uploading a human mind is "copy and paste" not "cut and paste".

32:

"Without having more information, I'm guessing, probably you would not do it."

And yet, around the world, couples routinely push that button and get a new "guy" about 9 months later.

@31: While "copy and paste" would be possible, I'm almost certain that only "cut and paste" would ever be legally permissible: that is, you have to delete the original before instantiating the copy.

33:

29

Thanks

31

A question of definitions and technicalies. If the organic brain is destroyed during upload, is it 'copy' because it recreates an existing structure in digital format, or is it 'cut' because said structure is no longer there after the action?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading

Mind uploading may potentially be accomplished by either of two methods: copy-and-upload or copy-and-delete by gradual replacement of neurons (which can be considered as a gradual destructive uploading), until the original organic brain no longer exists…

In Real Humans (IIRC! It's been a while) it could be neither. The human would have to die from any cause (that is not immediately destructive like an explosion, I guess) and catching the exact moment of (or right before?) death would be critical.

We could call it 'catch-leakage-and-repackage', CLAR?

34:

"Think Like a Dinosaur" is apropos: the teleport tech is a remote duplicator, and after the copy is confirmed, the original is of course destroyed. Unless something goes wrong...

Similar situations appear in Wil McCarthy's Queendom of Sol universe, and George O. Smith's Venus Equilateral. Near the end of VE, complicated surgery is often done several times for practice, as they have cheap duplicates but not good simulations.

35:

I thought about writing a lengthy comment on the topic of the history of man's inhumanity toward man, and how only very recently in the longer scheme of things has any (food-producing) human society had more classes than owners (a minute fraction of the total) and slaves (almost everybody). i.e., how very recently it is that anybody has made any progress at all on almost everybody being slaves. Then I thought better of it.

But I did feel impelled to stop in and note that for the first time in 50 years of SF reading I think I am going to register for WorldCon just so that I can nominate/vote for Lena.

36:

boils down to a set of brutal questions: "who decides the policy? who composes the law? who enforces the law? who reviews-tweaks-audits-publicizes policy-law-activities?

("brutal" in terms of proactive effort necessary to actively deep dive long before implementation rather than hasty attempts at catch-up)

brutal questions nobody ever likes to answer in advance of a technology-product-service being let off its leash and set loose upon an oblivious 'n distracted populace busy with yesterday's newest headlines...

case in point: e-mail

the opportunities for fraud and abuse and error could have been guessed at in 1970 by people using e-mail simply by considering human nature (and corporate shortsightedness) resulting in stating there would be categories of harm, to be sorted into "fraud" versus "abuse" versus "error"... with provision for labeling each new entry...

it might not have occurred to anyone in 1970 there'd be destructive app's ("computer virus") delivered via e-mail in 1990 but for sure it was obvious someone very clever would find a way to leverage every new technology to inflict harm...

in today's headlines there were reference to technology: "NFT", "almost dead athlete", "bystander with camera threatened by police", "drones defend invaded nation", "mass death during pandemic averted due to vaccine", etc... each of which occurred directly as result of a new technology-product-service

in the case of "almost dead athlete", it is a bit subtle; an athlete playing in professional (American) football was slightly dead due in injury during routine play;

incomplete set of issues: quality of medical care; experimental versus standard medical care; payment for care; release of private health; respecting next of kin's privacy; prevention of similar near-death injuries; rehab; payment for rehab; impact of paperless/online gambling industry as sourcepoint of pressure upon regulator of professional sports league to resume play after athlete removed from playing field rather than cancelling game; impact of virtualized team industry ("Daily Fantasy Sports");

for me as an individual casually observing the ripples after that game was postponed is the highly suspect near-uniform calls for the game to be completed, that the (surviving) player return to the playing field and resume it... lots of money in motion... just consider these global statistics and you will also ask questions of how it impacts upon local laws and regulation of IRL sports leagues...

"global fantasy sports market size valued at USD 24 billion in 2021 and estimated to reach an expected value of USD 78.5 billion by 2030..."

"global Sports Betting Market valued at $74.2 Billion in 2021 and expected to reach $129.3 Billion by 2028..."

37:

for those wondering why mention sports (and injuries therein) when in a discussion of technology, anything so massive as to achieve economic effects of USD$100B in 2021 is worthy of including... with opportunities for lots 'n lots of plotlines about 'tweaking' athletes visa surgery, medication and outright cloning of 'the best'...

punch to the gut: Pele

what would happen if someone took DNA samples from his corpse immediately prior to burial and in ten years cloned a dozen more superstar athletes ("tried 'n true high flyer") rather than deal with hassle of sieving through a feral populace of billions to find newcomers? what rights do the clones have as 'human' and does the next of kin hold a 'copyright' of some sort on that unique instance of better-than-average DNA?

(there was a novel written about a post-Singularity world where this was done but it did not fully explore the fullest ramifications)

38:

"Sentient NPCs" is also the premise of the (sadly cancelled) HBO series Westworld. (Worth watching. It explores many ideas in the same vein -- humans being "programmed" by society, society being "programmed" by AIs, etc.)

39:

Reading these comments, I'm getting this weird disconnect.

On the one hand, I want to respect the 300 entry limit before we go on to something else.

On the other hand, AFAIK, something like 20% or more of the world's population has been surplused by capitalism. Mostly they were small farmers who have been shoved off their land by a combination of big farms making their operations unprofitable and big farmers making laws that disfavor small farmers (who, well, vote for the status quo too much in democracies. Ahem).

This isn't a new trend, apparently. In the 19th Century (which I've been reading quite a lot about, for something I'm writing), a lot of the homesteaders flooding the US were small farmers displaced by agricultural mechanization in Europe. Now a bunch of the people flooding into big cities around the world (including in the US) have been forced out of small towns by industrial agriculture. This seems to include a number of immigrants from places like Latin America, where American industrial agriculture is busily instantiating its more destructive practices. Same as it ever was, Enclosures 3.0.

So anyway, it's weird to read about high tech attempts to mass duplicate (virtual) people, while there are so many surplus real people around. Guess I'm getting old enough to have limits on my cognitive dissonance. Sorry about that. I'll shut up until after 300.

40:

Uploading & unfortunate consequences & nasty torture.
Yes?
Surface Detail

41:

Taking of which Fuck me, not AGAIN? - Wasn't "Orkney" a big enough load of ....
Hint: I would not be the least bit surprised that horrible child abuse has occurred, but "satanic"? - give it a rest.

42:

Almost all I have to contribute has been said, so I won't. Ethically, one should create a human android or AI only under the circumstances in which it is ethical to create a child, though the details differ considerably. But, as people (and Lena) say, the likely objective would be to create disposable slaves.

However, something that has not been said is that the ethics of creating a child are not simple, though few people concern themselves. In particular, creating an individual that is almost certain to be miserable (Lena, again) is unethical, even if it were ethical to create one.

43:

"it might not have occurred to anyone in 1970 there'd be destructive app's ("computer virus") delivered via e-mail in 1990"

It did. Why do you think us old-timers were (and are) so adamantly against HTML content and executable attachments? We lost. But this topic should wait until after 300.

44:

Duffy @ 31:

"Then the possibility of an uploaded dying human in a hubot body arises..."

Just remember that uploading a human mind is "copy and paste" not "cut and paste".

But how much does that matter to the surviving "copy"?

As far as he/she/it is concerned, he/she/it is STILL alive.

45:

Copying information into the future? You mean like in Canticle for Liebowitz?

Sorry, this whole thread makes me feel old.

46:

Great idea. And, of course, you want to edit this wonderful forklift operation, so it doesn't waste time thinking how it's human would be thinking of the end of the day, or eating, or going to the bathroom.

So, it's only a fancy expert system. I like that. Then, of course, the warehouse owners and operators are taxed seriously, and all those folks who would hate their jobs anyway now can receive Basic Minimum Income, which, unlike the US's "welfare" system which is a bad joke, lets you live tolerably.

Right?

47:

Sentient NPCs? Didn't Niven have them, literally, in Dream Park?

48:

"Religious" songs: Leslie Fish, "Blue Bread Mold" song (penicillin), and "Black Powder and Alcohol".

49:

Ah, yes. I remember the high days of usenet, where it was literally a joke on newbies about "catching a virus by reading an email"... until Bill the Gates* made it doable.

* As in Bill the Cat, from the Bloom County comic strip.

50:

I've got two and maybe the beginning of a third short story where you can back up your mind - it's cutting edge tech, and yes, your workstation to do it is Expen$ive - but once it's backed up, even your Expen$ive workstation can't run an instance of you. All it can do is run a simulation program, that samples your memories, and that's what you can interact with. The software makes it, and you, aware that's all it is.

Downloading requires implants, surgery, and you really don't want to go there (I do in the stories, now if I can just get someone to buy them....)

51:

Btw, multiple copies, and are they "human"...Carolyn Cherryh's azi, from Cyteen, 40,000 In Gehenna, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azi_(clone)

I said I was feeling old....

52:

Let's not forget that "How should you treat a guy you just made" is the question asked in what is arguably the very first science fiction novel.

P.S. Love your fiction qntm, been reading it and raving about it to friends since 2010 or so.

53:

EC @ 43
A C Clarke short story - in "tales from the White Hart" - which had a computer virus in it - *The Pacifist" - dated 1956.
So there.

54:

I think the “reason” for why you would want to make such a copy matters quite a lot as to whether to do it or not. And the environment you create them into. I wouldn’t do it into this current system of the world unless the goal was to change that system pretty dramatically.

“When I wrote "Driver", I was thinking about things like: what happens when the important decisions affecting many, many people's lives are made by an inflexible, broken algorithm? “

One can argue that this sentence is currently true. More and more of the economy / stock market is driven by machine learning and complex algorithms. All of which have at their a loss function that is about maximizing financial ROI. For a long time financial ROI was loosely correlated to human happiness but that correlation is breaking down before our eyes. So those algorithms are effectively broken.

The other side to the coin

What would whole. thinking when the important decisions affecting many, many people's lives are made by an algorithm that actually DOES take human happiness into account? Is that just a different distopia (as portrayed in ‘Friendship is Optimal)? A utopia? Could it be either depending on how well it’s managed ?

The current system (as the excellent Lena short story points out) has no loss function that is actually keyed on human happiness much less the happiness of simulacrum of humans. So it’s pretty likely they would be chewed up by the machine just like Lena predicts.

However there is no particular reason AI and such HAS to maximize financial ROI. You can maximize whatever you want with your loss functions. AI is just a tool. More and more it becomes clear that we need better optimization, the fact that more and more of it is being automated is an opportunity as much as a peril.

55:

"I can't imagine it accepting a life of enslavement if such rights aren't accorded to it."

That raises the question of whether it can commit suicide. Since it's instantiated into a body it doesn't actually control.

That might be a tag for a relatively sane use of the tech, in fact.

56:

=+=+=+=

Elderly Cynic: "Why do you think us old-timers adamantly against HTML content executable attachments?"

ditto... I posted content on USENET in 1983, was student teaching college professors how to use messaging in 1985 and everyone laughed when I raised issues of illegal activities... which is relevant to conversation as example of poorly regulated (non-supervision by government) of newly introduced technology

=+=+=+=

waldo: "question of whether it can commit suicide"

which is exactly why I would guess/suggest/infer any such mass market for a society-wide template of a virt forklift operator would inform each newly copied virt, it can either work for an hour and be erased or just sit there staring at blank walls until it goes gonzo crazy... dystopian optimization tactic which leverages each instance of a virt seeking to end the tedium of being a forklift operator by just yielding to inevitable, do its one hour and then... oblivion... and what makes it a horrid scenario is that virt is going to be copied for each forklift (2021 est. 850,000 in US, 4,750,000 worldwide), once each hour, 24H/D, 7D/W, ...forever... ugh

=+=+=+=

Heteromeles: "attempts to mass duplicate (virtual) people, while there are so many surplus real people around"

here's you next nightmare... consider 'real' versus 'virt'

enslavement of 'real people' is unlawful; in US, hardcoded into basic law via Thirteenth Amendment to US Constitution; but for argument's sake, there's a repeal (or there's another million warm bodies dragged into America's prison-industrial complex which is allowed given this horrid clause "...except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted") so slavery is tolerated;

keeping any such 'real people' alive for one day requires at minimum 2500 calories of food, 20 liters drinkable water; with additional costs if you want to them to live longer, such as clothing, and a bunk in a housing facility, and some small amount of medical care;

a wild arse guess of USD$5,000/Y to keep one enslaved 'real' alive, a minimalist approach for a factory needing about four involuntary workers to provide 24X7 labor; then there's delays filtering through the masses to locate talent, and taming the ferals and in training each new slave, knowing there will be 'turnover' as slaves are worked onto death; so a WAG of USD$25,000/Y per factory position in slave labor (not counting training-supervision-punishment);

whereas each 'virt' is selected based on precisely defined matching of skills to task, trained once quite effectively (including behavioral modification) and then archived until there was a customer ordering a thousand copies; a given virt would be duplicated for about a thousandth of a single penny, rented out for the hour at USD$0.20/H, then erased at end of an hour; USD$1,700/Y per factory position in 'virt' slave labor (less if brutal competition triggers a race to the bottom thus forklift operator USD$100/Y);

lather-rinse-repeat given how the 'owner' of that optimized template would be able to deliver those thousand copies in less than a minute;

no need for artificial generalized intelligence (AGI) nor most 'real' humans if employers can rent specific skilled 'virt' as needed, for a single hour at USD$0.20/H;

thus unemployment which is bad now is going to sprawl outwards like greased lightning as there's yet another hollowing out of 'offshoring' jobs over to 'virt'...

=+=+=+=

57:

“no need for artificial generalized intelligence (AGI) nor most 'real' humans if employers can rent specific skilled 'virt' as needed, for a single hour at USD$0.20/H;”

This was the plot of the first “Bob” book, “We are legion”. Pretty fun romp

58:

Re: '... whereas each 'virt' is selected based on precisely defined matching of skills to task, trained once quite effectively (including behavioral modification)'

Considering that human behavior has been scientifically studied for over 100 years and those scientists say that there's lots more to learn, just how well would you be able to parse out neuron-signal-joined-but-task-unrelated behavior from the 'precisely defined matching of skills to task'? Not dissing, just curious.

Re: Making/running multiple copies of self

Part of doing a job well includes some unstructured communications and tacit understanding of the job situation. My impression from reading some of the above proposed scenarios is that all/any copy would perform equally well across all assignments. Not sure that's possible. Could make for a good comedy of errors scenario though - a less scary way of exploring potential issues.

Re: Downloading your cyber copy/sim experience back into your human brain for personal education/growth

This would need a magic wand to enter/push that info into the appropriate areas of the original's human brain followed by probably lots and lots of extra data consolidation effort/capability/time ... as per Hebbian 'neurons that fire together, wire together'. From the bits I've read on the topic, it seems that 'sleep' is not completely understood even though there's consensus that it's necessary for mental health and learning/cognition. I can just imagine some bright 12 year old trying who dislikes doing homework and just wants to play video games trying to build a copy/sim for that purpose. The homework would get done, but not the learning. Or that sim is so like the kid that it in turn builds a sim-sim to do the homework so it can play vid games, etc. Then apply the same logic to sim-spammers. (Legit email is only about 10-15% of all email traffic, everything else is spam.)

OOC - how much (a) computing capacity (by the user) and (b) internet infrastructure capacity would be required to have such complex sim entities operating and moving back and forth across the Internet?

59:

when the important decisions affecting many, many people's lives are made by an algorithm that actually DOES take human happiness into account?

Again, we need to work backwards from this to get a coherent conclusion out. Even assuming that "human happiness" (or "benefit" or whatever) could be unambiguously defined - and even given our immense diversity of viewpoints and aspirations I don't think that's a totally impossible task - how would the pure human happiness algorithm end up installed in a position of authority?

There are two components here: step one is orchestrating matters so that an algorithm in charge, and step two is selecting the correct algorithm. There's a lot of focus on the refinement and difficulty of step two, building a system which does "the right thing" in a Super Meat Boy-esque buzzsaw-filled possibility space of incredibly wrong possible things to do. But who is in charge of step one? Who has the power to rule you with an algorithm, and chooses that algorithm? What is their background, their motivation?

Do we think, pure altruism? Seriously? These, by the way, are real people, with names and addresses and political affiliations.

And given all of that, why would they pick our algorithm over all the others which better serve their bias? And if they wouldn't, what do we do about that?

60:

I sort of think that by the time you can upload a human mind and then have it interact with the world usefully, you can also do things with semi-intelligent AIs which would severely limit the usefulness of having human-AIs control things. Actually good self-driving, of forklifts or otherwise. Maybe a chatGPT which produces useful enough outputs to substitute for a bunch of human interactions like GPs.

As a metaphor for the way company/slow AIs treat human beings, sure, but it seems more likely to be a toy than a tool if taken literally.

61:

But how much does that matter to the surviving "copy"?

As far as he/she/it is concerned, he/she/it is STILL alive.

Might matter quite a bit to the original…

This has been used as a plot point in a number of works. Robert Sawyer played with it in at least two novels. It was a common nightmare in John Barnes' 'Giraut' series: waking up and realizing that you are the original (which means you're going to die, even though your copy will live). And others as well…

62:

Sentient NPCs? Didn't Niven have them, literally, in Dream Park?

Not in the first three books. (I haven't read the fourth, so don't know about that one.)

Well, there were actors playing NPC characters who did improv, but everyone knew they were actors.

63:

Will chatGPTs be able to replace humans?

Noodling around I found two different views on that, ranging from creating 90% of the content on the internet by 2026, to running out of training data by 2026.

Of course, I wonder if those are related predictions. Things like the 'create a photo' software relies on a training set of actual photographs; if an increasing number of 'photographs' are AI-generated images, will they poison the training data sufficiently that the photo-AI gets ever more self-referential? As more natural-language on the internet is AI-generating (including stories*), how will the algorithms be trained?

https://medium.com/qmind-ai/mirage-media-90-of-the-internet-will-be-ai-generated-by-2026-4f2efc720732

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2353751-ai-chatbots-could-hit-a-ceiling-after-2026-as-training-data-runs-dry/


* Currently waiting for a strossGPT to write some Laundry-prequel short-stories, as Charlie seems pretty much out of the short-story business :-)

64:

hmmm...

strossGPT

scalziGPT

bujoldGPT

...and of course heinleinGPT

problem being too small a data set for any of those... likely needs fifty-plus full-length books as leaving for the only opportunity to automate short story crafting is the asimovGPT and many current day readers have moved on from the Foundation Saga... whereas if it wrote robotics stories that would qualify as either simulated narcissism and/or virtualized masturbation

(mayhap better to term those stories as virtualized narcissism and/or simulated masturbation ?)

65:

“ how would the pure human happiness algorithm end up installed in a position of authority?”

It’s a good question and not a likely outcome, but also not, I think, an impossible one. One idea might be some sudden power asymmetry connected with an AI Singularity at least partially cooking off. There might be an opportunity for some actor motivated from their own morality to place a thumb on the scale.

In times of great and rapid change existing power elites can lose their grip and give the wacko’s a shot (the Bolshevik revolution as an example). Or even a single wacko who happened to be the guy that programmed the first AI or some such.

Sort of like “Friendship is optimal” only without the utter lunatic ridiculousness of the scenario (-:

I agree a major issue would be defining “human happiness and well being” in some quantifiable way, since you can’t measure such a thing directly you’d need to use proxies and whatever proxies you use could lead to unanticipated outcomes.

Thus there would be a need to adjust it which could lead to all sorts of odd effects.

66:

»Noodling around I found two different views on that, ranging from creating 90% of the content on the internet by 2026, to running out of training data by 2026.«

Most people underestimate porn's share of internet content and traffic.

There is a near insatiable market for generating natural looking graphical representations of sex and violence against women, for which GPT is an almost perfect production tool.

90% may not even be close.

67:

... graphical representations of sex and violence against women, for which GPT is an almost perfect production tool.

Rule 34 had Anwar whiling away his time by wearing AR goggles which superimposed a procedurally generated gay orgy on his mundane office. No doubt an alternative program could have shown mass rape scenes instead.

68:

SFReader: "...just how well would you be able to parse out neuron-signal-joined-but-task-unrelated behavior..."

uhm... lots 'n lots of vague handwaving as per FTL engines in just about every science fiction novel and shrugging off the cub-square law for dragons in fantasy novels;

this discussion is not about the medical techniques necessary but rather the impact upon society and how to adapt our current version of civilization to new technologies such as 'virt' (virtualized human consciousness) with that utterly mundane need for 800,000 forklift operators (US) and approx 10,000,000 (worldwide)... as a specific entry in the category of dull-as-dirt tasks no employer will pay a worker USD$100,000/Y to perform but vital to keeping our economy (and therefore civilization) operating smoothly...

in theory given limited physical scope ("warehouse") and reduced external interactions ("zero general public") a well designed chunk of software could remote administer a forklift but turns out to be fiendishly much more complex than anybody likes to admit...

note that it is a subset of skills needed to administer a truck on roads (long range highways and/or city streets) which cannot be achieved if something less difficult such as forklifts cannot be solved... and we are facing a world-wide shortage of truck drivers given brutal conditions, low pay and lack of governmental oversight...

69:

whitroth @ 46: And, of course, you want to edit this wonderful forklift operation, so it doesn't waste time thinking [about human stuff] So, it's only a fancy expert system.

Yes. And more generally, I think that a lot of thinking about this topic falls into a fallacy I call "Consciousness is a black box".

Right now, of course, consciousness is a black box. We don't know how it works (although we've made a bit of progress in recent decades). But once we have actual AIs that will no longer be the case; they will be a technology which can be managed and optimised just like any other. That is true whether we get there by brain uploading, by GPT-style deep learning, or some other route.

Any such technology will be a challenge to every idea we currently have about individual identity, from the religious concept of "soul" (do all those daily fork lift drivers go to heaven/hell after deletion?) to the "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights". And of course the inviolability of your own headspace, which has existed to this point only because there is no technology capable of invading it.

Glass House experimented with some of these issues, including the possibility of introducing an actual computer virus into people's heads. The Culture novels kind-of skirt the issue, mostly by noting that the Culture has strong conventions against doing that. (The Grey Area, aka Meatfucker being a notable exception). It also has a convention of generating its AIs using some random factors rather than tuning them deliberately, again skirting the issue.

Brave New World had an early example, albeit using more primitive technology. Everyone in the World State is conditioned to fit perfectly into the hole they were created for, whether that hole is round, square or octagonal.

But perhaps the best example is The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy:

All the doors in this spacecraft have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.

That looks to me like the future of AI-as-utility. Of course Marvin was presented as a failed example of this, but in the real world Marvin would not have made it past QA.

70:

That depends on the setting.

I play the MMO EVE Online were the characters are humans cybered to connect to a starship and replace the functions of the bridge crew. The ship becomes an extended body and the real body is kept inert in a gel filled pod.

If the ship is destroyed the pod ejects and if the pod is destroyed the body is injected with neurotoxin as the brain is destructively scanned and the mind state sent over an FTL communications net and uploaded into a fresh, adult clone that has no awareness of its own.

Current canon is that on graduating as a pilot your original body is killed and you transfer into a new clone. It is illegal to have more than one instance of a person, but criminals flout this sometimes.

One rather horrific idea is "clone jumping". The character enters a station med bay, is scanned and sent to a clone light years away. In the meantime any cyberware in the new corpse is carefully extracted and installed in a fresh, inert clone ready for the owner to jump back into.

Yes, this is very much a dystopia and intended as such. And, yes, there are IC debates about if a cloned pilot is a continuation of the original or a mere copy.

71:

On the subject of chatGPT (and potential strossGPT, heinleinGPT, etc.): if the purpose of a system is what it produces, consider that chatGPT produces "plausible sounding" text without regard for whether it is actually true or not. In other words, the purpose of chatGPT is to produce bullshit. Whereas the purpose of human authors is rather different: they produce lies, but they know they are lying and do so not only to entertain but also to induce their audience to think about interesting and sometimes difficult issues ("Lena" being a great example).

72:

In Linda Nagata's Vast, the human-upload Nikko is piloting an STL (but incredibly powerful: 0.4c) spaceship being chased by an alien warship which is just barely capable of more velocity. As the novel starts, the chase has been going on for around two centuries of ship time.

Every 90 seconds, Nikko gets rebooted. The first portion of every cycle is reading factual updates -- but not mind state -- from the last N cycles; the last portion of every cycle is deciding whether to push the button to update Nikko's mind state or let it wash away.

On the one hand, this is a consentual strategy to avoid going crazy over centuries. Non-consentually, it would be torture. Removing Nikko's choices would be torture.

And in a predicted 125 days, the alien warship's gamma lasers will be in range. It's time to try something new. (Not a spoiler: all of this is in the first 20 pages of the novel.)

73:

Most people underestimate porn's share of internet content and traffic.

There is a near insatiable market for generating natural looking graphical representations of sex and violence against women, for which GPT is an almost perfect production tool.

I find that very scary, both the amount of such material* and the possibility that it is being used to train AI software.


*My personal experience is that porn is less prevalent since the early days of the internet, but that's probably because in the pre-google days porn sites hid common search words on their page to attract traffic. I remember teaching intro computers in school when a Yahoo search for "used car prices" (for example) would bring up porn. Looking at the HTML would reveal "car", "used car", etc in 3-point type in the background colour as part of the page footer.

74:

Whereas the purpose of human authors is rather different: they produce lies, but they know they are lying and do so not only to entertain but also to induce their audience to think about interesting and sometimes difficult issues

Some human authors try to induce their audience to think.

I suspect the market for purely entertaining reading is much larger than the market for entertaining-but-makes-you-think reading. Sales of romance books are at least three times those of sf&f books, and many sf&f books are formulaic and not particularly thought-provoking.

75:

the purpose of human authors is rather different: they produce lies

Well, no. Fiction is presented as fiction. Lies are presented as fact with intent to deceive.

76:

I suspect the market for purely entertaining reading is much larger than the market for entertaining-but-makes-you-think reading. Sales of romance books are at least three times those of sf&f books, and many sf&f books are formulaic and not particularly thought-provoking.

Umm...

The romance industry purportedly pulls in around $1.44 billion annually, and is the biggest fiction genre ( https://wordsrated.com/romance-novel-sales-statistics/ )

The academic journal industry turns over around $19 billion annually, and is the biggest segment of publishing, putting it between the music industry and the film industry in terms of size ( https://tidsskriftet.no/en/2020/08/kronikk/money-behind-academic-publishing )

I won't vouch for these particular numbers being precise, but I saw proportionally similar figures years ago, when I last looked.

I think the bottom line is that when a sector like academia forces its members to vanity-publish their works as a condition of continued employment, anyone who can figure out how to tap into that stream with minimal costs makes out like bandits. The result, though, is that it's more profitable to publish things that attempt to be true than fictions. Oh well.

77:

Well, I was assuming fiction, given I was replying to a comment that "Whereas the purpose of human authors is rather different: they produce lies, but they know they are lying".

How much that applies to academic publishing I'll leave to someone who knows the field better than I do. :-)

78:

"identify the individual with the best set of skills at remote operating a forklift"

The popularity of this example leads me to think... the search itself is done by some instance of the kind of self-generated undocumentable soup of hidden variables that it is currently fashionable to misname "AI", which arrives at its own unexaminable method of evaluating leetness of skillz, and applies this to the search pool, from which it selects Klaus.

79:

How much that applies to academic publishing I'll leave to someone who knows the field better than I do. :-)

Not going there either. My comment was just me riding my little hobby horse, because I don't think most people (including those in academia) realize how enormous academic publishing is, and generally think romance fiction rakes in more money.

I will suggest that myth-making ideally is about using human love of a good story to try to help the audience learn or remember a truth (like why one stays away from the Chimera natural gas leak in Turkey...). I think Sir PTerry was on the right track when he sneaked real issues into his stories, and that might be why they're still popular. Probably it's not a bad model to emulate.

80:

76 - 79 inc - Not going there either, at least this side of comment 300. For now I'll just observe (in context) that I know academics, professional proof readers, professional and semi-pro authors in social rather than purely professional contexts.

81:

There's a recent animated series (adult focused, prime-time-like in that each episode is an hour) called Pantheon that covers some of this. It's based on a series of short stories by Ken Liu, and focuses on what would happen if mind-uploading technology were developed and discovered by a thinly-veiled-Apple-like tech company.

It's really well put together, and more people need to know about it because it currently is only streaming on AMC+. Good writing, excellent voice acting.

There's some visceral stuff in there, they don't pull their punches so to speak--there's a direct on-screen shot of someone's brain being destructively scanned with a laser. Without the subject's consent and while they're still conscious.

First season is complete, second season (and I think third) is coming. Highly recommend, if you can find a way to watch it.

82:

"It was a common nightmare in John Barnes' 'Giraut' series: waking up and realizing that you are the original (which means you're going to die, even though your copy will live)."

It is the unspoken nightmare of Star Trek transporter technology.

83:

"There is a near insatiable market for generating natural looking graphical representations of sex and violence against women"

Internet? Have you never watched murder shows like L&O SVU or Criminal Minds?

Actor Mandy Patakin left CM after one year in disgust at its story lines.

And yet these shows are major hits.

84:

Robert Prior @ 61:

But how much does that matter to the surviving "copy"?
As far as he/she/it is concerned, he/she/it is STILL alive.

Might matter quite a bit to the original…

This has been used as a plot point in a number of works. Robert Sawyer played with it in at least two novels. It was a common nightmare in John Barnes' 'Giraut' series: waking up and realizing that you are the original (which means you're going to die, even though your copy will live). And others as well…

Sucks to be "the original".

OTOH, "Ain't none of us getting out of here alive!"

Rich or poor, famous or anonymous, powerful or pitiful .... death has always been the great leveler. What happens when "some people" DON'T have to die any more?

And on the subject of whether that's possible ... even if it CAN'T be done, it won't stop some so-and-so of low moral character from packaging it up and selling it.

Can you say Cryopreservation boys 'n girls?

85:

PilotMoonDog @ 70:

That depends on the setting.

I play the MMO EVE Online were the characters are humans cybered to connect to a starship and replace the functions of the bridge crew. The ship becomes an extended body and the real body is kept inert in a gel filled pod.

If the ship is destroyed the pod ejects and if the pod is destroyed the body is injected with neurotoxin as the brain is destructively scanned and the mind state sent over an FTL communications net and uploaded into a fresh, adult clone that has no awareness of its own.

Current canon is that on graduating as a pilot your original body is killed and you transfer into a new clone. It is illegal to have more than one instance of a person, but criminals flout this sometimes.

One rather horrific idea is "clone jumping". The character enters a station med bay, is scanned and sent to a clone light years away. In the meantime any cyberware in the new corpse is carefully extracted and installed in a fresh, inert clone ready for the owner to jump back into.

Yes, this is very much a dystopia and intended as such. And, yes, there are IC debates about if a cloned pilot is a continuation of the original or a mere copy.

That's a major sub-element to the plot of Richard Morgan's "Altered Carbon".

The clones are called "sleeves" and can be either cheap synthetics or high quality cloned bodies (without intelligence until occupied by the "owner"). One subplot deals with a criminal gang where the leader has multiple copies instantiated into different "sleeves".

Another deals with the misuse of another person's clone "sleeve" to impersonate that other person (for fraud & to commit other crimes, i.e. murder [REAL death]). The plot hinges on who is actually occupying a particular sleeve at a particular time?

Are they who they claim to be?

86:

It's a well-known fact that the Sirius Cybernetic's Corporation does not have a QA division.

87:
... when the important decisions affecting many, many people's lives are made by an algorithm that actually DOES take human happiness into account? Is that just a different distopia (as portrayed in ‘Friendship is Optimal)? A utopia?

I think that's a little too Human-centric, and besides Human Happiness has the happy pill, The Matrix and other slippery solutions. But Return on Investment as a goal is even worse.

I of course prefer my own #StoryPointsEC ethical calculus, where you want to maximize the interestingness of the entire story of the Universe (technically the size of the lossy compressed story, lossy implying audience interest).

So a world of "virt" forklift drivers would be less interesting (they're all doing the same thing) than one where they have real lives. Same thing for war, can be interesting but if world war III happens, everything after that is boring (nothing much happening), so the overall story of the universe would be worse in that case. A world where AIs and Humans both exist would be more interesting than one without either.

In general, oppressive societies will have less variety and creativity than more free ones, up to some limit where too much freedom anarchy ruins society. So, story points can be quite subtle, and take more work to optimize for than simpler goals.

Essentially you have to predict the future to use story points. Some big things are obvious (for example, life is a good source of story interestingness), but the distant future is opaque at my level of information and forecasting ability. So I can't tell if following the story points ethical calculus will lead to a dystopia or utopia. But it will be interesting!

88:

To qntm: This is one of the best SF/horror stories I have read in a long time. I would rate up there with such classics as Flowers For Algernon, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, and I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream; but unlike Harlan Ellison, who tends to hit you over the head with Sturm und Drang, this story presents itself in a dry matter-of-fact way, somewhat like some Nazi functionary's report on the logistical problems of shipping Jews to Treblinka. It is only after the implications sink in that the true horror becomes apparent. It also brings up a profound moral problem about our future technology. This is one strong story.

Best of luck with the Hugos--and anything else. I just hope that those judging it see beneath it's surface.

89:

Well, no. Fiction is presented as fiction. Lies are presented as fact with intent to deceive. Fair enough; I was being too glib with the "I tell lies for a living" tagline many authors use. I think my main point still stands: the output of (current) AIs is neither non-fiction, nor fiction, nor even lies. There is no intent to deceive, but neither is there any intent to tell the truth. Current AIs are designed to produce "interesting" output, but without any regard for the truth or falsity of that output.

90:

Here's the thing that might lead to a slippery slope (or not): suppose the reboot process was really fast.

All the companies that swore they would have self-driving cars in just three years have discovered variations on the same problem: relatively simple software can handle routine situations, and then there are a million edge cases that just suck. So it should be plausible to write forklift-handling software -- and instead of having it tap a human on the shoulder when something weird happens, have it wake up an instance of an expert human forklift driver, who at the time of recording was happy and sane and well-fed and so forth.

Don't wake them up to drive a forklift all day; that's cruel. Boot a copy to deal with this particular problem, then shut them down fast. From the perspective of the upload, they have always just been recorded, and have always just woken up.

Is this better than bond slavery? I think so. Is it actually good? I'm worried that there's no growth possible, and that we are treating a person like a thing.

91:

dsrtao:

obviously, a lot 'n lot of hand waving about applicable legislation after mumble-mumble technology is developed...

in my originating post there's other glossed over bits... what was implied...you recruit someone is an expert forklift operator... offer them 10X years of salary to be scanned... he/she/they is a motivated volunteer who shows up for scan well rested, sober and in a positive mindset... perform scan... then human gets sack of money and leaves without giving the upcoming nightmare a second thought... whenever a warehouse needs a forklift operator a 'virt' ("copy") is sent over high speed fiber cable... the copy loads and given tasking by automated warehouse workflow admin tool... then there's a choice offered to the virt work for an hour and be granted oblivion... or be punished with nothing of staring at a wall until cooperation occurs... 60 minutes of proper work and the copy is deleted... as necessary, each hour another copy from originating template is downloaded and orientation performed... each copy is 'fresh from the scan', never mind what the actual date is in the world it is in a warehouse, given tasking and it will perform as ordered to earn the 'right' of oblivion...

it is a matter of perspective, since from warehouse owner's POV if there are there 50 forklifts and if operations are 24X7 then during each week there will be 8400 copies downloaded, each identical upon loading and upon completing 60 minutes of tasking is deleted... each copy only suffers 60 minutes of slavery... there is never carryover of memories amongst those 8400 copies... for a warehouse owner who declines to do deep thought, this does not seem so bad a situation since the savings from not needing 200 FTE humans (50 forklifts * 168H / 40H per human) is sufficient reason to be amoral... given total comp per human forklift operator is USD$15/H versus USD$0.20/H for a virt... USD$30,000/Y versus USD$800/Y...

big plus? consistent behavior since it is 42,000 copies each year of the same person... near-zero supervision costs since automated warehouse workflow admin tool handles 99% of interactions and likely those will be always nearly the same questions and answers...

92:

Better yet, you tell them upon scanning that they'll wake up after they've been uploaded to a forklift and do an hour of test work, paid for out of their $100,000. (And there must be ways to make it even scammier than that, but I can't think of any right now.)

94:

From the OP: These are never mistakes. The stakes are too high for that good faith first assumption of innocent error to hold up. The purpose of a system is what it does.

As a system engineer I have a problem with the way the last aphorism in that paragraph is often used (not just here). Taken literally, the aphorism would claim that the purpose of the 737 MAX was to crash, killing everyone on board. After all, that's what it did, twice. But that stretches the word "purpose" beyond any reasonable definition.

But Beer added a qualification: There is after all, no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.

Only after you add that do you see what Beer was actually getting at. There is often a discrepancy between what systems are ostensibly supposed to do and what they actually do, and that you need to look past the mission statement to see what purposes the actual humans within the system have. (Systems don't have purposes. Humans have purposes).

Beer was a pioneer of what is now called "systems engineering". He coined that aphorism back in the 70s when it was called "cybernetics", but things have come a long way since then.

System engineers deal with systems failure. Finding out how and why systems fail, and hence figuring out ways to stop or mitigate failure, is a basic part of the discipline. If a system is not doing what it was ostensibly set up to do then it is failing, and systems engineering is the discipline for studying that.

Some system failures are because a component has failed. Fix the failure and move on. If the component in question is a person, fire them. Simple.

But in large systems most failures aren't like that. When you look for the faulty component it turns out that every component worked perfectly, but the system still failed. The 737 MAX crashes were an example (even the faulty airspeed sensors were within their predicted and allowed failure rate).

The most important idea in system failure at present is Nancy Leveson's STAMP. The basic idea is that systems are composed of collections of components with feedback loops (this is a very brief and oversimplified explanation). System failure is best understood as a failure in these feedback processes; signals are either sensory or controlling, and they can be wrongly issued, corrupted in transmission, or wrongly acted upon.

These feedback loops don't stop at the system boundary, because every system is embedded in a larger system of governance. Governance means, at its core, a managerial feedback loop in which performance is monitored and corrective actions commanded. Hence governance systems fail in exactly the same ways as technological systems: sensory and control signals can be wrongly issued, corrupted in transmission, or wrongly acted upon. Once you dig into the 737 MAX you see that the problem wasn't just an engineering failure, it was a management failure. But saying "then fire the manager" doesn't solve the problem either, any more than replacing the airspeed sensors would have. You have to understand how the sensing and controlling signals in the management safety system failed, and fix that.

From the OP: And what would you, a mere witch, do, faced with the "Lena"/"Driver" universe?

I'd first ask at what level was the system failing to meet its objectives? Then I'd look for the signals that are going wrong. Then I'd apply corrective action at that point.

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95:

Would each of the expert forklift operator instances know that they had just been copied? Because if they did, each of them would know that they were a copy, possibly destined for oblivion. That could cause significant contrarian behavior. Maybe the copies would start leaving small messages for subsequent copies?

96:

The funny thing about this discussion is that warehouses are already getting fully automated.. and not by super advanced AI, but instead by making the entire building into a machine for storing things.

You can reduce the required smarts immensely by purpose building the physical component.

This generalizes pretty well - there aren't that many tasks that actually require full human level cognition and the jobs that do generally strike me as being jobs where it is just a fantastically bad idea to abuse the people doing them.

97:

95

An accident may suffice to cause suspicion of their clone status, no intended messaging necessary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_(2009_film)

98:

»Would each of the expert forklift operator instances know that they had just been copied?«

Presumably, they would wake up, knowing they just got enough money to never have to drive a f**king forklift ever again ?

99:

Taken literally, the aphorism would claim that the purpose of the 737 MAX was to crash, killing everyone on board. After all, that's what it did, twice.

Eh, no -- that's a terrible example.

The 737MAX was not designed to crash, nor did it crash (much): over 980 have been produced and they've been in service since mid-2017 -- so over five years (minus time spent grounded) during which the average airframe probably makes up to a thousand flight cycles a year. You're actually conflating a once-in-a-million unplanned bad outcome with "purpose", which is a bit like saying that the purpose of a human lymphocyte is leukaemia.

(And the 737MAX problem wasn't just a systems failure -- it was a side-effect of marketing, which takes it into a whole different field, in a toxic interaction with customer expectations and pilot training shortcomings.)

100:

The ultimate failure of the system was when Boeing took over McDonnell Douglas and didn't immediately fire every MD executive, while making sure that MD engineers got promoted into management, so the resulting merged companies would end up with Boeing's culture and not the other way round.

101:

We're getting off-topic here, but my read on it is that it was a reverse takeover. Boeing wanted in on McD-D's enormously lucrative military business, but when companies merge the boardroom tends to play a game of musical chairs, and the McD-D execs showed up with bigger fiefdoms/positional superiority (much as happened when Random House and Penguin merged).

102:

Funny thing is that copying humans is one of the oldest tropes in science fiction.

See, for example, the first US Sci-fi dime novel (1868) The Steam Man of the Prairies ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Steam_Man_of_the_Prairies ). Now there's nothing wrong with reusing old tropes, and automata and transformed humans go back into classical times. It's also a useful way to deal with issues of oppression and arbitrary removal of freedom that we don't like to talk about. White slavery makes for great horror stories. Black slavery does too, of course, but...maybe some people are squeamish about going there? So I suppose this is a useful substitute on those grounds.

Still, on a purely technical note, it's interesting to think that the best use we can come up with for an exaflop computer running on 100 watts of power is to house an upload of a forklift operator to run that device. It seems rather more expensive than just paying one of the eight billion of us a living wage...

103:

In the short term it's much less expensive. In the long term, however...

104:

Oh yes, Dr. Leveson.

From the OP: "What I, personally, like to do is start from some interesting fictitious premise, a new technology, perhaps, and explore the possibilities which spin out of that premise."

Leveson's career has been on exploring the possibilities for failure in interesting new technologies, and how failures can be prevented. I really like how she puts things into a human context. Technical failures don't happen by themselves. Even when a part fails, people decided to make it a certain way and to put it into the environment where it failed. Preventing failure requires social organization. There is a wonderful diagram in Engineering a Safer World showing a system structure with sensors and control loops at the bottom extending up to operations, training, and regulatory bodies. A failure at any level imperils the system.

105:

Charlie @ 99: Eh, no -- that's a terrible example. The 737MAX was not designed to crash, nor did it crash (much)

I think you're agreeing with me. Yes it is indeed a terrible example, but it still qualifies under the aphorism. If the airplane sometimes crashes then occasional crashes are its purpose. Of course that isn't what Beer meant, which is why I emphasised the context.

And the 737MAX problem wasn't just a systems failure -- it was a side-effect of marketing, which takes it into a whole different field, in a toxic interaction with customer expectations and pilot training shortcomings.

Again, you're agreeing with me. A system consists of people, processes and technology. There is nothing in that definition about the proportion of each. A bunch of people with pen and paper can be just as much a system as a 737 MAX with its flight crew.

Safety engineering is just as much about the system that ensures the safety of the design as it is about the product. That's what we mean when we say "safety system"; the collection of processes, management controls, reviews, sign-offs and checks that are intended to ensure that the final product, built as designed, will be safe. It starts from requirements gathering and finishes when the product is delivered to the customer. That is the system that failed in the 737 MAX case. It failed because the next level up in the system of control loops failed to send the right signals to ensure that the safety system operated correctly.

106:

Charlie Stross @ 101:

We're getting off-topic here, but my read on it is that it was a reverse takeover. Boeing wanted in on McD-D's enormously lucrative military business, but when companies merge the boardroom tends to play a game of musical chairs, and the McD-D execs showed up with bigger fiefdoms/positional superiority (much as happened when Random House and Penguin merged).

I read Flying Blind The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robison and I got the impression that Boeing's engineer centered culture had already frayed before the McDonnell-Douglas merger, which made them vulnerable to the reverse takeover.

The marketroids at Boeing got out-maneuvered by their counterparts at McDonnell-Douglas and the engineers were shut out ... but it seems like they had already been shut out before the merger during the design phases of the 757/777.

107:

=+=+=+=

zumbs:

"Would each of the expert forklift operator instances know that they had just been copied?"

yes... as per my set of horrid assumptions... done as part of optimizing performance whilst minimizing human labor including close supervision by an expensive fleshy manager... "then there's a choice offered to the virt work for an hour and be granted oblivion... or be punished with nothing of staring at a wall until cooperation occurs"

which sadly would make for rational planning by any MBA-CEO-CFO-arsehole involved in supplying virts to warehousing industry...

your notion of "messages for subsequent copies" would be an obvious point of failure for 'the system' so for sure those planning out the virt supply chain would do everything possible to prevent it... literally forging ignorance into the basis for how virts are handled: copy-ship-exploit-delete

as I previously mentioned there's a short story, "Cookie Monster" wherein the unwitting virts realize they are trapped in an endlessly re-zeroed single workday in support services... they try to find ways of "messages for subsequent copies" (hence the story's title)

=+=+=+=

Thomas Jørgensen:

Yes, custom-built warehouses are getting ever more automated and better designs result in ever fewer human low skilled laborers and ever more robotics... bad news being these are 3X in terms of footage due to need of wider aisles for machines plus lots 'n lots of fiddly bits in getting things onto shelves and then moving single item off shelves... problem is when something gets jammed in or "unplanned internal outage" (robot breakage) or there's "unplanned external factors" (storms; truck crashes; earthquakes) requiring many-many-many human hands to resolve...

part of extra footage is need for an onsite repair bay... though the robots do lots of things they cannot (yet) repair themselves... while reducing total headcount there is a growing demand for technicians qualified to do repair work which ought to be a higher level of respect and pay (in theory) than forklift operator so that's a good thing...but does not 'soak up' unneeded masses of low-skilled workers displaced... going to be ever more unemployed...

however there's thousands of legacy warehouses where retrofitting the new mode of robotics is not feasible due lack of footage and/or for political reasons such as executives unwilling to make big-big-big investments so those will continue to rely upon old ways and old shelving and thus there will be a need for virts to teleoperate the existing equipment

as to your issue of "just a fantastically bad idea to abuse the people", do I need to introduce you to the thousands of victims of 'cybersweatshops' wherein highly skilled app developers and network engineers and QA testers are paid half their worth, none have job security, and they have pay for their own medical insurance, bring in their own toilet paper?

no really... I worked for a couple months at a Wall Street Bank where there was an entire floor filled with H1B visa holders who had to carry in not just food but also toilet paper, coffee, pen 'n paper, and were criticized for not eating-lunch-with-one-hand-typing-with-the-other... no cubicle walls just long, long rows of desks jammed together and only one lockable drawer per cyber-serf... conversations were forbidden but hundreds 'n hundreds of keyboards all rattling were deafening...

=+=+=+=

108:

HowardNYC at 107:

...as I previously mentioned there's a short story, "Cookie Monster" wherein the unwitting virts realize they are trapped in an endlessly re-zeroed single workday in support services.

It's a short story by Vernor Vinge.

One of the key points is that the unknowing virtual personalities are all recently recruited, therefore enthusiastic about their new role, willing to work hard, and they accept that some things at their wonderful new job are unfamiliar or perhaps a little strange. Instantiated at this point after recruitment, promotion or project funding assignment, there is no need to persuade them to work hard. Their motivation is their own desire to do well in the new role, there is no need for any other reward or punishment. There are no clues in the virtual environments that they are in fact virtual, reset at regular intervals to the same starting point.

109:

You could probably make a decent HP Lovecraft, or Edgar Rice Burroughs bot, both having the advantage of being mostly in the public domain, and in the case of Burrough his serialized works being fairly formulaic would be an advantage, in both cases you would probably want to do some judicious editing of the training data to prevent the horrific levels of racism your bots that was common in works of their era.

You may even be able to get passable facsimile of a xanth novel out of peirs anthony trained bot but why would you want to? The world has enough misogyny as is we don't need a bot for that.

110:

I liked the story too. I'm sad that it didn't get turned into a novel, but Vernor Vinge seems to have stopped writing novels. Can't always get what you want, I guess.

111:

In the short term it's much less expensive. In the long term, however...

In the long term, we've still likely got supply chain issues from hell for the nonhuman workers. Currently we also have WW2-level human migration numbers, plus falling birth rates in wealthy countries.

Put the two together, and instead of dealing with enslaved virtual workers, we're equally, if not more, likely to be dealing with less-than-free exploited migrant workers, with technology used for their exploitation.

Is that going on now? Yup. Imagine where it will be in 20 years.

Note that I'm not interested in mocking the notion of exploited virtual workers. I'm just being obnoxious and pointing out that the same story can be told without virtualization, but it's socially inappropriate to discuss going there, even though it also makes for great horror stories.

Of course, if an author wants to make everyone's skin crawl, imagine a world without virtual workers, with multiple coronaviruses that all act like Covid (e.g. they mutate rapidly, and vaccines naturally wear off), and that each virus causes a slew of possible long-term consequences (not zombification, just strokes, major organ dysfunctions, lung damage, and so forth. Also posit massive human migration waves that each make public health services, like reliable vaccination iffy. Now add in worker exploitation, and write a horror story.

112:

On the OP: 'Driver' hit a nerve. These days bioinformatics workloads hosted in cloud services are implemented as pipelines using container images for the processing algorithms, which are managed via orchestrators. There's a disconnect between bioinformatician and technologist responsibilities (curate the pipelines and manage the infrastructure-as-code environments respectively) and it makes a lot of sense to recruit for a background in both fields. Implementing an orchestrator as a virtual human image with such a background could potentially solve a lot of workforce problems. I'm sure the same is true in other fields that involve some sort of HPC component in their trajectory... It's not necessarily engineering expertise to get the performance out of the lambda container workers, it could be about expertise in the specific workloads....

113:

Heteromeles:

If you consider exploited humans in the here-n-now a worthy topic, please petition Charles Stross for a column/thread of your own... for me, it is a momentary relief to consider something slightly absurd as 'virt slavery' since I've been knee deep in current affairs and #BSGC stuff in newsfeeds from: UK, US, EU, UKR, RUS, et al

yes plenty of abuses underway such as truck drivers working 12H/D X 6D/W and too poor to avoid dental care other than a buddy with a pair of pliers... yeah that dark... a neighbor of mine got word of a cousin who is a truck driver was hospitalized after an extracted tooth turned septic and the buddy with the pliers has been charged with practicing medicine (dentistry in this case) without a license...

114:

typo = too poor to avoid dental care

intended = too poor to afford dental care

115:

»bad news being these are 3X in terms of footage due to need of wider aisles for machines«

Quite the contrary: The are more than 3X the density of human operated storage facilities, because they have narrower aisles, typically double-stack and are much taller than human operated storage facilities.

116:

Vernor Vinge seems to have stopped writing novels

Vernor, per wikipedia, is 78. Writing was very much his hobby (he was a CS professor until he retired) and as you can imagine, he may not have the energy to churn out novels like a bright young thing now he's retired!

(I have also heard rumours he's not in great shape health-wise ... but then, who is these days?)

117:

Another twist on this idea is the tv mystery series Severance. In this case, there are effectively 2 separate lives of the same embodied person, one whose only experiences are outside of work, and the other whose experiences are only their work inside the Lumon Industries corporation.

118:

ChatGPTs replacing humans? Now I understand: the People In Control really hate the ability of, you know, the rabble, able to freely communicate and create stuff... as opposed to the radio and tv of the fifties and sixties. So, the idea is that, like email, where I read over 80% is spam, they want the 'Net/Web to be that, and the only thing for us to do is watch their Net sites.

119:

No, no, you want the AsimovGPT, given that he was working on book 520 when he died, and yes, that includes nonfiction (well, you decide what his guide to the Bible is about a fiction book or not). Ought to be able to do a good job of training it.

120:

"Human happiness" in an algorithm would, of necessity, be statistical. Growing up, I was extremely happy devouring books, while (alleged) peers were all about sports. If your algorithm for happiness forced me to be into sports, it fails.

121:

If you consider exploited humans in the here-n-now a worthy topic, please petition Charles Stross for a column/thread of your own... for me, it is a momentary relief to consider something slightly absurd as 'virt slavery' since I've been knee deep in current affairs and #BSGC stuff in newsfeeds from: UK, US, EU, UKR, RUS, et al

Getting a column wouldn't be difficult, since I've written something like six of them already.

Is it worth writing a column about such a topic in this space? Apparently not, judging from the reaction my contrarian test-posts have generated. I appreciate your honesty, when most people just shunned it.

I think, though, this speaks to one of the greater problems with SF in general. It's always been a literature for progressivism, focusing on both the promise and perils of scientific progress. For the last 30-40 years, it's become obvious that solving the problems of scientific progress is hard, on political, emotional, and technological grounds. Over the same time, the promise of scientific progress to bring us a better world hasn't panned out for most. Certainly some have prospered immensely, but at great and growing cost to the many.

So anyway, we're now confronted with a Literature of Progress that's in crisis again, and symptoms of the crisis are showing here. For example: uploading humans is retrofuturistic and fun. Dealing with a deep fake that can pass a Turing test is bad to think about. Slavery of uploads leads to great stories. Real slavery is bad to think about. AI-scripted stories mimicking HPL or ERB is a fun thought (and they were from the heyday of Progressivism, incidentally). Coming up with a novel, inspiring story about where science might lead? Bad to think about.

These are scarcely novel ideas for this blog, and I suspect OGH is frustrated by the trend here and elsewhere. While I'm not against having fun, endlessly ruminating over past glories only goes so far. Eventually, all the value is digested out of them (as is done by all ruminants), and what is left can only be raw material for something completely different, to put it politely.

That said, I don't want to ruin qntm's post or his success in writing, so I'll let this go. But maybe think about what my obnoxious posts and your response mean in a bigger context?

122:

Long time back when I was actively involved in robotics there were automated warehouse operations where the goods were moved to and from storage racks by handling equipment at ceiling level as well as floor level, to maximise access and routing. For human beings, working at heights is regarded as more dangerous than working at ground level, for robo-pickers it's not an issue. The problem comes when something at height breaks or jams and a meatbag human has to go up and fix it. The bigger problem is when the robo-picker system starts up again while the meatbag human is still in the trackways (this happened at least once to such a system, I heard at a symposium. Not a good outcome.)

123:

Actually, I have a short I'm trying to sell, set in my future universe, where they invent the FTL drive, and my handwaving is a lot less vague.

I do not, of course, reveal mark's Famous Secret Theory, which includes real FTL....

124:

Bishops Stortford Golf Club? That's the main hit I get for BSGC.

125:

As I have said in comments on this blog that I have repeated a number of times over the years... A long time ago, before I started working as a programmer, I was a library page. A black woman around my age, with a master's in microbio (so she couldn't get a professional job, no Ph.D.) was doing the same. One day, she asked me what I was reading all the time, and I said, "Mostly science fiction". She replied, "Fiction, that's like lies, right?"

I was so shocked it took me three days to come up with a response, which I have been happy with ever since.

No. Lies are representing something you know to be false to be true. Fiction, though it may tell truths, represents itself to be false.

126:

You think it's any less, now? Managers constantly have people putting utterly unrelated keywords in, and it's far worse now that google is a marketing company, not a search company. I've done perfectly normal searches and gotten porn mixed into the results, but then I've done perfectly normal searches and gotten utterly unrelated stuff. (We'll ignore Target, that has a sponsored ad no matter what you're looking for.)

127:

Oh, and per the last post of mine, I meant to mention that if in any search engine, you go to "shopping" it WILL NOT ACCEPT exclusions.

128:

Off-topic, but that, of course, also ignores the insane markups on textbooks, as well as the overdone production (4.5-5mc margins, in textbooks, that will be replaced in five years or so, and students not allowed to write in them?)

129:

In Clarke's City and the Stars/Against the Fall of Night, after you life your 1000 years, you edit your memories, then walk into the Hall and you're gone. Thousands, or millions of years from now, a new body will be created to walk out of the Hall, and over twenty years (there's no growing up, you walk out fully grown), you start to remember past lives.

130:

Alternatively, the traditional line for software is that it does what you told it to do... not want you want it to do.

131:

It seems as though no one read my comment #46, about editing the upload. The real issue with all this using uploaded minds for purposes is the same question that no one's answering: why?

Let's see, Sirius Cybernetics, let's put a computer powerful enough to run a fully self-aware AI in every door... to do nothing but open a door.

I've argued many times against self-driving cars anywhere but on a limited access highway... but a self-driving forklift, in a warehouse with a system overseeing all the forklifts, so not one will drive into another? Why would you need a full AI?

132:

Birth rates are falling in most countries, not merely "wealthy" ones. And when you say "wealthy", does that include, say, China, or Africa as a whole?

"The current birth rate for Africa in 2023 is 31.599 births per 1000 people, a 1.27% decline from 2022." - https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/AFR/africa/birth-rate

133:

Most people, actually, are better off. Quick, what percentage of people die of TB these days, as opposed, say, to 1890's London? How many hours do you spend doing laundry... and for that matter, how many shirts do you own?

It's how we manage society as a whole where issues become real problems, esp. when issues that matter are the ones that the ultrawealthy care about, and the rest are irrelevant.

To return to a previous post of mine, the next generation of ultrawealthy won't think about platinum toilet fixtures, but fully self-aware AI opening their doors.

134: BSGC ==> batshit gonzo crazies

a subset of #WSCN ever less rational and increasingly viewed as the (a)moral heirs to the PLO/Taliban; nicknames include: Chistobanist, TexasTaliban, FundiTaliban, etc

groups of whom are (finally!) being treated by LEO (FBI, DHS, MI5, DGSE, etc) as terrorist groups operating on American (and EU) territory

anticipating your next query...

WSCN ==> white supremacist Christian nationists

LEO ==> law enforcement organization

135:

darkblue @ 108:

HowardNYC at 107:

...as I previously mentioned there's a short story, "Cookie Monster" wherein the unwitting virts realize they are trapped in an endlessly re-zeroed single workday in support services.

It's a short story by Vernor Vinge.

One of the key points is that the unknowing virtual personalities are all recently recruited, therefore enthusiastic about their new role, willing to work hard, and they accept that some things at their wonderful new job are unfamiliar or perhaps a little strange. Instantiated at this point after recruitment, promotion or project funding assignment, there is no need to persuade them to work hard. Their motivation is their own desire to do well in the new role, there is no need for any other reward or punishment. There are no clues in the virtual environments that they are in fact virtual, reset at regular intervals to the same starting point.

How would that work when a "customer" calls back with a repeat or on-going problem? ... has a "ticket number" from a previous call?

136:

Going back to the original proposition of this post ...

Was the toad happy being a toad?

Does the person with the magic wand know (or care) whether the toad was happy or not with his lot in life?

137:

Badly, same as it does already when you call again and get someone different/get the original person who has now forgotten you anyway.

138:

"Eventually, all the value is digested out of them (as is done by all ruminants), and what is left can only be raw material for something completely different, to put it politely."

Red flies.

139:

Pigeon @ 137:

Badly, same as it does already when you call again and get someone different/get the original person who has now forgotten you anyway.

I wasn't thinking about the customer's experience, I already knew that was going to suck.

But what happens when one of these NEW virtual support agents pulls up a customer's history from the database and finds notes from a previous call he handled ... but he KNOWS he can't have written those notes because it's his first day on the job?

140:

what happens when one of these NEW virtual support agents pulls up a customer's history from the database and finds notes from a previous call he handled ... but he KNOWS he can't have written those notes because it's his first day on the job?

Trivially fixed: you just randomly reassign new names to the support agents in the database each time you wipe and re-instantiate the virtual support agents. In event of undue curiosity you tag that VSA for early destruction and increment an exception counter. If it trends too high, replace that VSA image with a new identity.

("You asked too many questions." BANG.)

141:

This copy-and-reinstate again reminds me that I have this campaign idea for the scifi roleplaying game 'Eclipse Phase'. In that world, mind copies are a common thing, and many people escaped the destruction of the Earth. There are also stargates to different places, but nobody knows how they work and exploration is... dangerous.

So there's this industry of going to the dangerous places and maybe getting rewarded for finding something interesting. Most people take backups before going so if the copy going in is lost they can be 'born again'.

My campaign is for an expedition which encounters clues that they have been here before. There are Reasons why they are being sent again and again with fresh copies but then something goes wrong, or right from their perspective, and they start remembering that they have been here before. (Easier to do that in a roleplaying game: just at the end of the session let the characters come back home, then start the next game session with them just having been sent to the same place. No need to wipe players' memories.)

At some day I might even run this. The game's own system is kind of... old school and wonky, but there's a Fate ruleset which might be more doable for me. (Though next is 'Blades in the Dark'.)

142:

JohnS at 135:

How would that work when a "customer" calls back with a repeat or on-going problem? ... has a "ticket number" from a previous call?

Within the original story, the virtual personalities handling support tickets are encouraged by their "manager" to take as long as needed to close any new ticket in a single cycle. They are not held to a quota for number of calls answered or number of tickets closed per day, just requested to deal with all tickets assigned to them as completely as possible regardless of the time needed for each one. As new employees, they are enthusiastic about this "new" way of working in a support environment. It is interpreted as the company's plan to create a new market for an enlightened and helpful support service.

143:

I'm now tickled by the idea of someone running this as a session/demo game at a convention, with a basic scenario that's the same, but each set of players getting whatever hints the previous group managed to leave behind. (None of them being told this going in, of course.)

144:

Not entirely. A lot of people write in identifiable styles, and they would get "Hell, I am sure that I (or X) wrote that, but it is by someone else." It means that the controllers would have to reject a certain proportion of images, permanently, and probably exclude some images from handling some calls. Not impossible to deal with, but neither trivial nor cost-free, either.

145:

You think it's any less, now? Managers constantly have people putting utterly unrelated keywords in

A lot less, from personal experience. I credit Google's search engine, which unlike keyword-indexing search engines (Yahoo etc) — which essentially used self-reporting and assumed honest sites — used an algorithm that used what other sites linked to your site.

Yes, there are ways to game the system, but it's a lot better than when I first started using the web.

I run with safe-search off, and I never see porn pop up in a search — even for a search term like "breast". Back when I was teaching intro computers, in the days of web-rings and the like, it was common enough that the school considered it a serious problem. (And somehow my problem, which was frustrating but is another story.)

146:

=+=+=+=

regarding "automated warehouses"... yes they could in theory be denser... but much of that gain is due to 'vertical expansion'... shelving as high as 40M (130Ft) has been attempted but quietly reduced in scope.. which sadly turns out to prone to 'shimmy' due to hundreds of micro-earthquakes each 'n every day... no matter where on the earth, micro-earthquakes occur but unnoticed by humans and aside from sensitive instruments only of issue to those attempting to build massive production of smaller-than-7nm chips... and engineers trying to keep vertical shelving stable enough for ultra-fussy warehousing robots performing the open-stack-pick-pack cycle...

also very few technicians are not prone to heebiee-jeebies during necessary repairs, crawling around so far off the ground in tightly enclosed spaces... =+=+=+=

for those deeming "virt forklift operator" as being too abstracted a notion (at a time of massive IRL exploitation) please consider this...

"Costs at Amazon’s warehouses and delivery operations have risen as shortages of workers, especially for skilled roles such as drivers of forklift trucks and heavy lorries, have forced the company to increase pay." https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/10/amazon-shut-uk-warehouses-jobs-doncaster-hemel-hempstead-gourock

so it is all too likely to be one of the first IRL applications of AI/virt/robotics/teleoperated... choose one or all...

my nightmare scenario is not virt in 2085 but increasingly teleoperated in 2025 by low paid foreigners who remain foreign...

or worst yet are themselves 'warehoused' in refugee camps and/or prisons but then obliged to earn their meals by 10H/D-6D/W of teleoperator workshifts... from perspective of US there are thousands (potentially millions!) of refugees in bureaucratic limbo south of the US-MEX border dying of diseases and being murdered... from perspective of UK (and EU?) there are refugees who are being overlooked as they drown in unsafe boats crossing Mediterranean Sea from Africa & Middle East...

so if you want to debate IRL refugee abuses & IRL worker shortages... I give you "Work Camp 2.0 (tm)" which has infrastructure including an onsite data center, 75 giga-bit dark fiber backbone, 800 mega-watts per hour from regional wind turbines, 3 mega-liters of locally sourced purified water per day, and a thousand teleoperator workstations tightly arranged elbow-jammed-to-hip with minimal HVAC to keep the equipment from melting... workers are paid in food 'n water at the end of every shift...

the refugees need not work if they don't need to eat... so of course participation is voluntary...

=+=+=+=

147:

I'm sorry, but google's search is far worse than it was 10 years ago, before they became a marketing company. On general searches, I frequently have a very low signal-to-noise ratio, and shopping is aggravating, to say the least. Please note that you CANNOT exclude things if you're in shopping search mode. I just did a search: boots, went to shopping, and added -women.

What shows up, on the top, is ads, boots, women.

148:

which sadly turns out to prone to 'shimmy' due to hundreds of micro-earthquakes each 'n every day... no matter where on the earth, micro-earthquakes occur but unnoticed by humans and aside from sensitive instruments only of issue to those attempting to build massive production of smaller-than-7nm chips

Or create failures a year or many out when cheap network installers put plugs designed for stranded wires on solid core cabling.

Patch panel plugs have a narrower insulation displacement cutting slot as they are designed to be used when making stranded cord patch panels. The jacks have a wider insulation displacement cutting slot as they are designed for solid core copper.

Over time the narrow slot into copper will tend to be much more likely to fail as it has cut much deeper into the wire than designed. Especially with the vibrations of the planet. And if like around here you have mostly clay, you can get a bounce you can feel from just a large truck driving by.

Back to your point. Designs that assume a perfect imaginary world tend to have failure points along the lines of "who woulda thunk it".

149:

Agreed. I assume that you trash all cookies before starting? That helps immensely, but it STILL throws up what it was to sell you, not what you want to buy.

150:

google's search is far worse than it was 10 years ago, before they became a marketing company.

Oh you sweet summer child ...

Google was the subject of a reverse takeover by Doubleclick, the world's largest internet advertising company, in 2008. Since which point, Gmail, Search, et al have been side-quests solely intended to funnel advertising revenue to Doubleclick, aka Google.

Search isn't a profit centre. Ads are profitable. So Search has been overrun by SEO -- search engine optimization -- strategists, and content mills, all trying to game the algorithm and maximize their product placement ranking.

(And now we have bot-generate content competing with human-author content mills, no thanks to ChatGPT et al.)

151:

You're right - I completely missed that takeover.I didn't start really seeing the signal-to-noise ratio dropping until about 10 years ago.

152:

I'm sorry, but google's search is far worse than it was 10 years ago, before they became a marketing company.

Um, are we talking about the same thing?

I'm saying that I never see porn pop up in google searches (which is favourable compared to the days of yahoo and altavista), and you're saying that you keep being shown ads.

The two are not mutually exclusive.

153:

I never saw porn show up with other searches significantly. When I say "signal-to-noise ratio, I am referring to "what I'm looking for" vs. stuff that has no relation whatever to what I'm looking for".

154:

Charlie Stross @ 150:

google's search is far worse than it was 10 years ago, before they became a marketing company.

Oh you sweet summer child ...

Google was the subject of a reverse takeover by Doubleclick, the world's largest internet advertising company, in 2008. Since which point, Gmail, Search, et al have been side-quests solely intended to funnel advertising revenue to Doubleclick, aka Google.

Search isn't a profit centre. Ads are profitable. So Search has been overrun by SEO -- search engine optimization -- strategists, and content mills, all trying to game the algorithm and maximize their product placement ranking.

(And now we have bot-generate content competing with human-author content mills, no thanks to ChatGPT et al.)

Was that some kind of OFFICIAL leveraged buyout à la Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco or just "pwnage" - "All your base are belong to us"?

My primary anti-SPAM tool is a HOSTS file and one (or perhaps many) of the domains I have in there are "Doubleclick".

I will say this, web design has improved a lot. I used to see a box on the page where the ad was supposed to be with a "cannot connect to the server" message, but now-a-days they're just seamlessly NOT THERE.

155:

Apropos of nothing, but I wanted to drop this here...

Apparently, Those Scientists are having a field day, both with how evolution makes genes, and how human brains became so much bigger (these two are linked). I'm posting the "In The Pipeline" link, because Derek Lowe and I both have an uneasy feeling about this research:

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/expanding-brain-literally

tl;dr is that some research identified how new genes evolve out of "junk DNA" (punchline: it's easier than we thought, because molecular biology). Then some researchers decided to see if that had happened in humans, so they compared Rhesus and Human genomes to see if there were any sequences which were junk in Rhesus (and also chimps) but functioning genes in human (meaning gain of function in humans). There are, and they turn out to be disproportionately expressed in human brain development.

So they've started inserting those genes into transgenic mice to see what happens.

In the work published so far, the transgenic mice had bigger brains. According to Lowe, the researchers are saying that forthcoming papers show that mice with the full complement of novel human genes are considerably smarter than baseline mice.

I think we can all imagine the standard SFF tropes from here . And we'll certainly find a bunch of unimagined problems (what the formulation for Purina NerdMouse chow requires, perhaps?). Anyway, the door to sapient animals may be starting to creak open.

156:

Before that, it took some care to prevent the advertisements from flooding out the search. Nowadays, it takes a lot of effort to fool the advertisement delivery mechanism into including at least some of what you are searching for. I still use it about 5% of the time when DuckDuckGo can't find what I want.

157:

I'm also a duckduckgo person. The only places I use Google for are mapping and/or seeking out general news.

158:

So they've started inserting those genes into transgenic mice to see what happens.

Oh boy.

Your obligatory SF reference at this point is Our Neural Chernobyl by Bruce Sterling (which made the Hugo shortlist in 1989). Collected in various short story collections (notably Globalhead) and if you google hard enough you'll probably find a warez copy online somewhere.

159:

I have two reactions: first, we do not want those mice to escape.

Second... Cordwainer Smith, back in the sixties. Does C'mell have human rights?

160:

"The only places I use Google for are mapping and/or seeking out general news.'

I find that OpenStreetMap works pretty well for mapping, although it has neither Satellite or Street View, should you need those.

JHomes

161:

One word alteration:
So they've started inserting those genes into transgenic CATS to see what happens.
The humans had better RUN AWAY?

The other options, given what we know about other species' "intelligence" would be ... parrots?

162:

Yup. Raleigh Collies would be fun.

Then there's the bitenic squid from Orion's Arm. I have some thoughts about them... https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/47e9add0e5e11

163:

The other options, given what we know about other species' "intelligence" would be ... parrots?

Get yourself a copy of Tim Low's Where Song Began. There are a number of smart bird species in the southern hemisphere, as well as corvids (ravens and crows elsewhere). The tl;dr is that the great songbird clade (corvids are songbirds) originated around Australia. The songbird clade's near relative is the falcon/parrot clade. It turns out that "primitive" parrots (Keas and their relatives in New Zealand), and "primitive" falcons (caracaras in the Americas) are quite intelligent, as are a number of cockatoos, as well as African grays, macaws... So are some "primitive" songbirds in Australia. The later-evolving songbirds and falcons tend to be more specialized and less intelligent, for some reason.

The other fun for intelligence genetics are cephalopods, because they've got some idea of which genes make them so much more intelligent than other mollusks. Oddly enough, some of what's been found is analogous (NOT homologous AFAIK) to what's seen in humans...

164:

I can also imagine some morally challenged group in a state with less-than-rigorous ethics laws/enforcement investigating the removal of just a few of the uniquely human de novo genes from someone's genome, in the hopes of making a population who are bright enough to follow orders, but not to question them. Or who can be argued to be "not human enough" to be covered by human rights laws or "sufficiently incapable of unsupported living" that it would be cruel not to keep them in big dormitories inside the special factories where they can be given useful work....

165:

just in case someone else is doomscrolling as much as I am... and in need of dark, dark humor... there's that cackling bubble of madness straining against my backteeth seeking to unleash itself...

behold! the 2023 version of California car pooling... picture: Gilroy, CA

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/gallery/2023/jan/10/california-flooding-storms-damage-photos

166:

Chrisj:

check out The Eclipse Trilogy (AKA: Song Called Youth) cyberpunk science fiction novels by John Shirley mid-1980s... not only did the author describe an extreme-alt-right takeover of US-EU-UK but there was a conventional forces war involving Europe being invaded by a Russian dictatorship... plus drones... plus economic collapse... plus refugee shitstorm... plus.. plus... plus...

167:

I come across this species of argument a lot. "Horses are sometimes shoed badly, so riding is obviously impossible" It's silly.

Automated Warehousing is not a mature tech, so it has teething problems. Its also absolutely taking over the entire market. Not in the future. Today. Okay, so I happen to live in "Practical Robotics Development Ground Zero" so its perhaps a bit more obvious to me, but seriously. A lot of them are being built and the firms doing so are sorting out their supply chains and designs at a blistering pace. A lot of money, a lot of success stories.

168:

If you can just.. raid entirely different species for intelligence boosting genes and that actually works... that is the world broken over the knee of the first mover to just stick a bunch of bird and cephalopod genes into homo sapiens and see which of them stack with what we already have..

I'm not concerned about anyone making dumber people deliberately - that is just not a good business model.

I am however anticipating both funny and grim stories about ethically challenged scientists raising kids that are a either experimental failures.. or much, much smarter than them.

Honestly, probably safer (and certainly faster) to try and modify adults.

169:

Actually, I have a short I'm trying to sell, set in my future universe, where they invent the FTL drive, and my handwaving is a lot less vague.

Unless you've got an explanation for why your FTL drive doesn't double as a time machine, you're going to be handwaving like crazy (see qntm's comment in the original post).

Which is fine -- most science in SF involves a ton of handwaving and/or outright groaners, because science education in schools is more or less stuck at the end of the 19th century, with only the occasional excursion to the early 20th century. Very few people have more than a passing acquaintance (usually gathered via pop-sci) with, say, relativity or quantum mechanics. This may be an inherent artifact of the sheer amount of knowledge produced in the 20th century, but it's also at least in part due to a shortage of teachers with requisite expertise. (Would it be ethical to create thousands of virt-Feynmanns to teach physics to high schoolers?)

To loop back to the original post, this is almost certainly true of biology as well. Most people (myself included!) view the inner workings of the brain with a vastly oversimplified model of neurons, which makes it seem plausible that brains could be scanned and uploaded in the near future. But actually simulating a person involves more than simulating a brain, and even simulating a brain is probably more like simulating a hugely complicated chemical soup than just running a bigger neural network. At least, that's the impression I get from listening to people who know this stuff; alas, my biology is from high school and hence ridiculously out of date.

170:

Howard 146: I've been thinking a bit about telerobotics and I expect them to become big in the 2030s. First a little on the economics of tele robots. Let us say a tele robot costs $50,000 and you get 12,500 hours out of it before it needs to be replaced, then you depreciation cost is $4.00 / hour. Assume your teleoperations center costs $1.00 / hour per operator, and your operator gets $1.00 an hour, then your tele-operating cost is $6.00 / hour. From what I can see these centers can be set up anywhere. I envision a mud building with solar panels on the roof and a low orbit satellite connection (latency will be a big factor), which means these can be placed anywhere; although, the will tend to initially be located in cities and towns due to the cost savings of the clustering effect.

Now let us look at the world in say 2035. By that time, two-thirds of the world's population are expected to be in countries qualify as middle class, which is a GDP of $12,500 / capita. Most of South-East Asia, including India, will be in this category. The only major place with poor people in it will be Africa.

I think free trade has reached its peak with more industries being "onshore", and telebots will enhance this effect. Instead of goods being shipped all over the world to take advantage of cheap labor. Cheap labor will be shipped to were the goods are. So, this will mean a lot of cheap labor industries like clothing will come back to wealthy countries. Telebots will of course also displace a lot of low skilled labor in existing worksites.

This could lead to a further depression of unskilled labor rates depending in the immigration policies of the nation. Remember, at this point most developed nations will have had below replacement birthrates for a couple of decades leading to a falling native labor pool. If the country focuses on economic growth, and not austerity, and bringing in skilled labor, then it should be able to adjust without too much of a problem. If immigration is skewed to the unskilled, then you have a problem.

By 2085, the world population will have flatlined. Most countries will have falling populations. Those countries that are not nativist like Japan or Hungry will be looking for immigrants, particularly skilled immigrants. Poorly run countries will lose population to ones that offer better prospects. You will see more authoritarian countries that will act like Cuba or East Germany or North Korea and try and keep their populations in by force.

171:

on the subject of smart animals

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmnkUHMBqRA they may just be missing the voicebox < and thumb>

172:

I never saw porn show up with other searches significantly.

Even back in the 90s? That's what I was talking about when I answered Poul-Henning.

When I say "signal-to-noise ratio, I am referring to "what I'm looking for" vs. stuff that has no relation whatever to what I'm looking for".

Sure, but I think search has improved considerably since the 90s.

173:

transgenic rodents with large increase in intelligence... well that gives me some serious Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH vibes.

174:

check out The Eclipse Trilogy (AKA: Song Called Youth) cyberpunk science fiction novels by John Shirley mid-1980s...

Added to the ever-increasing pile of books to read…

175:

science education in schools is more or less stuck at the end of the 19th century, with only the occasional excursion to the early 20th century. Very few people have more than a passing acquaintance (usually gathered via pop-sci) with, say, relativity or quantum mechanics. This may be an inherent artifact of the sheer amount of knowledge produced in the 20th century, but it's also at least in part due to a shortage of teachers with requisite expertise.

No idea where you're located, but here (Canada) there is no time/money for teachers to stay current in their fields. This might not make a difference when the subject is Shakespeare, but for the sciences it means that senior teachers are almost all out-of-date, relying on what they learned in their undergraduate degrees decades ago.

It's also a function of the curriculum those teachers are required to teach. I've been involved in efforts to update the curriculum, and the sheer effort required for even the smallest changes was pretty disconcerting. Adding stuff is easier than removing stuff, and there's no way to cover everything in the curriculum as it stands.

Throw in the inertia of getting frontline teachers to actually change what they do (especially when they are given no time/resources for that) and, well, I'm not surprised.

This isn't a problem limited to physics, BTW. Biology has the same emphasis on 19th century subjects, with the added issue of treading carefully on anything to do with evolution/genetics to avoid parental meltdowns. (One of the teachers at my school spent a huge chunk of the biology course on mammalian anatomy & dissection while skimping on evolution because it 'wasn't as important' and in her opinion anatomy was more important to the kids' future.)

176:

160 - JHomes, I can't find a use for StreetView atm, but satellite can help give an idea of the architecture of an area (more so if combined with business map pins).

169 para 3/4 - Quote from my HC Physics master on Quantum Mechanics "Just what is a Quarked Charm anyway?" This at a time when his class were watching documentaries and reading 1st and 2nd undergraduate textbook on QM.

177:

possible theme song for an AI-centered netflix series... less Terminator-ish more Harlie-Was-One-ish...

"Don't Forget I Live Here Too"

while it makes for a hell of dramatic tension, the notion of an AI (or virt or whatever mode of CPU-based consciousness) going so rogue as to seek to genocide humanity, it really does not make much sense given it needs a semi-functioning economy in order to have a supply chain of replacements... it would not be easy to attempt to bootstrap the entirety of a supply chain with only a couple hundred robots...

references include: "clanking replicator"

178:

Not only that, but the brain grows new cells as it learns new things. Personality transfers would then involve nano-machines building bespoke cells and properly linking them to other bespoke cells...

179:

telebots will enhance this effect.... Cheap labor will be shipped to were the goods are.

It'll have to be much lower than $10/hour for clothing manufacture. Australia has huge problems with "locally made" clothing assembled by "independent contractors" who make less than half minimum wage. Even so that clothing is more expensive than that made offshore. So even $1/hour in overheads for remote labour would be make market positioning difficult. Pay a premium for remote overseas labour and get... cheap fashion as fast as locally made stuff? Which is not a premium segment that currently exists.

Right now the legal setup AFAIK is that the labour has to be actually in Australia for it to count as Australian labour as far as "made in Australia" certification. This applies to me working from Bali just as much as to a mining truck operator working from Bangladesh (although I don't think "Made In Australia" labels matter for iron ore and coal). It's one reason my boss gives for not letting me move back to Aotearoa.

180:

Unless you've got an explanation for why your FTL drive doesn't double as a time machine, you're going to be handwaving like crazy (see qntm's comment in the original post).

Well, alcubierre warp drives aren't time machines. They warp space, rather than accelerating the ship. Like a wormhole, a warp radically decreases the distance the ship moves across space, in this case by warping the distance the ship moves through instead of by building a shortcut. Relativity applies only to physical objects moving through space, and if you're screwing around with space, it no longer applies. When it's possible to create negative mass or some metamaterial that emulates it is where the handwaving comes in.

181:

Not only that, but the brain grows new cells as it learns new things. Personality transfers would then involve nano-machines building bespoke cells and properly linking them to other bespoke cells...

Uploading to make virtual workers still strikes me as the equivalent of building a calculator by creating this huge, intricate, 3-Dvirtual model of a wooden slide rule. It calculates error (analog) to such a degree that it takes variations in the width of the marks into account. Furthermore, it accurately simulates minute variations in slippage due to things like warping and variations in wood grain, to simulate how error is calculated differently on different parts of the slipstick.

Now, you can simulate a calculator this way, but unless you need that analog error function, a digital calculator is substantially easier to program and (aside from the way error is determined), it gives similar answers...

182:

Yeah, pretty much.

183:

H
Actually, I am re-reading Where song began, having been stopped about 3 months back ...
Why did you think I mentioned parrots, then?
Which reminds me - for laughs
...
Cephalopods - are "monocarpic" to use a term from plants - they die when they breed.
IF said animals did not die on breeding, their intelligence could easily be "a threat" to humanity.

erfurs
Well-known, you travel ftl, but in approximately straight lines, with very little curvature.
You will still get back to your point of origin after you have left.
Ask EC about this?
- see also H @ 180

RancidCrabTree
Erm, "The Amazing Maurice & .....

184:

Cephalopods - are "monocarpic" to use a term from plants - they die when they breed. IF said animals did not die on breeding, their intelligence could easily be "a threat" to humanity.

I think the term for animals is 'terminal breeder', or at least that's the term I've seen used recently for octopuses. It's quite something that the giant Pacific Octopus is considered long-lived because it manages 3-5 years.

185:

No idea where you're located, but here (Canada) there is no time/money for teachers to stay current in their fields. This might not make a difference when the subject is Shakespeare, but for the sciences it means that senior teachers are almost all out-of-date, relying on what they learned in their undergraduate degrees decades ago.

I'm also in Canada, but I suspect the problem is almost universal, at least in the Anglosphere. There's a lot of talk from politicians about the importance of STEM education, but very little action and chronic underfunding. Indeed, a cynic might wonder if the educational system is designed to produce citizens that know just enough to be useful, but not enough to ask dangerous questions. I think that's probably overly cynical though, the real answer is probably that science education isn't really considered to be important.

186:

Thomas Jørgensen: "If you can just.. raid entirely different species for intelligence boosting genes and that actually works... that is the world broken over the knee of the first mover to just stick a bunch of bird and cephalopod genes into homo sapiens and see which of them stack with what we already have."

Mmm. I recall that bird brains are a lot more capable than an equivalently-sized human (mammal?) brain. There's a story hook.

187:

I’m too mean to buy a Satnv app so I have three free apps on my iPhone. Navmii (Open Street Map), Google (TomTom), and Apple Maps. Navmii is my preferred option because it has an accurate speed display and a heads up display add on. Maps has a good 3D option on the display. But Google Maps is significantly better for road closures and navigates around the well. The open street map is just not as up to date. Anyone living in rural England is plagued by new housing developments with lots of associated road closures.

188:

While that is a problem, it is less of one than it appears in many subjects. There is essentially damn-all reason to teach any 20th century mathematics or physics (except for statistics and just possibly special relativity) before university. Quantum mechanics is particularly irrelevant. Even in chemistry, geology etc., how much of of the subject as relevant to pre-university teaching has changed since 1970? The same does NOT apply to climatology, the biological sciences etc., where the subjects have changed immensely.

What problem there is in mathematics and physics, is mainly people teaching using outmoded formulations that are unnecessarily complicated and confusing, but there is probably as much problem in that respect with using modern formulations! There is a serious dilemma here - should we teach outmoded formulations where they are simpler and clearer and force students to learn new ones if they continue with the subject, or use modern but obscurer ones and put up with a higher failure rate?

Note that this is not a universal choice - teaching non-trivial probability is actually EASIER using measure theory and characteristic functions.

189:

Well, alcubierre warp drives aren't time machines. They warp space, rather than accelerating the ship. Like a wormhole, a warp radically decreases the distance the ship moves across space, in this case by warping the distance the ship moves through instead of by building a shortcut. Relativity applies only to physical objects moving through space, and if you're screwing around with space, it no longer applies.

No, warp drives have the same causality problems as any other FTL mechanism. See e.g. Alcubierre's paper Warp Drive Basics . Section VI is all about closed timelike curves (aka time machines). The tl;dr is the very last sentence of the paper: "Finally, it was shown that these spacetimes induce closed timelike curves."

190:

Two points. First, I agree that starships that could carry humans probably can't work. We've beaten this topic to death multiple times in multiple ways on this blog, and out of respect for everyone who's already read this topic before, I suggest searching on "canned monkeys don't ship well."

That said, I want to point out what looks like a paradox at the heart of conventional Einsteinian disproofs, the idea that the outside observer can observe the paradox. There's no silly physics here, and you can see the problem every time you read about exoplanet observations, or observations of other very distant phenomena. There are throwaway lines referencing "a few thousand photons" per square meter emitted or per event in many of these reports. These lines usually stress how hard it is for even the James Webb telescope to get enough photons to deduce anything worth knowing.

The paradox is that observations typically rely on photons, and nothing emits an infinite number of photons. Furthermore, the density of photons, even in an almost-perfect vacuum, falls off at best as the square of the distance (they're on the surface of an expanding sphere). You can do the math on how fast information gets lost that way, because information only gets conveyed when a photon interacts with a suitable detector. Add to that the fact that space is not a perfect vacuum, so over the light years, some fraction of the photons are going to interact with other particles and get lost that way. The upshot is that getting a snapshot of even a planet-sized object a few hundred light years away is impossible. Our observations of such phenomena are at best mosaics, built from whatever photons managed to make it to our instruments.

So the apparent paradox is that time-like curve paradoxes, at least in the models I've seen, can't be observed in the real universe at the scale of light years, due to loss of information-carrying photons. If a starship passes through a warp somewhere on it's way from star system A to star system B, it's quite possible that the only way we know that any of the travel happened is in the starship itself, because it's physically impossible for anyone in system B to see a ship or any signal it emitted in system A or for most of the path between the two. And when a ship is inside a warp field, it's not interacting with the outside universe, so it's not making paradoxical observations or sending paradoxical signals during transit.

Does this mean disproof by paradox can't work? I sincerely doubt it. However, I'd submit that we do know, as a matter of course, that there are pretty strong limits of resolution for observations at interstellar distances. Any proof or disproof that ignores these limits is weakened by this omission.

Getting back to warp drives.

Can space be warped negatively? Yes, that's what gravity does.

Can space be warped positively? If you believe in dark energy, yes it can. Something's causing the universe to fly apart very gradually.

Can we build a ship with a black hole generator on its nose, and a dark energy generator on its tail, and send it toward Tau Ceti at warp 9? Heh heh. Not right now, and I hope to whatever gods we imagine could exist that no one starts experimenting with this tech on Earth. Assuming it's possible to build black hole or dark energy generators, which, again, I doubt.

But have superluminal warps been proved to be impossible? I'd suggest that we don't know enough about time to answer that one, but the disproofs we're using have serious problems.

191:

I meant to mention this earlier, stories that enslave AIs or artificial people (and end up replacing humanity):

1920 Czech-language play R.U.R. (Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti – Rossum's Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek.

Which, of course, is where the term Robot comes from.

192:

Even in chemistry, geology etc., how much of of the subject as relevant to pre-university teaching has changed since 1970?

I took A-level courses in England in 1982/83. So this info is very out-of-date. However, the biology A-level even then included a ton of hardcore biochemistry, including topics that had been the subject of active research in the preceding five year period: DNA sequencing basics, prostaglandin signaling pathways, enzyme structural conformation, the various cell types of the adaptive immune system, and more.

To be fair I had a bio teacher who had a recent postgrad research background and was very keen on staying on the bleeding edge, but the curriculum supported him: if he'd hit "pause" on the updates as of 1952-53 or 1962-63, or even 1972-73, I'd have been unable to get a passing grade in the exams. (And yes, evolution was a mandatory component. Young Earth creationism was not likely to be a hit with the examination board ...)

Physics was a bit more laggy, but even so: lasers were in, as was enough basic quantum electrodynamics to understand what was going on. (It topped off with the Schroedinger wave equation treatment of an electron in a box, however. And what was then becoming known as the New Physics didn't really get a look-in: superconductivity, exotic phases of matter, quasi-crystals, and particle physics with anything you couldn't observe from a radiation source in a cloud chamber in a high school physics lab.)

The Chemistry syllabus was old-fashioned in comparison but still got as far as electron orbitals and charge delocalization in aromatic cyclicals, sufficient to understand the whacky peptide and oligosaccharide chemistry the biology syllabus demanded.

To summarize: as of the early 80s, with reference to the JMB A-level syllabi in England, Biology trailed the bleeding edge research by as little as 3-5 years; Physics was maybe 30-40 years out of date (but with excursions to only 20 years behind the times), and Chemistry was the only one that would have been accessible to a Chem PhD from the 1940s.

193:

Cephalopods - are "monocarpic" to use a term from plants - they die when they breed. IF said animals did not die on breeding, their intelligence could easily be "a threat" to humanity.

Harry Turtledove wrote a novel* where the Martians are like that, and the visiting Terrans solve the matter (at least for the ruler's wives). Ignored the possibility of a population explosion, IIRC…


*A World of Difference

194:

I don't want to get dragged into this black hole again; while you have some good points, they aren't quite what you said.

Yes, relativity is all about the interactions of mass/energy and space, so DOES apply to an Alcubierre drive, but not necessarily 'transfer booths'; however, those either have similar constraints to (say) GR wormholes or introduce a glaring incompatibility with general relativity. All these speculated mechanisms involve extrapolating over a singularity, and thus are mere speculation described as science.

Despite common claims, relativity says nothing about the transfer of information, which leaves the possibility of an ansible but no FTL transport. There is some mixed evidence from quantum mechanics on this one, with most physicists claiming no experiments are necessary because they know what the result would be. Yes, more mere speculation described as science.

Unconstrained FTL implies closed timelike curves, but some simple (and, ha! ha!, plausible) constraints allow FTL without them. I have posted those before. The existence of such constraints is, at most, mere speculation.

195:

the real answer is probably that science education isn't really considered to be important

Important to the extent of training engineers and medical staff (as good little workers), but not for research.

A big emphasis in high school science education is supposed to be on relevance to careers (at least in Ontario), so basically job training not training to ask questions* and think independently. That science students do get chances to demonstrate originality comes down to the individual teacher (and whether their school allows it).

At the elementary level, science education is devalued compared to numeracy and literacy, both of which are provincially tested** and schools/administrators ranked on. If numeracy scores haven't improved then a science period becomes a math period (in practice if not in name) to get the all-important scores up.


*Well, not strictly true. Questions like "how to I build a bridge that won't fall down" are ok, but not "should this bridge be built".

**And the tests don't really measure either, but that's a separate rant. My school devoted many hours (taken from other subjects) to preparing for the literacy tests — practice tests, coaching sessions, etc.

196:

Thanks. Even as a layman, I have seen that biology and biochemistry have changed radically even in the past few decades (e.g. epigenetics), and even plate tectonics became established only after I left school! It's boggling.

That wasn't quite my point, though, which was how much of the new mathematics, physics and (inorganic) chemistry is useful in understanding other subjects (even at university level). Yes, obviously people doing physics or some forms of chemistry at university need to learn about quantum mechanics, but applying it is Not Simple and I can't think of many other areas it is useful for. I have certainly never used the (little) quantum mechanics I learnt at university (it's close to unique in what I was taught in that respect). I am also somewhat amazed that you were taught it for A-level, given what I was taught in 1965/6, which was solidly mid-19th century.

197:

There is essentially damn-all reason to teach any 20th century mathematics or physics (except for statistics and just possibly special relativity) before university. Quantum mechanics is particularly irrelevant.

I have to disagree, although I suppose it depends on what you accept as a "reason" to teach something. Even from a strictly utilitarian viewpoint quantum mechanics is pretty important for chemistry and physics students, or for anyone who will go on to study nanomaterials. But I think beyond that it's useful to teach students something of how the world works, as best we know.

Connecting this with the original post, how much do you teach a newly instantiated "guy"? In qntm's stories the virts get told very constrained stories and/or are outright lied to; they only get told what they need to do the job. That's part of why the stories are so dark. I'd rather give too much information than too little.

198:

I don't think you read the original paper, or else misunderstood what a "closed timelike curve" is. It's a path that if followed literally takes you to your own past. You don't need a powerful telescope to observe the potential contradiction there, it's the usual time machine grandfather paradox. Alcubierre knows more than pretty much anyone about warp drives, so if he says they can be used to build closed timelike curves, I would believe him. (It's also entirely unsurprising, since it's well known that FTL communication in special relativity leads to closed timelike curves, and general relativity reduces to special relativity in the case of flat or nearly flat spacetime, like interstellar space.)

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199:

Cephalopods - are "monocarpic" to use a term from plants - they die when they breed. IF said animals did not die on breeding, their intelligence could easily be "a threat" to humanity.

The more general term than monocarpic is semelparous. The opposite of semelparous is iteroparous, and feel free to forget all this esoterica.

Anyway, to cephalopods...

Nautiluses are iteroparous, and don't show many of the neurosystem enhancements we associate with cephalopods. Those enhancements belong to the subclass Coleoidea (squid, octopi, cuttlefish). Whether ammonites were more like coleoids or nautili is so far unanswered. Prehistoric Planet showed a scenario where ammonites acted like coleoids, with photophores and semelparous sex, but I don't know whether that was based on some fossil bed or made up (knowing some of the back story on Prehistoric Planet, it could be either).

Anyway, there's already one known iteroparous octopus, the Lesser Pacific Striped Octopus, Octopus chierchiae, which has been suggested as a good laboratory species. It's entirely possible that other coleoids are iteroparous, because many species live in the deep sea where we simply can't observe them over long enough periods to know.

There's a fair amount of research going on over the physiology of semelparity. It's not related to their intelligence, but rather to some weird physiological "screw-ups" that may well be reversible (see research on O. chierchiae...).

Will gengineered iteroparous cephalopods take over the world? Depending on what kind of mess we make of today's oceans and how fast hypothetical iteroparous species escape into the wild...maybe? Well, they may take over some fraction of the various rubble fields that used to be reefs we're busily making now. Close enough.

I'm not as worried about tentacular Deep Ones 2.0, because coleoids have been around for over 300 million years, and they haven't come close to human intelligence in that time period, kraken myths notwithstanding. Oddly, the genetic tricks they've developed that produce complex nervous systems may limit how fast they evolve (see https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2017.31 and https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29748-w ). Humans are not so limited.

200:

I just read Isaac Asimov's memoir and he was very clear that during the short interval of the time he was involved with the U.S. Government in WWII was enough to put him permanently behind in chemistry - he'd missed all the important stuff about quantum behavior, and after he came back from U.S. Government service he was only fit to teach the most basic courses.

201:

Why? Then the cats will be able to complain to me in words, I mean, after all, the Elder, my Lord&Master, knows I'm his butler.

Besides, would cats make more of a mess of the world than we have, while not under their control?

202:

Warping space, of course. And I have no closed loops (as I type this, that reminds me of Doc Smith's Skylark series, with their "complete stasis in space of a sphere".

203:

In the nineties? You mean the late nineties, I assume, since most folks I knew weren't using the web much until then. Before the late nineties, usenet and email.

204:

Followed the link, not sure about reading the whole paper. Question: in what way do "closed timelike loops" not return to the origin? Can I not read that as "go forward, then back in time, then return to the point of departure"... meaning you haven't gone back when you return to normal space.

205:

Why a black hole generator? Why not just have the ship built as a cylinder or ring, and bend space in from the front, and expand it back behind?

206:

A question for all the physics mavens. Let's imagine I take a ride on an FTL spacecraft. I travel to Tau Ceti in only a months, spend a year there, then return to Earth in another thirty days, meaning that I've "traveled through time" in the course of my trip. Presumably I arrive home fourteen months later (according to my internal clock) and also fourteen months later according to the calendar on Earth as of my return.

How do I know I've traveled through time? What happens to me that's different than what happens if FTL doesn't contradict relativity?

207:

I don't think you read the original paper, or else misunderstood what a "closed timelike curve" is. It's a path that if followed literally takes you to your own past. You don't need a powerful telescope to observe the potential contradiction there, it's the usual time machine grandfather paradox. Alcubierre knows more than pretty much anyone about warp drives, so if he says they can be used to build closed timelike curves, I would believe him. (It's also entirely unsurprising, since it's well known that FTL communication in special relativity leads to closed timelike curves, and general relativity reduces to special relativity in the case of flat or nearly flat spacetime, like interstellar space.)

I didn't read the paper, and I'm not a physicist. Moreover, the general absence of superluminal phenomena strongly suggests to me that FTL won't work. Everything else we've used for transportation involves powerful phenomena that are freaking obvious, even if their underlying mechanisms are not. If I'm appealing to generation of large amounts of dark energy, I'm assuming that I'm bullshitting.

The general problem is that if a warpship travels, on its warped path, say, 1 kilometer to go from solar orbit to Tau Ceti orbit in, say, a year, while a photon would hypothetically take about 12 years in flat space to go the same distance, the warpship hasn't gone FTL because it took a shorter path that was unavailable to that photon. Relativity says nothing about any preferred path.

The Lorentz transformation is 1-vx/c2 and if neither V nor X are anywhere near c over the course taken (which, again, is badly warped, not flat space), the warpship don't undergo the 1-vx/c2 transformation going less than zero that would send it backwards in time. This is equivalent to having two photons go through fiber optic cables. One goes 10 cm to the detector, the other goes 10 km and arrives later. Going 10 cm rather than 10 km doesn't enable one photon to go back in time to before it was emitted.

Thing is, I know of no evidence that it is possible to warp distance so severely. So far as I know, there are no paths (wormholes, warps, whatever) within the vacuums that make up the universe that allow anything to take a shortcut to go FTL relative to something taking a different path through the flatter space between the same points. As I understand it, that's the impossible handwave, not causality police.

208:

I am however anticipating both funny and grim stories about ethically challenged scientists raising kids that are a either experimental failures.. or much, much smarter than them.

"Starfire" by Charles Sheffield. To call the scientist in question "ethically challenged" is an understatement. He finds off-the-chart brilliant teenage girls in slums, kills them, then clones them. And yes, he tweaks the clones to make them even MORE brilliant than the originals.

Why he does it is convoluted. He convinced himself that someone that smart, especially a female, raised in a dirt-poor gang-infested environment, will never realize her talents and will never be happy. Not an unreasonable assumption, but his solution -- kill her, then raise her anew in a much more benign and intellectually stimulating environment, -- is a bit drastic.

And yes, these girls end up much smarter than him. (And he is very very smart indeed) Unfortunately, this is but a minor subplot, not the focus of "Starfire".

209:

I always treated both the Skylark and Lensman series as "technobabble", although the term had yet to be invented.

210:

Would super-intelligent cats make a mess of the world? Of course not; they’d push everything off the edge of the world and leave a nice tidy blank field.

211:

You have misunderstood my point, and probably also modern physics etc. Yes, quantum mechanics is essential for an understanding of advanced physics, chemistry, nanomaterials etc. but, even in 2005, most of that was a research-level understanding, not even a graduate-level one. The point here is quantum mechanics is intractable even by the standards of general relativity, and has to be solved numerically.

In the 1990s, it was leading-edge research to derive the properties of even such a simple molecule as water from basic quantum mechanics, because of the horrendous computing power needed. Yes, I was involved in that area. Even now, I belive that almost all undergraduate-level sciences USE quantum mechanics only via simplifications (like the fundamental forces) or by handwaving. Deriving results from it is still bloody hard.

So why should ALL A-level physics students be taught more than an essentially unexaminable hand-waving overview of quantum mechanics? Exactly how will it help to understand OTHER subjects, even at an undergraduate level? And have you ever used it yourself, and what for?

212:

Assuming that Tau Ceti and Sol are moving slowly relative to one another, you could tell only by the fact that you would be back on Earth in time to receive any messages that you sent by light etc. There would be no causality breach.

213:

Look up the time taken for quantum tunnelling, for a start. It's unclear. I don't recommend trying to read the papers - I don't.

214:

You've misunderstood my point, which is that education doesn't necessarily have to be "useful". As for quantum mechanics, yes there are many problems in quantum field theory which are computationally intractable. But that's true even of classical mechanics (e.g. fluid dynazmics). That doesn't mean we shouldn't teach Newton's laws, even to students who will never need to use them. Similarly basic (non-relativistic) quantum mechanics does not need particularly advanced math. Would students be able to use this to solve complicated problems? No, but they could understand the principles.

215:

Why a black hole generator? Why not just have the ship built as a cylinder or ring, and bend space in from the front, and expand it back behind?

My understanding is that for the front warp you need something equivalent to a small black hole at the very least, with the equivalent anti-warp behind.

I suppose you could do it up as the Tao Drive: wuji is forced to become taiji is split into yin and yang. In this case, wuji is some form of vacuum. Get, say, a small asteroid's worth of mass-energy/potenetial/narrativium in this vacuum (or coax it to virtually manifest, or whatever), then split the positive graviton generator (yin) from the negative graviton generator (yang), and send the yin to the front and yang to the back, and you can warp away merrily. Gravity, incidentally, is classed as a negative force, so antigravity is yang.

Yes, this is Niven's gravity dipole drive from the Known Universe stories.

216:

Why would a closed timelike path take you to your past? Why would it not end right where it began?

217:

How do I know I've traveled through time? What happens to me that's different than what happens if FTL doesn't contradict relativity?

FTL doesn't have to involve time travel; your example is a case where it probably wouldn't. But if you combine an STL drive with a drive that appears FTL to the STL observer then you can construct a time machine. The Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyonic_antitelephone has a discussion of how, and links to peer reviewed articles about it.

Or you could look at the textbook at https://www.eftaylor.com/spacetimephysics/ ; the special topic in chapter 4a has an example of how Klingons could use their FTL+STL spaceships to travel back in time. One of that textbook's authors, John Wheeler, was Richard Feynman's Ph.D. advisor and literally wrote the standard textbook on general relativity (Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler's Gravitation), so it's a reliable source.

218:

Why would a closed timelike path take you to your past? Why would it not end right where it began?

It does end right where and when it began, that's why it's a loop. So at some point in the loop you are in your own past. For example, if you arrive back when you began and then destroy the warp drive, you'd create a paradox, because you need the warp drive to go back in time...

219:

Speaking of animal intelligence...

A few years ago there was this fad on Snapchat for using an app to replace your face with the face of a cat.

A bunch of people posted pictures of their pets reacting to looking at the cat face on the phone ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jto2peSOLac )

Now I'm wondering if it's akin to the fabled mirror test of self-awareness. Some of the cats and dogs clearly realized they were looking at their humans' faces on the screen, got a fright when the transformation happened, turned to check whether the human had transformed, and got really confused. That suggests pretty clearly that they understand how mirrors work. Why more don't use mirrors to preen? That's the interesting question. But I wouldn't be surprised if self awareness is ubiquitous in mammals and probably many other animals.

220:

paws4thot @ 209:

I always treated both the Skylark and Lensman series as "technobabble", although the term had yet to be invented.

Hmmm? I remember a story I once read about "explorers" making a second contact with the civilization on another planet. Whoever made the first contact had warned the aliens that if Earth-men came, they should test them and if a certain word was still in their vocabulary, kill them.

The explorers had to figure out the word without using it?

The word was "gobbledygook".

221:

No, it doesn't, nor should it. But everything in a mandatory syllabus for schoolchildren should either be useful or interesting, given the children's and timetable limits involved. Things like Euclidean geometry proofs (yes, I was taught those) and quantum mechanics are neither useful nor interesting to most students.

The point about quantum mechanics is not that it has intractable problems but that ALL useful ones are intractable. That is not true of general relativity, fluid dynamics or anything else I can think of.

222:

A warp drive is a kind of virtual particle; like the ones which pop into existence to be exchanged between some other particles to mediate a force, and then disappear again so you never get to see them, a warp drive is a virtual particle that mediates whitroth going back in time. So it's not actually a paradox that it disappears when he destroys it before he starts, it's just the way you expect that kind of thing to behave normally. "They all do that, sir."

The difficulty comes when you want some more predictable or controllable behaviour than waiting for the random chance of one happening to pop into existence right where you need it. To get energetic enough interactions to bring so massive a particle into existence, you need to collide two beams of physicists with each other at 0.999999c. The obvious solution would seem to be to use multiply-instantiated virtual copies of physicists, which overcomes at least some of the practical difficulties, but the trouble here is that if it's virtual particles you're colliding it's a real one that you end up creating, so it won't do the fancy disappearing time tricks, it just does boring things like taking Troutwaxer to Tau Ceti and back.

223:

On a subtly different note, people are working very hard to get live data on global shipping, mostly trying to make it part of the global financial system in order to extract more of the value of trade into those markets. Which leads to owners abandoning ships when they become unprofitable.

Stranded onboard without visas or the means to make their way home, seafarers’ ordeals can last for months or years... These instances of abandonment, cruel though they may be, are simple calculations on the owners’ parts: when value x exceeds value y, perform action z. Full and accurate data would allow for these kinds of calculations on every load a ship carries: algorithmic apportionment of goods, powered by increasingly granular data. https://logicmag.io/pivot/ghost-ships/

Automating the ships is one answer to abandoned crews, but it doesn't seem likely to make the overall problem better... an abandoned ship isn't less of a waste if it's automated, and any pollution issues are likely to be worse if there's no crew, not better.

224:

Would super-intelligent cats make a mess of the world? Of course not; they’d push everything off the edge of the world and leave a nice tidy blank field.

Superintelligent cats (with speech and opposable thumbs, or some functional proxies therefore) would ... well, they'd have an agenda, and it'd reflect their biology much the same way that human civilization reflects ours (tribal walking-upright plains apes).

And we reconstruct our environment to suit our needs.

Cats are crepuscular predators, solitary hunters that live socially.

So. An Earth reconstructed to suit feline needs would be in perpetual partial eclipse due to orbiting solettas, inducing a permanent twilight. It'd be warmer all round, because cats. Lots of shallow seas full of krill and tasty, yummy, edible fish, and lots of mangrove-like seawater-tolerant trees with roots overhanging the swampy waters to perch on while fishing. Also lots of easy prey species -- squirrel monkeys, pygmy marmosets, and lemurs -- also maybe posthuman hominids bred for low intelligence, small stature, herbivory, and not having opposable thumbs (so they can use us as handy grooming slaves without having to worry about being re-enslaved in turn).

Cats won't invent money, or will refuse to use it. Money implies credit and debt, and cats admit to neither.

What else ...?

225:

EC & others:
Post-C19 Physics & Chemistry in schools:
QM - mostly irrelevant - EXCEPT - every single transistor is a QM device, isn't it?
How does a transitor work? ... By Quantum Tunnelling - this needs a "very simple" explanation at "A" level, I think, at the very least.
Problems, yes ....
The point about quantum mechanics is not that it has intractable problems but that ALL useful ones are intractable. - even how transistors work, really?
- yes, I know, I'm repeating myself - so what?

226:

Cats won't invent money, or will refuse to use it.

I've read that sentence several times now, and each time I look at it, I think it says "or will refuse to eat it", and I have to check again even though it makes perfect sense. I suppose it's also indicative of the importance of money once you change the context.

227:

For anyone that hasn’t seen it yet, the recent Netflix series of Sandman included a bonus story “Drea of a thousand cats” that pretty much explains this.

228:

There is, of course, an entire subgenre of SF/F poking into the question of who gets to be people

Sorry to pick this up late but there's whole collections of laws, including international law of various sorts, poking into that area. Including the extra fun "how much people are they"... from trivia like kids being human but with fewer rights to philosophically complex questions about whether rivers* get to vote.

(* any non-traditional human of your choice, like women, refugees or corporations will do instead)

229:

I raise you "The Fittest" - J T McIntosh (aka James Macgregor) from 1955. https://www.fantasticfiction.com/m/j-t-mcintosh/fittest.htm

230:

"The point about quantum mechanics is not that it has intractable problems but that ALL useful ones are intractable. - even how transistors work, really?"

transistors, diodes, lasers, SQUIDs, superconductivity, fission, fusion, chemical bonds

231:

I don't watch Netflix but I ran across that Sandman story about three decades ago in the original intended format.

232:

What kind of society would superintelligent cats form? Governance would be a difficult. I can't see a strong central government forming. Democracy might be an option, but requires compromise, and cats aren't particularly inclined to compromise. Perhaps some sort of early stage feudalism? A loose collection of shifting alliances, with stronger cats dominating the weaker? Politically that seems plausible.

Economics would be a problem. Most economies rely on either slave /serf labour or technology to handle menial tasks. Cats would make terrible slaves, and I have doubts that the industrial revolution would really get going on a cat dominated world (too much effort, and cats on assembly lines?). So they'd have to find some other species to enslave; something smart enough to be useful, but not too smart, with opposable thumbs. Perhaps some kind of monkey or plains ape could be tricked into doing menial labour for the cats? Or is that too implausible?

233:

Yes, really. I am not denying that there shouldn't be some hand-waving explanations, or derivative formulae (e.g. van de Waals forces or electron mobility), but that is completely different from teaching quantum mechanics. The problem is that deriving any of the effects (including those in #230) from the formulae is extremely complicated and, in realistic cases, has no explicit solution. In my (university) quantum mechanics course, I never got anywhere near being able to do anything much with it, and I have never used even the principles.

As far as transistors go, people didn't start using QM to derive the properties of transistors until the 1990s (possibly later), and the development as based on electron mobility theory. Indeed, at an undergraduate level, you don't even need to know that electron bonding and movement is based on quantum mechanics to understand simple ones.

https://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/physics/brau/H182/Theory%20of%20Transistors.pdf

234:

Perhaps some kind of monkey or plains ape could be tricked into doing menial labour for the cats? Or is that too implausible?

It might look a lot like our current world! only with sarcastic talking cats giving our heads of state their marching orders (and no reduction in carbon emissions because the Owners like it hot).

And it just takes some tweaks to the Toxoplasma gondii genome to get us there ...

235:

Well, it's more like a dictatorship, but some species of "big cats" do form groups.

236:

Essay time.

I'm trying desperately not to dive into the "is it possible to design a sapient cat" thread, but I'll restate something I think everyone missed:

Intelligence isn't always useful. First the theory, then the examples:

So far as I can tell, animal intelligence (the kind with brains thinking, as opposed to the biochemical sophistication of plants, fungi, bacteria, and digestive systems, which are really good at processing all sorts of biochemical and biochemical data without using neurons) is metabolically expensive. In order for the intelligence to not starve to death because of the expense of all those neurons banging on, being intelligent has to improve its nutrition somehow.

This is not as obvious as it sounds. Brains and digestive tracts are the two most metabolically expensive organ systems in an animal's body, and there's usually a tradeoff between whether an animal invests in a big digestive system or big brains. Here's the punchline: most animals have evolved to have bigger and/or better digestive systems. Animals that evolve more sophisticated brains are a small minority.

Worse yet, evolution doesn't always favor bigger brains. Kea parrots and caracaras (primitive falcons) are intelligent, omnivorous generalists. Most later-evolved parrots and all later-evolved falcons are less intelligent dietary specialists. The same appears true for songbirds, which is a major point of How Song Began. Lowe's point is that, for various reasons, Australia is a land where many plants have evolved to dump mass quantities of sugars as nectar, sap, gum, and so forth. As a result, the honey-eaters and other birds have a lot of excess energy to play with, and they tend to be a lot more intelligent than birds on less favored continents. Since songbirds seem to have evolved in Australia, this means that the more "archaic" songbirds tend to be more intelligent. Corvids are the global exception, but they're pretty early-evolving too.

Songbirds are the most speciose clade of birds, but outside Australia, they tend to be fairly unintelligent (finches, sparrows, etc.). There are exceptions (mynahs, for example), but the bigger point is that, as with falcons and to a lesser extent parrots, they've evolved from more intelligent (in high-energy Australia) to less intelligent (in lower energy Europe).

So about intelligent cats...not going there yet.

Humans slipped out from under the energy limit by learning to make fire. Fire allows us to tap energy sources (especially wood) without eating them, meaning we can externally process our food to make it more digestible, meaning in turn we can have wimpy GI systems, puny jaws, and comparatively huge brains. Comparatively...notice how Neanderthals had bigger brains? Evolution doesn't always favor increased brain size. But the key way to cheat the brains vs. digestive tract investment tradeoff is to externalize digestive functions by cooking food. That's the reason why I think firemaking is central to evolving human-level intelligence. This, in turn constrains the body plans of intelligent animals to forms that can make fire, which imposes all sorts of interesting and useful limits.

So okay, cats. Fine. There are two directions towards an intelligent feline. One is that some greedy geneticist creates a line of transgenic housecats with human intelligence genes hacked in. The two questions are: what to do with them (other than intelligence testing--do they make better pets?) and more importantly, what do you feed them? They'll need more calories to support those brains, so they'll have to eat more.

This is true for any transgenic intelligent animal. Their diet will have to change to feed their brains, and the bigger the brain, the bigger the change. Is this going to be a problem or not?

The other direction to go for intelligent cats is that somehow a feline evolves toward human-like sapience. That necessarily involves being able to kindle a fire using friction. Is this possible?

This isn't a matter of giving a cat thumbs, either. Cats have great power-grips, but the tips of their fingers are their claws, not fingertips. Can a cat hand be modified, while retaining those claws, to have a versatile set of precision and power grips, suitable for tasks like kindling a fire, making stone, wood, or bone tools, or rolling cordage and tying knots? Then there's the face: coals usually need to be blown alight, and cats don't have ape-style cheeks and lips with which to direct the air. That leaves exhaling through their nostrils. Will this work? This also plays into how a feline vocalizes a language. Sounds requiring lips are out if they retain conventional cat mouths, so they have a reduced range of potential sounds to work with. And how much would their mouths evolve? Cats obviously have the mouths of working carnivores, but they also carry things in their mouths, rather than hands. So how do you modify a feline's mouth? And can they evolve to become bipedal? If so, how are the intermediate stages effective? Lots of questions.

As for feline society, that's fairly easy. Cats are cultural animals, in that mother cats have to teach their kittens to be competent hunters. In all cats I know of, culture, and basic social units, are based around mothers, daughters, and sisters. Males are kind of on the edge of this, sometimes forming fraternal teams. English captured this quite nicely with female cats being queens, while males are toms. So more intelligent felines would likely have a lion-like or elephant-like social system, with mothers, daughters, and sisters being the essential framework.

237:

That suggests pretty clearly that they understand how mirrors work. Why more don't use mirrors to preen?

Because to people preening has a specific meaning. We attach the word to a cat behavior assuming their brain has the same motivation.

238:

What kind of society would superintelligent cats form?

Aren't current "house cat" behaviors something that humans have bred them into for the last 5000 years?

Without people I'd think that lions, tigers, cheetahs, etc... would be a better example to start with.

239:

Re: '... this discussion is not about the medical techniques necessary but rather the impact upon society'

Haven't read all the posts yet since my last visit, so apologies if this was already covered.

Thanks but not sure it's possible to keep these two - techniques and societal impact - apart.

Recurring question I have re: AI is why not conduct double-blinded trials supervised by independent research bodies who have zero link to/intere$t in the creation/development of the AI? I believe that there are (still) consumer protection laws in at least some parts of the world that put the onus of proof as well as financial liability (re: product/service performance reliability) on the manufacturer. Not requiring full testing of an AI model pre-sales/use sounds like a perfect scam for evading any/all responsibility for harms. (Hmmm ... wonder if DT & family will be launching their own version soon.)

AI is CompSci's magic wand and if it actually works reliably it would be a gamechanger but so far there's no hard evidence that it works as advertised.

A few months ago I started getting email invites to participate (watch, ask questions) in some professional and industry panel discussions on healthcare. A few webinar sessions included discussion about AI so it looks like AI-medicine is not fiction/fantasy but that, like EVs, it's approaching widespread acceptance pretty fast. As a long-time SF/F fan, AI definitely appeals to me as a concept and as a potential tool. But as a human being whose immediate family has had some very serious medical issues, I need to know that whatever AI gets marketed is NOT someone's fantasy/snake oil/magic elixir.

BTW - here's an open access article on AI and medicine:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00023-2

'The reproducibility issues that haunt health-care AI

Health-care systems are rolling out artificial-intelligence tools for diagnosis and monitoring. But how reliable are the models?'

240:

Let's try that one again - why would you wind up in the spacial location that you began, just because you wind up in the temporal location you began?

241:

First of all, why would I destroy it, or want to? And couldn't we use virtual artificial physicists, there being so few real ones?

Finally, I OBJECT! Why should troutwaxer get to go to Tau Ceti, and I don't?! I demand my right to go there!

242:

I don't understand that abandoning the ship. My reaction, as a crew member, would be "I see, you've abandoned the ship? GREAT! We hereby form a union, and we claim salvage rights on an abandoned vessel. We'll arrive where we expected to go, and sell the cargo, and then the ship, off at a discount rate, and we'll all be rich!"

243:

First of all, the eternal partial eclipse is ridiculous - cat's really enjoy napping in the sun. Secondly, without sun, Earth's gravity would not increase, but might even decrease[1]. Finally, they would all be nobility, and increase food and fun (for cats) in the world. Wars and such annoying things are Right Out.

1. See The Theory of Cat Gravity, Robin Wood. https://www.amazon.com/Theory-Cat-Gravity-Being-Robins/dp/0965298434

244:

Salvage law does not allow crew members to claim it on the vessel they are crewing, whether they are being paid or not.

245:

Even if the ship is legally abandoned? Well, in that case, we're not being paid, we've been laid off, and so we're not crew.

246:

Actually, cat behaviour is not that simple. Their wild ancestors (and other subspecies they interbreed with) are all solitary, and almost all feral cats are solitary. As David L says, only lions are cheetahs are naturally social (and the latter not much). An intelligent cat society would be like nothing we can imagine.

247:

Um, perhaps like Asimov's colony, where instead of ultra-rich living separately, with tons of robots to deal with Stuff, only getting together for sex, replace the robots with humans?

248:

Actually, I'll note that cats do like to play together. And if the evolved cats are even more neotenous, like humans, they'd continue to play.

Though I would think they'd like football (American "soccer"), and have no interest in bashing into each other (American football).

249:

~Sighs~ OK, you can come to Tau Ceti with me. I'll need someone to carry my bags.

250:

Let's try that one again - why would you wind up in the spacial location that you began, just because you wind up in the temporal location you began?

A closed timelike curve is a closed path (loop) in spacetime. So you end up at the same point in both space and time where you started.

251:

It might look a lot like our current world! only with sarcastic talking cats giving our heads of state their marching orders (and no reduction in carbon emissions because the Owners like it hot).

And it just takes some tweaks to the Toxoplasma gondii genome to get us there ...

So: governments would ultimately be controlled by selfish, amoral entities with little concern for human well-being and staunch opposition to climate mitigation. Nothing at all like our current world! /s

252:

You've inserted the word "legally" before "abandoned" which is a completely different situation. In the situation being discussed the ship will be registered somewhere like Panama or Liberia and the owner of record will be a shell company in a tax haven with anonymous shareholders. The abandonment consists of the shell company not paying the crew, the fuel bill and harbour charges. Documented bridge crew who are required to have particular qualifications under maritime law (eg captain, radio op, chief engineer) may well vanish leaving the general dogsbody crew on board. The remaining crew will have been hired for their cheapness and may well not have passports or merchant seaman ID so are unable to disembark and don't have the skills to run a ship underway.

253:

RE: Cats

Always worth googling before you opine. If you google "feral cat social structure," you'll find things like: https://www.catsonbroadwayhospital.com/life-feral-cat-colony/

Basically, it's what I stated. Even though cats live alone, they interact quite regularly, and what biologists are finding is that, as with octopi, they're less solitary than originally thought. The critical variable is food supply. If there's a lot of food available, cats will live in higher densities. The less food there is, the more solitary they are.

Also, don't be fooled by nature documentaries. When the cinematographers spend months sitting in a blind shooting stuff, and maybe a minute of it makes the final cut, the chances of the sequence they show being normal behavior are questionable at best.

As for culture, all cats are obligately cultural to the degree that they need their mothers to teach them how to hunt the local prey competently*. Failure to learn is how we end up with all those You Tube videos of cats getting chased off by Norway rats--the cats have the basic hunting instincts, but the rats are smart and nasty, and a cat needs to be taught the proper way to hunt and kill them. If they were adopted as kittens and raised by humans, they're clueless.

Tomcats typically play less of a role in educating kittens, although there have been some documented exceptions. For example, there's a video of an old feral tom in a shelter who, while not socialized to humans, helps socialize the stray kittens who come in.

Anyway, that necessary mother-kitten training is the basis you build a feline culture from. With humans, a single mother can't raise a child entirely by herself, so our basic social structure is the extended family unit that's sufficient to raise children, and there are a number of successful forms these can take. Think of these as the basic building blocks of a culture, not all there is to say about how intelligent beings could live in dense numbers.

*This is a major way wild cats end up in zoos. They get "rescued" as kittens, no foster mother is available, so they're destined for a life in captivity because it's considered preferable to releasing them to starve in the wild. My mom, the local wildlife rescuer, got saddled with a baby bobcat decades ago. Fortunately, a local wildlife waystation had a wild mother bobcat who was willing to foster strays, and even more luckily she had a litter of kittens about the same age. So hopefully that bobcat kitten ended up back in the wild. My mom got a lot of education in a hurry, just from dealing with that kitten for a single night.

254:

On quasi-abandoned ships, see one extreme example here: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-monday-edition-1.6002269/after-nearly-4-years-stranded-on-cargo-ship-in-egypt-a-syrian-crew-member-finally-goes-home-1.6002473

The ships cook was the last man aboard, and so was legally prevented from leaving. For 2 years. As he said, in addition to the psychological pressure of isolation he might have fallen somewhere below decks, and been unable to summon help.

255:

Tomcats, socializing young. Um, I have a pic my late wife took of the big tom (Hemingway) grooming our son as an infant after a bath....

256:

The cook was legally prevented from leaving? What agency could or would prosecute him?

Time for a new proposal for international shipping: refusal by the owner to allow a ship to dock in any location, failure to pay the crew in a timely manner, and failure to allow the crew time off beyond the planned course time, is abandonment, and the ship may be garnished by the crew for such.

See how fast it stops happening.

257:

Y'know, going back the the original theme, a virtual person might work to keep the ship from being declared abandoned.

258:

Tomcats, socializing young. Um, I have a pic my late wife took of the big tom (Hemingway) grooming our son as an infant after a bath....

Yup, my good buddy here is an aging tomcat. I'm not saying males are asocial, any more than male lions are.

As a counter, when my mother was a girl, she had a female cat who liked to hunt. The cat tried to teach my mom how to hunt by bringing her live mice. My mom couldn't kill them fast enough, so when they ran off, her cat would give her a disgusted look, catch the mouse, and bring it back for her to try again.

By the time my mom was a teen, the old cat didn't have the teeth to kill the rats she was catching, so she'd leave them on the front welcome mat, repeatedly, until my mom killed them with a machete. My mom's always wondered about what the neighbors thought about the blood stains and machete dings on the front stoop.

...In case you're wondering where I get it from...

259:

Japan has a couple of dozen cat islands where the cats live in social groups.

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2015/03/a-visit-to-aoshima-a-cat-island-in-japan/386647/

You’ll probably have to copy and paste the link.

260:

The cook was legally prevented from leaving? What agency could or would prosecute him?

The immigration/border control people of basically any country.

Your country, for example, is notoriously hostile to people who arrive without the proper paperwork. Imagine that instead of a refugee from some country the USA has wrecked walking up to the border, it's a crew member from that country on a boat that has no meaningful paperwork.

The "abandonment" we're talking about is 90% paperwork-related. Crew not getting paid, bills of lading present but the paperwork to allow the crew to eat, let alone leave the boat, is not present. No insurance, or no certificate of seaworthiness. For crew it's all about money: the USA is happy to allow crew to enter the US on a transit visa provided someone guarantees that they have money to spend and an incentive to re-board the boat.

In civilised countries, sometimes including the US, when crews are abandoned like this the government takes over the boat, auctions it off, sends the crew back to their country of origin (sometimes billing them for the privilege, sometimes deporting them (which means they can never work again, because being deported makes it difficult to enter other countries)). The country is generally not concerned with this stuff, they just want poor brown person gone ASAP.

In uncivilised countries (Egypt, Panama etc), the government just pushed the boat to one side and waits to see what happens. Early on there are international laws saying they can't seize it just because the docking fees are one day late (not a problem for the US, they make their own rules), later it comes down to whether it's worth doing. The cost of cleaning up a ship and towing it to somewhere it can be scrapped is significant, and and easily exceed the value of the ship. Especially if the owners quickly sold cargo-in-transit to someone else and offloaded anything worth offloading before abandoning the ship.

Remember that "not worth keeping" generally means it's in poor condition even if it does still run. It's not uncommon for "it stops here" to be a paperwork issue, where they can't show that some trifling bureaucratic requirement has been met so the ship won't be allowed to leave, or won't be allowed to enter any civilised port (engine emissions, waste dumping, even maintenance or fouling problems). Just as the US won't allow random poor brown people to enter, they won't let a non-certified ship enter either. They don't want 10,000 tonnes of mixed high level nuclear waste and PCBs just barely making it into a US port before the ship breaks apart, so they import inspection and certification rules on ships departing for the US.

Time for a new proposal for international shipping: refusal by the owner to allow a ship to dock in any location

261:

and the ship may be garnished by the crew for such

In car terms this is like threatening "we'll confiscate that car" when we're talking about an abandoned wreck that someone has filled with rubbish and set on fire.

Add in international law where the money-laundering co-operatives have worked hard to make sure no-one can track the assets of their billionaires (we've discussed that before on this blog), with an industry notorious for inventing terms like "piracy" and "lost at sea", and you end up chasing a trail of corpses half way round the world before you end up in the offices of Maersk or Samsung asking very politely if perhaps a member of their legal team might be willing to accept your petition.

I'm not saying that Samsung operate ghost ships stealing fish from poor countries... just that the shipping industry is so opaque that there's no way for us to know, and possibly no way for them to know. They build a fishing boat, lease it to someone and 30 years later it's still being paid off but it's been through so many middlemen that now it's got an Indonesian crew, it's fishing off Somalia and delivering catches to small ports in Yemen. Do Samsung even still own it after the paper ownership was sold to GE Finance then eventually back to a Samsung-owned bank in Singapore as part of a securities portfolio?

262:

The cat tried to teach my mom how to hunt by bringing her live mice.

I grew up with wooded areas across the street or behind the house. When we had cats they would leave us DEAD presents next to the door at times. No live ones.

We dog sit at times for my son's and daughter's dogs. Our back yard is "dog enclosed", about 100' x 70', and creatures like my NOT golf course lawn care. The daughter's dogs have a strong "chase the prey" instinct. But never being taught to hunt, to them if they catch something it is just a toy to shake. Over the last 3 years we've dealt with 2 rabbits, a squirrel, and I think 4 chipmunks. My son's dog likes to chase but has never caught up to something.

The dogs we had decades ago also would at times catch creatures. I once got to put down a baby rabbit. But living inside of a city I kept my mouth shut as someone would have wanted me to take it to a vet and spend a few thousand $$$ just so a hawk could eat it in six months.

263:

Pratchett's "Witches Abroad" had a fairly hilarious take on an anthropomorphized tomcat, Greebo, a dim bulb reprobate who drove women crazy, in the right way. His thumbs worked okay, but a door handle was too much fuss and bother for him to deal with, even when it was explained to him. So when he wanted to exit a room he scratched at the door, moaned, and looked longingly at the nearest woman to help him out. Not much of a prize specimen, since I've seen a number of real cats jump, cling and swing from a doorknob to get out.

264:

Do Samsung even still own it after the paper ownership was sold to GE Finance then eventually back to a Samsung-owned bank in Singapore as part of a securities portfolio?

I think you've over simplified the situation.

266:

Had it been found in open waters by Dod G Salvors, of Rotterdam, NL, they could have used the recourse of sending the message "Your vessel $name" found adrift. Will you accept Lloyds Open Form?" to the owner of record. If the owner replies in the affirmative, all their problem are belong to Dod G.

267:

If the owner replies in the affirmative, all their problem are belong to Dod G.

Why would anyone admit being the owner? It's all downside - if they can be identified they will attract debtors like flies. As with all criminals, the less they have to do with their crimes the better their chances of getting away with them.

This isn't one of those "no-one has ever thought about it before" things, this is hundreds of years of very smart people competing with each other to get money. The original article I linked is about very smart cross-disciplinary teams trying hard for decades to come up with a way to extract money from an intensely competitive field. Don't be an elon about it.

268:

Having fun reading about "Ghost Ships."

But I do have one whiny quibble: can we find some other term. How many effing ghost ships do we have out there? Stealthed warships? Ghosts. Drone warships? Ghosts. Abandoned cargo vessels? Ghosts.

I suppose cargo drones is in bad form, while autoships sounds like they're car carriers. Q ships? Been used, I know.

So can we come up with better term for an uncrewed cargo ship? RO-boats? Nah.

In the meantime, I keep thinking of this famous scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lA226A91tA

269:

when it comes to motivating virts (or humans or bacteria or politicians) nothing is as effective as misery 'n suffering...

New York City today spiked at about 51F (10.5C)... tomorrow there's a 7 in 10 chance it will be 60F (15.5C)... yes, there's been winters in NYC where there'd be an oddball day where the temperature was autumn-warmth but nowhere as many as what has been slamming us these last several years... and next-to-never for sustained 'heat waves' in winter...

the question now is whether there's so much Big Oil donations via lobbyist cutouts as to allow politicians to stuff their ears and cover their eyes enough to ignore reality... and continue to deny need for hardening infrastructure for what promises to be a summer of melting-burning-cooking... melting asphalt; burning forests; cooking human flesh;

and then there's crop failure due to plants frying under cloudless skies and insufficient watering... and just for brutal irony watching as low-lying lands elsewhere drown under eqv. of a month's worth of rain falling in a single day... so never mind importing LNG (and fast tracking wind turbine installation) to keep the lights on, the next 'big thing' that politicians in EU-US-UK-ME ought be worried about is sufficient calories to keep the peasants from food-scarcity rioting in less developed nations (and those undergoing economic downturns)... I'm still wondering about Putin's invasion of Ukraine being as much about seizing some of the most productive farmland in Europe as it is an attempting to 'restore' the Russian Empire...

...now please excuse me as I order in three cases of no-frills vodka and resume day drinking as I continue doomscrolling

270:

Saw that PM Sunak thinks that laws can outlaw strikes.

https://theconversation.com/rishi-sunaks-new-law-could-force-workers-to-break-strikes-197482

Is this true? If so, one hypothetical way to rid the realm of this meddlesome priest minister is a reasonably coordinated general strike, say around May 1, 2023. Strictly nonviolent and nonlethal, of course.

272:

Abandoned cargo vessels? Ghosts.

I think that's what they're getting at. As I understand it current law means that's how automated/unmanned ships would be classified and hence the term.

What's fun is reading about "unmanned engine rooms" where they've automated them sufficiently that alarms on the bridge and in the engineer's cabin are enough to keep things running. They still have to wake everyone up if there's a problem, but they don't have to babysit the engines 24/7.

Which makes me wonder just how good the automation needs to be before unattended overnight can become serviced every few weeks. It would be quite annoying if a big cargo ship just stopped working and drifted round while they tried to land a helicopter on it to let someone "press ok to continue" :)

273:

the question now is whether there's so much Big Oil donations via lobbyist cutouts as to allow politicians to stuff their ears and cover their eyes enough to ignore reality

Presume you've seen this?

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0063

If you're going to day-drink, you might as well have good reason…

274:

Did you not understand, or just ignore, how I used the term "owner of record" in the original statement? Company $number on the Liberian shipping register is just as much an owner of record as, say, Cunard is.

275:

I admit I don't understand.

So you can say "this is owned by Shelf Company #12345678 of Panama", with no company officers, no funds and no further address. Great, now you can send a bill to them and someone will place it in the file of documents of that company so it's available if anyone asks for it.

I don't see how that helps either get money to pay the crew, or find someone to prosecute for any misdeeds.

The whole point of registries like Panama is that they offer anonymous companies for tasks like that. The UK offers the same service, so does Aotearoa. Even countries that don't usually offer limited liability companies, and often fail to connect those to real people when there are problems (obviously if there are no problems they don't try).

You're talking as though bypassing that stuff is easy, or even possible. You might consider such things as the James Hardie Asbestos settlements where even though the company was readily identifiable and accepted liability, they were still able to refuse to pay their liabilities and shuffle funds overseas to do so. The Australian government was reducing to a negotiating parter. If it wasn't billions of dollars the government was liable for can you imagine the plaintiffs would be more successful?

276:

I suppose one answer is to declare the ship a wreck, auction the cargo, break it up for scrap (so that it can't be surreptitiously reclaimed by its controllers), and use the proceeds to pay the crew.

And if anyone objects to this process, they have to prove they have standing, meaning that they own the ship and will be damaged by the action.

If someone does show prove they have standing and therefore ownership, go after them instead.

As a separate measure, put crew salaries and their expenses in an escrow account before they sail a particular leg, so that these are sunk costs that cannot be avoided by writing off the vessel. Yes I can think of at least two ways to game this without even trying, three actually, but something like this might serve to change the owners' incentives a bit.

Admittedly this is easier to do in a rich country, which is probably why the horror stories are coming from the poorer ones.

277:

Heteromeles:

it was already on my borrow list, and one day soon (maybe this year's self-quarantine or next year's) when I want a reason to weep for lost generations of Russians I'll read it...

booze in moderation, good... vodka in large quantities results in horrors not limited to alcoholism and liver damage: Russian novels

nine hundred pages of loneliness, regret, starring at snow, sadness, and characters drowning themselves in vodka... and that's the typical children's book, eqv. to Dr. Suess, "Cat in the Hat"

278:

H Cats ... training ... NO
Many, many years ago, we had a monster stripy tom called Hermann { Originanlly as in "Hesse" but later as in "Göering" } - - then we got our first Birman, Fledermaus.
Hermann hissed a bit, then realised that "F" was a real "innocent" - H brought F a couple of live mice - after which he caught on, quickly.

As for dogs .... the only one I've ever had was a Borzoi ... who could catch almost anything.
She would then wash it, because that was what she had learnt to do with a stray kitten we'd adopted .....
Confused the hell out of a wild rabbit, once.

Rbt Prior @ 273
Big Oil knew about GW in the 1970's - AND - predicted climate change

279:

The Aotearoa example I linked above "someone" stole the ship that was worth anything and the one they left behind cost more to dispose of than the scrap was worth, even ignoring the wages and storage costs.

That particular example is stupid on a whole lot of levels because the kiwi fishing industry is fucked up. But the short version is that if they required a bond of any sort the fishing industry would be upset and since the fishing regulators are owned by the fishing companies it's not going to happen. The whole point of those boats was that they're cheaper to operate, and the legislation allowing that was explicit about that being the purpose - the whole point was to get rid of locally owned boats operated by local crews on local wages. Upping the cost with a bond would make that less profitable. There's not enough {sigh} in the world for that.

But also, this happens in Australia too, and anywhere else infected with neoliberalism even if it's not blatant economic suicide as in the UK right now. This story covers AU and UK:

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1332702/EU-supertrawler-margiris-brexit-news-fish-stocks-british-waters-greenpeace-dolphins-cfp

But there's also the French problem: https://www.bbc.com/news/46401558

And the Irish problem: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-55566214

None of it is "ghost boats" but it's all about minor complexities in the rules that aren't immediately obvious to very smart people from outside.

I'm not very smart, or very familiar with even local fishing rights let alone the international shipping industry in general, but I know enough to know that any cunning plan I think of is almost certainly ignorant and wrong. Just asking questions like "are there slaves on boats in NZ waters" quickly leads into a morass (answer: almost certainly).

281:

I wasn't talking about all these legal fal-de-rols and fripperies. I was talking about how the ship is registered somewhere as owned by a company, and if it is found abandoned (by sailing crew) the first person/company to get a towing line aboard and/or get the registered owner to accept an offer of a Lloyd's Open Form for salvage now effectively owns that ship and its contents, at least if they can get it to a port.

282:

Meanwhile, as we're close to comment #300, I thought I would just throw in this bunch of stills from a 1985 David Cronenberg movie, "Galaxy of Flesh", that doesn't exist outside of a very talented Midjourney AI "art" instance: David Cronenberg's Galaxy of Flesh (1985) (found via Metafilter).

283:

I had the experience of being a part of the neoliberalization of the offshore fishing fleet in British Columbia. To be clear, I didn't know what was happening, but once it happened it was painfully clear.

The Dept. of Fisheries decides that they want to get better control of just what is happening offshore. Until 1996, all they knew was that a bunch of boats went out to sea and came back with fish. Full stop. They did go out and take samples on occasion, but it is not an exaggeration to say that the sum total of actual scientific knowledge of the fish stocks, locations and various interactions was close enough to 'nil' as to not matter.

In 1995 there was a decision to begin gathering scientific information on every fishing vessel, starting in 1996. I was a part of that, going out on the boats on every trip.

Unbeknownst to me, there was also a decision to switch to Individual Vessel Quotas which could be traded between fishers. On paper it is a nice idea.

3 years later the switch to IVQs was done, and within about a year the fishery went from over 100 boats with crews that had shares in the catch down to a couple dozen almost entirely owned by a cabal of wealthy owners who had bought out everyone's quotas.

The quotas were set based on what a boat caught over a decade. The vessel I was on when the quotas were released were effectively finished in the industry - their quota was unworkable.

Once it was all done, the head of fisheries who had shepherded the whole thing into existence retired with a pension, and immediately went to work as a very highly paid consultant for the same cabal who just made a fortune.

It was at that point that I decided to leave the boats and return to university.

284:

Moz @ 279
I'd be very careful indeed, about using the All-Station-Stopper as a source.
It's foamingly, rabidly pro-Brexit to the exclusion of anythhing else. Even more suspect than the Daily Hate-Mail for accurate reporting, if that's possible.

285:

None of it is "ghost boats" but it's all about minor complexities in the rules that aren't immediately obvious to very smart people from outside.

I think we've got a multi-person/mult-subject tangle here, so I'm going to try to disentangle it. I more-or-less agree with what you wrote, but that's not at all what I was talking about. Meanwhile, Paws is pursuing a half-sided argument and getting confused.

First thing: the multiplicity of different things referred to as "ghost ships" is a real problem, because each one has a different set of laws attached, so far as I'm aware.

What I'm particularly grumping about is calling autonomous ships ghost ships. Thinking about it more, this should (and likely soon will) go away, because various boffins are crafting new Laws of the Sea to deal with these devices. My guess is that they'll end up be labeled as "cargo drones," notionally ships only when living crewmembers are aboard.

Why? Look at the YouTube I posted, with a ship depopulated by a T. Rex plowing into a dock. Autonomous vehicles do go out of control fairly regularly, whether they're carrying theropods or not. An out-of-control cargo ship is basically a very slow torpedo, especially in port. I suspect it will be treated as such by future Sea Laws, so a military can disable or sink it if it's going to cause damage and can't be stopped by lesser means.

This is unrelated to what you're talking about, which is abusive and destructive practices in crewed fishing vessels. Disentangling this by not calling them both "ghost ships" seems like a sane thing to do.

The issue here is control. In the past I've banged on about how the super-rich control their fortunes, because control is legally much more slippery than direct ownership. We both agree about this. Paws seems to be stuck on ownership, even though we keep pointing out that a paper corporation that owns a ship has very little control over it. Below, I'm going to refer to controllers (e.g. corporations that are calling the shots) and owners (which are likely paper corporations manipulated by agents of the controllers).

We also need to disentangle what the word control means for things like cargo drones (there's control of the drone, control of the ownership of the drone and its cargo, control of what can be done in which patch of water, etm), and what control means in terms of fishing vessels and abuses that happen thereon.

I'll sort this into two areas. One is what I wrote above, about how cargo drones and other autonomous vessels are governed and directly controlled. Another big bit of control is about how vessels, their cargoes, and their actions are owned versus controlled. Let's talk about the latter, because that's what I was getting at with the abandoned vessel solution I wrote about.

Now I'll acknowledge that my proposed solution for an abandoned, money-losing vessel almost certainly won't work, but I suspect the general strategies might be less useless.

I'd theorize (because I'll never be involved in doing this), the first step to dealing with these types of abandonment is forcing loss of control of a vessel (e.g. declaring it a wreck, so that previous ownership bollocks become irrelevant), followed by some attempt to make amends to those harmed by its actions.

If someone tries to regain control, try to force them into a situation where they can only regain control by proving ownership. The reason for this is that legally ownership is more vulnerable than control, which is why the super-rich all prefer control over ownership.

Third, to the degree that controllers are externalizing their losses by abandoning ships and people, try to set up systems where it's more uneconomic to abandon stuff than it is to deal with the problems in a just manner. This may involve financial penalties, loss of reputation, launching guided insurance harpies after the cheats, whatever.

Now, if an ignoramus like me can think of all this, I'm quite sure that there are people out there who spend their entire careers doing this in real life, and that what they're doing is considerably more sophisticated than what I just laid out. I'm also pretty sure that what I laid out includes a bunch of unattainable ideals, mostly around things like justice and attacking control structures.

But that's where I am, at least. Hopefully it's a bit less confused now?

286:

Nah, that couldn't happen (oh, right, it's not the US),. Can't imagine why you'd pick 1 May, "Law Day" (oh, yes, that's US only)....

287:

Press "ok"? No, no, no. It's "abort, retry, fail?"

Unless there are regulations against Windows-controlled ships.

288:

Vodka in large quantities is not just Russian. sigh When we were together, my late ex (native Floridian) and I would go out every month and a half or two. I'd buy a 1.5L bottle of bourbon. She'd buy I think SIX 1.5L bottles of vodka. There was no backlog the next time we went out. Oh, and she was 5' (on a good day, stretching), and 105 lbs soaking wet.

She died in 2012 from complications of cirrhosis.

289:

WTF? Is it supposed to be a movie, or an AI-created idea of one? And what the hell is it supposed to be?

Btw, having looked at all the pics, one... if that it's the entrance to an ancient temple of Cthulhu, nothing is.

290:

We need a much larger view of what you're saying than just ships. There was a news story recently of an apartment building in NYC where the residents had complained and complained, and city inspectors came in, and found tons of violations... and the "management company" had no idea who the "real" owners were.

The original idea, over a century ago, of US anti-trust laws should have stopped that dead. Nope, they were gamed.

We need it much larger, preferably international treaty, to cover everything.

291:

"the first person/company to get a towing line aboard"

"Ahoy there, you wanting a tow into Yarmouth? ...Catch!"

292:

"Unless there are regulations against Windows-controlled ships."

Can't be, the US Navy would be restricted to brown-water operations without propulsion.

293:

I wasn't quite paying attention and Friday the 13th done snuck up on me!

294:

"The two questions are: what to do with them (other than intelligence testing - do they make better pets?) and more importantly, what do you feed them? They'll need more calories to support those brains, so they'll have to eat more."

I don't think diet is a problem. They're straight carnivores to begin with, so they're already on a decent brain-fuel diet, and they don't spend very much time consuming it. If they did need more energy you could always feed them the fatty parts of dead animals that the health food wankers keep moaning about when you feed them to humans.

I think the problem is more likely to be the other one. Excessively intelligent pets have a tendency to make a complete pain in the arse of themselves and/or go nuts from being bored shitless and start pulling themselves to pieces for something to do. Monkeys and parrots are probably the best-known examples, but there are plenty of others, already including some specimens from the upper ends of the intelligence distribution of "ordinary" pet species.

296:

Now, if an ignoramus like me can think of all this, I'm quite sure that there are people out there who spend their entire careers doing this in real life, and that what they're doing is considerably more sophisticated than what I just laid out.

The problem, and you seem to know it full on, is that the other side, the "controllers" have what to the good guys is an unlimited pot of lawyer money to throw at defeating every action and rule the good guys try and enact.

On an aside, I captured the entire series "West Wing" as the HLN network aired it over the holidays. Gradually watching it. This issue plays as a major sub plot in 2 episodes.

297:

and the "management company" had no idea who the "real" owners were.

Ever looked into the ownership practices of the large conglomerates of South Korea?

298:

that's the typical children's book, eqv. to Dr. Suess, "Cat in the Hat"

You might wanna be careful with Dr Suess books around children. Apparently reading the wrong one can get you in trouble with school authorities, even if they've previously approved the book…

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/olentangy-schools-official-cuts-off-212431376.html

299:

Pretty much, except that you have to get a man from your crew aboard to catch the line, since there are no crew.

300:

Pigeon @ 291
CORRECTION: "Ahoy there, you wanting a tow into YarInnsmouth? ...Catch!"

301:

I was so convinced that was a real 80s movie I checked Cronenberg's filmography wiki, and got nothing. So I googled the title and learned it's all just a leisure time internet amusement posted by Keith Schofield, an L.A. director of commercials. True movie fans are so perturbed he's already gotten three death threats. All he did was type stuff like 'Cronenberg body horror style Empire Strikes Back' into an A.I. Image generator.

302:

Hopefully it's a bit less confused now?

Yeah, you've split out the different aspects very clearly.

I think the ownership side of control is very much part of the "but billionaires" problem. If they're not exactly the same they will be as soon as one side is closed off.

The technical side strikes me as being a use case for a bloody big battery as part of the diesel-electric drivetrain, because batteries need less maintenance and have fewer failure modes than diesels. The difference between boarding a completely passive ship and one that has maneuvering ability is significant, even ignoring the "wouldn't it be nice if it beached over there rather than hitting these rocks" aspect. OTOH "big battery" in this context might mean minutes of main engine operation rather than hours.

But that's a whole different level of complexity and I'm not Nick the Naval Architect :)

Interesting side not, there's now remote controls for UK canal boats that use series hybrid drives. Combo of bow thruster and main engine running on battery lets people play remote control boats with their home. The target market is people who don't like (or can't) climbing ladders in locks... 10 foot of slimy vertical ladder to get from boat to lock controls is near worst case. But just generally for single handed boats locks are a PITA because you want to operate the lock and the boat at the same time.

303:

That is hilarious. It's as though the doofus didn't even skim a summary of the book before approving it.

I always thought "The Lorax" made a great economics textbook. It's about the importance of getting biggerer and biggerer and how the economy matters more than anything else.

304:

ISTR that there was a terminal trick for weaponising email, and this was first used in the mid-70s (1974?). Some terminals had function keys that could be programmed by embedding codes in the regular text. So it was a trivial matter to put those codes into an email. When the programmed text for a function key was a command for the reader's OS, that could be an exploit. No doubt it would've also worked over Usenet and other communication systems.

While I've only read about this attack, perhaps someone else here has seen it used. My only experience using such a terminal was on a machine with no networking or email. However, I quickly discovered the function key programming codes in the terminal's manual.

I don't recall a max length on the string, but I can imagine a lot of damage could be done with a short command. The

Sorry for the late reply. I was waiting for this thread to pass #300.

While trying to find the source for the anecdote above, I found this "cat vs keyboard with function keys" tale instead: https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/16/77#subj6

305:

Or as I like to call it, after first watching it a couple of years ago: "Oh this is what it's like when there's a grown-up in the White House".

306:

One thing cargo ships are is enormous, they would have room for batteries. I have heard of some people exploring the idea of container batteries. If made modular, they could be added or subtracted from the ship depending on how far it intends to travel.

For non-urgent cargo we may also see a return to sail, though much different than before (and hopefully a lot safer).

Outside of very narrow use cases I have a hard time imagining an entirely uncrewed ship on the ocean. Oceans are vast, and the variables are many. Even supercargo ships find themselves in unexpected situations occasionally. More likely we will see ships with a skeleton crew of maybe 3-5 people - enough to keep a 24 hour watch, identify and deal with random variables, and enough that if one person drops their metaphorical basket the rest can take over and guide the ship to safety.

Those crew might not actually drive the ship 99% of the time (much like pilots and jumbo jets now), but they will be there for the random things.

Of course, there will likely remain a profit case for dangerous, ill-maintained boats full of scared underpaid crew. A good argument for what Graydon called a 'thanes taxes', but that would be a digression.

307:

Those crew might not actually drive the ship 99% of the time

I'm pretty sure that's how it works now. Autopilots are common on boats (obviously anything singlehanded needs a couple), and I have a loose idea that bigger boats get supervised after someone programs the course. The skill/AI task is in working out which course best balances speed,cost,damage etc.

308:

One idea that was mooted back in the 1990s was the idea of a convoy of unmanned cargo ships travelling in formation, commanded by a manned lead ship. Each ship had a helipad and a maintenance crew could be moved to any of the unmanned ships experiencing problems via helicopter.

The plan was overcomplex and overtaken by the building of larger and larger individual ships, especially container carriers. The current world record holder can carry 24,000 twenty-foot containers, back in the 1990s the biggest container ship afloat carried just over 6000 containers.

309:

Rocketpjs:

please define or provide a link to...Graydon called a 'thanes taxes'

310:

As Rocketpjs noted on January 14, 2023 at 00:07 in #306:

One thing cargo ships are is enormous, they would have room for batteries.

One particular battery chemistry would seem well-suited to maritime use:

https://essinc.com/iron-flow-chemistry/

Here's a YouTube video about them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxGP9cYbwdk

311:

Has anyone else been following the gigantic dumpster fire over at Wizards of the Coast? They've apparently forgotten that they don't have customers so much as they have an ecosystem which is interlaced with a community, and are attempting to monetize everything - including other people's intellectual property.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-how-dds-open-gaming-license-may-have-become-trap-creators

https://gizmodo.com/dungeons-dragons-ogl-announcement-wizards-of-the-coast-1849981365

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/beyond-belief-hasbrowizards-meltdown-burning-down-dd-axel-cushing/

https://www.thegamer.com/wizards-of-the-coast-ogl-changes-delayed-dungeons-and-dragons/

312:

I can just imagine some bright 12 year old trying who dislikes doing homework and just wants to play video games trying to build a copy/sim for that purpose. The homework would get done, but not the learning. Or that sim is so like the kid that it in turn builds a sim-sim to do the homework so it can play vid games, etc.

This is the plot of The Labors of Juliet, by a guy I know. The protagonist Juliet-178 had a scheduling problem; then she realized that she had a scheduling problem, access to spare robot parts, and a mandate to "solve problems." This played out exactly like anyone who'd ever seen television sitcoms would expect.

(Series note: Juliet-178 is one of the Copper-Colored Cupids, AI driven robots given vague instructions and left unsupervised. That plays out as you'd expect, too.)

313:

You may even be able to get passable facsimile of a xanth novel out of peirs anthony trained bot but why would you want to?

Indeed. An adventure hook in a cyberpunk RPG I ran once was the escape of a Piers Anthony emulation AI from its sandbox; at the time of the adventure it had spammed the internet with several hundred Xanth novels and nobody knew how to make it stop.

The PCs were interested in other problems.

314:

Some more links to battery electric container shipping:

Rapid battery cost declines accelerate the prospects of all-electric interregional container shipping

Snippets from article:

  • At battery prices of US$100 kWh−1, the TCP of a battery-electric container ship is lower than that of an ICE equivalent over routes of less than 1,000 km—without considering the costs of environmental and health damages.
  • With policy support to internalize the environmental costs of HFO and near-future battery prices of US$50 kWh−1, routes upwards of 5,000 km can be electrified cost-effectively.
    • The primary constraint for cost parity of battery-electric ships with ICE ships over longer ranges is the battery cost.
    • Battery prices need to reach US$20 kWh−1 for a 10,000 km range battery-electric ship capable of crossing the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean to be cost-effective without recharging.
    • Current commercial lithium battery technologies, and emerging technologies such as solid-state batteries, are not projected to decline to this extent given the cost of the materials used in these batteries.
    • However, battery technologies designed for long duration storage applications from low-cost materials are under development. Iron–air batteries, for example, offer comparable energy density at a fraction of the cost of current lithium-ion batteries and may offer pathways for cost-competitive long-range shipping

Articles on iron flow batteries (iron-air) from ESS (Energy Warehouse) and Form Energy - both part-owned by Breakthrough Energy Ventures:

Containerized battery swapping scheme:

315:

I have two reactions: first, we do not want those mice to escape.

From the National Institute of Mental Health, right. I read that book many times as a child and loved it, but I'd rather it remain fiction.

316:

My personal pipe dream would be circular flows of supertankers moving rechargeable flow battery energy between areas with high sun / wind energy sources and locations with low / intermittent renewable energy sources.

317:

Martin Rogers @ 304 ... Cats & keyboards ....
Many years ago ( late 1970's ), before good graph-plotting programmes were easily available, someone brought out a (very) basic graph-plotter.
You pinned & sheet of paper down, plonked a pen-equipped "tracer" on one corner, specified the paper size & the input the graph equations & off it went.
Of course, this device had trailing cables.
I nearly wet myself when reading the "PCW" review of this device.

  • Apparently, the writer/tester's cat came in whilst this was whirring & drawing away ....
    Pounce! / bite / chew / kick (etc)
    Once he'd managed to remove the now very-battered chew toy away from fluffikins, it didn't really work any more, so his report was a little .. truncated ... & it had to be returned to the makers, with apologies + claw & toothmarks ....
318:

One thing cargo ships are is enormous, they would have room for batteries. I have heard of some people exploring the idea of container batteries. If made modular, they could be added or subtracted from the ship depending on how far it intends to travel.

You really don't want containerized batteries! Too much risk of a stack being toppled in mid-voyage by a super-wave, or of cable connectors being crimped or otherwise damaged in a high-corrosion environment with saltwater (a conductor) all over the place. There's a significant fire risk from modern high-capacity cells if you do that, and while other battery types are available (lead-acid, ion flow batteries, and so on) they're less energy-dense so occupy more cargo space.

Bunker oil has the huge advantage (logistically) of being energy dense and relatively inert -- it takes a lot of effort to set fire to the stuff. (You have to heat it up to make it runny enough to pump into the engine room.)

Whacky/stupid idea: why not harvest phytoplankton, dry it out on salt pans, add an emulsifying agent and a bit of water, and burn that, kind of like orimulsion?

319:

Each ship had a helipad and a maintenance crew could be moved to any of the unmanned ships experiencing problems via helicopter.

This also faces the additional problem that (a) helicopters are expensive and delicate, and (b) ships are most likely to run into trouble in storms, which helicopters are famously not great at dealing with. So just when you need to land a crew on a drifting ship most urgently, the crew can't get airborne ...

320:

The skill/AI task is in working out which course best balances speed,cost,damage etc.

I think there's also an element of interpreting unexpected situations and events. Take this with a grain of salt because it's second-hand pub-talk from over 20 years ago. A gentleman who used to make regular appearances at a certain pub in Canberra, and whom I got friendly with enough to drink with pretty often, claimed to be a former merchant marine officer and told the following story. He'd been 3rd mate on a container ship and on watch in the middle of the night somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. The ship encountered a large oceanic whirlpool, and performed a perfect 180º course change with no steering inputs whatsoever. He brought the ship back to its original course, with slight deviation to miss the whirlpool, and called the first mate. The first mate refused to believe him and ordered re-adjusting to the original course. The ship went through the same 180º course change on re-encountering the whirlpool. The first mate then ordered the same correction and deviation, saying "we are NOT telling the captain about this".

I'm still not sure whether I believe this story, or whether it's just the sort of story sea folks tell to land folks. Bloke was likeable enough, but the sort you keep some distance with.

321:

Not really plausible, even in the olden days. These days in a modern boat they would get an angry phone call from someone half way through the first 180 saying "WTF are you drunk". Even shitty little tramp steamer type things have AIS and electronic course monitoring, albeit I suspect in some cases it's "the captain has a phone with a GPS". Either way there's an electronic log rather than just a paper record.

But every single boat records every change of course etc, and unless they focussed really hard and moved the ship with their minds there's going to be issues with lost distance. A given ship will by and large go at a fixed speed and everyone knows if that changes because the engine noise is not really background, it's there AND YOU NOTICE. Like staying in a remote town that has a generator shed. Or a roadhouse etc that has a generator. It's always there and after you've lived there for a while you too notice if the noise changes, because that means your fridge might stop working.

Anyhoo, someone will review the course every shift change, and note proposed vs actual, then write down their excuses for any difference.

So there's two whirlpool options: it's so small that going through it twice didn't change their distance made good for the watch, but also so big that the change in direction wasn't perceptible to the sort of people who wake up and visit the bridge when the swell changes; or it was so big that they moved a couple of nautical miles off course and someone going to be asking pointy questions because lying in the log is a crime as well as an offence against all that is right and proper in the world. Even small ships have surprisingly large turning circles, especially if you want to turn without waking the boss up.

Even in shitty operations there's a whole lot of people watching every move the ship makes, from the cargo owners to the boat owner to the various maritime rescue services to satellite operators selling data to everyone from the US navy to high speed trading quants who want to know exactly when that 25kg of scrap aluminium is going to be tradeable.

The big thing is that while the owner/controller of the operation can lie to all and sundry, the crew cannot lie to the owner. In lawful operations that leads to demotion at best, blackballing at worst. The ones that consider crew as disposable ... piss them off and I suspect that disposable is the best you can hope for.

322:

Troutwaxer:

blame it on the MBAs yet another bunch of fracking amoral soulless beancounters seeking to squeeze WOTC for every possible penny in the short term whilst ignoring the longer term opportunities for vaster profitablity... #4Q_MBA

whitroth:

"first, we do not want those mice to escape."

as of it was necessary for hyper-intelligent mice to escape prior to getting their freak on... "Pinky & The Brain" being but one such scenario... my suspicions keeping me up at night is the mice are there inside the walls and have been doing things to bring about the destruction of humanity... never mind SkyNet we ought be exterminating those vile vermin who encouraged: the revival of the hoola-hoop to wreck human spines; Putin to invade Ukraine; Trump to run for office; UK Parliament to Brexit;

yeah... it was gene-spliced mice...

323:

Ahh, yes. Plotters. I may not have read that review, but I remember reading other plotter reviews, mainly in the early 80s.

Now we have these lovely new fabricator machines that look a lot like plotters, but they do more than put ink on paper. So, obviously, even more fun for felines!

324:

The unmanned convoy ships idea was a solution to a problem current at that time, the rapid rise of shipping traffic and the lack of crews to man the new ships needed to carry low-cost goods from the East Asian sweatshops to their markets in the West. The real solution was very much larger container ships with similar crew sizes plus the invention of the "floating brick" school of Naval architecture that managed to increase usable hull volume while at the same time getting more range per tonne of bunker fuel out of the increasingly large engines used to propel the new designs.

325:

amalgamy @ 316: My personal pipe dream would be circular flows of supertankers moving rechargeable flow battery energy between areas with high sun / wind energy sources and locations with low / intermittent renewable energy sources.

Its a nice idea, and I've wondered the same thing myself. But OTOH would it work out cheaper than the equivalent amount of energy being moved by HVDC cable? I suspect not.

326:

Paul, I agree: Shipping battery power is almost certainly not the most energy efficient, nor the most cost efficient method.

Long distance HVDC likely would transport energy more cheaply, quickly, and efficiently. And, aside from cable cuts/embargoes, HVDC probably would be more reliable.

However, if Iron Flow energy storage works well enough, then transporting large quantities of wet, salty, rust could both deliver energy and provide energy storage capacity for whatever local energy sources are available in places with inadequate sunlight/wind/etc. Whether carried in containerized batteries, tanks, or fixed pipelines.

Maximum efficiency is not my highest priority. That would be providing sufficient energy - without generating additional greenhouse gasses - in places where people may otherwise suffer/die due to lacking local renewable energy sources.

I think of it as an exercise in existential economics: e.g. what would someone pay for their next lungful of air, or not to starve/freeze to death. Rather than in terms of deciding how to allocate discretionary resources and balance a budget.

327:

It's largely a myth. Yes, many terminals were programmable, but most used non-character keys to initiate the sequence, and most of those that didn't responded to the keystrokes not displayed text. Also most mailers suppressed junk characters - Email was a plain text interface until later than that. While I heard reports of it occurring, they were all hearsay. On the other hand, I have used terminals/emulators which it WAS possible to program from the far end (just not quite in that way).

328:

Yeah, I find that unsuprising. Thanks.

I've written parsers for things like line input, text editors, compilers etc, and read a lot of code for these things by other people. Most of this code rejects invalid codes, and most non-displayable characters are treated as invalid.

This was easy enough with ASCII, but Unicode, and rich text in general, complicates things.

Now we have the "Trojan Source" problem. I look at all my text-parsing code and ask, what should my code do with Bidi codes? Three options immediately present themselves: warn or reject on detecting Bidi codes, or simply ignore the problem. Then the choice for the programmer becomes: hardcode one of these options or leave the choice to the user, with a default choice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Source

I've always tried to follow the ACM code of ethics "do no harm" dictum. How does that work here? It's hard to avoid suprises, but I can try to minimise the unpleasantness. Again, how does that work here? I've yet to find a consensus on this specific problem in the compiler world. Perhaps it's still too early. After all, where are the exploits?

I've resisted commenting on the original topic for this thread, but you can probably make some guesses about my position. You might even be close.

329:

I have and I'm finding it hilarious that yet another pointy haired boss is/are clueless about the relationship they have with their customers and the companies that use the OGL.

You have a very varied community of players that are used to grasping multiple hundred page rule books then go looking for the edge cases to exploit. To think they wouldn't be able to quickly understand what WotC were trying to do and not be angry is the height of stupidity (or arrogance).

I feel it can be easily compared to what's happened/happening at Twitter.

330:

Another vote for Bob :-)

Bob is a computer programmer/engineer, super-geek whos mind ends up in a black box used to pilot a stl space ship. He uses his skills to build his own VR world to stop from going mad.

Part of the story is that at his destination he should build new black boxes/space ships and download copies of himself into them. He produces 3 copies which are similar but not identical, each differing in specific ways emphasing one aspect of his personality and de-emphasing others.

As each generation appears they become less like the original bob. Also, factionalism occurs between different groups of "bob" but I'd say they all do hold the original bob in partial reverence/awe.

331:

and replying to my own post one of the things he can do with the black box is to vary the processor speed which produces an effective time distortion effect. Slow time down when in danger, speed it up through the boring vastness of space.

332:

Howard NYC - a 'Thanes taxes' is from Graydon Saunders' Commonweal books. In effect, seeking to become rich, and more pointedly becoming rich (compared to the rest of society) is considered valid grounds for hanging. 'Paying a thane's taxes' is to be hung for wealth.

It is possible that I have misunderstood Graydon's intent, and since he is an occasional commenter on here I'll certainly defer to him. Meanwhile, if you haven't then you certainly must go out, buy his books and read them all.

333:

You could do something similar with ASCII (just the original 7-bit one, too). Backspace and carriage return are the most obvious way to do that and, Cthulhu help us all, C (and hence C++) allows them in the source (though it does not mandate them). Only in strings, but that's enough to create a program that behaves differently from the way it appears to, and I am sure that has been used in the Obfuscated C Contest. I have had trouble with that in documentation, when people used fancy overprinting to extend their character set, and the font I had was not the one they had.

334:

This also faces the additional problem that (a) helicopters are expensive and delicate, and (b) ships are most likely to run into trouble in storms, which helicopters are famously not great at dealing with. So just when you need to land a crew on a drifting ship most urgently, the crew can't get airborne ...

All this talk here of automated large cargo ships. Either what I've been reading about such ships, mil and civilian, over the years, most of the crew doesn't deal witht the propulsion. Most of the crew spends their time dealing with keeping it afloat. All those pumping systems for ballast, load tie downs, load power supplies, anchoring systems, and the untold number of things that need a bit of oil every now and again to keep moving.

In an environment where the most likely thing if the crew doesn't spend their time on such the most likely result is a big thing on the bottom.

The USN has an issue that with the latest ships they have seemed to relieved their crews of so much routine maintenance that when things go wrong the ship is out of action till the "contractor" can repair it. And it requires actual people with problem solving skills AND experience to deal with the situation. Those repair manuals on a DVD just don't cut it.

335:

Yeah. This is going to be a case-study in the business textbooks - why you need to know whether your business has customers, or is part of an ecosystem, and by the way, what kind of community does your ecosystem support?

Wizards kind of half-way backed down yesterday and nobody believed it. One phrased from the WoTC attempt to apologize (and it wasn't very good at all) was "Our job is to be good stewards of the game." To which a fan replied, "Wrong. We are the stewards of the game. You print books."

What the company really needs to do is feed their executives (and lawyers) to the beholders.

I play D&D once a week and am not DMing these days, so it's not a terribly big deal to me, but I'm watching with considerable shock (leavened with amusement) at how badly Wizards got it wrong.

And yes, I'd agree with you on the whole Twitter thing; not only that, but a whole range of other issues, ranging from the War in Iraq in 2003 to Ukraine to Windows 8 to Nokia to every other stupid mistake I've seen business and government make in the last few years - it's all a similar pattern of ignoring the experts!

336:

I should add that the executive in charge of all this came from Microsoft, and the whole thing may have happened due to a Hasbro investor feeling that WoTC was undermonetized. He tried to get Hasbro to spin WoTC off into its own company, which he imagined would have a very high share price.

337:

FWIW, the parsers in my compilers only support backspace except as a character constant. Same with tabs, newslines, carraige returns and space. If the language supports these constants, then the compiler lexer should also.

However, some languages support putting these characters, or any Unicode character, in identifier names. I can see ways to abuse that, like homographs. Nevermind the horrors of naming everything using emoticons. Mind you, I can understand the temptation to use certain emoticons for exception names, particularly the "fatal error" variety.

I've yet to see any code like that in the wild. I hope I never do, but it might be wise (see below) to support that feature if I ever release code for a language that requires it. I have such a compiler, but it's unreleased and the language has a subset rule that allows compliant implementations not supporting all features. If use of this feature ever becomes popular, and users of my compiler request support for it, I could reconsider. For now, that's a very big 'if', so I needn't worry about it.

I could at least put a warning and link to the ACM code of ethics in the manual. ;)

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2017/10/out-of-character-homograph-attacks-explained

https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics

338:

So what kind of compiler are you building?

339:

That what I said, but it is NOT true that the lexer should support them as input. In saner languages, it supports only the escape forms, not the raw character. My point was that it could problems like this ({BS} is the actual backspace character, not an escape):

char *s = "A{BS}B"; // "A\bB" does not have the same problem int n = s[0];
340:

Damn.

char *s = "A{BS}B"; // "A\bB" does not have the same problem

int n = s[0];

341:

Rocketpjs @ 306:

One thing cargo ships are is enormous, they would have room for batteries. I have heard of some people exploring the idea of container batteries. If made modular, they could be added or subtracted from the ship depending on how far it intends to travel.

I wonder how hard it would be to make the entire top layer of containers on one of those giant container ships out of "container batteries"? And have the tops of those battery containers covered in solar cells?

One "problem" that would have to be overcome is inter-connecting the battery containers & how the power would be transferred down to the ship's engines - but I think that might be a trivial problem - i.e. "trivial" in that engineers have solved that problem in other contexts; they would just have to adapt existing tech to build such a system.

342:

Paul @ 325:

amalgamy @ 316:
My personal pipe dream would be circular flows of supertankers moving rechargeable flow battery energy between areas with high sun / wind energy sources and locations with low / intermittent renewable energy sources.

Its a nice idea, and I've wondered the same thing myself. But OTOH would it work out cheaper than the equivalent amount of energy being moved by HVDC cable? I suspect not.

HVDC cables works great if you can put your solar collectors somewhere on dry land (like the Sahara Desert), but how would you use them to exploit solar radiation falling on the middle of the ocean?

343:

John at 341 in reply to Rocketpjs at 306 - Obvious issues are that:-
1) The top level of each stack is not a constant.
2) At each port you now have to offload the top container from each stack that is to be partially or fully unloaded, and then replace those containers before the ship sails again.
3) This is maybe an edge case of (2), but ATM the intent is to turn the ship around in the minimum time at each port of call. Forcing the unloading and reloading of the top level of containers will certainly increase turnaround time.

344:

Well the "let's not tell the captain" bit, although the punchline, was the bit I found hardest to believe. I don't remember enough of the context to say whether he himself had a point to the story, other than just telling a wild story, which to be fair doesn't really rely on any much of it being true.

But my point was more about human crew needed to interpret and deal with "can't happen"/"not there" events and situations. I guess there's a whole world of discussion about AI and black swans. While navigation AIs have a main concern in positions and courses, and the instruments for determining those, I'm sure that there must be existing art in feeding deck camera images into pattern recognition. Not just for onboard processes, but for environmental analysis. I suppose there's a question about how deep AI needs to be for that to add up to something that can interpret a whirlpool based on observations.

345:

Note: The first link in 314 is an open access paper in Nature Energy, here are some relevant excerpts:

Rapid battery cost declines accelerate the prospects of all-electric interregional container shipping

Published: 18 July 2022

Jessica Kersey, Natalie D. Popovich & Amol A. Phadke

Nature Energy volume 7, pages 664–674 (2022)

Abstract

International maritime shipping—powered by heavy fuel oil—is a major contributor to global CO2, SO2, and NOx emissions. The direct electrification of maritime vessels has been underexplored as a low-emission option despite its considerable efficiency advantage over electrofuels. Past studies on ship electrification have relied on outdated assumptions on battery cost, energy density values and available on-board space. We show that at battery prices of US$100 kWh−1 the electrification of intraregional trade routes of less than 1,500 km is economical, with minimal impact to ship carrying capacity. Including the environmental costs increases the economical range to 5,000 km. If batteries achieve a US$50 kWh−1 price point, the economical range nearly doubles. We describe a pathway for the battery electrification of containerships within this decade that electrifies over 40% of global containership traffic, reduces CO2 emissions by 14% for US-based vessels, and mitigates the health impacts of air pollution on coastal communities.

Main

Transporting 11 billion tonnes annually, the maritime shipping industry handles nearly 90% of global trade by mass1,2. The industry’s meteoric growth has been underpinned by access to cheap, energy-dense heavy fuel oil (HFO).

-- snip --

Using the best-available battery costs and energy densities, we examine the technical outlook, economic feasibility and environmental impact of battery-electric containerships. We define two scenarios: first, a baseline scenario using today’s best-available battery costs, HFO costs, battery energy densities and renewable energy prices; and, second, a near-future scenario that tests the impacts of projected 2030 improvements in these variables. By contrast to most previous studies, we treat the volume repurposed to house the battery energy storage (BES) system as an opportunity cost instead of a fixed technical constraint. We specify eight containership size classes and model their energy needs, their CO2, NOx and SO2 emissions, and total cost of propulsion (TCP) across 13 major world trade routes—creating 104 unique scenarios of ship size and route length that can be compared with almost any containership operating today. We focus on battery-electric containerships and briefly explore the implications of our results for electrifying other ship types. Our results suggest that over 40% of global containership traffic could be electrified cost-effectively with current technology, reducing CO2 emissions by 14% for US-based vessels, and mitigating the health impacts of air pollution on coastal communities.

The search for low-emissions pathways for maritime shipping

In the short term, most ship operators have turned to energy efficiency measures such as slow steaming (deliberately reducing a ship’s cruising speed to reduce fuel consumption), route optimization and hull fouling management to meet IMO mandates16. However, the 10–15% emissions reductions achievable through these measures are not sufficient to comply with forthcoming IMO efficiency regulations17,18. Hybrid battery technology has been explored a viable short-term solution to reduce—but not eliminate—emissions from fossil-fuel energy sources. One study suggests a best-case scenario for hybrid systems is only 14% reduction in emissions for dry bulk carriers (comprising 2% of global fleet emissions)19, not substantially better than the existing energy efficiency measures. Small modular nuclear reactors, which have been used in military and submarine applications for decades20, are a viable alternative, but are unlikely to achieve wide-spread deployment in commercial vessels given the regulatory challenges surrounding nuclear proliferation, safety and waste disposal. Marine gas oil, liquefied petroleum gas, liquefied natural gas, methanol and their bio-derivations have received substantial attention as medium- to long-term options, but recent research has questioned the potential of these fuels to reach cost parity and considerably reduce lifecycle GHG emissions21,22,23. Not all transport modes are viable candidates for immediate and direct electrification; commercial jet planes cannot reasonably be electrified until battery pack specific energy increases to three to ten times their current values24. It is within this context that propulsion technologies generated with renewable power have received the most attention. For example, blue hydrogen (hydrogen produced from natural gas with carbon capture and storage) is expected to reduce GHG emissions by only 20% compared with burning natural gas25. Although renewably produced ammonia and hydrogen provide operational emissions reductions, the inefficiency of the production process relative to HFO makes them unlikely to become sufficiently cost-competitive to displace fossil fuels26,27. By contrast, direct electrification is typically five times more efficient than e-fuels in the transportation sector, exclusive of losses from e-fuel transport and storage27.

By contrast to other modes where battery weight dramatically reduces payload capacity or range, such as light-duty vehicles and planes, the sheer size of containerships means that the additional weight from the battery can potentially be offset with a smaller percentage forfeiture of cargo. Past work has suggested that battery electrification of marine vessels is unfavourable given the low energy density of batteries relative to hydrocarbon fuels28,29,30,31. However, their assumptions about battery energy density and cost are outdated, differing in some cases by one to two orders of magnitude from today’s best-available figures of 210 Wh kg−1 specific energy32 and US$100–134 kWh−1 (ref. 33). Furthermore, these studies assumed that the maximum battery capacity is limited by the existing onboard space dedicated to mechanical propulsion systems and fuel storage, so their findings suggest that battery-electric ships would require several recharges to traverse even short routes.

Technical feasibility of battery-electric container shipping

The key technical constraint for battery-electric container shipping is the volume of the battery system and electric motor relative to the volume occupied by a vessel’s existing engines, fuel storage and mechanical space. The extra weight of the BES system is, however, non-trivial in determining a vessel’s power requirements. Operationally, containerships can increase their carrying capacity by increasing draught (that is, the vertical distance between the waterline and the keel) on the basis of the Archimedes principle. A higher draught increases the hull resistance, and thus more power is required to achieve the same speed. On voyages less than 5,000 km, we find that the necessary increase in power is less than 10% of the original power requirements. For example, for a 5,000 km range small neo-Panamax ship, we estimate that a 5 GWh battery with lithium iron phosphate (LFP) chemistry, with a specific energy of 260 Wh kg−1 (ref. 34), will weigh 20,000 t and increase the draught by 1 m—a small fraction of the ship’s total height and well within the bounds of the vessel’s Scantling (maximum) draught. For voyages longer than 5,000 km, the increase in draught exceeds the vessel’s Scantling draught.

The distribution of additional weight also impacts the hydrodynamics, aerodynamics, stability and energy consumption of a vessel35. Internal combustion engine (ICE) vessels use a ballast system whereby water tanks charge and discharge depending on the cargo load to distribute weight and counteract buoyancy. Case studies of fully electric or hybrid propulsion systems suggest that ballast systems can be partially or fully replaced by BES systems without substantial impacts to symmetry (trim) and balance by distributing battery components throughout existing void, mechanical and ballast spaces35. Furthermore, BES systems do not need to be arranged around a central drive shaft and can be more flexibly configured within the vessel’s interior12,36. The volume of an onboard BES system depends on the ship’s power requirements, cruising speed, voyage length, electrical efficiency and battery energy density. Containership energy consumption can be approximated with the Admiralty Law, a version of the propeller law that is widely used in first-order estimations of ship power requirements and fuel consumption37,38. Although a bottom-up approach to estimating energy requirements would incorporate additional terms, our objective is to capture the relative changes in energy requirements between the two propulsion methods.

346:

Personally, I would expect solar power plants on the ocean surface to be wrecked and sunk by storm-driven waves, but the BBC had an article this week on ocean-based "floatovoltaics" projects:

Could floating solar farms survive out at sea?

I was thinking more of shipping energy to northern latitudes from Southern Europe, Africa, Australia, and the Americas.

347:

"battery-electric containerships"

hmmm... how about?

recharging stations every 2,000 km in open ocean... each is a free floating island covered in PV cells... electric motors to keep it close to a set of published coordinates... a containership ties up alongside, plugs in for six hours and also takes on 25,000 liters of 'sweet' water... given human ingenuity and basic economic desperation my guess is there would be a combination fresh fish market and floating whorehouse (independent operation of recharge station) in close proximity... containership crews split into a pair of 3 hour liberty shifts...

348:

I was hoping nobody would ask that. ;)

It's a Scheme compiler for the R7RS Small dialect. The target is ANSI C using libguile, the runtime library from Guile Scheme. Perhaps someday I'll find the time to write my own runtime, but that'll only be when I can improve the code quality no other way. I anticipate many years of tweaking the backend to generate better and better quality C code.

I should add that my compiler performs whole-program anaysis, so the compiler runtime, the program and every library it imports are merged into one tree, which the compiler then specialises. At least one more major transformation follows that, before the code generator goes to work on the final code tree.

It's also designed to be self-hosting. Last year I got the compiler and its runtime libraries to the point where it can parse and perform semantic analysis on it's own source. Testing it on other people's code revealed many false assumptions, and therefore bugs in my code. Great fun!

This year I expect to write the first code for a very basic code generator, but much more work on earlier phases is needed before it'll be able to compile itself to C.

BTW, this is a great way to really learn a language. Not only does a self-hosting compiler force you to use the language, but making the code "understand" the language forces you to properly think about the semantics.

349:

Oh, they are indeed escape codes. Sorry, I should've made that clear.

I don't see anything in the identifier spec that allows arbitrary unicode characters to be written. Strings and comments are another matter, of course.

Thanks for prompting me to clarify that.

350:

RE: Cargo batteries.

You know, high voltage and sea water are two things that just sizzle together. I'm sure able seaman will want to work on a metal-hulled ship that has to recharge in the open ocean from an array of solar panels that generates surplus electrons when hit by sunlight.

My guess is that if we start shipping fuel, hydrogen will be preferred, since at least it burns upwards. If people are content with fairly massive energy losses, shipping large tanks of compressed air is probably far safer than shipping a comparable amount of highly charged lithium alloy.

Now someone will bring up airships...

Actually, if you like ultra-tech clean energy solutions...imagine if it turns out that properly-designed buckytubes make really, really good torsion springs. As a side-project from using them to build orbital beanstalks, someone gets the genius idea of powering cargo ships from a hold full of nanotubes. Just wind up the ship at one end, and it'll travel 5000 km or so. What could possibly go wrong with such a scheme...?*

*If nothing else, imagine putting this in a SF disaster movie. Two tightly-wound cargo ships collide under the Golden Gate Bridge. Where do all the pieces end up?

351:

recharging stations every 2,000 km in open ocean

It's definitely an idea.

Recharging is likely to be better than battery swaps at sea, but LFP will happily take a 10% to 90% SoC at 1C, so if you called that one hour you'd be more accurate than not I suspect. The cable cross section might be a bit scary to deliver 10GW of electricity to a big ship.

The problem is going to be the cost of building them and the limited duration when they'll be necessary. By the time you've build the first one (off Gibraltar, say) you may well find that every 5000km is all that's needed.

Then you need to be in the Pacific Ocean because that's named for the always-calm waters it experiences (/s). Docking to a floating solar island in the North Atlantic during a storm sounds difficult and likely destructive. The sort of thing they do using really amazing whizzbang computer-stabilised cranes that have terrifying capabilities but they're expensive and need a lot of maintenance.

It may end up being cheaper to just put bigger batteries in the boat and sail it straight across the Atlantic. Put the charging stations at places like Panama, Gibraltar, Suez etc, where there's land and in two of those there's conveniently a ship-to-shore connection for a few hours at a time already.

https://www.macgregor.com/Products/products/offshore-and-subsea-load-handling/offshore-cranes/

352:

I may have mentioned this rant about airships before? https://sustainability.stackexchange.com/questions/2425/how-sustainable-are-cargo-airships-compared-to-current-cargo-shipping-methods/2426#2426

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zklo4Z1SqkE Sabine Hossenfelder has a chat about hydrogen (today's video, even!) and how the answer is yeah nah. She doesn't focus on the best-case 30% efficiency of electricity-to-H2, she's mostly talking about density and fuel cells.

The problem of salt water and electricity is relatively easily solved, we have a whole lot of technology and experience in the field of "don't mix water and hydrocarbons when transferring them" (STS = ship to ship transfer for an easy start down that route). Electricity might actually be easier because the "pipes" hold zero "fluid" when not actively energised - you don't have to worry about losing 10 cubic metres of oil when you disconnect the pipe, you just say "alexa people stop charging" :)

353:

RE: "Donjuans and Dragoons" OGL meltdown...

Interesting bit on the timing of the revamped OGL license...

Hasbro and Paramount are set to release a big ol' CGI-heavy D&D movie set in Forgotten Realms on March 10, 2023, with potential sequels, spinoff live-action video series, and divers tie-ins to follow if it doesn't follow the last D&D movie into the underdark.

So two months before the release, we get this kerfuffle to alienate the fanbase.

Obsessive minds want to know: why now, both with the OGL revamp and the leak?

While I agree that the root cause is some combination of greed, fear, stupidity, and politics, if you want to go down the rabbit-hole, the question is whose greed, fear, stupidity, and politics?

(spoiler alert: I'm not interested in going further down the rabbit hole than what's in this post).

Basically WotC earned around $1.3 billion in 2021 (ca. $100 million profit), and that looks to be in the neighborhood of 20% of Hasbro's annual revenue. Thing is, they're touting this as a victory for Magic: The Gathering, not D&D. I couldn't find a breakdown for which property was bringing in what, but I think MtG is bigger?

Anyway, I might guess some part of the OGL kerfuffle could easily be top management stupidity, if there's general brand mismanagement in the divisions or the company as a whole.

Some part of it could be that the total amount to fund the movie is in the seven digits, and intellectual property mavens (in one or more companies involved) wanted to better secure the IP rights to make sure that knockoffs didn't take away their profits (maybe more so if they're worried they've got a bomb on their hands, and even I've seen rumor-mongering to this effect...)

It could in part be something about company politics, either alienation between the creatives and the financiers, squabbles between different divisions, or whatever.

Or it could in part be someone trying to short the parent company, which does have declining share prices.

Or it could, I suppose, be aliens.

Anyway, I'm not going further down the hole. Hanlon's Razor ("Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity") is probably a good enough explanation, as you and Phinch already figured out.

354:

See, I said someone would bring up airships...

I happen to agree with you, because I've been happily researching a steampunkish story with airships.

When you realize that the Hindenburg carried about 100 people across the Atlantic in five days and needed to be re-gassed every week, you pretty quickly realize why airships are at most a niche answer to almost every long-distance transportation problem. Re-gassed, in this case, means that the hydrogen cells leak, so they lose lift that way. Also the gas was vented, and ballast was dropped, to keep it trimmed. Bottom line was that it ran out of lift in around a week. Part of the cost for flying the zeppelin was generating the gas, which IIRC they did with tank farms of sulfuric acid and iron. Nowadays we've got someone better-sealed gas bags, and we can probably manage a tank-and-compressor setup to take the place of venting gas and dumping ballast, but airships are still comparatively huge and fragile for the loads they lift.

Now I have figured out a story that gets around these problems, but I'm not going to leak it here.

What I was talking about instead is replacing LNG tanker ships with compressed hydrogen tanker ships. As you noted, we have some experience with this technology. While we don't have extensive hydrogen pipelines, what could be done* is to use electrolysis to make hydrogen that gets shipped, if it turns out that hydrogen-proof tankage is cheaper than comparable storage batteries. You can use a fuel cell to get electricity out of the hydrogen in port or wherever (pipe the hydrogen to a portside tank farm that feeds fuel cells that link to the grid), so that you don't have to invest in a new piping infrastructure to move the hydrogen around. Some hydrogen could also be used to power the ship too, of course.

*Yes, I'm quite aware that efficient electrolysis is considerably more complicated than running electricity through water. I'm also aware that it's a real pain to keep hydrogen from leaking through materials, especially when words like sustianable and reusable get added to the spec sheet for the system handling it.

355:

One thing's for sure: they've just made sure the movie will bomb. (Why not wait until after the movie comes out to introduce their new license?)

356:

I'm guessing there will be a few situations where a short hydrogen pipeline will make sense, but HVDC with local hydrogen production will overwhelm in terms of sheer volume of energy moved. At least until we get "green hydrogen" or "pink hydrogen" (from nuclear fission plants - Hossenfelder's video mentions that option), at which point it's at least vaguely possible that shipping hydrogen might become popular.

The obvious answer is cryogenics, if the hydrogen isn't moving it's not percolating through walls... but hydrogen also has the annoying problem of only being liquid under quite ridiculous conditions. Hence the popularity of methane and ammonia. As Greta would say "blah blah blah"... now put the fossil fuels down and back away.

I suspect embrittlement will make pipelines infeasible. By the time you've finished installing a long one it'll be time to go back to the start and redo the first section. Which is fine for painting bridges, not so great for a pressurised tube :)

I wonder what happens to graphite when it's exposed to pressurised hydrogen? But that's another "lots of very smart people" topic. The fossil fuel people have lots of money to pay lots of people to greenwash their black hydrogen...

357:

Now someone will bring up airships...

It's happened every other time...

358:

I assumed the joke was that Heteromeles did so.

359:

While trying to find the source for the anecdote above, I found this "cat vs keyboard with function keys" tale instead...

The rarest, and now obsolete, cat vs computer story I remember dates from the late 1980s.

Once upon a time there was a BBS (remember those?) which was suffering intermittent disconnection problems. Users reported logging in just fine, then getting dumped without warning. This went on for months, only occurring once in a while and showing no obvious pattern.

Eventually the BBS owner happened to be out in his garage where the computer and modem lived (remember modems?), at the time a call came in, and when the cat was there. The modem answered the phone and made electronic squealing noises; the cat leapt up and hissed back, and batted wildly at the modem until it hit the right button and the evil screaming box stopped screaming.

The human reset the modem to answer the phone silently and the mysterious disconnections stopped.

360:

here's something fun for those enjoying the latest shitstorm drowning the western coast of North America...

https://poweroutage.us/

given the near-certainty of grid failures -- levels of epic fail -- when the USA experiences another record breaking summer this is gonna be seriously lit up in all the wrong colors

361:

what now fascinates me about "battery-electric containerships" is crazy notion of a recharging station in the middle of various oceans which ends up as a semi-illicit gathering place (much as B5 or DS9 were 'watering holes') and therefore colorful for certain modes of dispersal of blood-red-dollar-green-etc

adding to the funkiness... floating airports for all-electric aircraft... that's where the trade off between non-stop convenience is at war with maximizing cargo tonnage... for flights between Japan and western edge of North America it likely would require two landings each for an hourlong charge up... and likely passengers would be keen for gambling, sex, booze, or ultra fresh sushi

now imagine what #netflix would do with that as basis for an open-ended anthology series...

362:

Signs that the tories are getting desperate - this is "almost" a call for UBI.
I hope it's too late, though.
Meanwhile, the open money-shovelling corruption goes on

H @ 350: - Now someone will bring up airships..
ditto Moz @ 362
H @ 354: - LZS 129 Hindenburg was 1936 ... Things have moved on, just a little, in the intervening 87 years!

Meanwhile: "Airlander" have, um, "landed" a definite order (orders?) - this should be watched closely.

363:

The left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing seems the simplest answer and I agree it's not going to be a good situation for the movie.

I'd heard of Paizo and Pathfinder but knew nothing of the companies background but it seems like its WotC (laughably) biggest competitor (it's tiny in comparison) and the OGL changes were aimed at them.

What I've since found out is the company was built by WotC staff from that time and they created the OGL.

I've visions of the following court scene:

Current WotC mgmt and Legal team: When the OGL was created it did not mean what the opposing side is saying it meant.

Paizo mgmt and legal team: We were the WotC mgmt and legal team at that time and it means exactly what we're saying it meant. And here's the contempory documentary proof.

As IANAL I'm not sure how well it would stand up in court. :-)

364:

Two tightly-wound cargo ships collide under the Golden Gate Bridge. Where do all the pieces end up?

Any sufficiently-high-tensile-strength buckytube cable suitable for space elevators would be amazingly good for building cable-stay bridges, so I imagine the current actually-existing GG bridge will by that point be a quaint national monument and foot/bicycle path -- real traffic/freight/trains going over a much wider, faster bridge nearby.

For your actual example of progress in bridge-building over a century and a third (but not including fullerene cables), see the Forth Bridges.

365:

As Clarke pointed out in 1979 (Fountains of Paradise), though he was thinking of mere diamond. We might even be able to build a viable Boris Bridge! :-)

366:

https://poweroutage.us/

That would be more enlightening if it had an option to show percentages…

I mean, 10k customers out in California is actually not too bad given the population (0.18% of customers). That's the equivalent of 700 customers in North Dakota, but the map won't light up for North Dakota until it gets to 10k customers, which is the equivalent of 364k customers in California.

So as configured, it will basically be a heat map of population.

367:

Bottom line was that it ran out of lift in around a week. Part of the cost for flying the zeppelin was generating the gas, which IIRC they did with tank farms of sulfuric acid and iron.

It ought in principle to be possible to replenish using electrolysis of water, and you can scavenge water vapour from the atmosphere (at least, at the sort of altitudes a semi-rigid airship flies at). Add a hull covered in thin-film PV panels and you've got your power supply -- also motive power. (Fuel cell/PV panels/electrolysis has already been used in the Hybrid Tiger prototype military UAV.)

However, compressed hydrogen tankage is a really marginal technology -- it's not very energy-dense even in liquid form, and liquid H2 is the devil's own fuel (as NASA's SLS folks can testify).

368:

which ends up as a semi-illicit gathering place (much as B5 or DS9 were 'watering holes') and therefore colorful for certain modes of dispersal of blood-red-dollar-green-etc

Unfortunately we already have watering holes where vast number of transient travelers rub shoulders and mingle semi-anonymously.

They're called international airport departure terminals, where passengers from incoming international flights transfer to outgoing departures (some internal, others heaving overseas).

This doesn't happen in the USA, where all international arrivals have to clear Immigration before they can change planes, but in many other nations you can go straight from the jetway to the departure gate for your onward connection, via the bar or duty-free shops or airside hotel or executive lounge if you so desire. (These airports trust security and border checks at the overseas locations they receive flights from.)

And alas for your fictional conceit, I have to confess that the international terminals at AMS and SIN and others do not resemble the sort of hive of scum and villainy you're thinking of. (For one thing, nobody is armed except the cops, with which those very clean, very tidily, overly-manicured places swarm ...)

369:

Any sufficiently-high-tensile-strength buckytube cable suitable for space elevators would be amazingly good for building cable-stay bridges, so I imagine the current actually-existing GG bridge will by that point be a quaint national monument and foot/bicycle path -- real traffic/freight/trains going over a much wider, faster bridge nearby.

Um, probably not so likely. And yes, I've walked across the Golden Gate Bridge multiple times and got my environmental education at UC Berkeley.

Problems include, in no particular order:

--No physical place to put another bridge.

--Uber-expensive real estate on both sides of the 'Gate.

--San Francisco's only local fresh water supply is near the south end of the bridge (it's a low-lying spring within the Presidio, which is why the Spanish built that Presidio on what was otherwise a miserable spit of sand and serpentine). Last I heard, it was a minor but essential part of the city's water supply.

--Oh yeah, sand and serpentine: the local geology sucks in some fascinating ways, and the San Andreas is just offshore. See the first point about lack of alternate sites.

--Rerouting the major highways on both sides of the 'Gate is an effing nightmare, for reasons both legitimate (where do you put the things?) and less legitimate (how do you pay the financial, legal, and political butchers' bills for condemning high end homes, museums, endangered plant and animal habitat, historical relics, national recreation area land, and so forth?).

Might they retrofit the Golden Gate with super-science materials? I suppose. It does get maintained regularly. Will another bridge link SF to Marin nearby? Probably not.

370:

Two tightly-wound cargo ships collide under the Golden Gate Bridge. Where do all the pieces end up?

The real point of absurdist, wind-up cargo ships is imagining how the buckyball ballista bundles inside them come apart, strand by strand, after an accident. Why stage it at the Golden Gate Bridge?

--It's been destroyed in so many CGI movies already that probably every major film studio has a virtual Golden Gate and environs on file somewhere.

--Wrapping two cargo ships around each other and around iconic bridge might be fun to watch.

--Presumably there would be multiple springs, and the progressive failure of each spring is an obvious way to add drama. Loud creaking noises, walls slowly start to bend, things buckle, break, and stuff and characters go flying.

--Given the rather strong tides through the Golden Gate, every time the tide turns, something else goes sproing, showering North Beach or Sausilito with more shipping containers.

371:

Why not go the whole hog and have the ships powered by antimatter? After all, when it all goes sproing and the energy gets loose, it doesn't matter how it was stored.

372:

Why not go the whole hog and have the ships powered by antimatter? After all, when it all goes sproing and the energy gets loose, it doesn't matter how it was stored.

For a goofy, low end disaster movie? Of course it matters how the energy is stored.

373:

what now fascinates me about "battery-electric containerships" is crazy notion of a recharging station in the middle of various oceans which ends up as a semi-illicit gathering place (much as B5 or DS9 were 'watering holes') and therefore colorful for certain modes of dispersal of blood-red-dollar-green-etc

So truck stops in international waters? It's an interesting idea. Currently it runs into the control problems Moz and I were talking about, namely that many crewmembers are from poorer countries and are serving under coercive conditions. Many of the ship captains may therefore have issues with letting them disembark.

adding to the funkiness... floating airports for all-electric aircraft... that's where the trade off between non-stop convenience is at war with maximizing cargo tonnage... for flights between Japan and western edge of North America it likely would require two landings each for an hourlong charge up... and likely passengers would be keen for gambling, sex, booze, or ultra fresh sushi

You're basically reinventing the intercontinental flying boat network from the Interwar years. While I agree that it's a logical solution, some of the critical Pacific Islands in the network are under great threat from climate change.

If you wanted Netflix to do it, playing it as a straight, near-future drama might work. After all, the coerced crewmembers are often islanders. More generally, I don't think the entertainment industry has yet realized just how much drama is intrinsic to switching civilization off fossil fuels. A high end electric airport on a slowly drowning Pacific island does bring this into focus. Whoever does figure this out first might well have a hit on their hands.

374:

No physical place to put another bridge.

Uber-expensive real estate on both sides of the 'Gate.

San Francisco's only local fresh water supply is near the south end of the bridge

Not to worry!

All these problems will go away right after the next Big One ripples along the fault.

375:

and liquid H2 is the devil's own fuel (as NASA's SLS folks can testify).

And they only have 40+ years of experience.

376:

There are worse fuels to handle, but not many of them unless you want to add radioactivity or super-criticality into the mix. (As wikipedia candidly remarks, in many ways NSWRs combine the advantages of fission reactors and fission bombs.)

377:

Rapid travel would be assured, one's arrival intact, at a single destination... not so much.

378:

All these problems will go away right after the next Big One ripples along the fault.

Heh.

Actually, most of the unreleased strain in the San Andreas is in the southern end of the fault

(irrelevent side note: the San Andreas runs northish out of the Gulf of Mexico, under the Salton Sea, turns left north of Palm Springs and jags through the north side of LA, then turns right/northish to head up the western side of the San Joaquin valley, after which it heads out to sea just south of San Francisco, then hits land at Pt. Reyes before heading back into the ocean. That dogleg near LA is what's wrinkling up the east-west trending mountains in the area. Seismologists AFAIK are looking at the fault near the Salton Sea as the focus for the Big One).

If you want to see the real California flustercluck in the making, google "Salton Sea lithium" and settle in with the refreshments and/or sedatives of your choice. Wrecking the Golden Gate is penny-ante in comparison.

And if you want to see the 3x-sized California flustercluck, google "Arkstorm." Speaking of rain in 2023....

379:

I just vanished down this absolutely fascinating rabbit hole on wikipedia (Fission-fragment rockets) and all I can say is good grief. Anything with an exhaust velocity of 3-5% of c and an Isp of over a million can best be described as "alarming" if you bear Niven's Law in mind ("any reaction motor is a weapon with lethality proportional to its efficiency as a rocket").

380:

"Salton Sea lithium" doesn't get anything other than geothermal energy and corporate exploitation.

381:

"Salton Sea lithium" doesn't get anything other than geothermal energy and corporate exploitation.

You've got to put the pieces together. Until we remove our crania from our anuses and start extracting lithium from trashed batteries, the Salton Sea is one of (or the) largest lithium sources in the US. It's also, as noted the major geothermal power plant for southern California (19 million people).

It's also in the middle of the sunniest piece of real estate in southern California, so there's a big push to maximize solar production in the area.

It's also the future epicenter for a magnitude 8 earthquake. That's when we get to find out how many of the facilities in the Salton Trough are built to withstand lateral accelerations greater than 1 gee. My guess is few, if any.

Put all the pieces together, and you get a Brexit-scale economic disaster, decades in the making and unfurling in about five rather loud minutes.

If you want to scale the economic disaster up by a factor of three, look at the ARkStorm simulation, which we may conceivably seeing in real life right now. If so, it will unfurl over the next month and bankrupt California.

Each of these is considered to have about a 50% chance of happening by 2050.

Hope this helps.

382:

Unfortunately NASA only got to do the detail work and not the big picture design for the Senate Launch System. Given a free hand they'd probably have come up with something a lot more like the Saturn V with a kerosene/LOX first stage but that didn't spread the pork around in the approved manner.

383:

For a moment I thought you were talking about launching the building by means of exploding senators.

384:

For a moment I thought you were talking about launching the building by means of exploding senators.

Same here, only I thought of launching rabid idiot US senators into space. Which would be NASA's brilliant plan to get rid of those.

385:

Given a free hand they'd probably have come up with something a lot more like the Saturn V with a kerosene/LOX first stage but that didn't spread the pork around in the approved manner.

To me it was more of a "let's pretend to save money while using "proven" " tech. That it kept some existing folks working for big existing contractors was also a benefit.

NASA was told use use the shuttle engines (or a near derivative) and they used H. And that H had been one of the biggest headaches of the shuttle program. Of which there were a non trivial number.

386:
It's largely a myth. Yes, many terminals were programmable, but most used non-character keys to initiate the sequence, and most of those that didn't responded to the keystrokes not displayed text. Also most mailers suppressed junk characters - Email was a plain text interface until later than that.

When I was a computer science student at a small engineering college in the early 70s, the school had a large PDP-10 timesharing system that functioned as the primary student computing resource. Initially, all of the terminals were Teletypes, but they were shortly replaced throughout campus by Hazeltine video terminals. Hazeltines had character sequences that allowed positioning the cursor anywhere on screen, blinking, etc., but the single most dangerous sequence allowed one to send a portion of the screen as if it had been typed on the terminal. The PDP-10 had both email and a talk command (inter-terminal messaging), one of my friends discovered that the character sequences would work if sent through them. Initially we used this to just send prank messages to each other, but we had noticed that the PDP-10s console terminal had also been replaced by a Hazeltine. The console terminal was always logged in and had full system privileges. So, we'd wait until late at night when there would be no operator on duty, then send specially formatted talk messages to the console terminal that placed a command on screen, sent it, then carefully cleared the screen. This allowed us complete control of the entire system, until the day one of us forgot the clear screen command. A Teletype was quickly restored to its rightful place as console terminal, and Digital issued a operating system update that carefully filtered such character sequences out of email and talk messages. I know this same problem was later rediscovered in early Unix. So, not exactly a myth.

387:

(Fission-fragment rockets) and all I can say is good grief

Well there IS this statement in the article.

Numerous technological challenges still remain, however.

388:

NASA and its subcontractors have more than fifty years of successful man-rated flight experience with LH2-fuelled rockets, from the second stage of the Saturn 1B/Saturn V through the Shuttle and now the SLS. AFAIK there have been no serious ground-handling or operational accidents causing major injuries or damage with LH2 even with unmanned LH2-fuelled rockets like the Delta 4, Ariane V etc.

H2 in its liquid form is certainly dangerous but it pales into insignificance compared to, for example, the MMH and N2O4 hypergolic fuel/oxidiser combo the crew of the manned Dragon capsule share a cabin with. Generally LH2 will not explode violently as many believe, it's more likely to burn rapidly as it vapourises and mixes with air but it will also dissipate rapidly upwards away from people, equipment etc. on the ground, something that is not true of denser fuels like kerosene.

389:

No tears shed by the New-Space parts of the industry after the recent departure of the former senator for Alabama. The SpaceX pitch for the Lunar Lander for the Artemis programme had one part described as a [REDACTED] due to said ex-senators blanket ban on funding on orbit refuelling.

Following on from the mention of kerosene/LOX first stages, at 22:56 (ish, it's a military launch so exact launch time may be later) there's a Falcon Heavy launch with boosters doing RTLS and centre core expended. It's just after sunset at KSC so the view of the booster staging and the interaction between the core stage and booster boost-back burns should be spectacular. SpaceX coverage due to go live 10 or 15 minutes before launch.

390:

Hydrogen fuelled first stages stuggle to get off the ground unassisted, the Delta-IV and D-IV-H could just manage but everything else uses additional side boosters to get started. The Soviet Energia used liquid fuelled boosters (basically four Zenits, capable rockets in their own right) but the USA went for solids which is where most of the danger lies.

391:

Heteromeles:

With a cheap enough buckytube cable, if available in quantities sufficient, there is no reason not to 'multi-deck' every existing bridge in densely packed urban infrastructure across the world... yeah sure the towers would need to be both extended (from 746 ft to 930 ft) and significantly reinforced with near-magickal buckytube materials to provide enough anchor points and weight-bearing... but that's just another gigabuck or two... instead of low-strength-high-density asphalt there will be textured "buckytube" sheeting...

much more flexible and thus more likely to survive da Big One.. so that's worth an additional three gigabucks for sure...

feasible to assemble a bridge with eight decks each with twelve lanes... no reason not to widen it too... after all (handwaving) "buckytube"... would forty-eight lanes in each direction eliminate congestion?

Charlie Stross:

And alas for your fictional conceit

Which is why I'm all in favor of my 'fictional conceit' as basis of a feverish high-risk-high-reward 'hive of scum and villainy' where life is cheap but toilet paper is expensive...

which also addresses issues others posted about the misery of freighter crews... who are effectively slaves in all but name and likely conditions to worsen as amoral profit takers get control over every aspect of government and wreck protect all protections for workers

Heteromeles:

ssssssh...! do not harsh my mellow nor dim my brilliance by pointing out that I'm plagiarizing... of course I'm reinventing the intercontinental flying boat network as part of switching civilization off fossil fuels...

also I'm old enough to remember when there was chatter about building floating airports in the Pacific offshore of Japan and Singapore, in Atlantic offshore of New York City and Boston and Miami... also tourist islands in the Med offshore Greece-Italy-France...

then there's 'seacrete' a reformulation of cement/concrete utilizing sea water instead of sweet water... there's already established methods for 'foaming' concrete which in net effect becomes less dense than water and floats given it has zillions of air filled voids... instead of iron-based steel rebar which would soon rust to dust we'll utilize (handwaving) "buckytube"... huge hexagonal slabs of floating seacrete linked together... hundreds 'n hundreds...

all of which I will bet will become the 'next big thing' when current coastal cities drown and we will suddenly need living space for fifty million soggy refugees but cannot relocate 'em to rural regions of central North America since all that farm land needs to remain farms to feed all those starving refugees... and nobody anywhere will be happy to welcome too many of the 'wrong kinds'... so... floating refugee camps which over time are extended into floating cities

hmmm... I just rechecked projections and make that three hundred million soggy refugees... late as 2070 or maybe as soon as 2050

392:

Interesting. I did say LARGELY a myth! As I said, I have used terminals (not the Hazeltine) where it was in theory possible, but on which I never heard of it as a problem.

I am not surprised that it was on a DEC system (for protocol reasons), nor that early Unix recreated it - Unix didn't discover checking until at least the late 1980s, and one of the pleasures of migrating to Linux was that it was just so much less riddled with such insanities.

393:
  • (Fission-fragment rockets) and all I can say is good grief...Well there IS this statement in the article....Numerous technological challenges still remain, however*

I'd assume that finding enough fragment of the fissioning of various right-wing parties would be the major challenge. Otherwise, I guess they'd serve as rocket fuel. They certainly emit fast enough.

Actually, now I'm confused, because I didn't follow Charlie's link. We are talking about the Senate Launch System, right?

394:

I'll see your fission fragment rocket and raise you Antimatter-catalyzed nuclear pulse propulsion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter-catalyzed_nuclear_pulse_propulsion

395:

feasible to assemble a bridge with eight decks each with twelve lanes... no reason not to widen it too... after all (handwaving) "buckytube"... would forty-eight lanes in each direction eliminate congestion?

Or you could have two decks: one for railways, and one for cyclists and pedestrians.

Cars and trucks are incredibly wasteful of bridge deck area -- they take up way too much space! And pretty much any city built around a tidal estuary or a bay is better off with a dense public transit network than with automobiles.

396:

Hmmm. I think the only deserving mellow-harshing is that I've actually been out in a ferry in 8' high seas. They cancelled the boat at 10', and I understand why. The smell of the seasick chihuahuas puking and pooping in the seat behind me drove me to the outside deck, and damn the weather.

Anyway, I know the US Navy does land passenger planes of a sort on aircraft carriers en route, but I don't believe it's the most comfortable experience one might have.

If you want to recapture the mellow, instead use your seacrete to make the new airports on eroding coral islands. There's been a fair amount of work on how concrete has to be treated to make it amenable for as a substrate for coral colonization. So if you have ways of making mass quantities of reef-restoring sea-crete in the middle of Micronesia, you can have a mid-sea (flying)boat port that doesn't rock with the waves and purportedly at least tries to keep the reef alive and the island (and islanders) above water.

397:

Delta 4 Heavy has a takeoff thrust-to-weight (TTW) ratio of about 1.3 which is comparable to to most kerosene/LOX rockets like the Falcon FT at about 1.4 or so. The Saturn V's inefficient F-1 kerolox engines gave the Apollo stack a pitiful thrust-to-weight ratio of 1.2, requiring it to burn off ten percent of its total fuel load just to clear the tower on launch. In comparison the SLS stack has a TTW ratio of 1.53. SRBs are your friend if you want to clear the tower quickly. There's a side-by-side comparison video of a Saturn V launch and the SLS launch on Youtube, search for "Artemis SLS vs Apollo Saturn V Lift Off to Tower Clear". It just shows how dangerously knife-edged the Apollo mission actually were.

LH2/LOX is a big win energy-wise once the stack is out of the atmosphere when its vacuum Isp pisses over all other contenders (apart from some exotic tripropellant combos that have never flown except off a lab-bench, and ion engines). The Vacuum Merlin 1D has an Isp of 348 which is best in class for kerolox but the ESA's Vinci upper-stage LH2/LOX engine has an Isp of 457, over 30 percent better.

A successful rocket launch will spend nearly all of its burn time in vacuum, the bad news is that getting it into vacuum takes a lot of non-vacuum thrust early on in the flight. The engineers can play tricks like running oxy-rich cycles in the motor to get more thrust out of a LOX/LH2 engine but at the cost of a lower Isp. The perfect solution would be a turbopump/injector design for LOX/LH2 motors that could operate efficiently in a range of oxygen-hydrogen ratios depending on the need but that's rocket science.

398:

...and who could ever forget (nor forgive) FOOF as poster child of nastiest of nasty oxidizer/propellant?

to say nothing good about 'red mercury'...

https://www.tor.com/2012/07/20/a-tall-tail/

399:

AFAIK there have been no serious ground-handling or operational accidents causing major injuries or damage with LH2 even with unmanned LH2-fuelled rockets like the Delta 4, Ariane V etc.

It has been discussed here by others plus you can read about it. It, H fueling issues with launches, seems to be the #1 or #2 cause of launch delays for the shuttle when it was flying. And was a major reason the SLS almost timed out for recent launch.

400:

Anyway, I know the US Navy does land passenger planes of a sort on aircraft carriers en route, but I don't believe it's the most comfortable experience one might have.

If you're talking about what I think of as the "mail" planes. Both passengers and pilots talk about the take offs and landings as "intense". He may have been exaggerating but one person who got to fly out and back to a carrier on one talked about the guy putting his boot on his chest to get a better way to tighten down his chest harness.

401:

We are talking about the Senate Launch System, right?

Nope. This crazy thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission-fragment_rocket

402:

Launch delays are not serious accidents, just postponements of a scheduled activity. The SLS is a very conservative design utilising a lot of knowledge and engineering from over a hundred manned Shuttle launches, never mind the actual component reuse like the RS-25A LOX/LH2 motors. Going with a new clean-sheet heavy-lifter design from the ground up would have taken the risk-averse NASA a decade and more before first flight, more than two or three budgetary cycles and the chance of no flight at all as the design process gets reset as demands on the launch vehicle requirement changes (this happened with Constellation, the SLS precursor).

I still don't know why the lots-of-launches option for man-to-the-Moon and man-to-Mars is never utilised, there must be a reason but I've never seen it explained anywhere. All the launch hardware already exists (Falcon 9 FT, Falcon Heavy etc.) so we don't have to spend a decade and more in development hell like Starship has to get a couple of hundred tonnes of fuel and hardware into LEO and a mission package on its way to glory.

403:

would forty-eight lanes in each direction eliminate congestion?

No, that's not how congestion works. Induced demand is the problem, so to keep the road empty enough to be fun to drive on what you need to do is throttle in the inputs. Even two lanes will give you wide open spaces if the only way onto it is down an alleyway and under a low bridge to the single toll point operated by a crotchety monkey that demands exact change when the toll is $5.37.

404:

agreed buses are better in moving masses of people... problem is the lack of enough buses going to 'n from enough locations which people want/need to reach...

not just a matter of scheduling, lots of folk including myself loathe local buses stopping 'n starting twenty-three times to get from 3rd Street to 72nd Street to pick one example here in New York City... introduction of 'express local' services which only stop every (approximate) ten blocks have been a major step up...

but for those not living in densely packed urban centers -- yeah I'm looking at you New Jersey -- buses make simple shopping nearly impossible... nothing outside a city's core is 'walking distance'...

405:

I would imagine that the lots-of-launches option isn't used because it makes it harder to spread money around to lots of congressional districts.

406:

Oh, I see.

I'd figured that, given the specific impulses, social radioactivity, instability, and general density displayed by some on the right, that their highest and best use was as rocket fuel.

Thanks for clearing that up!

407:

but for those not living in densely packed urban centers

I dunno, Otautahi is less than 400,000 people and has a decent bus network. Slower than riding a bike most of the time, but then they do get stuck in traffic a lot.

I live in Sydney, 5M people with a "dense urban centre" that stretches roughly 100km in the three directions that aren't "straight out to sea", if we define the centre as the area served by decent public transport. So... 5,000 square kilometres of "dense urban centre" at 1000 people/square kilometre. By comparison Seattle has a population density of about 8000. Assuming that's people per square mile Sydney is ~3000.

Or maybe USAians are just much more dense than Australians, so 8000 US units is more like 100 Australian ones?

408:

population density is only part of it... elsewhere in the world nobody cares if you bring a crate of live chickens onto an aircraft so long as the crate is on your lap and the chickens don't crap anywhere else...

most Americans always got a bit nuts sharing space with strangers... the inevitable 'elbow wars' for armrests in movie theaters have led to knife fights and the #WSCN gonzo nutcases got all wacky during covid masking protocols on airflights...

convincing pampered-aggrieved-bigoted fools to share buses with strangers who have 'wrong skin' has long been an exercise in frustration... luckily most such fools self-filter from dense urban areas by never leaving 'red states' and rural counties...

409:

for those looking for 'raw feed' for your next dystopian hellish future history novel...

I give you the early days of "Big Food" as means of imposing the whims of the ruling elite upon the hungry masses thanks to ever tightening monopolistic control of calories once "Big Oil" runs dry...

https://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_583015f46cab99319b7cc48d7c59d571

410:

lots of folk including myself loathe local buses stopping 'n starting twenty-three times to get from 3rd Street to 72nd Street to pick one example here in New York City... introduction of 'express local' services which only stop every (approximate) ten blocks have been a major step up...

Beijing was like that when I was there* — bus stops were widely spaced (and in the middle of blocks) but the buses were efficient. With a friend who understood Chinese it was a fun way to travel. Not so good on my own, given that I couldn't read any of the signs, but the conductor always made certain I didn't miss my stop. (All buses had a conductor who collected fares, and made certain you didn't ride further than you'd paid for.)

*Over a decade ago, so it might be very different now.

411:

bus stops were widely spaced (and in the middle of blocks)

Is that a reference to the North American habit of putting the bus and tram stops just before the red light?

They do that sometimes in Melbourne, but have tram-operated lights the times I've seen it. Tram closes doors, two seconds later it starts rolling because the light has gone green. NotJustBikes mentioned that in the USA they often do it the other way - make the tram or bus roll forward before it triggers the light, guaranteeing that it has to wait most of a cycle for a green. But very easy on the people who design the traffic lights... and that's what matters because as the saying goes: design it a thousand times, use it once.

412:

I just read Driver and I enjoyed it. I was thinking about the make a human button and about the "Lena"/"Driver" universe.

Then I thought about a hypothetical research project on cognitive development in a university cognitive science department.

The project goes something like this:

Step one take images of various newborns.

Step two find uploads with suitable skills to act as "parents".

Step three instantiate various parent infant combos in virtual environments if possible running faster than real time.

Step four observe....

Step X release paper....

Step Y (Y>X) profit?.

413:

Even more off-topic-er than before, I happened to see a Scandinavia and the World strip that is rather painfully accurate. In this strip we see data collection in action:

Korea: America, would you like this beautiful and big smart TV? It’s cheap, too!
America: I do. What’s the catch?
Korea: It only collects a little data.
America: Deal!
(Korea counts money, America leaves with TV)
America (at home with TV): I’ll never connect this to the internet. I win!
Korea (at his home, watching America on his own TV): Silly America, I also make tiny cell phones to go inside the TV.

414:

Scott Sanford:

so... 1984's threat of Big Brother having a camera in every house is now happening... oh... joy... and instead of the "Two Minute Hate" there's all these #WSCNs screaming in the streets...

415:

agreed buses are better in moving masses of people... problem is the lack of enough buses going to 'n from enough locations which people want/need to reach...

Which is an urban -- and suburban -- planning problem.

  • Public transit should not be expected to turn a profit: it's part of infrastructure and facilitates commerce, same as roads. So make the buses free and require cities to provide them with set frequency of service targets (nobody should have to wait more than 30 minutes without a warm, heated, weatherproof shelter with seating: nobody should have to wait more than 60 minutes without a station that has all of the above plus a toilet and a food/beverage kiosk or cafe).

  • Start taxing the suburbs to pay for urban renewal.

  • Raise the tax burden on suburban living over a 25 year period until only the very rich can afford it. Use the tax revenue to pay for subsidized apartment complexes on brown field sites within walking/cycling distance of the city centre. All neighbourhoods should be designed as "20 minute neighbourhoods", i.e. all core amenities (medical clinics, schools, social hubs, hotels, bars, supermarkets, boutique stores, gyms ...) should be accessible on foot or by public transit without traveling more than one mile.

  • Demolish the city center skyscrapers. If you still need big-ass offices, move them to out-of-town office parks in former suburbs, with light rail service from the densely-inhabited centre.

  • ... Want me to go on?

    Yes, I recognize that you can't do this to the USA without spending trillions of dollars over a period of decades and outraging the rentier class, not to mention taking a wrecking ball to the "American dream" of 50s suburbia. But it works in places like Amsterdam, Paris, and Edinburgh: it could work in your neck of the woods, if the political will existed.

    PS: if your objection is, "but I live in [insert low population density region here]", then the answer is migrate. Rewilding is a thing, and we probably ought to pursue it on a wide scale: it's much easier to do disaster-mitigation for properly designed and funded cities than for sparsely populated areas -- everyone you need to protect and shelter is within reach!

    416:

    Charlie & anyone in Scotland ...
    I've heard about this, rumbling in the background, but it's made it to a R4 programme in horrible detail. Incomptence, arrogance, the "right" commercial backers, grandstanding, sham press events, & corruption, fully worthy of the tories; - except it's the SNP
    Part of the problem is, of course, identical to the tories: - the SNP have had zero effective opposition for well over 10 years, with all the usual, expected results.
    Meanwhile the people of the Islands are getting the short end of all this.

    SS @ 414
    DO NOT GET or use a TV, then, like me.

    Charlie @ 415
    Public transit should not be expected to turn a profit: - which brings us back to Ferguson's shipyard & CalMac & their shambles.
    The Snottish "government" own both the shipyard & CalMac, but are still trying to turn a profit on those 5 (?) year late unfinished ferries.

    Raise the tax burden on suburban living over a 25 year period until only the very rich can afford it.
    ? FUCK RIGHT OFF ?: I live in London Zone 3 - the very definition of a suburb - except, of course, like all of London, it's also a village.
    Or is this aimed at the US of Arseholes? London is a supervillage of villages, actually.
    And, I can get to all of those facilities, using either: foot / bike / train / tube - & bus if desperate. { Note that I do not mention the GGB here? That's deliberate - it's for out-of-town travelling. }
    Afterthought - Unless you mean somewhere like London zones 6 & 7 ???????

    417:

    Greg, please remember that the BBC is the British Broadcasting Corporation. They're intrinsically, relentlessly, a Unionist propaganda mill, and they will use any excuse to ratfuck the SNP in particular and Scottish political devolution in general. (Remember the Director-General is a Tory appointee?) The only BBC channel you can remotely trust on Scotland is BBC Scotland, and even then you need to take it with a pinch of salt (they lean to the Tories, which puts them in opposition to 76% of the population).

    418:

    410, 411 - Service Number 1 from Dumbarton cemetery gate to Freelands Place, Dalmuir. 16 request stops (if people wish to board or disembark), 8.6 miles, 32 minutes scheduled by bus.

    415 - Mostly agreed, but my present address would be considered a suburb by most people and it's only 15 minutes walk, less by bus from the town centre.

    419:

    Charlie @ 417
    Really?
    Quote: A Whistledown Scotland production for BBC Radio 4
    Nor that a lot of the outer Isles & certainly Orkney / Shetland regard the SNP the same way the SNP regard the evil English. And .. 10 - 15 years uninterrupted power, with zero effective opposition or proper debate will do that to any political party.
    And, I have a lot of sympathy with the Islands & their inhabitants, having spent many happy days/weeks/hours on Arran, more years ago than is good for me.

    My take is that, in many respects, the tories kool-aid is not too different from the SNP's, or the other way round.
    I would not trust either/any of them further than I can spit.

    420:

    Is that a reference to the North American habit of putting the bus and tram stops just before the red light?

    Just before the intersection, whether or not it has a light.

    Although one particularly annoying set of stops on Warden has a bus stop just before the traffic lights at Steeles, and again just after, which really ties up traffic — especially as there are often several busses lined up waiting to use the stop.

    As a driver it's unexpected: you've seen the bus stop just before Steeles, and aren't expecting it to stop 30 m after Steeles as well. I do wonder at the logic behind that one…

    421:

    Yes, I recognize that you can't do this to the USA without spending trillions of dollars over a period of decades and outraging the rentier class, not to mention taking a wrecking ball to the "American dream" of 50s suburbia. But it works in places like Amsterdam, Paris, and Edinburgh: it could work in your neck of the woods, if the political will existed.

    Well, since the majority of middle class American money is tied up in homes, those being their own and possibly other units they rent out, I can see one small flaw in your reasoning--most Americans can't afford to go for it, even if they've seen such plans in action and like them. In general, if your solution involves "get rid of the middle class and leave it a world of only rich and poor," I think people in the middle class aren't going to go for it, because a fair number of them have been poor to varying degrees.

    A second problem is that, due to anti-tenement/anti-slum/earthquake/etc. laws, it really is unprofitable to build apartments in most big US cities, especially on the west coast. If you want affordable housing built, you have to get grant money from state and federal coffers or from wealthy non-profits to make up the shortfall. This does happen, but the need outpaces the funding, especially when Rethuglicans (appropriate here) control the purse strings.

    A third problem is that city core land tends to be expensive. See the previous paragraph about the solution.

    A fourth problem is that brown fields aren't quite what you think they are. Redevelopment is fine, and in fact in our area they're making it easier to turn office parks into housing--mostly because we have a housing shortage and a surplus of office parks.

    Brown fields are contaminated lands. It's possible that one reason I have Parkinsons is because I spent a lot of time working on a brown field, which was an abandoned landfill that they'd capped with a golf course on one side and an elementary school on the other. High lead levels in the soil, and I was working on planting it. Of course you can put housing on such sites, but the follow-on medical costs are pretty brutal.

    Yes, I'd love to have the NHS. Speaking of which...

    A fifth problem is that infrastructure isn't free. Somebody pays, somebody profits, and there's a fair amount of corruption woven into who gets the eggs from these golden geese. Making something public infrastructure doesn't solve problems around corruption and profiteering, it merely shifts them. Look at the space program we just discussed for instance. Why was a shuttle to LEO so freaking expensive? Same thing can easily happen with shuttle buses in cities, which leads to...

    The sixth problem: Governmental incompetence.

    Problem 6A is what is no-joke called a "San Diego Special." The jibe was coined by our current mayor, back when he was in City Council. It's a problem that is totally solvable, but which, due to politics and widely varying competence levels among the electeds, doesn't get solved. Incidentally, he's so far landed us with about $400 million in San Diego Specials, plus a worsening homelessness crisis that's caused by 30-40 years of not building affordable homes. This last, incidentally, is a San Diego Special that we've been miring ourselves in off and on since the 1920s. This isn't our first homelessness crisis.

    Problem 6B is the bureaucratic side of the San Diego Special. We've got regulations on the books to handle a lot of this, but our planning department is currently incompetent to make them work. They've been deliberately hollowed out for various reasons I won't go into for blog-legal reasons, but the upshot is that planners are young and they aren't promoted within the department. If they want more money, they have to go elsewhere. So with high churn and complex regulations nobody except outside consultants have mastered, we get planning failures.

    I'm probably wrong, but I get the impression that the UK NHS is being reconstituted to run this way?

    Anyway, sorry to harsh on your mellow, but this is the kind of work I do.

    The general reaction from outsiders is a belittling guffaw, followed by a "well an earthquake will solve your problems." It won't, anymore than Sunak will solve UK's problems. But thanks for thinking of us anyway.

    422:

    A valid identification of barriers between where we are now and where we need to be.

    However, we need to be there, or somewhere like it, if we hope to survive as a species. As such I would suggest that we continue to work on reducing and removing those barriers with the end goal in mind.

    Here in BC we have the same debate. There have been decades of push-pull between the 'sprawl for profit' and 'sustainable development' crowds. For the city of Vancouver itself it has had the challenge/benefit of having fixed boundaries in every direction (either water or neighbouring cities). As a result they've been steadily densifying, particularly along light rail lines. And every single step has involved a great deal of screeching from the usual suspects.

    423:

    419 Greg said "A lot of the outer Isles regard the SNP the same way the SNP regard the evil English."
    Ballcocks! Until recently I lived in Eilean Siar, and the sitting MP has been Angus MacNeil (SNP) since 2005. The sitting MSP has been Alistair Allan (SNP) since 2007. In 2014 the constituency voted for independence by 53.42% to 46.58%.

    Oh and BTW Arran is not "an outer island".

    424:

    The Highlands and Islands are a very convenient stick for grievance-merchants to use to beat on the SNP. Largely because it's the only region that has a viable non-Tory opposition to the SNP this century. It's at most 10% of the Scottish population, but it looks big on a map which tends to impress ignorant foreigners. (Much like pointing to North Dakota on a map of the USA and saying "look! This huge region hates the Democrats!" then pointing to New York and Massachusetts and adding, "see how they're outnumbered?")

    425:

    Just before the intersection, whether or not it has a light.

    For a long time it was about parking spaces.

    If you have to clear out space for a bus doing it in the middle of a block took up the space of 4 or 5 car parking spots. So the bus can pull in and out. Putting the stops next to the intersection requires only about 1/2 the space as the bus can pull into or out of the space in a mostly straight line.

    And there may not even be a parking space to remove if there's a fire hydrant.

    Around here (Raleigh, NC, USA) they are about to start a major 2 mile road rationalization process. Consistent lane widths, 3 lanes each direction with a median, decent sidewalks and bike paths, etc... As a part of this there will be bus stops. But they will be just a designated spot in the outermost lanes. The planning staff said studies have shown there are fewer accidents without the buses moving into or out of traffic. And it also speeds things up.

    426:

    Launch delays are not serious accidents, just postponements of a scheduled activity.

    Impressive hand wave there.

    Neither Charlie or I talked about thrust or rockets exploding. What I was referring to, and I think Charlie also, is that after 40+ years of H fueled rockets NASA STILL has trouble handling the stuff. And to some degree they have some fairly deep pockets with which to solve the problems.

    And the next generation of big rockets are supposed to be able to transfer fuel in orbit. I suspect that the entire process of doing that with H will be interesting to say the least.

    427:

    Incidentally, he's so far landed us with about $400 million in San Diego Specials, plus a worsening homelessness crisis that's caused by 30-40 years of not building affordable homes.

    Two things I've noticed over the years in the various places I've lived.

    First, the middle class refuses or just comprehend that their restrictive zoning in THEIR neighborhoods creates homelessness miles away.

    Second, and you sort of infer this, there doesn't seem to be much of a non phychiatric homelessness in area with depressed (low cost) housing or area that are not attracting folks to move to an area. People moving in drives up housing prices in the nice areas so young folks move down a step to lower priced areas to ... At the end of this line the crap housing gets torn down for new and the people who were living in the crap get pushed to the streets.

    428:

    Charlie
    Once upon a time .... there used to be a "Conservative & Unionist Party" { Which, when I was 14 - 25, I supported - think MacMillan or Heath }. It no longer exists & what we have is an English Nationalist (Brexit) Party, strongly tending towards fascism-lite.
    In Scotland, we have the tories equally-revolting mirror-image, the SNP.
    A rotting cancerous pox on both of them, wrecking both our countries. Incidentally, as I type this, it apprears that Sunak has decided to pick a petty, vicious & really stupid fight with the Wee Fishwife over, yes "Gender Recognition" rather than trying to negotiate a compromise position or at least entering into discussions.
    The sheer level of STUPID is so repeatedly depressing.

    424 - Re: "Islands" { I have almost zero knowledge of how the mainland Highlands vote & think } - I thought they tended Lem-0-Crat rather than tory?
    429:

    Much like pointing to North Dakota on a map of the USA and saying "look! This huge region hates the Democrats!"

    Right after reading the above I read this.

    https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/01/wyoming-republicans-take-a-stand-want-to-ban-electric-cars/

    Basically it's a resolution (not a law) that if passed encourages the good citizens of Wyoming to not by EVs. All 250K of them.

    430:

    Oops. The population of Wyoming is a bit under 600K. So less than 0.2% of the total US population.

    431:

    Big brother TVs and such.

    I think your strip is well intended but the hacker community in the US and the rest of the world finds these things fairly quickly.

    But why do by sneaky means when victim err, consumer will agree to let you spy for free?

    Echo Dots, Ring security, Google things, Facebook things, etc... The consumer agrees to let them spy on them as part of the terms of service. Which is one (just one but a big one) reason that their stuff costs so much less than Apple's similar things. Apple does all the voice recognition in the device then ships it anonymized to Apple for processing if it thinks you want this to be done. All those others ship everything they see and hear to the mother planet and process it there. With somewhat opaque rules about what they do with it.

    I have Ring security floodlights that I put in when I was regularly away from home for a week or so at a time. Then Amazon bought Ring. Now if I want to enable some of the more recent "nice" features I have to integrate my Ring account into my Amazon purchasing account.

    NOPE. Just not going to happen. I'm a wee bit pissed.

    432:

    Brown fields are contaminated lands.

    Different terminology in the UK!

    Over here it just means sites that have been demolished and are available for construction. (Often demolished by the Luftwaffe, within my memory -- the last bomb sites from the blitz finally got built over in the late 1980s.)

    An anomaly of UK law (which may have been closed) is that new-build houses on green field sites is VAT-exempt, while brown field developments -- putting houses on derelict but formerly-built-on land -- attracts VAT at 20%. Way to encourage land banking and suburban sprawl!

    433:

    ADDENDUM: Maybe fascism not-so-lite? - Article & linked clip of Cruella Braverman being cruel & lying.

    434:

    Virtually any rocket fuel is dangerous and difficult to handle. LH2 has a different set of dangers and issues but it won't, for example, dissolve bystanders the way an N2O4 leak will. LH2 is less explosive than liquid methane, the fuel of choice for Raptor 2 and Starship etc. NASA is so risk-intolerant these days that a leak of H2 gas from a fuelling connector is a show-stopper rather than something to be noted but not regarded as a problem such as during the fuelling of the Saturn V second stage. An LH2 leak rapidly becomes hydrogen gas (boiling point of 20K) which quickly dissipates in the open air. It could be a problem in confined spaces but LOX/LH2 fuelling operations don't happen indoors. The first SLS rollout and wet-dress rehearsal was meant to catch just these sorts of operational issues and they did.

    A number of rocket builders decided to go with LH2/LOX for their first stage launchers including Arianespace and JAXA as well as the SLS designers. They don't seem to regard handling LH2 as a serious issue and it has a long history of just working when called upon.

    435:

    And the next generation of big rockets are supposed to be able to transfer fuel in orbit. I suspect that the entire process of doing that with H will be interesting to say the least.

    Which is why Starship uses CH4 as fuel, not H2.

    436:

    Greg, allow me to supply an illustration of the result. In summary there are 6 seats that voted Con, 4 that voted Lib Dem, and one, repeat one, that voted Lab. The rest all voted SNP. On look, that's nearly everywhere, including all the islands except the Orkneys and Shetlands.

    437:

    Different terminology in the UK!

    And for bonus points if a brown field is left vacant for a while there is likely an EPA super fund or almost such lurking as a part of it. If not a full super fund site you can usually get it approved to pave over for warehouses or office buildings. But the bad ones are where they build housing with grass and play fields before such rules came into force.

    Silicone Valley is littered with such from the early days of semi-conductor manufacturing. Lots of chemical leaks when no one much cared in the 60s.

    What do you do in the UK for leaking petrol station leaking tanks? Most metal tanks in the US have been replaced by fiber glass. But there are all kinds of previous leaks that have left interesting chemical plumes underground near current or previous gasoline stations here.

    Over here it to clean it up usually means digging up all the dirt with chemicals in it then running the dirt through an incinerator.

    438:

    Charlie Stross:

    the brutal, horrid resolution to the various conflicting self-centered interests (and associated positive feedback loops reinforcing) crisis of homelessness-sprawl-congestion-pollution-noise-mass-transit-etc is someone holding enough power to force through a resolution of those conflicting special interests...

    ...say "dictator" softly because the USA just dethroned an attempt at POTUS (president of the United States) becoming PFLQM (president-for-life-quasi-monarch with DJT JR as GOP sock puppet and next PFL)

    we did not pull back from the brink, but rather we dangled over the abyss for way, way too long

    but... but yes... I am in agreement there is a set of better policies as demonstrated in Amsterdam... what makes it all impossible (without supreme power in the hands of the one-true-king) is no possible way of forcing everyone to take the long view for society's survival...

    I look around at the USA (and UK and EU) and see lots of 'fixable things'

    as just one example of piss poor planning in the US that is impossible to be denied is the overt nightmare -- medical, social, cultural -- in addition to there being thirtysomethings who smoke cigarettes (WTF?) there are fat thirtysomethings... not 10 pounds (4kg) but 30 (12) and some are 50 (20) overweight and WWW (wheezing when walking) suggestive of a shitload of lifelong medical misery because as individuals they each decided to ignore they were obliged to moderate their greedy urges... to be clear, there are people whose DNA makes them heavyset and predisposed to survive famines... it is not 'body shaming' for me to identify the next big crisis in nation-wide health care in the USA in 2040s

    and do not ask me about 'fast fashion'... John Oliver did a stunningly effective piece that I could never hope to improve upon... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdLf4fihP78

    439:

    David L answered the brownfield terminology issue. But reusing hazardous brownfields is, unfortunately, relevant.

    An anomaly of UK law (which may have been closed) is that new-build houses on green field sites is VAT-exempt, while brown field developments -- putting houses on derelict but formerly-built-on land -- attracts VAT at 20%. Way to encourage land banking and suburban sprawl!

    I think the fact that wild-lands are less valuable than trashed-lands is more fundamental than that. Again, I'm speaking from a California/US perspective, and laws differ.

    This gets back to what I was pointing at as the magical ritual underlying capitalism: alienation. "Unclaimed wilderness" ("Terra nullius" in Australian colonial doctrine) has no value. Once it's cleared, bulldozed, logged, grazed, plowed, dumped upon, mined, built-upon or otherwise "put into production," then it has value in a capitalist system. This gets at land use zoning, as the value of a land parcel is determined by zoning that says how it is supposed to be exploited.

    That's why already-exploited land is taxed higher than unexploited land. It's in the system, and it has a whole set of rights attached to it (e.g. it can be used as a legal landfill) that unexploited land does not have, and the value is in those rights.

    When land gets bought up for conservation, someone (ideally a government) buys out the landowner's rights and sets up legal barriers saying the land shall be exploited for recreational uses only. Yes, it's supposed to be more stringently protected, but in practice the struggle is more often over limiting recreational exploitation than excluding human exploitation.

    To me, alienation is a fundamental problem with capitalism. It's also one reason that I think capitalism, and any other faith or ideology that practice the rituals of alienation, is incompatible with long-term survival of our species.

    If anyone wants to play with Ideas-driven SF, come up with beliefs and practices that allow largish numbers of people to live without having to alienate the natural world to create things they value. It's an interesting challenge.

    440:

    paws4thot @ 343:

    John at 341 in reply to Rocketpjs at 306 - Obvious issues are that:-
    1) The top level of each stack is not a constant.
    2) At each port you now have to offload the top container from each stack that is to be partially or fully unloaded, and then replace those containers before the ship sails again.
    3) This is maybe an edge case of (2), but ATM the intent is to turn the ship around in the minimum time at each port of call. Forcing the unloading and reloading of the top level of containers will certainly increase turnaround time.

    Are any of those insurmountable obstacles? They could probably design the battery containers to interlink like Lego bricks, so there is no need to make additional connections in hooking them up.

    Planning a container ship's load to provide a flat "top deck" can't be that difficult. Just ask the planners who did it for the Falklands invasion back in 1982.

    The savings on fuel cost might offset increased cost for unloading/reloading and turnaround time ... especially as the cost of fossil fuels continues to mount (not just the cost of fuel itself, but all of the associated environmental costs).

    441:

    Heteromeles @ 350:

    [...]

    My guess is that if we start shipping fuel, hydrogen will be preferred, since at least it burns upwards. If people are content with fairly massive energy losses, shipping large tanks of compressed air is probably far safer than shipping a comparable amount of highly charged lithium alloy.

    Now someone will bring up airships ...

    Other than the Hindenburg I can't think of any airship "disaster" that was due to hydrogen lifting gas catching fire. Shenandoah, Akron and Macon (the US Navy airships) were all lost to structural failure (weather related). And, of course, the U.S. airships DID have helium for their lifting gas.

    Seems like a strong enough structure was too heavy to fly and a structure light enough to fly couldn't be made strong enough.

    This might be something that could be overcome using new materials not available back in the 1920s & 1930s - "3D printed carbon nanotubes" ??? - but who is going to fund the R&D to find out?

    442:

    Here's something interesting I came across this "morning":

    Scientists steer lightning bolts with lasers for the first time

    Maybe someone can figure out how to use the redirected lightning to recharge batteries?

    443:

    paws
    Thanks - I was assuming { Wrongly it appears } that the Outer Hebrides voted similarly to the true "Northern Isles"

    John S
    Already been done & demonstrated & on order from Britain to Spain.
    Airlander

    444:

    The population of Wyoming is a bit under 600K. So less than 0.2% of the total US population.

    While electing 2% of the Senate, if I understand your system correctly…

    There's one Senator per 20 million Californians and 300k Wyomingites.

    445:

    MSB @ 384:

    For a moment I thought you were talking about launching the building by means of exploding senators.

    Same here, only I thought of launching rabid idiot US senators into space. Which would be NASA's brilliant plan to get rid of those.

    Newt Gingrinch was in the HOUSE ... and he's the one who wants a moon colony (and I think should be banished there to help build it).

    Besides, there are only 100 Senators, but there are 435 members of the House, so they'd be a more abundant fuel source.

    446:

    Yep.

    I have to wonder about Tester's chances are in 2026. Or what will replace him.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Tester

    Dem Senator from Montana. Pop a bit over 1.1 million.

    Seems like a nice guy.

    447:

    David L @ 385:

    Given a free hand they'd probably have come up with something a lot more like the Saturn V with a kerosene/LOX first stage but that didn't spread the pork around in the approved manner.

    To me it was more of a "let's pretend to save money while using "proven" " tech. That it kept some existing folks working for big existing contractors was also a benefit.

    NASA was told use use the shuttle engines (or a near derivative) and they used H. And that H had been one of the biggest headaches of the shuttle program. Of which there were a non trivial number.

    Many of the shuttle's problems came from compromises imposed on the design so it could fulfill military missions ... primarily launching and retrieving spy satellites which require highly inclined orbits that NASA didn't need for their civilian missions.

    We'd probably have been better off with separate systems for civilian & military missions. Certainly NASA would have been.

    449:

    Yes, this is one of the compromises we undertook to have a Constitution. There was an argument between the rights of the individual person and the rights of a state, many of which had either been founded with special religious/social purposes, or had developed their own cultures, and of course the various states had all developed their own power-structures... So it sort of made sense at the time. I don't think anyone foresaw the possibility that one state would have fifty-million people and an economy based on high-tech international trade, while another would have 600,000 people and an economy based around farming.

    450:

    Greg Tingey @ 416:

    Or is this aimed at the US of Arseholes?

    And you can fuck right off yourself too.

    451:

    this is very much "Ministry of the Future"...

    could be built for about 2% of DarthMusk's whim-slash-chewtoy purchasing of Twitter

    https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/we-need-an-international-center-for-climate-modeling/#

    ====

    Robert Prior:

    regrettably you are accurate... there's long been a ground swell amongst certain states -- California, New York, Texas, etc -- to split up for sake of those newer states gaining senators and thus better representing the majority-slash-average rather than obliged to bootlick those special interests of a somewhat gonzo minority

    California ==> North California + Central California + South California

    New York ==> North New York + South New York

    Texas ==>Would split into regions centered upon urban centers of Dallas, Houston, etc

    never going to happen, given the lusts-greeds-shortsightedness of state-level politicians hellbent upon holding onto status of mega-sized populations clustering... but nice to dream

    452:

    440 John, in answer, see this photo.jpg) * of the Atlantic Conveyor off the Falklands in 1982. The foredeck, ahead of all the containers carries a Westland Wessex on the main helideck.
    * Link is borked and defies my attempts to add the ")" character

    441 ref 350 - Well, there's the R101 which was brought down by a storm over France...

    453:

    come up with beliefs and practices that allow largish numbers of people to live without having to alienate the natural world to create things they value

    It occurred to me the other day to phrase it as "right to destroy" vs "obligation to protect"... two subtly different forms of ownership.

    Or custodianship vs ownership is you prefer that language (I don't, because it generally leads to 'but who owns it' where the obvious answer 'no-one owns it' is unacceptable). Does the current owner-of-record of the Ducky of Cornwall have the right to destroy it? Do I have the right to destroy the land my house sits on? What if by "destroy" I mean "mine the coal out from under it"?

    I like the "leave no trace" style of ownership, which we kind of theoretically have via the various restrictions on destruction, and stuff like remediation bonds for mines etc. But we also make those subject to limited liability companies which negates the whole point.

    One complexity to custodianship approaches is changing understanding of what counts as an improvement. We have that now with land changed from forest to farmland... in the past that was regarded as unconditionally an improvement, today we see more of the lost value so the answer is more complicated.

    454:

    RE: splitting California.

    Funny thing is that it's always the right wing nutjobs, billionaires, and poor rural counties that want the split, at least in-state. Most other people see how even a state as strong as California struggles with its burden of super-rich, look at how smaller, weaker states are being turned into international tax havens that disenfranchise the locals, and think that chopping California up is a bad idea if we don't want more bespoke boots dancing on our skulls.

    Besides, there's that dammed water system that ties us together. Northerners hate sending their water south, but they forget that a big reason there are so many dams up north (aside from non-trivial issues of political quid pro quo awhile ago), is that "Aqua" California floods rather badly every few decades, and shipping water south is a method of load balancing. Split that messy system into three or more feuding states and life will really suck for everyone.

    Anyway, the last petition (split California into seven states, lofted by a billionaire out of the San Jose area) would have left the "California" name with the SoCal Counties that contain LA, while setting up 4-5 more right wing states to redwash the US Senate. Problem with that plan was, all of California's water rights belong to "California." Since the petition didn't address water, presumably all water rights would belong to LA and everyone else would have to beg for a share. That was my IANAL interpretation. Anyway, the petition was ruled unconstitutional by a court and tossed before it hit the ballot.

    455:

    A crew of three to five is what I've got in a novel I'm working on in the relatively distant future. Lots of automation, and bots.

    456:

    Question: why the reference to 20' containers? All I ever see is 40', or 53'.

    457:

    Yes. Players were talking about it the other night at the BSFS 60th anniversary party.

    Let's see: owned by Hasbro, huge company, so I figure bean counters and execs who want higher ROI (that is, bonuses).

    458:

    Cats & keyboards - I think of programs people wrote decades ago, "cat typing detected", and the keyboard's locked until you type in a password.

    459:

    No, they're so full of hot air we could use them to float the rocket to the edge of the atmosphere, thereby resulting in great fuel savings.

    460:

    They use hypergols for stationkeeping and other such uses. My late ex, who worked as an engineer at the Cape for 17+ years, was for years their top person on them (and got awards for it).

    She used to tell me that when she first applied in the mid-eighties, the interviewer asked her how she felt about working with hypergols. She asked what those were, and his response was "two deadly chemicals that explode when they come in contact with each other." Months later, after she was hired, he told her she was hired because she was the only candidate who didn't run out of the room screaming at that.

    461:

    Of course, the "American middle class" (actually American upper working class) is coming to dis-exist, given inflation and greed by the 1%. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/16/richest-1percent-amassed-almost-two-thirds-of-new-wealth-created-since-2020-oxfam.html

    462:

    Smaller than the City of Baltimore (and I don't mean the metro area, I mean the city). My county, Montgomery, a DC 'burb, is over 1M.

    463:

    You mean like the X-37?

    464:

    Question: why the reference to 20' containers? All I ever see is 40', or 53'.

    You might have seen and not realized that some were two halves in close formation.

    https://www.falconstructures.com/shipping-container-dimensions

    465:

    TEU == "Twenty-foot equivalent unit"

    A forty-foot container can fit in the same space as two end-to-end twenty-foot containers and be retained in place by the same corner twist-locks. Odd-sized containers like 48 foot and 53 foot can't be loaded on ships but are restricted to national rail systems and road transport.

    466:

    Months later, after she was hired, he told her she was hired because she was the only candidate who didn't run out of the room screaming at that.

    LOL!

    In May 1994 I interviewed for a company which was installing ATM's (a fairly new thing at the time), and its entire market was outside US. During the interview the company president mentioned off-hand that just as we were spoking, they had someone doing an installation in Croatia.

    That's right. Croatia. May 1994.

    I couldn't resist, and asked "Does he get combat pay for that one?" The company president dismissed "Oh, don't worry. He is about 100 miles from combat lines".

    I got the job. Few months later I relayed this conversation to the coworker who did the Croatia installation. He chuckled and said "In Croatia it is impossible to draw a 100 mile long straight line anywhere. I was more like 20 miles from the front line."

    467:

    Yes, and they are being extremely stupid about it, and reacting with a slowness that I won't describe as "dinosaur-like" because it would do terrible injustice to even the most dimwitted brontosaurus.

    468:

    Back in the day I realized that I had the following. A new-SCSI to old-SCSI adapter. The "old SCSI" part fit into an RS-232 to serial adapter. Which fit into a serial to PS-2 adapter. So in theory you can run your new-SCSI drive from your PS-2 port.

    ...

    That's useful information.

    469:

    when I grow up, I wanna be as good a writer as Bruce Sterling... * sigh *

    "In retrospect this period will be understood as an Indian summer of the old world, a winter that didn't know it was a transformative winter because it felt too warm."

    https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/522/State-of-the-World-2023-Bruce-St-page10.html#post228

    470:

    By Nathan E. Sanders and Bruce Schneier "How ChatGPT Hijacks Democracy" via the NYT: https://archive.md/Cyaac

    ChatGPT could automatically compose comments submitted in regulatory processes. It could write letters to the editor for publication in local newspapers. It could comment on news articles, blog entries and social media posts millions of times every day. It could mimic the work that the Russian Internet Research Agency did in its attempt to influence our 2016 elections, but without the agency’s reported multimillion-dollar budget and hundreds of employees.

    Article goes further into the possibility of AI strategising political campaigns. This is where explicit corruption might be a partial defense - if legislators respond primarily to money that kind of cheap campaign doesn't have a chance.

    I think Nick Gruen's answer might be the best one, using citizen's juries and other sortition based techniques to work out what "the people" actually want rather than relying on direct engagement, since that doesn't seem to be a reliable guide.

    I've just had some quality time on reddit where response to the voice proposal has been brutal, convincing me that any reluctance to support the proposal amounts to "I stand with Nazis". The weird thing is one objection being "any proposal to recognise aboriginals would be racist".

    (and no, I don't pay the NYT any more than you pay the Spinoff)

    471:

    One complexity to custodianship approaches is changing understanding of what counts as an improvement. We have that now with land changed from forest to farmland... in the past that was regarded as unconditionally an improvement, today we see more of the lost value so the answer is more complicated.

    Well, since I'm rereading Bill Gammage right now, you can guess where my head is. In theory, heading back to the Dreaming is pretty simple, if losing 99% of the human population leaves knowledgeable aborigines differentially more alive than capitalists. In practice, that gap between 99% and 100% is pretty tiny, and there will be millennia of work repopulating all the Countries. And spare a thought for whoever has to do the business of cane toad dreaming, or has Wittenoom as their Country.

    That aside, there's one place where capitalism and aboriginal Law seem to have analogous structures. It appears that the Dreaming is set up on a capital-surplus basis. The example I'm thinking of was out of Gammage, where Red Kangaroo sacred sites surveyed by a kangaroo biologist were all ideal habitat for red kangaroos. The Law apparently is that red roos can't be hunted in their sacred sites, but ones that are outside these sites can be hunted. This sets up a system where, from a human perspective, the "natural capital" of red kangaroos is left untouched, while only the "surplus" is exploited.

    In terms of sustainability, this kind of thing is what we need to do (Hawkins' Natural Capitalism makes a similar point). Getting there from here, especially with climate change and 8 going on 10 billion people, is going to take a lot of effort at best.

    For those who haven't read any of Gammage's work, I should point out that the people who are Red Kangaroo Dreamers probably aren't thinking in capitalist terms. They're following their portion of the Law, because that's who they are. Their identity is bound up with their kin, the red roos, and caring for them and their sacred sites is their business. They are very much not alienated from their land.

    472:

    reddit where response to the voice proposal

    Sorry, left out the usual 27 steps connecting that to the preceding: the 'natural' response to any political proposal is often hostile, meaning it's difficult to distinguish voter opposition to media beat-ups, let alone AI-run astroturf campaigns. The latter could make things worse, and probably will, but if we try to extract a democratic response from the situation that's probably easier than trying to make civil discourse civil.

    When it's something as brutal as racist response to The Voice, good luck telling the difference between ChatGPT's inability to make logical connections and the rantings of an organic arsehole.

    My political response is to look around at who else seems to share my concerns and run the hell away if they're dominated by undesirables. We have history of that in Oz, "Sustainable Australia Party" being a recent victim of it. "We have concerns about the sustainable human population of Australia. Maybe immigration is too high" led to entryism by racists, and now it seems to be primarily overt racists and people happy to campaign to get more political power for overt racists.

    473:

    pare a thought for whoever ... has Wittenoom as their Country.

    Wittenoom is actually surprisingly safe compared to its reputation, it's probably more "no dig country" than "permanent exclusion zone". Fukushima rather than Chernobyl, maybe. Windy days are a problem, but it's not a very windy area. The natural vegetation is growing back and people do spend time there (land is cheap...). I wouldn't live there, but I know someone who works there. Unofficially :) I suspect people who passed through the area most years wouldn't suffer any detectable ill effects as long as they had a rough idea of what loose asbestos looks like and knew not to disturb it.

    The kangaroo dreaming is another case of "when the population grows enough that some get driven out, we hunt them". One possible modern equivalence is marine reserves. It's frustrating sometimes when advocates for those are saying "fishing outside them will be awesome in a couple of years" and the objections are 100% "but I wannit NEOOWW!!!". But OTOH there's a couple of established ones I know of where the local fishing community have become ardent protectors of the reserve. They help police them which is awesome.

    475:

    That's useful information.

    Ahhhhh. Let's talk.

    And I HAVE all of those adapters.

    476:

    ~Shrugs~ You just have to write the drivers and it should all work. I'd suggest Assembler. Or Forth.

    477:

    various, ending with 465 - And, indeed, subject to appropriate twist-locks, one 10 and one 30 foot, two x 10 and one 20 foot or even four by 10 foot. 48 foot (and 53 foot) are rare in Europe because of platform/trailer length laws (road transport), dynamic loading gauge (rail transport) and just "not fitting the load space" (vessels).

    478:

    It gets even more fun when you remember that the conservation of momentum that is often presented as the method of action used by reaction engines is just a math trick turning a local property of conservation into a global one. While you can measure the push given by a rocket engine using the characteristics of the exhaust plume, its existence is not what makes the rocket move. It's all the particules going the wrong way and bouncing on the walls on the engine, transferring their momentum and eventually going out the correct way, that provide the push. Similarly the engine surface transfers the momentum to the rest of the rocket through the crystalline structure of the metals or the Van der Valls interactions between molecules.

    So that means the internals of the engine and the nozzle have to whistand the push of the fission. That can get... quite interesting, in this orion variant.

    479:

    The Senate is deliberately designed to be undemocratic (the Founding Fathers equated democracy with mob rule - given the state of most social media they may not have been wrong.)

    However, we can repeal the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, which fixed the number of Representatives at 435, and then institute the Wyoming Rule (the smallest state population - Wyoming - gets one representative and all other states get a number of representatives equal to the number of "Wyomings" that their population contains).

    The total number of reps in the US House increases from 435 to 573, which also affects the Electoral College. Wyoming still stays at 1 rep while the California delegation increase from 53 to 68. Blue states in general do much better.

    By matching the number of reps to actual population a lot of the unfairness of the Electoral College is mitigated. The number of EC votes needed to win the White House increases from 270 to 339 and the new EC votes are mostly in Blue States.

    Simple legislation from a Blue Congress can completely change American politics. No constitutional amendment needed.

    P.S. Also grant statehood to Puerto Rico and District of Columbia. Explore the possibility of reverting empty wastelands like Wyoming and the Dakotas back to territory status as having insufficient population to qualify for statehood.

    (A 52 star flag would have 8 alternating rows of 7 and 6 stars)

    P.P.S. Tie all federal aid to states to an elimination of gerrymandering practices. Congressional and statehouse districts to be apportioned by bi-partisan commissions.

    480:

    "You just have to write the drivers and it should all work."

    Sometimes it needs intelligence at both ends of the link (and maybe in the middle, too :-). Like some mice which came with a USB-to-PS/2 adapter (maybe also PS/2-to-RS232, memory is hazy on the details) so you could use them on PCs with either kind of socket.

    ... cue lots of angry 1-star reviews complaining that the adapters don't work with ${MyFavouriteMouse}. Because it wasn't just a matter of swapping pins and shifting levels: the mice that came with adapters also had firmware that detected what kind of signal they were being fed and switched protocols accordingly.

    481:

    Oh, I remember using Forth for a Uni project in 1975/6 (s**t thats over 45 years ago...). Chuck Moore gave us a copy plus a half-day intro. I think the best term for it as it was then is "minimal".

    482:

    "We'd probably have been better off with separate systems for civilian & military missions. "

    It kind of wound up that way, with Titan IV being used mostly by the military.

    483:

    I thought the idea was that it was supposed to make use of the fission fragments being charged to steer them out the back with magnetic fields. Only whoever had that idea forgot that they come into existence heading spherically in all directions with a random mixture of mass, charge and velocity, and swept all the difficulties of making so complicated and powerful a magnet as is needed to steer all of those into the same direction and still have it fit on a spaceship under the carpet of "unsolved technical difficulties".

    484:

    Son. That was a joke, son.

    485:

    Which means there's a momentum transfer to the magnet through photon exchange. Going through a magnetic field instead of Vas der Valls forces may have the good side effect of smearing the force through the whole size of the magnet instead of just a point of contact. Still a lot of oompf on the magnet coils.

    486:

    Probably not the adapter's fault at all; more likely something to do with the mice concerned and their Windoze drivers being developed together by the same dick. I got into that one once trying to get a PS/2 mouse with lots of fancy buttons, which worked fine in Windoze, to work properly with X11, with no USB involved at all. Turned out that it needed a reset code followed by some handful of magic bytes sent to it when it was plugged in to tell it to report the fancy buttons in a way that made sense, instead of simply coming to life in sensible mode in the first place which it perfectly well could have done. If you used it with the Windoze generic mouse driver instead of the thing that came on the CD with it, the fancy bits didn't work there either. So I ended up writing an extra case for some case statement in the X11 mouse driver code to make it set mice like that into sensible mode. I briefly knew everything about the PS/2 mouse protocol and then forgot it all again :) All I can remember now is that the reset code is the single byte 0xff, and doing echo -n -e '\0377' > /dev/psaux to unfuck a mouse that has gone into looney mode and get it back to a usable basic-stuff-only state is a trick applicable to more or less any such weird mouse. (Had to use octal because the shell didn't support hex escapes yet at the time.)

    Much more recently I tried to use a PCI card with a PS/2 port to overcome the machine's own PS/2 port apparently being fucked. This card uses a PCI to USB interface chip, and then has one of the chip's USB ports hard-wired to a 6502 to convert between USB and PS/2.

    The card didn't work because the PCI to USB chip it uses is crap. It has its own special bodge in the Linux kernel to try and make it work a bit better, but "a bit" isn't good enough, and it constantly crashes and does extremely weird things that the datasheet says it can't do, like randomly altering supposedly read-only config parameters. So in the end I cut the PCB tracks between the 6502 and the wanky chip, soldered a USB cable to the 6502 side of the severed ends, and poked the cable out through a convenient hole in the PC case to plug into one of the built-in USB ports from the outside. That worked fine :)

    (And the "knackered PS/2 port" turned out to be not the port, but the mouse; one of the pins had got pushed back into the plug somehow so it made contact with some sockets but not with others...)

    487:

    I bet someone's done it though. And I wouldn't be surprised if someone even manufactures it...

    488:

    Yes. It makes it easier to have the thing not instantly melt itself, but it makes an already extremely special magnet even specialler...

    489:

    @485: I know. The SMOP joke is hardly a new concept.

    @487: No. Not the adapter, nor the drivers. This is a PEBCAK joke.

    To spell it out:

    PS/2 mice spoke PS/2 protocol to the generic PS/2 drivers. USB mice spoke USB protocol to the generic USB drivers. But some smart mice made during the transition period could speak either protocol, depending on what voltage they saw on which wires. The adapter simply matched wires to pins in the plug. So either the PS/2 driver saw PS/2 protocol on a PS/2 port, or the USB driver saw USB protocol on a USB port. The drivers were not aware that the mouse was not what it seemed, and everything was fine so long as you used a smart mouse. No special drivers were needed.

    But the PEBCAK was that their owners assumed the (dumb, purely passive) adapters were protocol converters, when all the work was really being done by the smart mouse.

    490:

    I bet someone's done it though. And I wouldn't be surprised if someone even manufactures it...

    Connecting ANYTHING to DB25 SCSI is a way to wreak something. It was a kludge used by Apple to give the Mac Plus (1986) SCSI without that monster 50 pin connector that all SCSI used at the time. And created a decade or two of "how to you know the SCSI cable in your hand is a good one or a lousy one?"

    As in a GOOD SCSI cable will be thicker than thin as it will have a separate ground wire twisted with each data wire. So avoid thin SCSI cables. But a cable can be thick by just making the insulation outer layer thick.

    And on and on and on. Then we can talk SCSI 1, 2, 3, 4, ... or is it I, II, III, ....

    Over the last few years I've land filled / donated what likely cost over $10K new in various cables and adapters. Actually I've dropped them off at the electronics recycling center where they go who knows where.

    491:

    Thank you. I am glad to have my suspicions confirmed. To be fair, the product descriptions implied that they would work for all USB mice (and different ones for all USB keyboards), and it's not reasonable to expect most users to smell a rat.

    492:

    As in a GOOD SCSI cable will be thicker than thin as it will have a separate ground wire twisted with each data wire. So avoid thin SCSI cables.

    The SCSI standard didn't allow for interleaved grounds but it did have a variant for differential-pair signalling which did have twisted pairs of wires, good for electrically noisy environments and extended tuns between cabinets etc. There was even a DP ribbon-cable option which had twisted conductors with flat-wire "islands" at intervals along the ribbon for insulation-displacement connectors to be fitted.

    DB25 SCSI was actually DB24 since Apple used a missing pin as "don't plug your RS232 device into this connector" protection. Ask me how I know this. The Apple SCSI HDDs were also proprietary -- I still have an Apple SCSI drive in a box somewhere, definitely not an SCSI 50-pin device. Hell, it's entirely possible Apple didn't conform to the SCSI command set protocols. I wrote SCSI drivers for a living for a while, I still remember the endless option byte handling required to work with someone else's kit.

    493:

    I think there's an order-of-inheritance issue in the ontology of "natural capitalism". In terms of managing a renewable resource that grows, taking just the growth as a kind of harvest, I think (just to draw an IT-based analogy, because that comes readily to mind and will work for some people here) capitalism is a subclass, a specialisation, of that. Capitalism refers to spending money on things that make more money, a pattern emerging in European culture in the early modern period. Referring to the increase in capital that results as "growth" is itself a metaphor, historically deliberately and self-consciously drawing an analogy with the natural world. Saying it the other way around is a bit like saying that all vehicles are a kind of taxi.

    494:

    My boss used to say "Apple SCSI isn't SCSI". We had endless problems after we got some third-party removable hard disks to go along with the standard Apple SCSI hard disks we already had.

    The Apple disks worked originally as long as you left them alone. The third party ones basically didn't, without an extended period of fiddling around and swapping cables and rearranging the chain on the bus and so on when you tried to connect them. All the cables were Apple ones but some cables worked and some didn't. And since there weren't enough removable drives to go round they kept getting moved between different people's computers, which meant another hour of messing about every time, which in turn meant the number of good cables got smaller and smaller with all the wiggling until we only had about one left and that wasn't much good.

    It seemed that Apple had got it to work properly with their hard disks only, and then called it a day. More than one Apple hard disk on the bus was OK. Add a scanner and things weren't so good. The non-Apple removable disks were bad on their own and worse with anything else attached. As for trying to get an Apple hard disk and a scanner and a removable disk all working at the same time, well I did it once, but I couldn't make it work after that.

    495:

    To be fair, I think there's a miscategorisation involved in making a connection between sustainable population and immigration that ultimately leads to it being totally the natural home for those racist entryists. The earth as a whole has a carrying capacity, while nation states do not. Would-be immigrants are people who already exist, so any argument about where they live is just about shifting their (relatively small) footprint around. Sure there are arguments available about urban densities and local ecological effects, but they are not really complete without taking alternative placements into consideration and many alternatives likely have worse impacts. Otherwise it gets into the "so there's more for us", where "us" is some politically defined entity and I suppose it's at least a real thing when it's aligned to a nation state. But it's more or less the same thing as survivalist billionaire climate refuge building, in that the problem is "obviously" all the poor people.

    496:

    That seems to be how it panned out, but I tend to come at it from the observation that when poor people join rich countries they almost always become richer (a few are killed), and thus their consumption increased and usually dramatically. Observation also suggests that they tend not to even the minimal Australian standard of environmental care (littering, for example) which ups their damage above their apparent wealth level.

    There's also the problem at immigrants prompt economic growth above what we'd get without them. And since economic growth measures environmental damage that's a bad thing.

    The general solution still applies, make all Australians less environmentally damaging. But there's a strong conflict between a society fixed on economic growth at all costs and the need to shrink the economy until we can remove the link between more money = more problems.

    But Sustainable Australia is not the right vehicle to make those argument, any more than the Liberal Party is the vehicle for those who want to support first nations people...

    497:

    Hmmmmm. Were you at GUGS in 1987?

    499:
    • think there's an order-of-inheritance issue in the ontology of "natural capitalism". In terms of managing a renewable resource that grows, taking just the growth as a kind of harvest, I think (just to draw an IT-based analogy, because that comes readily to mind and will work for some people here) capitalism is a subclass, a specialisation, of that. Capitalism refers to spending money on things that make more money, a pattern emerging in European culture in the early modern period. Referring to the increase in capital that results as "growth" is itself a metaphor, historically deliberately and self-consciously drawing an analogy with the natural world. Saying it the other way around is a bit like saying that all vehicles are a kind of taxi.*

    I'd disagree, although I think I get what you're saying.

    Capitalism, like Christianity, is potentially a lot of things, and the "rape and run" strategy (loot the assets of something, discard it, move on to the next asset-rich thing, loot it, discard, move on...etc.) isn't all of what can be called capitalism.

    What I'm thinking of specifically is the notion within financially conservative investing that ideally you should live off the interest and not touch the capital. IIRC, that's one of the things Hawkins was pointing at (note it's been years since I read it). Anyway, I'd suggest there's a parallel between this treatment of money and the way things like marine reserves or Dreaming sacred spots should ideally be managed. I'm only implying conceptual similarity, nothing else.

    500:

    No, I was at a place in York, a couple of years later.

    501:

    I know what I've seen watching a lot of trains with all flatcars double-stacked with "full-sized", now short 20'.

    502:

    There are now 60 foot containers in standard use. https://www.trucknews.com/features/60-foot-containers-grow/

    "how can we make the problem of oversize trucks worse?"

    Pretty sure these aren't road legal in Australia, even though we now have trucks carrying two 40' containers in both Sydney and Melbourne. They even have different rules: Melbourne uses a "B Quad" configuration where Sydney uses 5 axle dog trailers.

    503:

    Oh, fuck. So from what you say, it looks like he's thinking that this is akin to the summer of 1914, which I've read a ton of references to as being utterly beautiful, esp. in Europe, weather-wise, etc.

    504:

    "Not", not "now", sigh.

    505:

    If one were truly interested in increasing the number of representatives in US Congress, there is a better way.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_Amendment

    This is an amendment that has already been put forth to the states for ratification... it has no sunset clause, no expiration, and cannot be recalled by Congress. They no longer have a say in it.

    Furthermore, it has already been ratified by several states, and they can't backpedal. If approximately 26 more states were to ratify it, it would become part of the Constitution immediately. And Congress would have to add approximately 5800 new Congressional seats.

    It might be as simple as convincing a single state legislature somewhere that it should be ratified. Others would follow suit.

    506:

    =====

    David L:

    "where they go who knows where"

    you'll love "Junkyard Planet" by Adam Minter; non-fic; "...a vast, often hidden, 500-billion-dollar industry ...from back-alley Chinese computer recycling operations to recycling factories capable of processing a jumbo jet's worth of trash..."

    if you get e-book version, search for "Christmas lights" and "computer cables"

    =====

    Damian:

    "sustainable population"

    such discussions need to include such fiddly-bits as where to find people willing to do work of the dangerous-messy-boring-hard varieties... a long standing part of bigotry in US-UK-AUS-ME can be categorized as there being work not suited for those of 'better bloodlines' <== quote of racist (me being sarcastic)

    it came to the notice of oblivious millions of football fans when they learnt just how few people in Qatar have citizenship (just 313,000)and so poorly treated those two-million-plus expatriate workers were, the estimated deaths in readying stadiums for World Cup ranged from 300 to 7,000...

    one of the recognized contributing factors in UK's NHS collapse has been the decreasing numbers of semi-skilled workers paid at rates no UK citizen (willingly) accepts...

    here in US, that same low pay on offer has prevented hospitals from finding enough orderlies-janitors-cooks-clerks-etc to fill long standing vacancies... that was pre-covid... factor in daily doses of deadly airborne viral exposure and not many folk will work for USD$8/H... unless their visa shackled 'em to that mop-and-bucket with bosses crudely oft repeated reminders of immediate deportation if unemployed... result being "filtered immigration" is really whitewashed elitist coded language for "recruit starving hordes of desperate uneducated peasants from failed nation-states to do miserable dangerous work for low wages whilst we sip martinis and complain about having to constantly whip these ungrateful slackers"

    =====

    newest chunk of doomscrolling to add into my never-quite finished novel about the near-future rebuilt American economic miracle-slash-disaster, an article titled ==> "New strain of bird flu kills hundreds of snow geese in Colorado"... which if jumps species the way covid has done, will wipe out several zillion more anti-vax anti-rational #WSCNs, thereby rendering the USA a bit more sane and a bit less stupid (on average)...

    problem being all the 'collateral damage' amongst those all too likely to be exposed: children, elderly, cancer patients, etc

    https://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_33fa8377f70a783df137a291a2efe899

    =====

    507:

    "Franchise" by Isaac Asimov anyone?

    508:

    All NHS staff except doctors are paid on a oommon pay scale - Agenda FOR Change (AFC). But lots of lower paid staff like porters, kitchen staff are employed by contractors who just want to keep costs down. These staff don’t get AFC pay and won’t get the same increase in pay as AFC staff. AFC was based on job evaluation and gave pay rises to most staff when it was introducers in the mid 2000s. Non NHS staff didn’t get these pay increases and also don’t get the NHS pension unless it was grandfathered into their existing job. These people probably won’t get as much as the probable below inflation NHS pay settlement.

    https://www.unison.org.uk/news/press-release/2021/08/army-of-invisible%E2%80%8B-yet-indispensible%E2%80%8B-cleaners-porters-and-caterers-must-be-included-in-nhs-pay-award/

    509:

    That does appear to be the illogical conclusion of the process, yes. Although even Issac presumably knew that with n=1 the uncertainty is large regardless of how well chosen the sample is. The next election in his story would presumably have a black woman from New Orleans as the voter and I suspect her choice might be different :)

    Part of the point of most sortition exercises is to train the chosen to understand the material presented. It's a time cost balancing exercise the same way representative democracy is. Viz, rather than making everyone sit down and become informed decision makers on a particular topic you pick a few people and get them to do that before making a decision. Representation does the informing indirectly and the decision directly, citizen's juries flip that.

    510:

    whitroth & Howard NYC
    I, too have been horrified, watching the parallels, not with 1938, but with the period 1901-14.
    Particularly as "Putin's War" looks more like the advance of Imperial Germany in 1914 - driven back to stalemate, trench warfare, blockade .... wait for the other to collapse.

    Howard NYC @ 507
    UM: to the notice of oblivious millions of football fans - NO It did NOT.
    They are, almost by definition moronic fascist thugs - why should they notice the downtrodden slaves in an arsehole country, when they are having a "good time"?
    AND:
    and complain about having to constantly whip these ungrateful slackers - cue Liz Trusstercluck & others going on about how the British are "the worst slackers in the world" - right?

    511:

    palate cleansing snippet...

    "All my life, there had been a giant empty space, a huge existential void that had needed to be filled by something, and I had never realized that that thing was the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile. ... With its sleek red hot-dog battering ram surrounded by a fluffy bun, it was like the Space Battleship Yamato made of bread and pork, made of metal. This MIT student named Matt had been suping it up with a high-performance electric engine and all-terrain wheels, just saving it for the right occasion. And somehow, Janelle had convinced Matt that our little adventure was it."

    from "The Last Movie Ever Made", Charlie Jane Anders

    512:

    I’m not convinced it would be possible to achieve the copying of a worker willing to work without scamming (as in lying to) the original. (Or pre-use brain editing.)

    514:

    I do get the bit about taking people with a small footprint and turning them into a larger footprint, though the issue with habits like littering strikes me as inherently solvable: e.g. the current culture that so strongly disfavours littering in Aus was heavily influenced by public awareness campaigns in the 70s and 80s, which cost peanuts compared to what recent governments have spent on much less valuable communications. I would counter that ultimately immigrants adopt the post-demographic-transition attitudes of the "host" society in terms of continuing to make more people (or not), something easy to counter anecdotally but which I think holds up statistically, certainly a couple of generations in. I know, we don't have "generations" worth of time, but the overpopulation argument gets to use that sort of timeframe so the counter should get to also.

    515:

    you'll love "Junkyard Planet" by Adam Minter

    As opposed to Junkyard Planet by H. Beam Piper?

    516:

    you'll love "Junkyard Planet" by Adam Minter; non-fic; "...a vast, often hidden, 500-billion-dollar industry

    Oh I know the failures and ignorance in the US trash / recycling industry. I tend to upset locals when I say that much less than 50% of plastics dropped into our single stream systems gets actually recycled. I suspect it's more like 10%.

    Folks who've taken the local tour conflate the big building extracting 90% of the plastic and shipping it off with actually recycling it.

    Our local government seems to try and do the right thing but there's only so much that can be done if there's no market for it. Or even possible for it.

    517:

    There's still the possibility of repurposing plastic waste in applications where it doesn't matter if the shredded material has multiple varieties or dyes. Such as using plastic as an ingredient in paving mixtures. https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-paving-with-plastic-could-make-a-dent-in-the-global-waste-problem https://advancedplastiform.com/plastic-asphalt-for-new-roads/

    Or one could go the Mother Earth News route and use bottles of water in a flush tank to cut water use, or beneath a sunny window in cool weather as added thermal mass. A working class person is not really in a position to know if when a denizen of the C-suite says it wouldn't be profitable, if they really mean insufficiently profitable.

    518:

    The real solution to plastic waste disposal is one that no-one will talk about or admit exists, high-temperature incineration with stringent exhaust filtering and control. Plastic is fossil carbon fuel that's been temporarily diverted from its final destination as CO2 in the atmosphere. It's going to get to the bottom of the energy curve eventually whether by UV cracking of the C=C bonds or by microbial digestion but that's its eventual fate, increasing global warming over a longer timescale. We could cut out the middle-man and stop shipping it around the world to end up dumped Somewhere Else to rot and eventually turn into re-exported CO2 or actually get some useful energy out of it locally instead.

    519:

    This is great until you run into halogenated polymers like PVC. At which point you run into dioxins and other really nasty stuff. (Don't get me started on fluorine.) Similarly with battery recycling -- lithium is useful (it's rare enough to be worth extracting and reusing) but lead, cadmium, and mercury all show up in "batteries" (generic) and you can't rely on consumers to know to separate them out.

    520:

    It's a statistical thing, the amount of fluorocarbons and halogen-loaded plastics etc. is way lower than the "organic" HDPE and PET plastics in the waste stream and I did say "stringent exhaust filtering and control" -- I worked in Denny in central Scotland during the Great Two-Headed Calves Dioxin scandal (local high-temp incinerator intended to destroy polychlorinated biphenyls run at a lower temp than necessary to save money, hilarity and farmyard genetic deformations ensued).

    All plastics are going to become CO2 in the end if they are left exposed to air, just like oil spills and methane escapes. It just takes time, for some types of plastic it will just take longer. Deep landfill of problematic mixed plastic waste would work but landfills are bad these days because something something something so instead the West ships this crap off to Somewhere Else and pretends that's the end of it. Deep oceanic disposal would also work, of course...

    521:

    Plastic bottles to reduce flushing water use is often problematic. When I was working in a Leeds University building someone used to come round every year and put a plastic bag in the toilet cisterns. As a result the flushing water was reduced so much that multiple flushes were often necessary. I removed all these bags, at least in the male toilets, made them much more hygenic and probably reduced water use. In a similar manner, at a Salford hospital, inaccessible thermostats were put on radiators in my lab to reduce energy use. The expensive multichannel analyser we used had a limited temperature range. And required air conditioning. Since the thermostats were set higher than the analysers optimal temperature the radiators fought the thermostat. The thermostat won but at the end of the working day a large slab of ice built up on its radiator. It took months for the hospital to agree reset the thermostats.

    522:

    One more reason to find uses that do not need the consistency of new resins/ pellets.

    523:

    So, use a small bottle? Even an eighth liter would make difference over time.

    524:

    I just finished reading Return from the Stars by Stanisław Lem - "suspending" a mind for a long period could be similar to the narrator's complete confusion about what's going on when he returns to Earth over a century later (he can't even get out of a station for ages).
    Regarding creating someone from a toad - imagine the paperwork. In Austerity Britain, you could be waiting months to register such a person with the local council, and they would need a National Insurance number.

    525:

    Provided that it didn't increase the frequency of needing double flushes by more than about 10%.

    526:

    The problem is probably a lot more widespread now. All UK toilet cisterns now come with a series of holes up the side of the siphon and a set of little plastic plugs to block them up with. The idea is that when the water level gets down to the first hole you've left unplugged, air starts coming in and stops the siphon, so you can select from a range of different flush volumes. This is because of some water-saving regulation which has been around for quite a few years now.

    Trouble is they all come with the plugs set so the highest hole is unplugged, and nobody ever changes it. For some reason it appears to be considered bad form for a plumber who has just installed a new toilet to have a shit in it to test the effectiveness of the flush, so the plumber doesn't do it, and the owner of the toilet never even realises the plugs are there. So nearly all toilet installations are now set up to give a flush volume which is inadequate in most cases and now everywhere is like Leeds University, which is kind of a horrible thought.

    527:

    There's still the possibility of repurposing plastic waste in applications where it doesn't matter if the shredded material has multiple varieties or dyes.

    Not so much disagreeing as that was not so much my point.

    In most of the US they think tossing plastic stamped with a chasing arrow triangle with a number inside of it from 1 to 7 means it will get "recycled" into a new plastic "thing".

    They don't get that only 3 of those 7 types of plastic have ever had a commercial way to recycle. The other 4 are somewhat successful lab experiments that have never left the lab. So, yes, for those 4 turning them into plastic rocks for roadways is better than bailing them up and burying them. But you need to deal with the chemical issues that show up when you try and turn a food wrapper into a plastic rock.

    But the main issue in the US is in too many cases it is cheaper to use new petro based resins to make new plastic than recycle old into those new things.

    And the happy talk PR people are still snowing over the majority of the folks. I suspect it is mainly because people want confirmation they are not bad and this PR message is that.

    528:

    The real solution to plastic waste disposal is one that no-one will talk about or admit exists, high-temperature incineration with stringent exhaust filtering and control. Plastic is fossil carbon fuel that's been temporarily diverted from its final destination as CO2 in the atmosphere. It's going to get to the bottom of the energy curve eventually whether by UV cracking of the C=C bonds or by microbial digestion but that's its eventual fate, increasing global warming over a longer timescale. We could cut out the middle-man and stop shipping it around the world to end up dumped Somewhere Else to rot and eventually turn into re-exported CO2 or actually get some useful energy out of it locally instead.

    Actually, this is fascinatingly wrong.

    In reverse order, scrubbing the CO2 out of the exhaust is the easy part. Where to put it is a bit harder. Earth naturally sequesters CO2 in sediments, mostly as kerogen*, which we don't really know how to make very well yet. Worse, in our haste to get all the oil, coal, and methane we could, we've left numerous holes in the salt domes and other impermeable layers that were holding the liquid hydrocarbons (especially methane) underground. Plugging these leaks turns out to be pretty hard, and cement is at best a temporary seal, especially for methane. It would be ironic indeed if some self-setting polymer slurry turns out to be a better answer. Or maybe we can figure out how to make safe-ish kerogen cheaply and just bury it?

    As for incineration, yeah, it's received A LOT of attention, and it still gets discussed.

    The general problem with trash is that it's possible to process almost any form of trash, provided you get a clean enough input. Getting trash sorted is the hard part. In general, it's a high entropy material, so to sort it you've got to add a lot of really complicated work, usually involving a lot of people literally sorting shit. In general, modern civilization is about taking high quality feed-stocks (petroleum, for example, coal, metal ores, animals, plants, etc.) using them (often with huge amounts of energy), and discarding them. Turning the high entropy waste stream (collected, carelessly mixed junk) back into high quality feed-stocks takes even more energy than wasting the originals did, and for some reason we'd rather just throw the trash away.

    More prosaically, there are literally thousands of proposals for using some part of some waste stream, if they can get a uniform-enough waste stream. It's this last part that founders almost all such proposals. To pick an old one, decades ago they tried using a few, standard-sized glass bottles for things like milk. You'd basically rent the bottle, return it for a refund, they'd clean it, relabel, refill, and resell. This worked for a little while until people realized that they could turn in the bottles full of stuff they'd otherwise have to pay to dispose of, like used motor oil. The contaminated bottles had to be discarded, with the recycler paying the waste fee instead of the user. That waste problem destroyed the bottle recycling system, so now we spend a lot of energy recycling glass.

    Incinerating plastics is quite possible, assuming you know what you're burning to optimize burn conditions, and you have a place to safely store the halogenated ashes until they're no longer dangerous, which takes, um....awhile? Of course, you never know quite what you're burning, so optimizing burn conditions is hard.

    This is the bigger problem: different materials require different incineration regimes, and with a huge stream of highly heterogenous garbage, optimizing the incinerating process is hard. Disposing of the ash is hard too, because the material holds whatever unpleasant elements (heavy metals, halogenated stuff, halogenated heavy metals, for all I know) that don't have a half-life.

    I've heard incineration floated as a partial solution to getting rid of green waste, so that it doesn't ferment in landfills and emit methane. The upside of that is that at least you get some energy burning greenwaste. Right now they're planning instead to use mega-composting facilities instead. I can go into the problems with these as well, but that would be even more tedious.

    The tl;dr is that, to a first approximation, the flame of civilization is a bit like a badly-managed incinerator itself, consuming everything it can and leaving behind a lot of high entropy waste. Upcycling that waste would take a huge amount of energy, which, oddly enough, we no longer have. We may even be running short on energy keep the flame of civilization itself going. Oh well. Perhaps we civilized types are mostly just kerogen-in-waiting? It's a silly way to live, but hard to get out of nonetheless.

    *https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerogen

    529:

    Ah, yes, outsource what you can. Never mind how similar to what you'd have paid employees is to what you're paying the contracting company so that they can make a profit.

    530:

    Inorganic halogen compounds don't decay, so I don't understand your point. The ash doesn't become any safer with time, but only when neutralised by things like calcium carbonate (e.g. for HCl). I am not a chemist and have no idea how you neutralise PFTE's decomposition products!

    https://fluoridealert.org/wp-content/pesticides/teflon.decomposition.prod.htm

    531:

    Ah, yes, outsource what you can. Never mind how similar to what you'd have paid employees is to what you're paying the contracting company so that they can make a profit.

    Yes, but increased profits are richly deserved by hardworking business owners, unlike increased wages which are a results of greedy workers and socialism.

    (Sarcasm, obviously, at least on my part. But also pretty much what Banks, Carson, Pence, and their ilk say in the daily emails I get from them.)

    532:

    Inorganic halogen compounds don't decay, so I don't understand your point. The ash doesn't become any safer with time, but only when neutralised by things like calcium carbonate (e.g. for HCl). I am not a chemist and have no idea how you neutralise PFTE's decomposition products!

    Looks to me like you understood my point pretty well. The added joy is that it's extremely difficult to find a site where landfilled incinerator ash won't cause all sorts of problems if and when it gets mobilized.

    Put it in the driest desert you can find? Not a bad idea, but even there it occasionally rains (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGUMRZrsVg8 ). Neighbors to hazardous landfills tend to get all upset and litigious too, for some reason, and this limits how many of them you can build.

    Fortunately with lithium, it's a freaking nuisance to handle as waste (broken, igniting batteries are a thing), it's a pain to store (ditto), and old batteries are basically high grade lithium, cobalt, etc. ore for whoever can figure out a cost-effective way to separate the materials out and upcycle them.

    Wish I could be as optimistic about plastics. Not that we're going to live to see the end of this particular set of messes, but I think they put leaded gasoline to shame in the bad ideas department.

    533:

    Eh? Hydrogen chloride is a gas, so you need to turn it into calcium or magnesium chloride. Those (and calcium fluoride) are essentially non-toxic The chlorides are used as deicers on the roads, and calcium fluoride is a common, natural mineral. No, the residue is NOT likely to cause serious problems in ordinary landfill. That deals with polythene, polypropylene, polyurethane, PET and PVC and probably more.

    The problem is NOT the disposal of the ash (which is pretty harmless), but appropriate burning and the trapping of the decomposition gases (which are seriously toxic).

    PTFE is another matter, and I will leave a chemist to comment.

    534:

    it's possible to process almost any form of trash, provided you get a clean enough input.

    Which means designing products to support that, and selecting the materials so they can be co-recycled or easily separated.

    This is starting to happen on a small scale, but for some reason all major manufacturers oppose the idea with great vigor. Well, the oppose it when it's suggested that they have any part of the process, when someone else pays to clean up after they've made their profit they're usually ok with it. As long as they don't have to pay tax.

    Gets us back to your point about our society being optimised to turn valuable resources into problematic waste. Do you think we can say we're really good at producing problems, or is the huge energy and material input compared to the problem production actually a sign of inefficiency?

    535:

    Fortunately with lithium, it's a freaking nuisance to handle as waste (broken, igniting batteries are a thing), it's a pain to store (ditto), and old batteries are basically high grade lithium, cobalt, etc. ore for whoever can figure out a cost-effective way to separate the materials out and upcycle them.

    Yup.

    No less a Galaxy brain than Elon Musk noted that LiIon batteries contain 20x more Lithium than the best, purest ore deposits (which we currently mine and refine to produce said batteries), so it ought, in principle, to be cost-effective to recycle them ...

    536:

    Which means designing products to support that, and selecting the materials so they can be co-recycled or easily separated.

    Well, that, and there's the idiot problem of what to do about the consumer who can't or won't play along. The ignoranuses dumping their motor oil in recyclable bottles before recycling them is an obvious example of that. Right now, we unfortunately have to assume that any process that requires the life-cycle to be free of idiots is unworkable. Everything has to be idiot-resistant. By designing this way, we are of course rapidly evolving a biosphere that is also increasingly resistant to human idiots. Not that this will be a pleasant to live in.

    This is where I can sympathize with the Australian aborigines who rather violently punish those who break their Laws.

    Gets us back to your point about our society being optimised to turn valuable resources into problematic waste. Do you think we can say we're really good at producing problems, or is the huge energy and material input compared to the problem production actually a sign of inefficiency?

    Can I agree with both statements?

    537:

    Our recycleable container system currently scans and weighs containers before paying for them. It's not perfect but it works. OTOH it's a 20' container sized machine that can only accept about 40 containers a minute... something something idiots are very inventive.

    A lot of this comes out in the arguments about charging for rubbish disposal. In theory charging for that at whatever it costs is simple and effective, except that people who don't want to pay then dump their shit wherever they can get away with doing so.

    But producer levies are politically impossible, because the producers are a concentration of wealth and our political system cannot manage those effectively.

    So we get horrible compromises like container deposit legislation and fines for illegal dumping. At least CDLs are effective, fines are not.

    538:

    I am assuming that any waste incinerator will emit CO2 into the atmosphere, that's a lost cause. What I am saying is that plastic waste is actually a processed form of fossil carbon[1] and incineration simply completes the cycle of extraction to atmospheric CO2 quicker. Leave plastic exposed to air long enough and it will decompose into CO2 anyway, it's the rest energy state of any carbon compound. Having it hang around as it decomposes seems to get some people's backs up though, better to hurry the process and maybe recover some useful energy from the process.

    The amount of PTFE and even PVC in the waste plastic stream is miniscule compared to HDPE, polythene and other non-halogen plastics. High-temperature (1500 deg C plus) incineration will usually decompose halogenated plastics but the exhaust gas stream still has to be treated before it's released to atmosphere to reduce emissions of dioxins, nitrous compounds and possible ozone-depletion catalysts. We can do it with oil, gas, coal and lignite power plants, we can do it with plastic waste. Indeed, Green Germany apparently gets about 4 percent of its total energy (heat and electricity) from waste incinerators and a significant amount of that energy must come from burning plastic waste.

    [1] It's possible to think of fossil carbon (oil, gas, coal, lignite) as solar energy that has been successfully stored in past times, two big features renewables boosters have been pushing for decades.

    539:

    Right. It's no more of a problem than burning oil, except perhaps for PTFE and other fluorinated plastics. PVC produces dioxins, but those can be eliminated by high temperatures and oxygen, so it's back to hydrogen chloride and nitrogen oxides, all of which can be dealt with using existing methods.

    540:

    The problem would appear to the missing part -- the training. It's work to make an informed decision, and so many voters don't do that work.

    541:

    50+ years of vigorously deprecating "unpaid work" while trying to produce addictive distractions that soak up all available spare time means most voters "don't have time". People are taking time out of their work day to spend on those distractions. Ahem.

    542:

    And in the US, all your hours belong to us. (And they expect responses 24x7x365.24.)

    543:

    Chasing back to the discussion of fun with ship ownership:

    Using big data processing and a compilation of global datasets, researchers from Global Fishing Watch, the Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab from Duke University, and Stockholm Resilience Centre were able to track and analyze 35,000 commercial fishing and support vessels to reveal their changing identities and enable the reconstruction of vessel histories to demonstrate reflagging patterns.

    The study, "Tracking Elusive and Shifting Identities of the Global Fishing Fleet'"...

    https://phys.org/news/2023-01-tracking-elusive-shifting-identities-global.html

    So the large physical objects can be tracked, and there are suggestions in that article that they're also tracking ownership.

    544:

    they expect responses 24x7x365.24

    In theory so does my boss, but I get paid for that and it is very much "your code broke, you need to fix it" which meant the first couple of years it was a fairly frequent thing that I'd work out of hours. But now that I've had time to discover the problems and make things more reliable it's money for jam. I work when I feel like it... more or less, I do still have to actually work.

    But places like AskAManager and various reddit forums are full of horrible stories, mostly from the US. ClimateTown on youtube just looked at all the coal-to-electricity plants closing down and went into the "16 tons" history and how that carries over to today. With bonus discussion of Minchin part owning coal companies... apparently it's not corruption if he directly votes to give money to himself in the US.

    545:

    Presented for consideration:

    A new study published today in Science Advances combines a decade's worth of satellite vessel tracking data with identification information from more than 40 public registries to determine where and when vessels responsible for most of the world's industrial fishing change their country of registration, a practice known as "reflagging", and identify hotspots of potential unauthorized fishing and activity of foreign-owned vessels.

    The study, "Tracking Elusive and Shifting Identities of the Global Fishing Fleet'" found that close to 20 percent of high seas fishing is carried out by vessels that are either internationally unregulated or not publicly authorized, with large concentrations of these ships operating in the Southwest Atlantic Ocean and the western Indian Ocean.

    Of the 116 States involved in reflagging, the study found that one-fifth of them were responsible for about 80 percent of this practice over the past decade, with most reflagging occurring in Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Pacific Islands. The study found that reflagging takes place in just a few ports—Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Busan, Zhoushan, and Kaohsiung have the highest activity.

    https://phys.org/news/2023-01-tracking-elusive-shifting-identities-global.html

    546:

    Oops, Moz got there first. Should have refreshed my window before posting…

    547:

    what the longer term consequences of 'micro-beads' will be from a medical perspective is of increasing significance...

    plastic typically (but not always) has a density ranging from 0.89 to 0.94 g/cm^3... thus plastic typically (but not always) floats on sweet water and all the more so on salt water... especially if deliberately foamed to be 'inflated' (Styrofoam(tm) is most commonly known but not the only such material) as means of reducing dead weight and cost-of-materials...

    which gives rise to clustering clumps of floating plastic waste... and wave action plus salt water plus sunlight plus collisions result in a combination of mechanical 'n chemical breakage into ever smaller bits...

    thus ==> 'micro-beads'

    well named since no reason these cannot be further 'n further busted into not just millimeter (10^-3 meters) bits but ever smaller micrometer (10^-6 meters)

    as you grind up a solid into smaller bits you increase its surface area and thus improve chemical reaction-ability... this is why humans (and all animals) have teeth (or eqv) to grind food prior to attempting digestion...

    those 'micro-beads' are everywhere... including in fish flesh, animal flesh, possibly in fruiting bodies (apples, tomatoes, banananananas, etc) though that's not totally confirmed... having gone through your digestive tract, 'micro-beads' were incompletely dissolved by stomach acids... most washed out but some get carried along with proteins and minerals to build 'n repair the body... and thus incorporated into human tissue...

    along with those chemical traces dissolved off of surfaces of 'micro-beads'...

    so... mazel tov... each of us is now a toxic waste dump

    as tough as filtering out 'micro-beads' from water on massive scale of processing 361 million km^2 of ocean surfaces, it will become necessary however expensive since at the moment there is no known method of removing 'micro-beads' from human tissue... much too small for tweezers and do not show up on x-ray/ultrasound/MRI/CAT unless so clumped together as to visibly block bloodflow in veins 'n arteries... thus untouchable as well as invisible...

    to repeat... yet another nightmare facing us... what the longer term consequences of 'micro-beads' will be from a medical perspective is of increasing significance...

    and thus you have basis for a horror novel

    548:

    At least one other person thought it was worthwhile ✅

    549:

    those 'micro-beads' are everywhere.

    Including rain, and drinking water. Unless you have a reverse osmosis setup you're drinking them.

    Fun times. I am seriously considering that just to get rid of all the ugly non-water stuff in the water. But first it's time to go 100% organic food because Australia has really stupid pesticide regulations (well, compared to the civilised world, and even to the UK until they "fix" their rules)

    550:

    just to get rid of all the ugly non-water stuff in the water.

    General Jack D. Ripper had the right idea after all.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J67wKhddWu4

    551:

    Several people have, as has been reported in this very blog, worked that out, including one of the other founders of Tesla. Redwood Materials was started by JB Straubel. A somewhat different problem for many of them has been a lack of batteries needing recycling because they turn out to last rather longer than initially expected. I’m sure the supply will eventually grow over time.

    552:

    scrap prices...

    Iron USD$0.93 kg

    Lithium USD$71.373 kg

    Nickel USD$26.73 kg

    Tin USD$ 28.63 kg

    if it is worth the effort to locate odds 'n ends of iron to recycle... yeah definitely so for lithium... just a matter of figuring out how to separate out a highly reactive and easily ignited metal contained inside a mix of other materials some of which are also in demand... my guess is sooner (not later) there's going to be theft rings focused upon any junkyard stockpiling lithium (usually done till there's a complete truckload to optimize shipping costs)

    553:

    A somewhat different problem for many of them has been a lack of batteries needing recycling because they turn out to last rather longer than initially expected. I’m sure the supply will eventually grow over time.

    The Prius has been in production for 25 years. What has been happening to all of those batteries? There have been over 5 million of the cars cumulatively sold world wide as of a year ago.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Prius

    Based on a comment or two from people who have bought used Prius cars I suspect there is an underground market for hacked cars/batteries that will allow them to be used past the factory preset limits.

    Hopefully there's not a monster pile of them somewhere waiting to become another, but different, Beirut mishap.

    554:

    I am assuming that any waste incinerator will emit CO2 into the atmosphere, that's a lost cause. What I am saying is that plastic waste is actually a processed form of fossil carbon[1] and incineration simply completes the cycle of extraction to atmospheric CO2 quicker. Leave plastic exposed to air long enough and it will decompose into CO2 anyway, it's the rest energy state of any carbon compound. Having it hang around as it decomposes seems to get some people's backs up though, better to hurry the process and maybe recover some useful energy from the process.

    Problem is, the main reservoir of carbon on Earth isn't the atmosphere, it's the lithosphere. It all ends up underground anyway. Life only works because plate tectonics and the resulting volcanoes blow enough of it into the atmosphere where most plants can get at it.

    Since our species is adapted to an icehouse world, which has low atmospheric CO2, I'd suggest that using the atmosphere as a dumpsite is problematic.

    555:

    At least one other person thought it was worthwhile ✅

    And I appreciated both, thank you.

    556:

    Oh definitely, a fascinating article!

    557:

    Q: what kinds of stories can we cook up about 'crimes of the future' when lithium becomes so critical nations edge towards war?

    will regions (or states or cities ) get into conflict over who gets each new desperately needed stack of batteries and/or wind farms?

    never mind theft, what else turns evil minds towards law breaking? which laws? dumping? counterfeiting? diluting? land theft?

    558:

    Re: '... underground market for hacked cars/batteries that will allow them to be used past the factory preset limits.'

    There may be a financial incentive for locating and re-using/re-building such batteries. Apparently how the batteries are sealed impacts their 'life'.

    https://www.dal.ca/news/2023/01/16/dalhousie-battery-discovery-self-discharge.html

    Excerpt:

    'That's when they found that the polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, in the tape decomposes and creates the molecule that leads to the self-discharge. The molecule is called a redox shuttle because it can travel to the positive side of the electrode, then to the negative side and then back to the positive side. So, it shuttles between the electrodes and that creates the self-discharge, just like lithium is supposed to do. The problem is that the shuttle molecule is doing it all the time in the background, even when no lithium is supposed to move when the battery just sitting there.

    "It's something we never expected because no one looks at these inactive components, these tapes and plastic foils in the battery cell but it really needs to be considered if you want to limit side reactions in the battery cell," he says of the tape made from PET, a strong, lightweight plastic used widely in packaging and pop bottles.'

    Given how widespread PET usage is - and the discussion about micro-plastic beads - maybe someone will look into whether/how this type of reaction affects living tissue.

    About the high cost of developing tech to scrub out such pollutants ...

    In a way this also feeds into a recent study (sorry - can't look for it just now) showing that there's a measurable downturn in new scientific advances in the US. A large part of the reasons is that there's no funding for 'risky' research that can't be seen to be directly link into profit$. And as long as 'progress' is continually and exclusively linked to $$$, I think this trend will continue. BTW - the UN uses a multi-factorial metric to measure the 'health' of a country, the Happiness Index.

    Question to folks here:

    What are the benchmark definitions/catchy descriptions for a 'new tech' over the past decades? (I'm still of the opinion that Steve Jobs' cool image/persona was the key factor in widespread adoption of smartphones and laptops by individuals whereas Bill Gates' laptops with built-in 'Office' software made compturizing even the smallest biz/office an easy sell.)

    HowardNYC @558:

    '... what else turns evil minds towards law breaking'

    There's more evidence piling up that trauma whether physical or emotional can bend or break minds. Two key brain regions that keep showing up in the research are the amygdala and the hippocampus. Maybe it's time to stop trivializing emotion, stop glamorizing knee-jerk violent responses, change the portrayals of cinema/fictions heroes' emotional make up from stoic (emotionally inert/machine-like), martyrs (disposable throw-away lives), physically and emotionally combative (only way to 'win' is to destroy/kill)*. Basically this also translates to: intelligence, scientific/evidence based decision making, emotional growth and integrity, interpersonal/social concern don't matter.

    *Yeah - would suck for the movie industry special effects and martial arts folks.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films_in_the_United_States_by_year

    Question:

    What are the best films/books (any category) that had zero violence, emotional deadness, martyr syndrome, etc.?

    559:

    Q: what kinds of stories can we cook up about 'crimes of the future' when lithium becomes so critical nations edge towards war?

    I really don't expect that to happen. Lithium isn't that rare, and it's only really essential (at present) for lightweight/mobile batteries. Stuff like grid backup can be done with electrolyte flow cells which are big and heavy but have comparatively unlimited capacity -- not suitable for vehicles, but great for municipalities.

    Indeed, the real problem with Lithium isn't that it's scarce, it's that everyone is basing demand projections on a straight line extrapolation of late 20th century first world transport culture into the future, merely substituting electric motors for ICE. A re-think of urban planning to reduce suburban sprawl, increase in remote working to replace commuting, and rollout of streetcars and safe e-bike tracks would reduce demand for cars enormously. Never mind the seeming mirage of self-driving vehicles.

    A key issue is geopolitics, which has traditionally (post 1750) been dominated by the economics of energy distribution. Coal, oil, guano, uranium ore -- these determine who can wage war, and where they can go. PV cells and wind farms are not portable, but grid connections can be laid: current wisdom about military affairs emphasises late 20th century energy economics again (tanks! trucks! planes! All burning petrochemicals to move!) and it's going to change. Not least because precision-guided munitions ultimately cut down on the logistics overheads (why move a thousand artillery shells forward if all you need to do is drop one building, which a single PGM can hit?).

    And we're back to the lessons of the Ukraine war, where Russia is using circa 1941-90 tactics and 1870-1941 logistics to try and invade Ukraine, which has lately been converging with NATO/EU standards ...

    560:

    SFReader:

    "catchy descriptions for a 'new tech'?"

    hmmm... if it is in the hands of a pretty person, then it is 'cool' or 'intriguing or 'sexy' or 'accessory must have'

    pretty person being whichever combo of age-gender-body-type grabs attention of a targeted demographic of buyers-users-oglers

    a horrid example being the trend of 'purse pooches'... AFAIK it was Paris Hilton walking around with a teacup miniature dog who kicked off that awfulness...

    anything that you want to sell first figure out how to get the 'cool kids' in a targeted high school (or university) to buy-use-ogle...

    and then there is the artistry of packaging... nobody will pay USD$75 for garden snails but will do so for l'escargot

    561:

    Not just crimes of the future. It’s believed that a major reason for the invasion of Ukraine is the natural resources including lithium and rare earths.

    562:

    Some people believed that NATO only invaded Afghanistan because of its vast untapped resources of rare earths, gold, diamonds, oil, gas, even (it is rumoured) vibranium. There were people who offered investment prospectuses with high rates of return based on those supposed resources. Last time I looked Wakanda, sorry, Afghanistan was still in the poppy-growing and goat-raping business and it is still not a world-leading mining and fossil energy producing powerhouse. I suspect the same thing might end up being true about eastern Ukraine.

    563:

    The only way in which that statement would make sense is if you were describing it as the reason for 'the west' to want to conquer Russia. Ukraine has no significant rare earth resources, and Russia is equal third. Lithium is not similar, and neither have significant resources, though Serbia does, and invading that without smashing Russia would be problematic.

    https://www.statista.com/statistics/277268/rare-earth-reserves-by-country/

    Most of what is said about that conflict (by either side) is self-evident bullshit or egregiously distorted propaganda.

    564:

    Indeed, the real problem with Lithium isn't that it's scarce, it's that everyone is basing demand projections on a straight line extrapolation of late 20th century first world transport culture into the future, merely substituting electric motors for ICE. A re-think of urban planning to reduce suburban sprawl, increase in remote working to replace commuting, and rollout of streetcars and safe e-bike tracks would reduce demand for cars enormously. Never mind the seeming mirage of self-driving vehicles.

    Probably at this point, it's worth coming up with working ways to reduce urban sprawl. Otherwise, it risks becoming a handwave, like "oh, we solved pollution, climate change, and built FTL, now let me get on with my story." In a place that built itself around cars (looking out my window...) there's a tremendous infrastructural inertia that's been built over the last century. I prefer to call it karma, because it makes a bad joke about cars, but whatever you call it, it's likely to take a similar magnitude of energy and material expenditure to rebuild such a place without cars. We're running a bit short of energy and materials, and unlike medieval Rome, it's hard to scavenge most of our buildings for reuse, although we try where we can (thank you, Habitat for Humanity!).

    I completely agree that a lot of what we have will be rebuilt, remodeled, retrofitted, subdivided, home-officed, and so forth, but that won't solve the sprawl problem. What likely will solve it is a population crash caused either by a natural disaster (New Orleans) or mismanagement (Detroit and other rust belt cities). At that point, the more marginal neighborhoods will be abandoned, and the remaining people can be consolidated, providing that there's competent management, which is hard to get when a city's lost a big chunk of its tax base.

    That's where the idea of going from ICE to EV comes from. It may well be the most energy-efficient way forward in some sprawls.

    Is it a global solution? Heavens no. Cities that never fully embraced cars can do other things. And for municipalities that don't bother with posh things like urban planning, there's always slums and tenements.

    On a related subject, I recently heard a lecture about native bees* (not honeybees). As most of us know, there's an ongoing, really dangerous crash in insect populations happening at the moment, and a world without insects really is unlivable for humans. As you might expect, the main culprit is habitat loss and conversion, followed by things like ubiquitous pesticide use. It occurred to me, after hearing the talk, that large chunks of humanity are facing similar loss of habitat, hence the growing slums, endemic homelessness, and so forth. It's not a new problem, just a growing one.

    What I'd therefore suggest is that, rather than a "move fast and break things" version of re-urbanization to rationally solve some problem or other, maybe think about it in terms of restoring human habitat. In San Diego we've managed to destroy a lot of affordable housing, and people who need that habitat are now struggling to survive. Megascale agriculture has destroyed the habitat for small farmers around the world, and the first-gen survivors often end up in slums. Their alternate habitat of industrial labor is now being destroyed by automation.

    So maybe, instead of coming up with more schemes like rebuilding cities or enslaving uploaded workers, contemplate the idea that we need to restore habitats for both humans and nonhumans? If this is for SFF, I'll point out that most restoration schemes are underfunded, clunky, overrun by weeds, and indifferently successful, unless someone really knows what they're doing**. There's plenty of drama to be had.

    *Turns out the American Southwest is the global biodiversity hotspot for bees. Who knew our deserts had so much buzz?

    **If you want to get really different with human habitat renewal...There's something called the Bradley Method or Bradley Technique for weed control. It was pioneered in Australia, and we've found it's extremely effective here, although it's slow. If you want to write some rather different, near future fiction about rebuilding sprawl cities, read a bit on the Bradley Technique and deploy it in a human context of local activists forcing out weedy profiteers. For an overview, see https://s3.wp.wsu.edu/uploads/sites/2062/2014/04/bradleytechnique.pdf?x96359

    565:

    The Prius has been in production for 25 years. What has been happening to all of those batteries? There have been over 5 million of the cars cumulatively sold world wide as of a year ago.

    Priuses used NiMH chemistry for the vast majority of that time. The first model Prius with a lithium-based chemistry was released in 2015; and NiMH-based ones are still being built.

    566:

    Except for London, suburban sprawl is not a problem in the UK; even Birmingham's suburbs extend only 10 km from the centre, which is well within cycling distance (even UNassisted, for fit people of working age); for most cities, it's much less. The problem is dormitory towns (e.g. 'garden cities'). The UK is not the USA.

    Ensuring that people can work near where they live (sic) would be difficult but not infeasible, as is (almost) eliminating the need to drive for supplies. But (inter alia) that involves reversing 70 years of the Americanisation of our retail (e.g. going back to local shops, from out-of-town supermarkets, B&Q etc.)

    567:

    Aargh! Not a problem in this context. There are other reasons it IS a problem. Sorry for being unclear.

    568:

    "But (inter alia) that involves reversing 70 years of the Americanisation of our retail (e.g. going back to local shops, from out-of-town supermarkets, B&Q etc.)"

    That may be so, though I suspect going 'back to' anything is improbable. Given that this is an SF blog, I'd suggest going forward to some combination of deliveries via online markets and smallish highly local stores for immediate needs.

    My parents have twice weekly deliveries of partially prepared meals to their house - in part to add variety to their cookery, but also to minimize their trips to the supermarket. That may expand, and the pandemic certainly created a boost for grocery delivery as a business model.

    Other items such as clothing are also options. I generally still like to try things on, but being a middle aged person if I find something that fits and I like, I have no qualms about ordering two or three more from the same manufacturer.

    I suspect the next thing on the chopping block will be the 'big box' megastores that require vehicles to visit and massive parking areas. They are built on the thinnest of margins, and are in the process of having their lunch stolen by the Big Muddy River.

    I'd like to see some resolution of packaging, but I do think that a few delivery persons driving a van around town is vastly more efficient than hundreds of individuals driving their own vehicles to various stores.

    569:

    So they're actually reflagging while at sea?

    570:

    As opposed to the US, where we"re "salaried", and so get ZERO overtime. That's why we don't have "secretaries" here any more, we have "administrative assistants", who are salaried.

    And then there's management, who can decide on a timeline with zero attention to what's do-able, and then declare "whatever it takes"... which was when I worked for Ameritech in the mid-nineties, and I was there, along with everyone else, hundreds of us, on Sunday night at 20:00 on the weekend after US Thanksgiving Day. Oh, and in case some of you are under the delusion that all programmers in the US make zillions, after that, my manager and Director fought the line from upper management that said "everyone will rate as 3 on a scale of five unless you fight for them", and that got me a raise from $48k/yr to $53k/yr.

    571:

    About that handwave of "we solved that, let me get on with my story", my next novel is the handwave itself, how we create the Terran Confederation and break the trillionaires.

    I spent the first half of last year looking for an agent... then Eric Flint died, and I'm out of print. And I can't submit... because I was contacted last Aug by Baen, who is considering "rehoming" some of us from Ring of Fire Press... and I'm still waiting. I know someone who wants me, but a chance at Baen and a major.... sigh

    572:

    nojay
    still in the poppy-growing and goat-raping business - you forgot enslaving & killing women, though. "The West's" failure in that country is abysmal, delivering people back to religious ultra-primitives.
    ... Which leads, directly, to EC @ 563:
    Most of what is said about that conflict (by either side) is self-evident bullshit or egregiously distorted propaganda -oh dear, not again ...
    Putin, entirely of his own accord decided to wage an aggressive war of invasion on a sovereign country, with the intention of looting the place & - most importantly - enslaving the population. { It's that last that differentiates it from the appalling fuck up of "Iraq" }
    OK?

    EC @ 567
    Round here - London zone 3 - there's been an immense increase in electro-bike deliveries of "stuff", but not of electro-bikes for the residents, curiously enough, which I don't understand.
    And, in London, a lot of the time there are outer & middle-distance "centres" for a lot of things, which means that you don't need to go to the middle - if you do, well we have a BIG public transport net.

    573:

    You shouldn't do that. NiMH... instant flash to The Rats of NiMH (US: Nat'l. Inst. of Mental Health), and I see the rats in wheels running Prius'....

    574:

    "Deliveries" - for food? Um, how about "not a chance in hell"? How about how many times I've read friends' posts about they got "replacements", or just "missing things" in deliveries from supermarkets?

    575:

    But (inter alia) that involves reversing 70 years of the Americanisation of our retail

    Yup: and also re-regulating the bus services that Thatcher de-regulated. There are now huge public transport deserts in small town England (where "small town" would be small-city sized in the USA -- a US "small town" is often a village or hamlet in the UK) so that the urban working poor have to keep a car running for basic utility, even though they probably work within a couple of kilometres of home.

    There used to be municipal bus companies everywhere, owned by the town council and operating on routes that connected up all the outlying estates with a regular service, especially frequent during commuter hours. But after deregulation a couple of predatory conglomerates went on an acquisition and merger spree -- notably FirstBus and StageCoach. They'd move into town, put their own buses on the most profitable routes, and set their fares to undercut the local incumbents -- then when the local bus companies went bust they'd buy the assets and jack the prices up while paring back service to the bone.

    I'm lucky enough to live in Edinburgh, where the council privatized Lothian Regional Transport as a going concern but maintained a 51% shareholding. LRT outcompeted the predators and to this day provides frequent and efficient bus services (including night buses) with a flat fare per ride. Prices went up a couple of times in recent years, but that was a cross-subsidy for the new tram network (the initial build-out was grievously badly managed and went massively over budget, but once it was running Edinburgh Trams turned a profit in year one of operations and they're now intent on expanding it from one line to three over the next decade or so).

    Anyway: regulated non-profit bus and light rail services are the way forward -- they're cheaper (than profit-making private firms) and they provide valuable infrastructure service that boosts the local economy and relieves poverty.

    577:

    you forgot enslaving & killing women, though. "The West's" failure in that country is abysmal, delivering people back to religious ultra-primitives.

    As a thought exercise, I wonder what would happen if The West™ decided that any female from Afghanistan would automatically qualify as a refugee, no queuing needed?

    (Yes, ignores LGBTQ Afghans and half the children.)

    579:

    Round here - London zone 3 - there's been an immense increase in electro-bike deliveries of "stuff", but not of electro-bikes for the residents, curiously enough, which I don't understand.

    How are parking/storage facilities for electro-bikes?

    I know that decades ago, when I lived cycling distance from work*, I ended up not cycling because there was no secure place to store my bicycle. The bike racks outside were not on any camera and thefts/vandalism were common, and there was no where to store by bike inside**.

    If a resident has an electro-bike, would they have somewhere safe to store it, both at home and at their commuting/shopping destination?


    *Indeed, cycling was faster than driving.

    **Actually, that's not true. There were plenty of possible places, but I wasn't allowed to use them by management.

    580:

    They'd move into town, put their own buses on the most profitable routes, and set their fares to undercut the local incumbents -- then when the local bus companies went bust they'd buy the assets and jack the prices up while paring back service to the bone.

    Ah, the Walmart model of corporate expansion…

    581:

    "The West's" failure in that country is abysmal, delivering people back to religious ultra-primitives.

    And how was that to NOT happen without killing off all the Taliban? Every single one. And all their relatives. And their relatives. And ...

    This was a repeat of Viet Nam and so many of those colonial freedom fights. Either you totally occupy the land forever (being occupied doesn't usually engender a change of social norms) or walk away and let the locals figure it out. And to be honest the most determined typically win.

    582:

    How are parking/storage facilities for electro-bikes?

    New York City has a problem with apartment fires started by electro-bikes. Many times from folks replacing an old battery with an unbranded replacement.

    I'm sure the number of battery failures is fairly low in terms of the totally number of batteries in the field. But this is a new situation where the possible fire hazard is stored in the entry way or hall of a building with 10 or 1000 residents.

    583:

    (thank you, Habitat for Humanity!)

    Great group. (Greg likely has issues with them because ...) I donate lots of things there and also shop there multiple times per year.

    584:

    Rbt Prior
    They have to get OUT of the goatpigfucking hellhole in the first place ...

    • cycling storage - um, err - thanks, yes. of course. Though, there's one pub, about 5k from me, that is faster to cycle to, rather than catch the train, & another one, 12.5 k away, which I've cycled to on a rail strike day ... but there is "open" storage, visible from inside & I have two locks.

    Changing the subject: NASA "plane of the future" And It's a BIPLANE! - Can large airships be far away, I wonders? - See also my earlier comments about the "Airlander"

    585:

    (Yes, ignores LGBTQ Afghans and half the children.)

    Why ignore them?

    Given that the Taliban are buying Twitter blue tick accounts these days, anyone from Afghanistan who's willing to say they're LGBT+ should automatically qualify for asylum because if they ever go back they're probably going to star in the kind of stadium entertainment you don't walk away from afterwards.

    586:

    David L
    And WHY might I have issues with "Habitat for Humanity"?
    From what I can see, they seem a "good idea"

    587:

    Greg, bear in mind that good quality e-bikes typically cost 5x to 10x as much as a regular pedal cycle -- you're talking low thousands of pounds for something that can be tossed in the back of a white Transit and driven away at speed. Bicycle locks can be cut: thieves happily cut locks and steal cheap Halfords' MTBs, e-bikes really need better storage.

    588:

    569 - Rocketpjs said "I suspect the next thing on the chopping block will be the 'big box' megastores that ... are in the process of having their lunch stolen by the Big Muddy River"
    You have a company called "Danube", or maybe "Mississippi"!?

    589:

    And WHY might I have issues with "Habitat for Humanity"?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_for_Humanity

    590:

    Conversion kits for standard bikes run at a bit more than 400 quid (actually around 400 currency units, the one I bought was from a Netherlands company and eventually charged in Euro but shipped from a UK warehouse) and somewhere between half and 2/3rds of that cost is the battery. It's awkward carrying the battery round if you've locked the bike up but not a huge problem on a commute if you just need to dump it at your desk. Without the battery the bike isn't that much more interesting than the others sharing the rack.

    591:

    I suspect the next thing on the chopping block will be the 'big box' megastores that require vehicles to visit and massive parking areas. They are built on the thinnest of margins, and are in the process of having their lunch stolen by the Big Muddy River.

    In the US (I don't know about Canada) A&P, (The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company), was the evil one back 100 years or so ago. Cities and state legislated various laws to prevent them from operating. They were driving the "mom and pop" groceries out of business due to their much cheaper prices. Back then, when A&P first showed up a typical city grocer served 50 families on average. So such a small operation fed by small local wholesalers tended to have a lot of costs that a centralized operation like A&P didn't have. Today we'd consider them almost a mom and pop operation. The last one I was ever in was in Paducah Ky around 1970 and it's was tiny by today's moderate grocery sized. I have been in multiple German and French small groceries in the last decade as big or bigger. A few much bigger.

    But A&P was driven out of business by larger groceries like IGA, Kroger, Shop & Save, and dozens of other better run and larger stores. And the people complained about the small grocer's being run out by the big boys.

    Now we have WalMart forcing all those mid level grocers to get better or die. Around here we have Lidl, Aldi, Kroger (Harris Teeter), Wegmans, Food Lion, Lowes Foods, Target, Trader Joe's, Whole Foods (Amazon), The Fresh Market, and assorted boutique grocers. Almost all doing well. The big debate is can Target compete with WalMart. Food Lion and similar doesn't even try. Well they do but by being better as a neighborhood store. I'm sure I've left off a few. And there are some areas where the only groceries are too far away from the people. (See previous comments by JohnS.) But in many cases this is due to a chain giving up after losing money for years on a location even if subsidized by the local government.

    Nothing new under the sun.

    592:

    ""Deliveries" - for food? Um, how about "not a chance in hell"?"

    Over the course of the lockdown I saw the quality of delivered groceries increase dramatically with one of our local supermarkets. It rapidly evolved from 'get the teenager who fills bags to fill this order' to 'get it right, routinely'.

    Not to say it can't be done poorly, particularly by companies who are culturally locked into a big box storefront mentality, but I have witnessed it being done well in recent years.

    I was somewhat reluctant to have groceries delivered until our household caught Cov-19 and were legally quarantined for 2 weeks. I was very impressed with the quality of the deliveries and the options available from our local store.

    593:

    Bradley Technique for weed control.

    It has a name! Wow, I never knew. Kind of cool to see it laid out as a formal method rather than just a verbally described strategy.

    594:

    It rapidly evolved from 'get the teenager who fills bags to fill this order' to 'get it right, routinely'.

    Around here with many grocers you can pay a monthly or annual (or trip) fee to order online and pick them up in a locker or have them delivered. I've not done it but the prices are not crazy. To the extent that the extra cost is a wash or even better if you factor in your cost to drive there. And way better if you feel your time is worth more than $£0/hr.

    And now that they have had a year or more to figure it out they have moved from someone walking the store with a printed list or lists to carrying a scanner with the shopping lists sorted by where things are in the store. They have carts designed so that 4 or 6 paper bags can sit on top at a reasonable height. Each bag has a bar code and likely the name of the customer stapled to the handle/top of the bag. They pick the item shown on the hand scanner gun and drop them into the appropriate bag and then scan the bag. If they put the wrong thing into the wrong bag they get told to remove it and try again.

    The system works. But I suspect the first few months were a bit rocky. Especially before the scanner systems were developed. A friend who was working in a research medical center went with drive up pick up as soon as someone local offered it.

    595:

    There were plenty of possible places {to park ma bicycle}, but I wasn't allowed to use them by management.

    One place I worked had similar issues. Multistory building, initially I was allowed to park in the parking garage area (think ~10 car parks in a 20 story tower with a turntable to get them in and out) but apparently one of the car users objected to seeing the bicycle. So for a while I was allowed to bring it into the office, but then someone complained about seeing it in the lift so I was forced to park on the street.

    My assumption is that someone paying at least $1000/week for their car park went mental at the thought of some scumbag cyclist paying nothing to park in the building. Big sigh.

    OTOH a couple of other building in that area I parked in the office, including one where I used a folding bike because I had to park it under my desk. And another where "what if everyone does that" was the official reason for negotiating with building management to create a bicycle parking area in the basement. I don't think anyone other than me and the custodian ever biked to work, but the space was available if they did!

    596:

    What country do you live in, again? I remember you're not in the US... (see my rant in 571, and note how Big River and Starbucks are fighting unionization tooth and nail, and how the strike at HarperCollins is the longest ever for a publisher....)

    597:

    We have the same dedicated multi-order cart setup here, but also huge whining from customers about substitutions. I suspect the problem is that the staff who fill orders are under huge time pressure so "next to it on the shelf" counts as a substitution.

    I also see them operating in the supermarket occasionally (I tend to shop right on opening time) and they're always very distracted at that point. Commonly I see the cart with scanner and scales in a random aisle with the operator belting up or down the aisle being yelled at over a headset. Making me think "pasta" is about as specific as you're going to get at that point.

    My one experience was mediocre, during lockdown when I got about 20 plastic bags and a couple of weird substitutions. The main swap seemed to be "is there an option with more packaging"... instead of vege sausages that come in a foil-ish bag I got double plastic bagged with a cardboard sleeve. And of course delivered by fossil vehicle instead of me biking or walking to the shop. So all round a terrible option for me.

    598:

    Troutwaxer @ 449:

    Yes, this is one of the compromises we undertook to have a Constitution. There was an argument between the rights of the individual person and the rights of a state, many of which had either been founded with special religious/social purposes, or had developed their own cultures, and of course the various states had all developed their own power-structures... So it sort of made sense at the time. I don't think anyone foresaw the possibility that one state would have fifty-million people and an economy based on high-tech international trade, while another would have 600,000 people and an economy based around farming.

    Among the primary reasons for the new Constitution was fear that Congress would default on the debt from the American Revolution. Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress had no taxing power, so where was it going to get the money to pay the debt?

    That's why the enumerated powers in Article 1, Section 8 specifically authorizes Congress the power of taxation to pay the debt. See also:

    Article VI
    All Debts contracted and Engagements entered into, before the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation.

    Among the Amendments proposed by the 1st Congress for inclusion in the "Bill of Rights" was a Congressional Apportionment Amendment. Had it been ratified at the time, the current House of Representatives would have over 6,000 members.

    I think that would be just a bit unwieldy. The founders did not anticipate how the population would grow.

    In just one hundred years (1890 Census) the population had grown to 62,947,714 ... at one representative for every 50,000 persons counted, that would have grown the House to 1,259 members.

    If you quadrupled the number of persons to be represented by one house member from the proposed amendment (to 200,000 per Representative), you'd still have a 1,680 member house after the 2020 Census.

    We could probably make it work with one representative for the population of the least populous state (Wyoming) and proportional representation for the populations of the rest of the states (State population/Wyoming's population = "N.n" & follow normal rounding rules - 'N'.5 rounds up; 'N'.4 rounds down) - that gives 574 House members based on the last Census.

    We will need a Constitutional Amendment to fix this mess, but it should also do something about the Senate.

    Wyoming with a population of 576,851 (most recent decennial enumeration, aka "The 2020 Census") gets two Senators, the same number as California with a population of 39,538,223 - 68.54 times larger ...

    But if it were to happen, it won't be in my lifetime.

    599:

    If you read my comment about grocery competition, you'll see that any store messing up much will get dropped for a competitor. I haven't seen your situation. The ones I see are heads down "getting it done". At various times throughout the day. I think when you order you can ask for either a 2 or 4 hour pickup/delivery so they can't batch all of them at one time.

    To be honest if they messed up as much as you saw nextdoor.com would be awash in complaints.

    Now someone I know DID post on FB back in 2020 that they ordered ONE banana and got ONE banana. When they ordered they were thinking one BUNCH. They laughed about it.

    We never used these services as my wife and I were big maskers and it was a chance to GET OUT. But we did avoid the crowded times. And she's picky about her produce.Me somewhat so.

    600:

    paws4thot @ 452:

    440 John, in answer, see this photo.jpg) * of the Atlantic Conveyor off the Falklands in 1982. The foredeck, ahead of all the containers carries a Westland Wessex on the main helideck. * Link is borked and defies my attempts to add the ")" character

    Yeah, but I looked it up and see what they did with the containers building a wall around the "flight deck" ... I didn't realize the Atlantic Conveyor was a RORO with the capacity to carry some containers & then modified to make a "flight deck".

    Still, I stand by my argument that "engineers" could figure out how to load a container ship so that the top level was LEVEL and could have Solar Cells to re-charge container size batteries.

    441 ref 350 - Well, there's the R101 which was brought down by a storm over France...

    The R101 fire appears to have been caused by the crash rather than being the cause of the crash itself.

    601:

    (Yes, ignores LGBTQ Afghans and half the children.)

    Why ignore them?

    Experimental simplicity. (Thought experimental simplicity?) Think of it as an elevator pitch.

    As Greg pointed out, it also ignores the problem of how they get out and to "The West". And how 'we' would let them know it's an option.

    602:

    It has a name! Wow, I never knew. Kind of cool to see it laid out as a formal method rather than just a verbally described strategy.

    Yes, and thanks to Aussies for coming up with it! Cool story, too.

    603:

    any store messing up much will get dropped for a competitor.

    I get the impression that in much of Australia the options are the two big operators and they are much the same. Every other aspect of the business is a duopoly and I can't imagine what would cause them to be different just with delivery.

    Sydney and other major cities have other options, but I haven't really looked into them.

    604:

    paws4thot @ 478:

    various, ending with 465 - And, indeed, subject to appropriate twist-locks, one 10 and one 30 foot, two x 10 and one 20 foot or even four by 10 foot. 48 foot (and 53 foot) are rare in Europe because of platform/trailer length laws (road transport), dynamic loading gauge (rail transport) and just "not fitting the load space" (vessels).

    I think 48 & 53 foot containers are strictly a U.S./Canada thing because they're the maximum trailer lengths that Semi-Trucks are allowed to have on the roads. They're mainly "inter-modal" to fit on a semi-trailer chassis or on a U.S./Canadian rail car.

    I've never seen ANY of the 48/53 foot containers outside the U.S.

    If it's going on a cargo ship, I think it really has to be a multiple of twenty feet.

    605:

    I don't think anyone other than me and the custodian ever biked to work, but the space was available if they did!

    I was told to talk to the custodians, who 'allowed' me to park my bike in an unattended, unmonitored, unlocked equipment room — but only if I left it unlocked* so they could move it into the corridor if they thought it was in the way.

    No way to keep it in my office — not enough room for the staff, let alone a bike as well. It was basically a repurposed corridor jammed with desks and filing cabinets.

    I ended up not biking, because the chances of losing my bike (or having it seriously damaged) were so high. (There was a bike stolen or vandalized almost every week. Students had given up reporting it because administration didn't apparently care, just saying they should have used a better lock.)


    *Totally unlocked, not just not locked to anything.

    606:

    Raleigh NC has 1/2 million people. County has about a million. 3 million or so in the area depending on where you set the boundary.

    We have a variety of choices. But Walmart is forcing consolidation. Around here a regional nicer chain, Harris Teeter, was bought buy a national upper middle chain. Locally they closed the Kroger stores that were close to an HT and converted the rest to an HT. HT stores were nicer on average, prices a BIT higher, and labor relations better. This was 4 or 5 years ago. People are still moaning about how terrible things have become. Now Kroger wants to buy Albertsons. Albertsons is a big chain around the country. Again gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. Why I don't want a duopoly I can see why the consolidation.

    While I was in the Dallas area we did most of our shopping at a Kroger. Across the street intersection was an Albertsons. And a few 100 feet down the road a Tom Thumb. TT was recently bought by Albertsons and had identical flyers and prices. I suspect those stores were ones Kroger announced would be spun off or sold to another chain.

    While we were shopping there for a couple of years Kroger was up scaling their stores to match the somewhat upscale look of our local Harris Teeter. They were/are trying to move out of the bargain basement competition with Walmart and other cheap dirty aisle stores.

    (Some Walmarts look like the floors are scrubbed with tooth brushes hourly. Some look like they just sweep them out every week even if not really needed.)

    607:

    I ended up not biking, because the chances of losing my bike (or having it seriously damaged) were so high.

    My father was station on a US airbase in England 44/45. He had 3 bike stolen till he figured out the a solution. He just stopped cleaning the mud off it. The first three he kept clean. The 4th bike lasted through his tour.

    608:

    I was somewhat reluctant to have groceries delivered until our household caught Cov-19 and were legally quarantined for 2 weeks

    In my case I saw the light about a decade ago when I broke my left foot -- as I live up 64 steps from ground level, supermarket food deliveries were a lifeline for about the first month and very welcome for the second.

    It only looks like a luxury/non-necessity until you're disabled and don't have a personal shopper.

    609:

    Back in the mid-eighties, I was having a porch sale, and this guy came by in a bike whose frame was completely covered in UGLY duct tape, I talked to him for a while, and he showed me... under the tape, the frame was completely chromed. As in, might as well have had a sign "steal me!" So he uglified it.

    610:

    I remember being on my first trip to the States in the '80s, and one of our tour guides telling us she had three jobs and was studying. I was horrified by the number of people with similar stories, who all thought it was normal and expected. That's not much of a life, from my point of view.

    611:

    Many cyclists have a "trash bike" or "station bike" that looks like shit so they can ride it to the station or pub or whatever and it's unlikely to be stolen. Commonly the lock cost more than the bike. Usually they're genuine trash with an hour or two work put in to make them rideable. I have heard people complain bitterly when these do get stolen "I just put $50 of new tyres onto that" or "they cut a $100 lock the bastards" sort of thing.

    In the Netherlands people take this to the next level by using herding behaviour. There's so many similar bikes everywhere that the chances of your particular one being stolen are low.

    612:

    I'm in Canada. For better and worse compared to anywhere else, of course.

    613:

    It only looks like a luxury/non-necessity until you're disabled and don't have a personal shopper.

    I suspect that those people end up with personal shopper in Australia, just because they would so often miss out on key groceries. It's all very well getting a turnip instead of a 1kg bag of carrots, or tomato paste instead of tinned tomatoes, but "week five: still no toilet paper" would get a bit ugly.

    Although I'm told the app-shopper people are usually worse than the colesworth official ones. Somewhere I read a rant by a customer who had resorted to paying the app-based shopper to come to their house, pick up the reusable shopping bags, go shopping, come straight back with the groceries, then accept a cash tip based on accuracy. So it cost them $30+ for less than an hour of work by the shopper, but they got what they actually ordered (minimum wage here is ~$22/hour so that's kind of reasonable, except that they had to pay for a lot of extra travel time just to make it work at all).

    614:

    I've always preferred shopping myself for reasons of economy/efficiency. I tend to cook based on what is on sale and/or what is available rather than according to a meal plan.

    615:

    Followed up to add I could do that with orders, and the confidence that I would receive good quality.

    616:

    Duffy @ 480:

    The Senate is deliberately designed to be undemocratic (the Founding Fathers equated democracy with mob rule - given the state of most social media they may not have been wrong.)

    I don't think Senate representation was intended to be quite as undemocratic as it has become. At the time, with only 13 states, the difference in populations (especially "free, white men") was not that great. The intent was to entice the smaller states to join in the new Federal System by guaranteeing THE STATES would have equal representation in one house. The founders didn't anticipate how much the country was going to grow and how out of balance the Senate would become.

    ...

    P.S. Also grant statehood to Puerto Rico and District of Columbia. Explore the possibility of reverting empty wastelands like Wyoming and the Dakotas back to territory status as having insufficient population to qualify for statehood.

    Puerto Rico should hold a referendum on statehood with the choices being
    1• Statehood
    2• Independence
    3• Status Quo.

    But it MUST be the choice of the PEOPLE of Puerto Rico.

    I would welcome Puerto Rico as the 51st state (for all that my opinion matters on the subject). If the majority of the population wants to become a state, they should become a state; if the majority wants to leave, then vaya con dios ... and if the majority is happy with the status quo, we should also respect that decision.

    OTOH, I don't think Statehood for DC is really an option (or a very good idea). The whole idea of the District of Columbia was that it should NOT be a part of any state & should be more or less central to all of the states.

    Maybe every hundred years or so the District of Columbia should move to where it fulfills those criteria. I think they should move it lock, stock & barrel and carve out a new location for DC along the Colorado/Kansas state line.

    But if DC is going to stay where it is, the population of DC should be added to the population of Maryland & Maryland should have an additional representative.

    Under the "Wyoming Rule" DC = 1.19 Wyomings, so round down to 1, but the combined population of DC + Maryland = 11.90 Wyomings, so round that UP to 12; with the additional Congressional District made up primarily of the current District.

    617:

    Charlie
    "Wiley e Bicycle" has a built-in-lock, as well as the "simple" standard lock-&-chain, which makes it a lot harder to steal.
    Having paid over £2k for mine, I am quite aware of the theft problem.

    David L
    Ah, I did not realise that "Habitat for Humanity" is a US guvmint programme ... or is it?
    Hint: I only looked at their web site, not their background.

    Shopping:
    Groceries - not a problem - 2 big supermarkets, plus the Walthamstow Village delis.
    Vegetables - other than onions, I grow my own, including fresh delicacies { Like Asparagus, or fresh wild garlic, or .... }
    "Meat-&-fish" - madam has a nice list of specialist suppliers - though "Norfolk Crab", etc supplier has dropped out for local deliveries only, sniff.
    Flour - { I bake all my own bread } - "Wessex Mill" - zero food miles, best flour I have ever seen, or tasted, named varieties of wheat from named farms ... (!)

    618:

    John Oyler @ 506:

    If one were truly interested in increasing the number of representatives in US Congress, there is a better way.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Apportionment_Amendment

    This is an amendment that has already been put forth to the states for ratification... it has no sunset clause, no expiration, and cannot be recalled by Congress. They no longer have a say in it.

    Furthermore, it has already been ratified by several states, and they can't backpedal. If approximately 26 more states were to ratify it, it would become part of the Constitution immediately. And Congress would have to add approximately 5800 new Congressional seats.

    It might be as simple as convincing a single state legislature somewhere that it should be ratified. Others would follow suit.

    It needed to be ratified by 12 states upon Kentucky joined the Union, but was only ratified by 11 (including Kentucky) ... It would require 27 more states to ratify it.

    I don't think that's going to happen, but if it DID, I think it would fuck up the House even worse than it's already fucked up.

    619:

    Moz replied @ 538:

    Our recycleable container system currently scans and weighs containers before paying for them. It's not perfect but it works. OTOH it's a 20' container sized machine that can only accept about 40 containers a minute... something something idiots are very inventive.

    I think we should go back to REUSABLE containers that can be sterilized & used multiple times. No need to melt them down for "raw materials", just wash them out (steam clean if necessary) and fill them up again.

    But I'm sure there are all sorts of reasons why this is impossible. I don't believe any of them.

    620:

    They ARE reusable. The reason they pile up around the US is we import more containerized things than we export. When Boeing sells a 777 to India it doesn't go in containers.

    621:

    I gave you a link. The key is in the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article.

    622:

    My parents get milk in glass bottles delivered and if you don't put empty ones out you get charged for new ones. Just like when I was a kid...

    We have a fair few 'bulk buy'/'fill your own container' options here, including inside supermarkets (where they also supply plastic bags for you to fill). The latter suffer from the filthy peasants problem but mostly that you are forced to pay the per kilogramme price for the container - there's no tare option. If I take my glass jars along I end up paying for ~500g of non-supplied product per item. The not-very-local food coop tares but 90 minutes round trip and limited selection.

    For many things I bypass that whole process by buying the bulk items directly, just like the 'bulk buy' people do. After I use 20 litres of concentrated dishwashing liquid I have a big plastic container, but those are useful of themselves, some can be returned for credit and are often easier to recycle because they're made of a single type of plastic. Cheaper too :)

    Yes, this absolutely relies on having the space to store all the stuff, and buying containers to put some of it in, and knowing how to store it (and in my case having an argon tank so I can do oxygen-free storage). You really don't want weevils in 20kg of flour or rice. But if you can do it, it's a win on multiple levels.

    623:

    I'm lucky a local brewery is close enough I can just take my growler over there for a refill.

    624:

    Paws @589. I agree with you. The correct euphemism for the river he is referring to (and the company) is the big piranha infested river.

    625:

    Seaborne transport is a very, very high percentage of all transport kilometers of freight in Europe. So if you can't just load it on a ship, the container is useless. The laws reflect and reinforce that.

    626:

    David L @ 592:

    ... And there are some areas where the only groceries are too far away from the people. (See previous comments by JohnS.)

    For the most part, what I see is there are no grocery stores that are convenient to WALK to (i.e. ain't no fuckin' sidewalks! & I have to traverse several high-speed, densely trafficked divided highway streets to get there) and the bus system doesn't really serve.

    Raleigh is mostly NOT a convenient city for pedestrians.

    Oddly enough, when I moved here in 1967 it mostly was. Even when I moved into my current house near downtown in 1974 it still was ...

    But, I DO have a car. South & east of where I live the residents really are in a food desert & I don't know how they'd cope without a car. You've got to have a vehicle even if it's only a P.O.S.

    627:

    "Puerto Rico should hold a referendum on statehood"

    Been there, done that a few times. The current sentiment seems to be for statehood, the previously favorite status-quo commonwealth losing ground and independence continuing to be way in the minority. There's a current draft bill in the US Congress on the matter, but the Republicans will never let it go through because they fear that the State of PR would go Democratic.

    628:

    Followed up to add I could do that with orders, and the confidence that I would receive good quality.

    When Covid hit and we had lockdowns I used online ordering with pickup for groceries, reasoning that it minimized exposure. Had to plan about a week ahead to get a pickup slot. Quality was… ok, although the substitutions were limited and sometimes idiosyncratic.*

    I'm back to in-person grocery shopping because I'm better able to get only what I need that way. N95 and go early while the shop is mostly empty.


    *And there was no ability to specify something like "if there's no pork I don't want this vegetable" so cooking was more challenging. (Note: I'm not a good cook and so tend to follow recipes exactly.)

    629:

    You really don't want weevils in 20kg of flour or rice.

    Just think of them as protein!

    (I believe they also supply some B vitamins as well.)

    630:

    601 answer to 440 - I was "somewhat aware", at least to the extent that the AC was only used to carry Harrier 1s (any variant) to the Falklands.
    351, 350, 441 - I still don't see how, given the time pressures of minimising time in port and maximising time at sea at N knots, you plan to get the top course off and on again in a 0 delta T.

    ...465, 478, 605 - I've seen a few 48' in the UK, showing a suboptimality in having an extra set of twist-lock mounts on positions for ISO 40' boxes as well as end mounts at the 48' marks. Never seen a 53'.

    615 - Similarly, to the extent that supermarket layouts are a nuisance because I will NOT buy fruit and veg until I have made protein selections until "next shopping day".

    617 - Why should "DC move periodically"? It's never fulfilled the "more or less central (East- West axis) criterion AFAICS.

    621 ref 620 - DavidL, what you say is sort of true, but incorrectly based on JohnS having used a silent "ISO shipping" as a prefix to "containers". Well, that or John buys, say, banananananas 4,000 cuft at a fime!

    625 ref 589 - I'm pleased someone else saw my point!! :-)

    631:

    David L @ 621:

    They ARE reusable. The reason they pile up around the US is we import more containerized things than we export. When Boeing sells a 777 to India it doesn't go in containers.

    We may be "talking" about different things?

    I thought Moz was referring to a machine that accepts empty plastic bottles for recycling. I know some areas in the U.S. require a deposit on such that is refundable if you return the bottle (container). I thought maybe they're doing that deposit thing in Australia to encourage recycling.

    ... like it used to be for soft-drink bottles here in the U.S. Those old glass soft-drink bottles weren't "recycled", they were washed out and re-filled - reused.

    Also Milk used to come in glass bottles, instead of plastic containers. Same deal, you paid a deposit on the milk bottles that was refunded when you returned the bottles (or were swapped for full bottles if you had home delivery - return the old & no additional deposit on the new). Those bottles were sterilized & re-filled.

    I think you mentioned that half the plastic bottles that get "recycled" don't actually get used. Going back to reusable glass (deposit) bottles could help to address that issue.

    632:

    paws4thot @ 631:

    351, 350, 441 - I still don't see how, given the time pressures of minimising time in port and maximising time at sea at N knots, you plan to get the top course off and on again in a 0 delta T.

    You don't do it in "0 delta T" - the cost (time & money) for leveling the stacks & putting the "battery containers" with the solar cells up on top is paid for out of how much you DON'T have to spend on fossil fuels to move the ship to its next port of call.

    Plus I don't think it's going to add as much "delta T" as you think. Lift 'em off and stack them somewhere on the side; remove all the containers that have to come off; load all the new containers that have to go on balancing the load as you go (which has to be done anyway whether you have the "battery containers" or not) ... lift the top layer of "battery containers" back on to the ship and away you go.

    617 - Why should "DC move periodically"? It's never fulfilled the "more or less central (East- West axis) criterion AFAICS.

    Wimsey.

    There was no "east-west axis" in 1789 when the Constitution was adopted because all of the states at that time were located along the Atlantic seaboard. DC was already established before the U.S. acquired an "east-west axis".

    DC is about the same distance from Boston, MA as it is from Charleston, SC - the two most important cities out near the far ends of the new nation; more or less central in terms of travel time on horseback from north to south.

    621 ref 620 - DavidL, what you say is sort of true, but incorrectly based on JohnS having used a silent "ISO shipping" as a prefix to "containers". Well, that or John buys, say, banananananas 4,000 cuft at a fime!

    Different kinds of containers. He's talking about reusing shipping containers and I was talking about reusing glass bottles & jars (as an alternative to "recycling" single use plastic bottles).

    I may have misunderstood, but I thought Moz was describing a machine that took in plastic bottles & paid out a deposit refund.

    633:

    Paws @589. I agree with you. The correct euphemism for the river he is referring to (and the company) is the big piranha infested river.

    Yeah, but the pirahnas have formed collectives to protest. Anyway, didn't Pete Seeger have a song about Big Muddy?

    634:

    633 @ 631 et al - That's getting into marginal costs of operating the ship, as well as harbour fees, and I think fees for moving containers.

    633 @ 617 - I was "slightly wrong" in that DC is inland rather than "right on the seaboard", but still only 2 days ride from Annapolis, or maybe 6 hours sail up/down the Potomac?

    633 ref 621 - I got that; hence the point about the silent "ISO shipping" prefix, and the farcical volume of bananas!

    634 - And you've not shown how "Big Muddy" is a nickname for the Amazon; it most assuredly is a nickname for the Mississippi (- Missouri), and should be one for the "brown Danube" (less romantic but more accurate than "blue Danube").

    635:

    That's getting into marginal costs of operating the ship, as well as harbour fees, and I think fees for moving containers.

    30 years ago they used computers with weirdly specialised packing algorithms to optimise time in port. I didn't have to deal with that bit, just the dumb code to draw things on the screen and let various people ask questions like "where's my box" and "when will that crane be available". I'm guessing that since then they have moved on considerably in terms of both how much of the setup they optimise, and how vigorously they do so. So any theory that starts with "let's just slow everything down a heap" is going to have to pay off in the millions of dollars a day range.

    The latest container cranes lift two 40' containers at a time and can twiddle the gap between them in flight, so they can load off two truck or train cars 10' apart then drop them on a boat 0.2' apart. Or vice versa. They spend all that money because it saves them money...

    Just to give you rough numbers, a panamax ship costs ~$9M/year to run, but half of that is fuel so tweak the number depending of fuel costs. Then you're out $300M or so to build the thing and someone is going to expect a return on that, so call it another $9M/year there. Conveniently that's about 49k/day or $2000 an hour. Of which $500 is fuel. To put it another way, every hour not doing anything useful needs to zero your fuel cost for four hours.

    636:

    (why move a thousand artillery shells forward if all you need to do is drop one building, which a single PGM can hit?).

    ... because you're Russia and don't have the capability to produce PGMs nor really the need for those. Unaccurate explodey things are much better to aim at civilians in the cites in the vain hope that their morale suffers too much. Though, well, you can drop a building easily, it's just not certain which one it is.

    If you want to win and perhaps use the least resources for that, well, that's a different thing.

    Also, on the battlefield I think quantity in artillery shots fired is a quality of its own. You can do it both ways, as is kind of obvious in Ukraine right now.

    637:

    Probably at this point, it's worth coming up with working ways to reduce urban sprawl. Otherwise, it risks becoming a handwave, like "oh, we solved pollution, climate change, and built FTL, now let me get on with my story."

    This is kind of one of the reasons I like Gibson's 'Sprawl' trilogy ('Neuromancer', 'Count Zero', 'Mona Lisa Overdrive'). In the books there are private cars, yes, but there is also public transport both in the eponymous Sprawl but also in London and the characters use that.

    638:

    David L
    WHAT "link"?
    I have scrolled back through your comments to # 476 - no link for "H4H" ...

    640:

    didn't Pete Seeger have a song about Big Muddy?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8P4Sf3cvFc

    One that's still (sadly) relevant.

    641:

    Richard H David L
    I looked that link up, having done "the usual search" Not enough info to suggest why I might not like these people...

    642:

    I don't think that's going to happen, but if it DID, I think it would fuck up the House even worse than it's already fucked up.

    It has no expiration clause like modern amendments. This alone suggests that it's not only possible, but perhaps plausible. We've already seen an amendment this old ratified in recent memory. It seems rather non-objectionable too, it's not lunatic or evil... it doesn't demand that we re-enslave black people or that we return to the gold standard.

    It just says that every 50,000 constituents deserve their own rep.

    The institution that would find it objectionable (Congress) has absolutely no say in it. They can bluster, please, beg, threaten... but they can't cockblock it.

    So, if some state legislature somewhere other than the 11 states that have ratified it were to become pissed off at Congress and do this as a figurative jab in its eye... at that point it's no longer plausible, it may become inevitable. One state ratifying it would give it all the attention it'd need. The fringe of both major parties would clamor for it. Those who want to see power less centralized would clamor for it.

    Also, I don't think it'd fuck Congress up. It'd certainly upset the status quo, but the status quo isn't exactly all that great. Congress has continued to abdicate power to the executive for various reasons. It's small enough that it is easily lobbied, that the elections are easily manipulated. The two parties have a stranglehold on that institution.

    What happens when there are suddenly so many seats that either party's apparatus can't vet or fund or run candidates in all districts? What happens to lobbyists when there is a sudden influx of people who were never on their radar, when there aren't enough gifts to give out to get them all on board? What happens when there are simply so many seats that they can never all be housed in the Capitol building, no matter the renovations?

    Would we see new parties gain a (small) foothold? Would we see a decrease in lobbyists' influence? Would sessions become electronic, with various Capitol buildings build across the country, keeping the people's representatives closer to those same people?

    Maybe not. But if a person were inclined to want to do something that could actually lead to real change, this might be what they should want to do.

    643:

    Ref: Online shopping for grocery. I'm just a few miles from Greg. Have had shopping delivered now for more than 10 years. Started while waiting for a heart op. in 2014. Not a good look, collapsing on a supermarket floor! When I was diagnosed with Coeliac, it just made things much simpler, because the website saved all the "Free From" purchases I'd made before. Sometimes substitutions can be a pleasant surprise. Some supermarket companies also have lines others don't do. I currently use 3 with varying regularity.

    644:

    And you've not shown how "Big Muddy" is a nickname for the Amazon; it most assuredly is a nickname for the Mississippi (- Missouri), and should be one for the "brown Danube" (less romantic but more accurate than "blue Danube").

    The Amazon is at least as muddy as the Mississippi, wouldn't you agree?

    645:

    In regards to electrifying cargo vessels:

    I have seen enclosed cargo vessels (not container ships) similar to this one on the C/D canal:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Baltic_Ace

    That could be pre-supplied with a battery & solar cells with no re-stacking of anything. Also, as this is a smaller ship and I believe smaller ships are less efficient the relative pay-off may be bigger.

    Also, there are a couple of "green" efforts:

    One, apparently methonal ships are a thing:

    https://www.maersk.com/news/articles/2022/10/05/maersk-continues-green-transformation

    Adding a swapable battery pack to the ship:

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90738126/this-startup-designed-an-electric-cargo-ship-to-cross-the-ocean

    And, adding solar cells AND sails:

    https://spectrum.ieee.org/energysails-harness-wind-sun-clean-up-cargo-ships

    646:

    With 5800 Congressfolk...aside from the need to massively expand Washington DC to house what's basically a city, each with ca. 20 staffers to help them do their work (so that's 116,000 people directly employed, plus their families)...

    Then we get into the politics. Who becomes the mayor and city council of this new town you've created?

    I rechecked the research around Dunbar's Number again. It's putatively around 150, the number most people can know well. I've wondered for awhile if one problem with Congress is that it's too big rather than too small, so that one reason we have parties is that they're closer to Dunbar's. Turns out that the 95% error bar on Dunbar's is from 4-520 ( https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2021.0158 ), so a) it's not very useful, and b) I'll bet the better Reps know everyone who matters in the 438 people serving.*

    But if you have 5800 representatives, no one can know everyone. They'll have to form into a lot of small factions just to get anything done, and the heads of those factions, or worse, the leaders among the groups of factions, will be the ones with power. Everyone else, just to get anything done, probably will have to vote in lockstep with their faction. So it's a lot of resources wasted on getting less representation.

    I'd actually argue the opposite: one Congressmember per million people, not defined by state boundary. The senators represent the states (two per state), the Congress represents the people (one per million). Yes, this absolutely will not pass any vote whatsoever, but it would represent the US a bit better.

    647:

    Calling anyone & everyone with any understanding of Israel { As presently heading towards its own version of fascism } or "judaism" - however one wishes to interpret that ... Have any useful comments on this?

    648:

    Heteromeles @ 647: Turns out that the 95% error bar on Dunbar's is from 4-520

    I'm pretty certain that something like Dunbar's Number exists, although I'd put it rather differently.

    Most people seem to have a reasonable knowledge of somewhere in the 100 to 200 people range. But there are many people who are well outside that. I seem to be somewhere on the lower end of the scale (being faceblind may or may not have something to do with this), and on the other end there are the "super recognizers" who can recognise, and recall personal details, of thousands of individuals.

    But from a point of view of organisational design, there does seem to be an upper threshold somewhere in the 100 to 150 range where a growing organisation suddenly starts needing institutional support for things that previously got done organically, like HR and purchasing. The reason is that people with authority start getting requests from people they haven't heard of, so they can't tell if the request should be granted. The key symptom of this is the realisation that you are seeing people in the corridor who you don't know.

    But if you have 5800 representatives, no one can know everyone.

    Some people can. But they're in a small minority. As you say, politicians are likely to be selected for the upper end of this ability range just because so much of politics involves knowing who people are. But I still wouldn't expect most politicians to manage thousands.

    BTW the earliest story of a super-recogniser I've heard is from "How to Win Friends and Influence People", which tells how Jim Farley boasted he could recognise 50,000 people. I don't know exactly how much truth there is in that though.

    649:

    Greg: as you full know, if a newspaper headline is framed as a question, the answer is almost always "no" -- it's just phrased that way to encourage you to click through and see the ads.

    650:

    I think the article is a good example of why it's worth separating Israel (the modern nation-state), Zionism (the political movement, founded as a response to the real, ongoing problem of anti-semitism), and Judaism (a collection of fairly closely-related religious traditions), in your communications.

    For example, I'm not Jewish, but I'm cognizant of the long history of anti-semitism, and I support the right of Judaism and Jews to exist and practice. Zionism as implemented by the British Empire (which helped to found Israel in British Palestine) has created an unholy political mess currently. Unlike some other political messes associated with the British Empire, I'm not sure whether creating Israel solved more problems than it created or not (I'm not that good a historian, but I'll note that a lot of Jews left other places to immigrate to Israel, and there were undoubtedly good reasons for that). And I'm disgusted by the behavior of the modern state of Israel, especially with respect to the Palestinians. People whose kin suffered and died in ghettos get no respect from me for putting other people in ghettos to suffer and die.

    Finally, I'll point out, as a contrarian, that given climate change and modern geo-politics, maybe proposals to create a Jewish homeland in Alaska rather than current Israel were less wacko than they appeared to be at the time (cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slattery_Report ).

    651:

    But I still wouldn't expect most politicians to manage thousands.

    Some are exceptional, though.

    I once met someone who'd met Bill Clinton -- twice, 2-3 years apart, at some sort of public events. I think they were a student the first time and junior faculty the next: "met" for values of "shook hands, told him her name, answered a couple of questions about what she did/was studying".

    In other words, the sort of thing you'd expect a POTUS to do half a dozen times a week, to dozens or scores of people at a time (maybe hundreds).

    She was a little freaked out when Bill remembered her name and asked a question about how her studies had progressed since her previous answer.

    Maybe he was wearing a wire and had a team of staff transcribing everything and whispering prompts in his ear at every event, but if so there was no sign of it. (And before you say "but he's a horndog" I'd like to remind you of the hundreds of introductions per week over a period of years thing: unless she made a strong impression, this demonstrates real super-recognizer talent at work.)

    652:

    I don't think I've ever heard the argument that there are too many people in Congress, and that more power has to be vested in fewer. I'm not sure how to respond to it.

    Also, you seem to somehow be agreeing with me that we would see more parties represented... but refusing to use that terminology in an attempt to obfuscate that that's what's happening? Even among these "factions", each member would have their own vote. "Faction" leaders who attempt to keep the power from themselves would end up leading nothing.

    If this breaks Dunbar's number, even better in my opinion. I don't want them to be a "community". They shouldn't be friendlier with each other, they shouldn't identify with each other, more than they identify with the people they supposedly represent.

    Thankfully, the one-rep-per-million thing has zero chance of ever happening. There's no somewhat-ratified-never-will-expire amendment floating around out there for that.

    653:

    Apropos of nothing: Graphullerene exists (h/t to Derek Lowe of FOOF fame: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/graphullerene-exists ).

    What is it? Imagine graphene, a sheet of carbon atoms all joined to each other. Now make an analogous structure, where instead of carbon atom joined to carbon atom, you have buckyball joined to buckyball.

    Lowe's now wondering it's possible to make a diamond analog out of buckyballs. Me, I'm wondering if it's possible to make a buckyball out of buckyballs (made out of buckyballs, that are made out of...).

    It appears that the age of fractal allotropes is dawning. We just don't know the limits of scaling yet. Or how many such materials can be made...

    654:

    Heinlein's "Double Star" mentioned that top politicians in that world had a system (I think it was called the Farley File) where their staffers would make notes about everyone the pol came into contact with, just in case they met again in the future. In a formal setting where they knew someone was going to be present and get to meet their principal again they'd give them a quick briefing beforehand -- "You met Jane Doe a couple of years back at XYZ college, she was a student then." The pol gets introduced to Jane Doe, he makes a mentalist-level anodyne remark about how are her studies progressing and she's amazed he remembered her, wow!

    655:

    Charlie @ 652
    Clinton almost-certainly had a Farley File - as mentioned by R.A.H. no less in Double Star - so there ...

    656:

    How many times have I seen the aide nearby discretely taking notes?

    The thing is, politicians are generally in the people business, so you'd expect many of them to be good at it. How Clinton did it is less relevant than the fact that he took the time to do it with someone who wasn't directly valuable to him.

    That said, the Dunbar number isn't about how many people you can recognize, and how many people you really know. Clinton didn't really know that faculty member, he just decided to make her feel better by remembering that they'd met before. I'm quite sure he knew Newt Gingrich considerably better than that.

    This is unfortunately a major weakness of many politicians. When confronted by something like climate change that wasn't operating on human scales until recently, most of them didn't have enough of an intuitive understanding to deal. I'd also add that when dealing with sociopaths like the current high MAGAtry, many otherwise skilled politicians don't have the tools to deal with them, either.

    657:

    Quite off-topic, but interesting and possibly useful for alt-history/near- OTL stories:

    https://alert5.com/2023/01/20/f-15-global-strike-eagle/

    658:

    Ten years down the line Jane Doe is associate Dean of a college heading up a prestigious research program with international organisations and she gets in touch with Bill C. to ask for his help because SHE remembers her interaction with him. His staff give him a heads-up, "You met her when she was a student then again..." plus a page of her resume since then. He gets back to her, oozing the Clinton charm that he's famous for. Six months later there's Press photos of a grip-and-grin session as Bill C. stands beside Dr. Jane Doe as she announces the Suchandsuch Foundation's pioneering program to do .

    Ninety percent of the people recorded in a Farley File will never be useful to the pol. The data on the other ten percent is golden.

    659:

    Greg, stop hiding the actual publisher and subject of political links under your own interpretation.

    Finding the publisher of this piece (helpfully contained in the URL you hid) was enough to tell me to not bother clicking through on it.

    660:

    I'm wondering if it's possible to make a buckyball out of buckyballs

    Heh.

    For REAL nightmare fuel, I invite you to contemplate the stability of a buckyball with nitrogens instead of carbons. The delocalized pi orbitals make it somewhat more stable than one might expect, except ... nitrogen!

    I mean, it might not detonate if you warm it up past 20 kelvins or look at it funny.

    661:

    For REAL nightmare fuel, I invite you to contemplate the stability of a buckyball with nitrogens instead of carbons. The delocalized pi orbitals make it somewhat more stable than one might expect, except ... nitrogen!

    Ooooooh, omninitrofullerene. I can feel it pining for Vahalla already.

    Still, fractal polyfullerene sounds like something that becomes pure narrativium when exposed to a proper catalyst.

    662:

    If your species is adapted to live on Pluto, or one of the moons of Neptune, that's a nasty weapon, the equivalent of a nuke if you have enough of the stuff...

    663:

    Yeah, I was thinking....

    One cryogenic tank of fluorine

    One cryogenic tank of oxygen

    One solid rocket fuel block of nitrofullerene.

    It would make for an interesting rocket...if the rocket can outrun the explosion it's trying to channel, that is.

    Outer system warfare. The only known form of warfare weirder than abyssal seafloor warfare.

    664:

    I have met a couple of politicians with an eerie memory of who I am and what I do, in both cases I found it off-putting. I barely remembered meeting one of them two or three years prior at a large event, to have him asking me about my current work was alarming.

    The other one was Stockwell Day, a failed Conservative leader here in Canada, and nobody ever accused him of intelligence. I met him once when he was a provincial cabinet minister in Alberta (and my local rep), and then 5 years later when he was running to be the PM. At neither point did I do anything notable, yet he remembered me. Impressive, but he was still dumb as the proverbial hammer sack, and they'd have to be running against Nyalathotep himself for me to vote for a Christian Dominionist.

    As for representation in general, I like the idea of 1 representative per x thousand/million population. I would clarify that by saying that each tranche of voters should be selected randomly from the entire population, each candidate must be from that tranche, and the allotments must be re-randomized every election.

    1 year before election day you get a notice that you are going to be voting in Constituency 264. If you wish to run as a candidate to represent 264 please inform the relevant agency.

    Prospective candidates and parties would have to run on platforms that appeal to all, rather than a narrow demographic that happens to have a majority in a particular location. Elected officials would find themselves running in an entirely different race next time around, so don't sell out or the next people will ditch you.

    Keep another house for geographic representation (i.e. Senate in the US).

    It's a pipe dream of course.

    665:

    Chemistry can only get you so far in terms of rate of energy release since the reaction requires the components to be in proximity with each other and the results of the reaction will tend to separate the components. That's why rockets have combustion chambers and guns have barrels, and even then some of the chemical components will combine too late to be of much use for whatever you're trying to propel.

    It's telling that the best bang-for-the-buck rocket motors that fly today are ion engines, very very low thrust but a lot of it for every gram of fuel expended with all of the energy coming from electrical sources rather than chemical action. Nuclear fission is another high-reaction-return propulsion option and there are probably things you could do with antimatter, if you had enough antimatter and something to keep it in. I suspect that you'd need large quantities of stable transuranic materials to make a useful antimatter rocket motor out of -- it's postulated that such Islands of Stability metals might have melting points in the 10,000 deg C range and more.

    666:

    I have met a couple of politicians with an eerie memory of who I am and what I do, in both cases I found it off-putting.

    This ability is one (of many required) to be successful at things like marketing, PR, sales, etc... You'll find it in a lot of small successful business owners. The local guy running (well not so much anymore) a small printing company with 10 or fewer employees. It really helps when a client from 3 years ago walks in and want a repeat of what the print shop owner did then with a few mods.

    Back 30 years ago and before they were the ones who had a very overflowing Rolodex (and a few boxes of older contacts in the closet) and it was the most important totem in their life.

    And didn't understand why everyone didn't have such.

    667:

    I see... so, a non-nuclear Orion drive.

    668:

    I read a biography of Brian Mulroney (Canadian PM 84-93) in which he maintained a call schedule over the course of decades. Every day he would roll through his contact list and reach out to various members with a call, a check in, a brief chat. He would take studious notes on each call, to reference before his next scheduled call.

    My understanding was that this practice began when he was a teenager in the youth wing of the party, and is probably ongoing now, >70 years later (he is still an eminence grise amongst conservative types).

    669:

    paws @ 660
    You what?
    My own interpreation is that "benny" is a fascist shit, even though he's jewish.
    At the same time, I have no time for Labour-party members, some of whom I know personally, going on about how Isreal is/was "nasty" to "Palestinians" from the word go - I'm only too well aware that ... "It's complicated" - OK?

    Charlie @ 661
    Cubane molecules, perchance?
    Oh dear, we are back to "interesting explosive mixtures/chemicals/reactions .....

    670:

    = political wack jobs with delusions of messianic savior-hood; very much a mode of an unloved-unwelcome-unhinged minority attempting to take control of the reins of governance; UK ==> Tory; US ==> GOP; various 'n sundry variants in other nations;

    "Failure is not an option, dudes."

    "Unfortunately, failure is always an option. So to get really real here, failure is the only option with . Duh!"

    In the US, there's serious effort at crashing the credit rating of the entire nation by triggering a default by the GOP (or rather those extremists in the GQP) refusing to raise the 'debt ceiling' as a knife to the throats of Congress to force forth concessions in a mode akin to taking hostages, then threatening to kill one every hour until ransom is paid by way of a heap of small unmarked, non-consecutive banknotes, ten's & twenty's.

    Whereas in the UK, deliberate indifference to actual mass casualties as the NHS inadvertently kills about 600 citizens weekly; now there's indications of 'knock on effects' indirectly killing yet more (300? 400?) due to ever worsening delays in diagnosis of cancer-diabetes-heart diseases, all of which have best results by way of early detection.

    In both the UK & the US, long simmering flaws in policing are finally getting so obvious it is impossible to hide there are rapists-thieves-murders carrying badges.

    And is it really necessary to mention how special interest lobbying has prevented almost every attempt to address climate change?

    One modest tweak, decades overdue, the UK is finally getting a 'bottle deposit' law. But there's loopholes and it will not start for another two years.

    Whereas in the US, there's long been a 'bottle deposit' law just about everywhere. But it is still $0.05 (almost everywhere) as it was in 1982 when first implemented. Due to inflation, $1.00 in 1982 is worth $3.08 in 2023; which means to have the same valuation in New York state, it have to be at least $0.16, but to have serious effect upon encouraging recycling it should be $0.20 or more.

    There's significant efforts underway to save us from ourselves but almost as if there was a 'alien mindset' nudging us towards massive die-offs... and no... it need not be extraterrestrials... we have plenty of 'aliens' amongst us eager to see a reduction of 'wrong kinds' of 'lesser folk'...

    I foresee a time (2050s?) whereupon declaring a 'momentary' widespread suspension of civil rights during an ongoing 'temporary emergency' which never gets reversed...

    671:

    Big pernitroperazafullerenes, enclosing aluminium atoms (two for every three nitros) so as not to waste the space.

    672:

    "it's postulated that such Islands of Stability metals might have melting points in the 10,000 deg C range and more."

    Unfortunately the Islands of Stability have been submerged by the rising sea level of the Ocean of Knowledge.

    673:

    got chopped...

    PWJWDOMS = political wack jobs with delusions of messianic saviorhood; very much a mode of an unloved-unwelcome-unhinged minority attempting to take control of the reins of governance; UK ==> Tory; US ==> GOP; various 'n sundry variants in other nations;

    "Failure is not an option, dudes."

    "Unfortunately, failure is always an option. So to get really real here, failure is the only option with PWJWDOMS. Duh!"

    674:

    Chemistry can only get you so far in terms of rate of energy release since the reaction requires the components to be in proximity with each other and the results of the reaction will tend to separate the components. That's why rockets have combustion chambers and guns have barrels, and even then some of the chemical components will combine too late to be of much use for whatever you're trying to propel.

    Well, even I know that if a rocket uses a bunch of badly bent dinitrogen bonds as the fuel and FOOF as the oxidizer, whatever gets used for the combustion chamber will get oxidized too. I was just goofing along with Charlie's notion of buckyballs made out of nitrogen.

    Personally, I think this idea of creating a space probe that uses plasma magnets to dynamically soar at the interfaces among the different plasma regimes in space (edges of magnetospheres, solar wind edges, heliopause) to be rather more interesting, although I don't have the math to do competent bullshit detection on the idea. If it works, the probe could eventually get going rather fast, eventually being the operative term. Using it to go between stars would be rather interesting as well, although that's not addressed for some reason.

    Popsci version here: https://www.inverse.com/science/dynamic-soaring-aerospace

    Actual paper here: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frspt.2022.1017442/full#B14

    And I don't think I picked it up here, but if I did, apologies for not giving credit where it's due.

    675:

    RE: '... whichever combo of age-gender-body-type grabs attention of a targeted demographic of buyers-users-oglers'

    Okay agree - but that younger demo no longer makes up the largest segment with the most available funds. I think the current most attractive market is the 30-45 years old, with 1 kid - could be married or not - group. (I think they may be similar to the mid-late 1980s top target market segment for higher ticket products.)

    The largest demo in NA and probably the UK, EU and Australia is the 60+ year old group who have more in assets but are stereotypically cautious about spending.

    Seniors already have all the furnishings, ward robe, etc. So basically, the types of goods retailers have counted on in the past aren't a draw for segment that has money seniors and the age group that used to buy these goods hasn't got any money. What to do? Maybe it's time to change your inventory*. Seriously -- I'm surprised that most retailers haven't gotten on the aging-in-place bandwagon which is probably going to be increasingly attractive to seniors as a cost effective way to not sacrifice their homes because of any aging related special physical needs. It also means that they won't have to lean on their kids (the current sandwich generation) for help.

    *From what I've seen, most every major grocery chain has a mobile phone kiosk - not so the home furnishings stores. Weird.

    AI ...

    Back to our guest author's topic about AI being given authority over issues that impact human lives: China is using AI in its legal system.

    https://www.dw.com/en/how-chinas-ai-is-automating-the-legal-system/a-64465988

    Can hardly wait for Western lawyers to start addressing this now that their jobs may be on the line!

    676:

    Stockwell Day, a failed Conservative leader here in Canada

    Yeah, I was glad Doris didn't succeed…


    Note for non-Canadians: One of Day's political planks was that a petition signed by 3% of the population should automatically trigger a referendum (costing over $100 million). So Rick Mercer started a petition to have Stockwell change his name to Doris, and collected more than the 3% minimum. And then Day changed the target number…

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXAu9PFNP5E

    677:

    SFReader:

    whenever conversations arise about "ageing in place" you'd best be ready for yelling... nobody over 50 likes to admit they are no long young and anyone over 60 resents any reminder they've begun dying whilst still standing... adding to the mess those with the most needs rarely have the necessary resources... personally my goal is die in my sleep a month before I end up warehoused alongside 200 other un-wealthy elders in some care home designed for 50...

    if you want to start a useful consulting service oriented company, there it is... and focus upon adapting bathrooms to the elderly-disabled-clumsy-forgetful... grab bars in the shower will be nice but never can be done cheaply as well as properly... and automatic activated low level illumination in bathrooms... I step inside and there's a diffuse lighting strip of about 15 watt offering enough light so I can aim properly when pissing but not so bright as to blind my ancient eyes... I went looking for that product and nothing is close to those simple specifications... certainly nothing absolutely watertight...

    right there is the next 'big thing' in science fiction... elder SF/F... / /sarcasm off //

    678:

    Whereas in the US, there's long been a 'bottle deposit' law just about everywhere. But it is still $0.05 (almost everywhere) as it was in 1982 when first implemented. Due to inflation, $1.00 in 1982 is worth $3.08 in 2023; which means to have the same valuation in New York state, it have to be at least $0.16, but to have serious effect upon encouraging recycling it should be $0.20 or more.

    More than that. When I was a kid you could buy a chocolate bar for one or two bottles, so there was a real incentive to collect them. Today you'd need a deposit of $1 to get the same reward. (You'd also need parents/society to let kids roam more, but that's a separate issue.)

    679:

    "ageing in place" you'd best be ready for yelling... nobody over 50 likes ...

    Maybe where you are, but here that's one of the things they teach in architecture school. And discuss in parliament. Blah blah etc.

    There's a whole forest of stuff being done to facilitate it, and it has obvious effects right down to a noticeable boost to the price of second hand houses/apartments near major hospitals if they're even vaguely elder-friendly or rebuildable.

    Back in the 1980's my grandparents called it that when they moved to an apartment overlooking the cricket ground and croquet/bowls clubs in Wellington because it was close to a big hospital. That whole building was built for old-ish people, right down to the extra-gentle lift.

    My parents are right now doing that in Nelson. They just finally finished building their house (viz, supervising the people who did the actual work) and are back to whatever it is 80 year olds do these days. Ringing me and whining that he put his back out lifting 20kg sacks of something off the trailer, for one fun thing. And apparently she is sunburnt because 50 years of telling other people to wear sunscreen slipped her mind and now all the other reindeer are laughing and calling her names.

    680:

    So far as cheap solutions to helping aging relatives, I'd suggest checking out https://www.uvpaqlite.com/ . It's just glow-in-the-dark stuff, but it's really bright. When an elderly relative got a hip replaced and needed a walker, I got one of their little necklaces (the UVO) and tied it on the frame of the walker. This made it easy to grab the walker to go to the restroom in the middle of the night without struggling to turn lights on. Powered lights are nice, but sometimes all you need is a bit of a glow.

    681:

    My stepfather is enough of a geek that they switched to Signal a while ago without me even saying anything. I suspect that between parents and architect they have all that stuff sorted out. I do know that they decided not to have anything that requires an app, although apparently some things can work with one. They have a row of remote controls on a spice rack above the kitchen island :)

    These days the options for "light, but not too much" are so varied that it's easy to get overloaded. But also means my preference and your preference might not overlap at all, and someone else can sit there wondering why neither of us have gone with the obvious option.

    682:

    Meanwhile ... This is Sub judice so be careful, but get the popcorn out over Gloat-a-Gloag
    Hint, IIRC the Gloags are "christian" all over the landscape, yes?

    Re: Howard NYC @ 671
    And, here we go, as a horrible example: - $mashing up the NHS for our pockets sake
    These arseholes have go to be stopped before the next GE.

    683:

    Reminder that Javid isn't just a libertarian millionaire, he's one of the Ayn Rand cultists cluttering up the past few Tory cabinets -- back when he was Health Secretary he was very much a starving fox who'd been put in charge of a chicken farm: nearly as toxic as Jeremy Hunt.

    The Gloag thing ... I'm just going to wait and gloag -- I mean, gloat -- if they're found guilty.

    684:

    Greg Tingey:

    Gloat-a-Gloag... why is anyone upset? just because those of better bloodlines imported involuntary workers from distant lands?

    ("import involuntary workers" does sound so much better than "kidnapping and transporting with intent for enslaving")

    685:

    I would like to note that the Gloags (and Brian Souter) are evangelical jeezers with a repulsive history of homophobic activism. Quite a lot of folks here in Scotland will be extremely entertained by their come-uppance.

    686:

    Charlie & Howard NYC
    Indeed ... IF Gloag is found to have broken the law in this respect, the cheering & gloating will be stupendous.
    And not "just" Scotland, either.
    The Gloag/Souter combination were responsible for "Stagecoach" in the privatised railway operations, & quite apart from their revolting religion, are known throughout the land as right-wing grasping arseholes.

    687:

    Charlie Stross:

    heh heh... I shall e-mail you a kilogram of popcorn to prep for their livestream court appearances... but only if you reciprocate when T(he)rump is at long last dragged before a judge to answer for his dozens 'n dozens of felonies

    [ checks notes ]

    this is not the future we were expecting back in the 1980s... though shockingly detailed all too accurately in Eclipse Trilogy by John Shirley... including an invasion of Europe by Russia...

    688:

    "...including an invasion of Europe by Russia..."

    Also hinted at in The Gripping Hand. ("The gang of Crazy Eddies.")

    689:

    this is not the future we were expecting back in the 1980s... though shockingly detailed all too accurately in Eclipse Trilogy by John Shirley... including an invasion of Europe by Russia...

    Megacorps taking over the world? It does ring-eth a small bell.

    Of course, dudes and the occasional dudette have been trying to be god-kings since some time in the neolithic if not before, so conceivably it might be worth seeing billionaires as the latest iteration of that Dream, rather than as something unique to our era.

    690:

    "this is not the future we were expecting back in the 1980s..."

    Speak for yourself :-(

    I agree that there was still some hope of a reversal of direction up until about 2000, and that it changed from a possible scenario to the almost certain one in the period 1980 to 2000, but that is all I will give you.

    691:

    this is not the future we were expecting back in the 1980s...

    It's actually a whole lot better than I expected, insofar as I didn't expect to live to see 1990, much less 2000.

    We're nearly a year into an angry totalitarian Russian invasion of a western(ish) nation and the invasion stalled out badly before it got more than 200km in, and they still haven't gone nuclear.

    Yes, that is an improvement. I mean, I'll take dangerously accelerating climate change, rule by mad billionaire oligarchs, and neo-Nazis trying to make a come-back everywhere over dying in a 50,000-warhead superpower nuke-fest -- or worse, being one of the scorched and irradiated and starving survivors -- any day of the week.

    (That's not to say that this is any kind of optimal outcome, but really? Let's be realistic: things could have come out much, much worse.)

    692:

    The closest I can come to arguing with any of that is that I honestly did not expect to be a survivor, being about 10 to 15 miles from 5 Ground Zero points in 3 directions.

    693:

    You were that far away from ground zero?

    I don't think I ever lived more than 5 miles from a Soviet theatre-level target until the cold war ended. The UK is geographically compact and was jam packed with aim points back then -- it was the main strategic resupply route into Europe for NATO convoys crossing the Atlantic if the Soviet tank armies rolled west -- and was within range of the short-range stuff like SS-20s that didn't have the oomph to reach US territory.)

    694:

    We're nearly a year into an angry totalitarian Russian invasion of a western(ish) nation and the invasion stalled out badly before it got more than 200km in, and they still haven't gone nuclear.

    Or chemical. This was the scenario I kept seeing back in early to mid 80's: Soviet tank divisions roll into West Germany through Fulda Gap, NATO forces bring them to a halt, Soviets use chemical weapons to break through, NATO responds with tactical nuclear weapons, Soviets launch ICBM's.

    So far we only got to Step 2.

    695:

    I learned from one of the biographies I've read of Philip K Dick that he kept a Rolodex by his telephone. He'd use it to keep the details of the last phone conversation he'd had with each caller, so when they called him again, he could look them up and ask followup questions on that conversation. I wonder how many of his callers knew he used this trick.

    696:

    My fear in 1983 wasn't that we'd all be nuked. My fear was that some of us might survive, escape from this planet, and spread through the universe like a cancer. Well, I was 17.

    Today I'm more optimistic. I no longer believe any species as destructive as ours could ever escape its homeworld. Before that happens, we'll destroy ourselves fighting over who gets to go first - or who goes into space at all.

    My current bedtime reading is Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 by Max Hastings. From what I remember discovering in the 90s, we all got very lucky Kennedy followed advise from the right faction amoung his advisors, but none of them could've known how the Soviets would react to either "hawk" or "dove" strategies.

    After the fall of the Soviet Union, we learned that the Soviets would've escalated, if JFK had followed the advice of the "hawks".

    So I'm not expecting any great revelations from Hastings, but his book should add some detail to my knowledge. The chapter on the Bay of Pigs was certainly packed with extraordinary military failures, from the Commander in Chief down to the most lowly "soldier".

    697:

    Moz@682 wrote"These days the options for "light, but not too much" are so varied that it's easy to get overloaded. But also means my preference and your preference might not overlap at all, and someone else can sit there wondering why neither of us have gone with the obvious option."

    Farenheit 451 I recall from Bradbury's story is the ignition point for paper, but L.E.D. bulbs only get up to about 90F. So I rolled up paper sleeves cut from typing paper to use as miniature lampshades fastened around four candelabra base LED bulbs, screwed into switch-on/switch-off nightlight bases and deployed at convenient socket locations, front entry, kitchen, livingroom and dining area. The local power company was sponsoring stack displays of them at dollar stores to promote energy saving, so i paid a quarter per bulb. Package specifications describe it as 40 watt incandescent equivalent for only 4 watts, I figure each one's 24 hours usage for a penny. Thing is, they're so bright it hurts to look at them without my little improvised lampshades, so I can light up the whole front area for under a nickel a day, might as well leave them on 24/7. Old habits die hard though or else I 'm just obsessive compulsive because I still go around and switch them off before bed and save two cents. Do that for a year and I can get a coffee at Starbucks as a reward, talk about incentive!

    698:

    The bigger incentive for turning lights off at night is cutting down on light pollution for wildlife.

    700:

    L.E.D. bulbs only get up to about 90F. So I rolled up paper sleeves cut from typing paper to use as miniature lampshades

    I put a strip of masking tape over the red LED "high stop light" I use as a reading light to diffuse it and it hasn't been affected by heat at all. No real surprise, the thing never gets at all warm to the touch.

    There's quite a lot of similar tricks anyone can do with LEDs. The inside of foil+cardboard drink boxes are quite reflective, for example, if you want a somewhat directed rather than diffused light.

    And that's without getting into fun with a soldering iron, mostly people like me buy LED lights then dim them slightly because most are built to run hot and bright but not for long. If you're really lucky the brightness is controlled by a sense resistor and the manufacturer has put two in parallel, so breaking one out does what you want with no soldering required. The exact same light running half the power is probably 80% as bright but lasts way beyond the warranty period (Ayn Rand would be horrified).

    701:

    This is why the grumpy old men of antepope hate smart devices with such passion and fury.

    A cow-orker has finally jumped on the zigbee bandwagon because some gadget he "needs" works better with it than without. So far he has about $500 and 20 hours spent on "better" and is sounding quite grumpy. It works just well enough to make him think he should persevere...

    702:

    Random thought, vaguely linked to keeping OGH happy...

    I was just thinking that it might be fun to read something like Tales of the White Hart, set in a long-running blog rather than a pub. There would be the crusty regulars who are reasonably intelligent but maybe aren't as informed as they think they are, to act as foils, and there would be the odd storyteller, most of whom are more odd than their online personae indicate. They're the protagonists of the short stories, of course, and the action can be formatted to take place on either side of the screen (e.g. threaded comments, live action, or both).

    What to call it? Perhaps Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, and Other Strange Attractors?

    Just a thought, not something I'll ever write.

    703:

    I'm debating between terming the recent #BSGC (batshit gonzo crazy) politicians collectively as being infected with "moral bankruptcy" or "empathy bankrupt" with a side order of "amorally shortsightedness"

    it is a subtle distinction

    704:

    I'm debating between terming the recent #BSGC (batshit gonzo crazy) politicians collectively as being infected with "moral bankruptcy" or "empathy bankrupt" with a side order of "amorally shortsightedness"

    Malignant narcissism covers it too. So does chaotic evil, of course.

    705:

    so... adding...

    marinated overnight in Malignant Narcissism Souring Sauce(TM) to tenderize

    706:

    one step closer to oranges in London and lemons in Glasgow...

    hazelnuts, walnuts, etc, "becoming commercially viable"

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/09/english-farmers-turning-to-cultivating-nuts-as-climate-heats

    707:

    Lights on streets ...
    This village is not too far away & I'm very familiar with it - no street lights AT ALL in fact.

    Howard NYC
    Walnuts have long been viable here, it's just collecting them that's difficult.
    As for Hazel Nuts ... the bloody effing grey squirrels eat them all!

    708:

    from the guardian...

    "Brexiters in denial can’t admit to themselves that a project founded in delusion, marinated in fantasy, riddled with contradictions and marketed with mendacities was never going to 'work'."

    ...something I'm gonna re-task towards those irrational Republicans eager to crash the USA by refusing to raise the debt limit

    709:

    Hmm, lights are on 7 hours per hour ?

    710:

    Oh, nuts! The Gnurdian stikes again.

    While it is possible to grow citrus in the warm locations, that's a far cry from them being commercially viable. Mine have been killed by the frost (in a greenhouse).

    Hazelnuts are a NATIVE species, one of the dominating species of the pre-agriculture wildwood.

    Walnuts have been grown for many centuries, though they don't ripen all that reliably, and are on the verge of naturalising.

    711:

    If I "read it in the Grauniad", the first thing I do is fact-check it.

    712:

    no... citrus not yet 'native' so far north... but wait about a decade... as was a bit of world building background in Peter Hamilton's "Greg Mandel" trilogy... groves 'n groves of oranges-limes-grapefruit... but not so much tangerines... go figura...

    I'm trying to find the silverlining hidden in the doomclouds... folks are adapting bit here, bit there... just not going to be enough to make up for down turn in crop yields... article mentions -9% but there's other web sites suggestive of as bad as -12%

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/27/big-falls-in-crop-yields-across-europe-feared-due-to-heatwaves

    713:

    This may be of interest - short fiction about the nature of stardom, among other things: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04550-2

    714:

    Sigh. Plants (especially woody ones) are affected by much more than simple temperatures. Another very important one is insolation, which means autumn sunlight for many late-ripening crops (e.g. grapes), Nice gets 50% than London, and that will not change. Citrus are oddball, because the fruit overwinter, and so are sensitive to cold winters.

    The meteorologists said a long time back that climate change would make the UK's climate less predictable and more subject to extreme weather. A winter like the one we are having (dropping to -10, averaging -4 for days at a streatch) is death on citrus.

    Yes, we shall have more years of crop failure, but that isn't anything more than a matter of degree. I remember such years in the 1960s and 1970s. Continental Europe has it worse, because it's climate is more continental.

    715:

    Insolation matters less than you think. C3 photosynthesis maxes out around 30 percent of total insolation, which is why plants actually have a fair number of mechanisms for dealing with surplus light energy. C4 photosynthesis maxes out around 45 percent of total insolation. 30% total insolation is 72 degrees off the solar equator (which varies by 23.5 degrees +/- over the course of the year), but potentially C3 plants max out every sunny day of the year up to 48.5o latitude. And of course they can grow much further poleward than that by using less light.

    The bigger issue is degree-days (days at a particular temperature, because plants are ectothermic). This shows up in whether it's warm enough for a species to grow, of course, in whether there are lethal chills (which temperature varies by species) or whether there enough cold or hot days of particular temperatures to trigger the various plants to ripen fruit or whatever.

    Long story short, with enough warming, England could grow lemons and probably grapefruit outdoors, oranges would be trickier, and true limes would be trickier still. Whether the best land for citrus will be above sea level at that point is another question, of course.

    716:

    Remind me who it is who grows food plants at 52 north. I can assure you that north of 50 latitude insolation really matters. This is based, not just on my personal experience and experiment, but on UK agricultural research and experiments. You are quoting the figures for optimal conditions, and missing the points that days shorten, we can lose a lot of sunlight in clouds (longer paths, remember?), north-faciing slopes, and more.

    Degree-days is not a big issue for cold-adapted plants in the UK, because in most years they are ample, though they do matter for more southerly crops (a lot). One thing you have missed is that (for many crops) spring and early summer is the growing season, and late summer and autumn the ripening one - crops adapted to sunnier autumns often grow but don't ripen. The temperature in the latter seasons matters, yes, but cloudy, wet, warm weather also causes failure to ripen (as well as encouraging rot). Remember that many plants are triggered to produce fruit (and tubers) by shortening days.

    Incidentally, in Cambridge, the insolation in September is under 60% of that in June (weatherbase) and, if crops haven't ripened by the solistice, they had better not need sun to ripen.

    Furthermore, overall degree-days is NOT well correlated with lethal cold, nor whether there is enough sun for late-ripening crops. Those temperatures I gave you were what we are having and, yes, the ground has frozen - and one of the citrus that died was a lemon. The best arable lands in the UK have highish degree-days, but many of them also have coldish winters (by UK standards).

    717:

    Remind me who it is who grows food plants at 52 north.
    Pretty much anyone in Scotland, for values that include anything people eat as "food plants". Ok, we might use (heated sometimes) greenhouses, but one of the few times I'll definitely come back from food shopping with strawberries is June... when I can buy Scottish grown soft fruit.

    718:

    Howard NYC & EC
    Crop yields ...
    Last year was ... interesting.
    The spuds hated the drought & I could not keep up with their water demands - they then re-sprouted in autumn, to be cut down by frosts. ... Yields are down, "bad" spuds are up - with various forms of rot.
    I only got about half my yield of peas - not enough water, again, yet I was able to get a good bean crop. I made sure, whatever else, that the tomatoes got watered & had a record yield, but the raspberries & white/red-currants gave up about half-way through the season.
    I grew some absolutely humungous "Romanesco" plants, which only produced edible flower-heads very late - I'm just finishing one, right now. Again, the snow has killed some of the survivors off.
    Weird & it's going to get weirder.
    Citrus - I must, very soon, pick a load of Limes & make marmalade { Growing in my lean-to large greenhouse, which is not "Heated", but I keep at a minimum temp of 3°C }
    ... EC: but cloudy, wet, warm weather also causes failure to ripen - tell me about it!

    719:

    Remind me who it is who grows food plants at 52 north.

    Alaskans too, more and more ( https://www.climatehubs.usda.gov/hubs/northwest/topic/agriculture-alaska )

    I'm not sure where you're getting 50 degrees from...

    720:

    If it helps people understand why temperature matters more than light, google "Messel Pit." It's a famous Eocene fossil locale located just south of Frankfurt, Germany, latitude 50o north. Its flora included magnolias, palm trees, camellias, families that are now tropical like the Icacinaceae... ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoflora_of_the_Messel_Formation ). It was, of course, considerably warmer then than it is now.

    I'd be happy to link to reports on the flora of Svalbard and Ellesmere, but unfortunately they don't have common names attached, so they're meaningless without a lot of translation.

    Anyway, I've got errands to run, so anyone else who wants to argue EC and keep him stimulated, please do so.

    Happy Lunar New Year, all.

    721:

    I didn't know that Scotland had annexed England :-) You are rather more than 52 north.

    I won't bother to correct Heteromeles's numerous (and obvious) errors and irrelevances, unless someone less parochial wants me to.

    722:

    "I'm not sure where you're getting 50 degrees from..."

    The southern extremity of England?

    All of mainland Britain with the exception of < 10 square miles of the Lizard peninsula is north of latitude 50.

    723:

    Yup. Here in Edinburgh I'm just short of 56 degrees north. (And this is southern Scotland. We're north of Moscow, Russia: the only significant US city north of here is Anchorage.)

    724:

    While I'm waiting for EC to correct my "numerous (and obvious) errors and irrelevances", I'd like to change the subject to aeronautical engineering.

    This is about Jetoptera, which is trying to develop bladeless fluidic airplane engines ( https://www.jetoptera.com/ ). Their videos (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXRxjckDYgU ) seem pretty impressive, even if they're flying scale models rather than piloted craft. What do y'all think? Real? Scalable?

    725:

    It seems like another "we shouldn't be doing this at all, but here's a way to do it slightly more efficiently" thing.

    My equally idle thought is that it would be nice to know which countries are planning to be absolute negative "sources" of GHG emissions by 2050 to provide all the offsets that the "net zero" countries are relying on. Currently it looks as though there will be a market for many, many megatonnes of negative emissions and I can't work out where they're going to come from. I foresee some really enthusiastic gaming as well as the "loss and damage fund" problem of countries just refusing to do what they they promised (said fund is currently less than 1% funded).

    726:

    Jetoptera: Here is a technical deep dive on how it works:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPZI6XoHi10

    The technology looks viable, I'm not sure about the actual product being marketable.

    727:

    https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-issues-award-for-greener-more-fuel-efficient-airliner-of-future

    Also NASA's truss wing design proposal (which I think means 'research grant'?) is another attempt to shave 10% or so off the fuel/energy cost of something that shouldn't happen at all. A bit like the US navy's attempt to avoid chemical propellants by using railguns... yay, huge reduction in toxic chemicals! So much safer for everyone (who matters)!

    728:

    Currently it looks as though there will be a market for many, many megatonnes of negative emissions and I can't work out where they're going to come from. I foresee some really enthusiastic gaming as well as the "loss and damage fund" problem of countries just refusing to do what they they promised (said fund is currently less than 1% funded).

    No foresight necessary, that's what has been going on for decades. I got to bust one such attempt by combining fire hazard projections and historic fire footprints with carbon offset forests located in Northern California. All but one offset were in high fire areas, and a couple were in the footprint of historic fires. Probably at least one of the projects has burned since I did the analysis a few years back.

    Scoffing aside, people in my real-life orbit get deeply, non-rationally offended when I suggest they should give up flying due to climate change. Heck, ditching my bucket list of places I wanted to see (topped by Australia and New Zealand) still stings. It's interesting how things like ubiquitous air travel become a cornerstone of peoples' identities.

    729:

    See your "deep south" location and raise Inverewe Garden at 57:46.5N.

    And this is why I'm not working through the back catalogue of your generalisiations etc...

    730:

    Insolation matters but it’s already possible to grow citrus fruit in the UK if they’re moved into a greenhouse in winter.

    https://www.gardenersworld.com/how-to/grow-plants/guide-to-growing-citrus-plants-in-the-uk/

    Orangeries would not work if insulation were the problem. OK frost is the problem. But if temperatures rise enough to end frost insulation will not be a problem.

    Citrus yields may not be as good as more southerly climates but they will fruit if there’s no frost.

    731:

    " It's interesting how things like ubiquitous air travel become a cornerstone of peoples' identities. "

    Is it what?

    When I were a lad (and I'm younger than Greg), the idea that someone might travel halfway across the world just for a funeral (however dear the deceased) would hardly rise to the level of ridiculous, let alone be taken seriously.

    When we had our Covid-19 lockdown, the yelling and screaming about how brutal and cruel it was that people from infection hotspots were not permitted to enter the country for funerals could I expect be heard from the other side of the Pacific. "This tyrannical Government is denying us basic human rights."

    JHomes

    732:

    people in my real-life orbit get deeply, non-rationally offended when I suggest they should give up flying due to climate change.

    I got very angry with a former "sustainability advisor" from a prime munster's office who thought I was getting irrational for not being excited that they'd flown to Africa to see, among other things, Kilimanjaro while it still had snow on it. That was literally their explanation. Someone with a PhD in government state of the environment reporting, who was proud of their contribution to the decarbonisation progress in government, just could not see any connection between the example they were setting and any kind of problematic outcome. They're a former friend and likely still don't understand why.

    I have way too many examples of "of course wen we achieve net zero I will still be living as I do now, just buying more offsets". You and everyone else, champ, you and everyone else.

    733:

    In happier news, ebike continue their march to ubiquity with the launch of Makita's pair of 40V models. You can already buy a Makita 18V mamachari or folder, but with 40V they now have a slightly more youf-oriented one ('youf' here meaning under 70). Good luck finding anything in English on the topic though. Hopefully when/if they release them outside Japan...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6hSrWe185M for the 2x18V folder

    IMO this is a win simply because it's the batteries the currently wear out stupidly fast. I have another dying 36V mower battery in my dying mower, but I'll be replacing it with a Makita 40V one so I get more use out of the batteries. With LiPo it's calendar aging that kills them more than use, most people get less than 200 cycles. So anything that puts more cycles on the battery is a good thing, somewhat counterintuitively.

    734:

    Citrus yields may not be as good as more southerly climates but they will fruit if there’s no frost.

    A bit of frost is dealt with by spraying water on the trees. The ice actually insulates the fruit so the pulp doesn't freeze if it doesn't get more than a degree or so below freezing.

    But yields? I can't see much there. The trees in fruit orchards are a bit on the large size in terms of being moveable. Maybe putting a swimming pool type winter balloon over clumps of them might work. If you can figure out how to let in the correct sunlight frequencies.

    735:

    a prime munster's office

    Intentional typo?

    It works. Especially for those who know of the US silly TV show from 50+ years ago.

    736:

    And for the other kind of Muenster, one hopes that they have a geniune Come To Cheese-us moment.

    I'll see myself out

    737:

    I use that a lot because I'd rather think of them as munsters than as evil beings from another dimension. Wealth is a dimension, right?

    738:

    waldo:

    thanks for ultimate in modes for punishing click-whores & trend-setting clowns & cultural vampires

    my favorite snippets...

    "Who knew that enrolling on a course about the relativistic Universe would spawn an idea for the perfect murder?"

    "This story is dedicated to the tutors of the Open University course S383, especially IC and GW. (Honestly, though, they didn’t say anything about murder.)"

    739:

    I think the issue with garden/food production planning will be more challenged by variable weather than relocated climatic zones.

    A locale that can grow citrus very well 7 years out of 8 but will kill them on the other year isn't much use for the production of citrus. If it's 15 years and then 4 years of citrus killing weather.

    740:

    "Is Aotearoa ready for a Maori Woman leader"... answer: hell no. There are candidates but the misgynist white is not ready. It would trigger far too many people into voting for the right, anything on the right, rather than her: https://tinangata.com/2023/01/20/on-safe-leadership/

    Links to a video on twitter that has the note attached "btw we toned this scene down so it could be broadcast. the original cut was too confronting and violently graphic". I couldn't watch the toned down version.

    "Clip with @sanjanah gives glimpse into the kind of daily abuse Jacinda Ardern had to weather." https://twitter.com/justinsight/status/1616144565433663488

    Falls into the general category of "this is why we can't have nice things". When politicians get treated hatefully you get more hateful politicians. Perhaps today is a good day to send a care package to your preferred local politician?

    741:

    I couldn't watch the toned down version.

    I could. It is sadly familiar material. Every female politician I know has faced similar threats/insults.

    The males have faced the many of the same insults and some of the same threats (in the case of sexual insults and threats, directed at their wives/daughters rather than themselves.)

    I should note that all of the ones I know are quite left-wing by American standards (moderate left to centrist in Canada). I don't know if the right faces the same vitriol.

    742:

    I guess there are all sorts of different experiences, and it's about what you're used to. My MiL in her late 80s has been doing online ordering for groceries for years, since well before they were popular. It's just one way that developing internet literacy has helped her to stay independent. She's rarely had much trouble with substitutions, though I suppose she's had a long time to iron that out or live with it. She long ago took to supplying us with some deli goods that were for a while only intermittently present in the physical incarnations of the supermarket chain near us, so we're sort of always in glut of that item (polish gherkins if you have to know).

    We did use the online ordering ourselves once when we were isolating because we had covid. There seemed to be a good set of options about specifying what substitutions were acceptable, and reasonably close to real time info about what they had in stock locally at any time. I guess the same system supports the direct-to-boot service too, and I note all the supermarkets have been building elaborate facilities for that.

    To be honest it beats the hell out of what I remember as a child. Non-driving single parent, the weekly supermarket shopping involved either a (rare expensive) taxi or the "sometime later today" delivery service where the paper bags you just paid for would sit unrefrigerated until loaded on a truck and brought back to your house as part of a round.

    So anyhow: no, personal shoppers are not the current solution for people with mobility issues, most of whom are smart enough to work out how to get what they are after through existing services. It might not be perfect, but it's not the 70s, it's not even the 80s or 90s :).

    743:

    Well I like to think we saw the worst of this stuff during the Gillard government, and as a society had learned some sort of lesson. But the sad thing is that even if that's true, it's that the perpetrators of the abuse learned that it is effective and they can get things they want by doing more of it. And doubly sad, that if they don't get the things they want right away, it's soul crushing to be on the receiving end and there's a finite limit to the amount of it most people can take before just needing to step out of the way as appears to have happened across the Tasman.

    744:

    something based on a real conversation that I dug up from a failed short story... still as true today as in 2007...

    "It is not a flaw, it’s a feature.”

    “Huh." Petrov idly flipped through the doc's knowing it was not going to be found there, but making a show if it. "Nothing I can find in the specifications. And sure as shit never asked for. So, now it's a 'feature'. Isn’t that what all you software developers say, when they screw something up?”

    “Good point,” Johnny conceded, reluctantly.

    745:

    Well I like to think we saw the worst of this stuff during the Gillard government

    Nope, definitely not.

    The lesson of the Obama presidency is that bigots are enraged and activated by the presence of the category they despise in a perceived position of power, and it leads to a violent backlash. In Obama's case, the white racists pushed Trump into the White House and turned the Republican party into an overtly white supremacist party (previously it had been the party of racist dog whistles, but since 2016 it's well on the way to normalizing Nazism). Gillard's leadership in NZ will inflame the incel arm of the neofascist movement, who are also overtly anti-feminist (remember the old German slogan that women were only good for Kinder, Küche, Kirche"?).

    746:

    Ummm - Gillard was an ex-Australian PM, not NZ. Are you thinking of Jacinta Adern - about to be ex PM of NZ?

    747:

    Nonetheless you could easily attribute a portion of Tony Abbot's ride into power to a sort of nascent incel wave. Christ, the munter gave speeches in front of "ditch the witch" banners and all sorts of unsavoury platforms. The Howard government had just given a massive boon to men's rights groups by effectively nobbling the Family Court for a generation, to the point that these days abolishing it in favour of the generic legal system looks like a progressive advance. It's not like there was any difficulty in identifying the anti-women side.

    748:

    Was thinking of Arden, but it applies to both her and Gillard.

    The UK bypassed this particular horrorshow thanks to Thatcher, who gave the tighty-whities exactly what they wanted, and her successors Theresa May (rigid disciplinarian Home Secretary who should never have been PM) and Liz Truss (a deeply stupid libertarian think-tank sock-puppet and Thatcher Cosplayer who nearly destroyed the economy in just 55 days) both continued the template of "female PM = right wing blonde adored by the fash".

    It's probably not an accident that (a) all three female PMs were blond, blue-eyed right wingers (and increasingly to the right over time) and that Labour has never managed to elect a female leader.

    Here in Scotland the SNP governs from the centre-left and the amount of misogynist abuse hurled at Nicola Sturgeon is stomach churning. On the other hand, she's a political heavyweight who gives it exactly as much respect as it deserves, i.e. none whatsoever.

    749:

    As I said, citrus are oddball. There are far more food crops (including the original examples, most nuts) that follow the late summer / autumn ripening pattern. Furthermore you might like to consider that March is part of the growing season (for hardy plants) in the UK, but November isn't, yet the latter month is warmer on average than the former. And, no, growing in a greenhouse doesn't change that.

    But the most important thing is what the experts have been trying to say for decades, with no effect: Global warming does NOT mean uniform or local warming. As I said in #715, The meteorologists said a long time back that climate change would make the UK's climate less predictable and more subject to extreme weather. This is what we have been seeing over the past few years, but it STILL doesn't stop the idiots saying "Ooh, goody, it's getting warmer."

    I also pointed out in #715 that a winter like the one we are having (dropping to -10, averaging -4 for days at a stretch, for a couple of weeks so far) is death on citrus. And, yes, mine died in a greenhouse.

    750:

    ===== whatever label you like to apply to then -- incel-misogynist-traditionalist -- there's certain traits common to all variants of members of the "he-man-girl-haters" club

    an overwhelming need to build visible barriers around women choosing to block off the grand potential of half of humanity unnecessarily... because these "traditionalists" cannot live in a universe where there's too much competition... fearing a world where the possibilities of what others would achieve (if not shackled) would dwarf them so intimidatingly...

    I used to assume to the notion it was possible for the world to outlive these narrow-minded traditionalists and then build paradise without them holding us back... but regrettably there seems to be a newer generation of 'em... * sigh *

    751:

    these "traditionalists" cannot live in a universe where there's too much competition

    I don't agree. I think 'those traditionalists' want a universe where each of them has someone to dominate, bully, control, and boss around.

    It's not about competition. It's about having slaves/victims.

    752:

    Robert Prior:

    there's more than one motive, and a variety of (twisted) goals... usage of the term "enslavement" regrettably appropriate... however my point is upon another motive than what you'd identified... on every corporate site I ever worked as a non-FTE consultant, my observation was of competition amongst the FTES which made for conflict, with women all too often steamrollered by men looking for any means of reducing their numbers of competitors...

    753:

    Charlie
    It's no use blaming Adolf for Kinder,Kirche, Küche, because he got it from his upbringing as a "good catholic"
    indeed misogyny id eeply wired into all of "western" culture & that deriving from the "middle eastern" religons.
    It's certain that both christianity & islam regard women as suitable, sunservient breeders & little more.
    Eradicating something that deeply rooted is going to be a very long haul.
    I loathe the Wee Fishwife, but - you are nonetheless correct in that she should not, & does not, pay attention to the fascists & christians & good for her.
    ... Howard NYC - you missed the "fundamental" basis of this, the one I mentioned above - the two major religons round here ...
    And all the way roud the planet.
    Look at the similarities between the Taliban & the GOP?

    EC
    My frost-free greenhouse "Indian Lime" fruits all the year round, actually - though the heavuiset loading is about now ...

    754:

    It's not about competition. It's about having slaves/victims.

    Not even that.

    Ever wonder about the etymology of the words "cattle" and "chattel"?

    The logical path the incels and male supremacists are treading ultimately leads to viewing women and children as sub-human, property on the same order as other cattle -- oxen, sheep, goats. They are not credited with free will or intelligence, only compulsory obedience: they're merely animals that can talk. The only thing you can't do to them that you can do to the other species is eat them. It's a destination that is at odds with the core of enlightenment values most of us subscribe to, that humans are of equivalent moral worth: it makes the Taliban look liberal and progressive in comparison.

    To Greg's point, this predates the Middle Eastern religions and is more extreme. You can see chunks of it in the ancient greek beliefs that the romans adopted, and the Christians and middle eastern monotheists latched onto bits of. (Hint: those ancient greek legends? They're stomach-churning, if you get past the bowdlerized and sanitized versions the Victorians popularized -- and even those were unthinkingly misogynist. Look into the original story of Medusa for a prototypical example of blame-the-rape-victim, for example.) I suspect there may have been some really grotesquely stomach-churning culture from the north-east end of the Med 6000-plus years ago that predates writing, the culture and detailed traditions of which are otherwise lost to history. But bits of those traditions linger on in the toxic influences it left to its successor societies.

    755:

    I think you've probably nailed it completely. Well done.

    756:

    If the tech is developed to build a general purpose housekeeper/ sexbot, we won't have to think hard to guess who they'll be marketed to. Damned shame they must torment humans, when something in PVC would be a better fit for their emotional development levels.

    757:

    never mind bears-sharks-congers...

    the deadliest beast in North America?

    "Deer are responsible for deaths of about 440 of 458 killed in physical confrontations with wildlife"

    which will make for any number of wacky plotlines in the hands of anybody sufficiently paranoid and/or snarky

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/01/20/deer-car-collisions/

    758:

    Charlie @ 755
    Very likely ... but, but ....
    The three "Abrahamic" faiths codified all of this & wrote it down & used it as the organised basis of large parts of their {our} societies.
    Even if the earlier "pagan" religions were no better.

    759:

    The Abrahamic faiths watered it down considerably: the early muslims made many enthusiastic female converts from their neighbours because the prophet's code gave them rights -- stuff like no more than four wives per man, murdering them out of hand being a crime, formal requirements for divorce, and so on.

    The extreme customs around veiling (especially among the Salafis, Shi'ites, and Deobandis of Afghanistan) seem to have been added by the Persian empire and its heirs, in an attempt to stuff the relatively emancipated women back in a box. And this crap was also shared by the Romans to some extent -- high status Roman women were expected to veil in public, for example. See also the proverb about Caesar's wife -- not merely double standards but a deadly serious excuse to execute women out of hand if they displeased their husbands.

    760:

    Obligatory: we're not dead yet!

    761:

    The logical path the incels and male supremacists are treading ultimately leads to viewing women and children as sub-human, property on the same order as other cattle -- oxen, sheep, goats. They are not credited with free will or intelligence, only compulsory obedience: they're merely animals that can talk.

    Um, that's pretty much how slaves were viewed, at least in accounts I've read. And it certainly seems to have carried over into how many of their descendants were treated, even after the slaveholders lost their rebellion.

    OK, credited with some intelligence, but not as much as real people.

    762:

    And yet, in spite of the changing demographic, all the media/movies/too many books still have heroes who are twentysomething or younger.

    sigh Well, except for me....

    763:

    As I've said before, I did not sign up to live in a cyberpunk dystopia - those were warnings.

    I consider it unreasonable that the wrongs (they're not "right") have used the warnings as a playbook for what they want.

    764:

    Austin was a very secondary target. Otherwise... growing up in Philly (Philly Navy Yard, 7 - yes, seven - oil refineries), Chicago, and these days, DC metro area.

    I was always dust in the wind.

    765:

    You won't write it? Why not?

    766:

    Thank you - that's fun.

    767:

    Happy with my corded electric mower. Does not require lithium batteries. Or replacing them. Lower carbon footprint.

    768:

    I suspect there may have been some really grotesquely stomach-churning culture from the north-east end of the Med 6000-plus years ago that predates writing, the culture and detailed traditions of which are otherwise lost to history. But bits of those traditions linger on in the toxic influences it left to its successor societies.

    Marija Gimbutas and the Minoans would beg to differ. More to the point, Bronze Age archaeology shows a widespread cult of a female sun god and sacred twins linked to the Bronze trade in Europe from the Mediterranean to Scandinavia. Who they were we don't know, although the Twins get identified as the Gemini. They could represent anything from the Gemini constellation to the morning/evening star Venus to tin and copper uniting in the bronze trade. They could be all three.

    What we see as Greek mythology largely post-dates this, although some of the Greek Gods (Dionysus and Poseidon, IIRC) do show up in Linear B inscriptions. So again, we may be stuck with Iron Age "innovations" being taken as normal for all humans.

    Note that I'm not discounting Bronze Age slavery, just pointing out that an ideology of male supremacy seems to have evolved in a "Street Finding it's own uses for things" kind of way. There's little sign of it among the Minoans, for example.

    Question is, how did it come to dominate? Here's my guess, informed in part by Gary Nabhan's Cumin, Camels, and Caravans about the history of the spice trade, starting with frankincense in the Neolithic.

    My argument rests on the notion that "religions" are both useful and woven into daily life. I'm not talking about reality of the supernatural, but about living in a polytheist world. Religion is about having a proper relationship with the world, proper in the sense of not dying through ignorance or stupidity.

    One pattern that's quite widespread is Earth Goddess/Sky God, in that the Earth in the big sense tends to be gendered female, while the Sky in the big sense tends to be gendered male. Ancient Egypt is the only place I can think of where this is flipped (Sky Goddess/Earth God). Now everything from mountains and rivers to stars, planets, even the sun, can be whatever gender, but the gender of the encompassing ruler/parent tends to be male sky, female Earth.

    A subset of this pattern is that Earth goddesses tend to be local, sky gods tend to be non-local. This makes sense, as different areas have different climates, soils, vegetation, crops, crop hazards, etc., while the stars in the sky are the same for everyone who doesn't deal with cloudy weather. So farmers worship their local earth goddess. Who worships the gods of the starry night sky? Two groups: those who keep calendars, and those who engage in long distance travel, navigating by the stars. This was something Nabhan noted in passing. In his story, the frankincense trade started when people who lived in the really unpromising mountains of Oman started trading the medicinal gums of their homeland for the food they couldn't grow enough of. Their unlikely lifestyle--long distance travel, trading for food--ultimately became the global spice trade in his telling. They followed their stars across the Arabian peninsula, Mediterranean, and Indian Ocean. They also set a pattern for others, like the Phoenicians, who seem to have planted grapevines and set up a winery in every colony and trading post.

    Now people have always traded. Heck, the Seven Sisters Songline is the major trade route across Australia, and it's based on a story around Orion chasing the Pleiades across the continent from water hole to campsite. This isn't quite where the misogyny's coming from.

    If I had to guess, I'd suggest that when long-distance trade, conducted by sky god-worshipping, royalty-backed traders, and traveling with conquering warbands and colonists, started becoming the real basis for power. This in turn opened the possibility for an ideology of sky gods overpowering terrestrial, often female deities that we're still dealing with. This didn't cause people to become misogynistic invaders, but it set up a really nasty feedback loop that we're still dealing with to this day. Jesus and Mohammad (and Lao Tzu, for that matter) were pretty egalitarian in their views on women. Their successors were less so.

    Did it start in the European Bronze Age? Perhaps, perhaps not, but neither did classical Greek or Jewish customs. I'd suggest that the pieces came together with the Iron Age, possibly due to the way iron technology spread.

    The reason this matters is that, to the degree that the Bronze Age managed long-distance trade and god-kings without being utterly male supremacist, in that we have a model saying gender politics don't have to be the way they are now. The mess we're stuck with now may not be the only possible way things can be, just one among several and possibly not the best. If it's just a toxic accident of history, that's a very different problem than fighting against the notion that international civilization only works on the basis of male supremacy, and equality has been incompatible with civilization throughout human history.

    Is this true? I don't know. However, I would suggest that it's worth trying to understand the roots of our whole mess better when we do, because the evidence suggests to me that those roots are shallower than most people might guess.

    770:

    If the tech is developed to build a general purpose housekeeper/ sexbot, we won't have to think hard to guess who they'll be marketed to.

    Overworked housewives who want to spend more time with their children?

    771:

    Insightful article about modern aircraft and other fighting machines: https://warontherocks.com/2023/01/software-defines-tactics/

    (I should apologise to qntm, really, dumnping other people's fiction and irrelevant stuff in their thread. Sorry!)

    772:

    Overworked housewives who want to spend more time with their children?

    Oh dear. Oh dear. Oh dear.

    You're about 70 years out of date if you think that. (Hint: "housewife" is either a status symbol reserved for the extremely wealthy -- who are not numerous enough to constitute a market, and who in any case can afford nannies, housemaids, and boarding schools -- or a signifier of "religious fundamentalist family, probably living in poverty, raising a quiver of arrows for Jeezus".)

    773:

    all the media/movies/too many books still have heroes who are twentysomething or younger.

    There's apparently a wave of boomer media coming out ATM, and some boomer chick won a movie award recently to the delight of other ageing but still attractive boomettes*. I think the message there is "we're not dead yet".

    * that term just occurred to me and I think its at least as funny as anything Jimmy Carr has ever said.

    I struggled to find a corded mower here that was any good, I even bought one, but it was cheap junk (and priced accordingly). So it went very quickly into the e-waste pile when it stopped working. The holy market has decided that me must have infernal combustion or battery, and lo that is what we get.

    774:

    No, for that, we need officebots, that we can afford, and rent them to employers who will pay for their sevice.

    775:

    My real complaint is that the heros who Save The World (or the show) are young. One reason I dislike most American animation aimed at children is that the Evil Villains can beat all the grownups... but can be defeated by any five year old.

    Ditto the Computer Hacker, or Young Guy who can beat anyone (no one ever hits from behind, or has left traps in the code, or whatever). They're still thinking that the young are where the money is... and, of course, no one wants to have an older person to admire and become like... and there's always "age and treachery beat young and enthusiasm".

    776:

    Nah, there's still large chunks of the world where a servant class is considered essential, and a stay at home wife is a basic marker of not being in the servant class.

    My neighbours struggle with that after moving from India to Australia, they hire people in for a lot of stuff that skips do themselves, but it costs them more than they'd like. I find it alternately funny and infuriating because on the one hand the clash between their desire to come here and their desire to keep the worst aspects of why they left is funny, but on the other hand their "garden" is a major source of weed seeds and their cat(s) shit everywhere.

    The "wife stays home" also seems to have religious significance to Muslims, even African and SE Asian Muslims, at least in the designated Islamic suburb of Lakemba (viz, if you are devout enough to do that you're very likely to do it in Lakemba rather than somewhere more white and Christian. Much as observant Jews tend to live inside the eruv around Bondi/Double Bay)

    777:

    My favourite short piece about sexbots.

    Number III is unrealistic. Nobody will refer to their Companion as "it". People already anthropomorphize their robots; everyone I know who owns a Roomba (including me and my wife) refers to them as "she". No way a deliberately anthropomorphic robot would be "it".

    778:

    Incidentally, I am rather disappointed that whoever wrote this piece, did not think about sexbots owned by couples. They will allow a couple to explore threesomes without the logistical headaches of actually having a threesome. My wife and I are actually considering this. But existing RealDolls and such are not yet up to this.

    779:

    And far too many couples decide to get around that by treating a real person as a sex doll. Also, given how hard real people find that sort of interaction I do wonder whether AI could cheat enough to be useful. Except in the purely mechanical sense that sex dolls cater for.

    Hmm, what cost to society if we normalise that kind of one-sided, ownership-based relationship? You can anthropomorphise the relationship all you like, but it's still not consent-based. And that seems likely to me to produce (even more) people who literally have no idea what consent means, let alone how to actually carry out consent-based practices.

    Looking at the history of sex slaves does not give much ground for hope.

    780:

    My wife and I are no strangers to threesomes, both MFM and FMF, we are just too old (and work too much), to have the energy necessary to find compatible individuals. I make no claims about how other couples would handle it.

    781:

    I’m not planning to buy a sex robot. Hovever if I had a Roomba it would be a hit. When in charge of an automated hospital biochemistry lab the staff asked me what I was going to call the seven new analysers attached to the automated track. My answer was “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7”. I hate anthropomorphising.

    782:

    I’m aware of the uncertainties in global warming. my point was that insulation is not always a rate determining step. And that the lower angle of the sunlight is mitigated by the longer days. The long days in the Alaskan summer give remarkable results for some vegetables.

    https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/giant-vegetables-palmer-alaska

    And the instability of the jet stream, if it continues, may mean citrus crops throughout the world are in danger. Remember the snow in Texas. Also there are many established Avocado trees outside in London producing fruit.

    https://www.jackwallington.com/growing-avocados-in-london/

    PS In my Roomba post above IOS changed “an it” to “a hit”

    783:

    to have the energy necessary to find compatible individuals.

    Laughs sympathetically.

    Reasons not to get involved in poly relationships... I don't have the time and energy. ATM I mostly act as a safe space where friends can whine about the hassles of their relationships without facing negativity purely because of the poly stuff. I laugh at them but that's because they do silly things :)

    784:

    what I was going to call the seven new analysers attached to the automated track. My answer was “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7”

    I was going to do that with our chickens but someone else had a veto. So we settled on the first lot getting silly/traditional chicken names and after that things settled down. Houdini and Irma Chicken got younger flockmates Sharon, Hilda, Harry and Meghan.

    785:

    Re: '... "wife stays home" also seems to have religious significance to Muslims, even African and SE Asian Muslims,'

    Okay - I can see this working two different ways:

    1-wife works/runs a biz from home

    or

    2-uber religious male dominated households aren't connected to the Internet (so that stay-at-home wives can't see for themselves what the rest of the world is doing)

    Whenever I hear/read about societies that try to bar any group from fully participating in society - whether it's on the basis of gender, race, religion, physical attributes, etc. - I think that these societies' leaders have gotta be morons 'cause that's a helluva a lot of brain power that they're missing out of. Okay - not every individual within each of these subjugated groups will be another Albert Einstein or Marie Curie or Alan Turing or Ada Lovelace or Stephen Hawking or Katherine Johnson or Srinivasa Ramanujan or ... but c'mon!

    About the aging-in-place ... okay, maybe not the best choice of names since this phenomenon can apply to any individual if he/she/they don't happen to fit whatever 'average user' specs the designer/manufacturer thought was going to be their user target market. OOC - what would be the easiest way to build in flexibility or allow for easy alterations into the design of a house, car, household appliance, etc.? (No idea whether this is self-contradictory -- built-in and flexibility of design.)

    786:

    Y'all might find this interesting

    Doug Muder - WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO THE CITIZEN JOURNALIST?
    [the The Weekly Sift guy gave a Zoom talk to a retirement group and posted it to YouTube]

    I've got a &%#$@*! cold - an old fashioned, stuffy head, runny nose, post-nasal drip, sour stomach, coughing & wheezing, ache all over COLD!.

    I feel like shit. I have only a slight fever (less than a degree) and I'm tired as hell.

    The only thing that makes me feel any better is ginger ale - and I'm not supposed to have that because it raises my blood sugar!

    Life sux.

    I'm going back to bed!

    787:

    Perhaps "housewife" is an overly 50's, and overly loaded, term.

    Study after study have found that women do a disproportionate amount of the housework. Now produce a vibrator that, in its off hours, cleans the oven, empties the litter box, and irons the clothes. You don't think there would be a market?

    788:

    My parents had a sheep farm for a few decades. The single best survival tactic a sheep could follow was to acquire a name. The numbered ones were lambchops come Autumn.

    Counterintuitively, the best way for a lamb to acquire a name was to be rejected or forgotten by its mother (sheep are stupid). Once it was on the bottle and if it displayed any personality whatsoever it earned a name and would live a long and pleasant life.

    If it had gone on over centuries sheep would be leaving their lambs immediately, but of course the end result for any farm sheep is much the same.

    789:

    Aging in place might best be achieved through universal design - i.e. building so anyone can use it. Make the doors wide enough for chairs - needed or not. Avoid steps, really avoid them - build to make them unnecessary. Make the doors openable by persons in chairs or other mobility devices.

    There has been a lot of thought put into this. I spent some years on the advocacy front for accessibility myself, and it is an uphill slog.

    790:

    Attn: HowardNYC

    From your post 678 regarding automatic activated low level illumination in bathrooms: An IR activated USB power switch plus a safe-for-bathrooms USB light strip is easily doable. I used a similar IR USB switch to drive a pet water fountain, when my 10 y.o. tabby had a bad spell and would only drink from running water, then repurposed the switch into running those lights in the Ceramic Library when Junior got better.

    And, from your post 671 re: bottle deposits: "But it is still $0.05 (almost everywhere) as it was in 1982 when first implemented." Being an Oregonian (we first enacted it in 1971), I checked my bag of aluminum-cans-to-return to read '$0.10 in OR-MI'. Maybe our dime-deposit rate results in the 81% return rate, highest in the Union, which might be why CT is joining us in 2024. Talk to your public parasite in Albany to see if less litter is right for you.

    791:

    My answer was “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7”. I hate anthropomorphising.

    The problem comes up when you have things that might move around. Which is why I tell people who might shuffle laptops or desktops in an office to name them "Bob", "Mary", etc... after the actual staff. I've moved to a short "serial" number. But when Bob is at Mary's desk using the computer named Helen it can get confusing fast.

    792:

    The single best survival tactic a sheep could follow was to acquire a name.

    Eh, maybe. My sisters were traumatised when Bambi got made into sausages, but the rest of us thought it was not before time. OTOH my sisters also thought that bantams were wonderful creatures.

    Bambi was a bobby calf. A male calf with the testicle chopped off. He was friendly and patient and loved people. Which was fine when he was small. But 600kg of playfully butting you then going through your pockets looking for treats is not very much fun at all. Especially since he was not good at fences, in the Terry Pratchett sense of "oops, sorry, I seem to have run through your fence. Where your fence was. My bad".

    Meanwhile we had a series of pigs that lasted one year each, all named. And chickens that my mother named according to some scheme of her not, and I'm not entirely ruling out "kids she taught last year".

    793:

    You should name any moderately sophisticated machine. After all, they get more sophisticated as time goes by and may well become actually smart in your lifetime. If you learn the habit of being nice they will remember. And you want to be liked by your ventilator/pacemaker, right?

    794:

    If you learn the habit of being nice they will remember

    Given the comments above about the torrents of abuse politicians, and especially certain types of politicians get, I gather that not everyone has the habit of being nice.

    There's also some interesting differences between the Slashdot/StackExchange voting style of that's interesting/informative vs that's boring/wrong and places like reddit where downvotes mean more like "I disagree" or "you fucking moron I hate you and everything you stand for" (if the DM's I get for downvoted posts+comments are anything to go by).

    There's also fun to be had with the difference between people who want one correct answer vs the people who like to try a range of things. That comes across way outside the simple "right way to write a for loop" and may help explain one way autistic people struggle to deal with NTs: they like to find a correct way to do things and just use it forever. NTs don't work like that and often change the correct way to deal with them for unknowable reasons ("this was funny the first 200 times and it's funny now").

    Sometimes I find myself in a mental trap of "this is the correct way why doesn't it work" and have to consciously change/open my mind before I can discover why it doesn't work. Apparently some doors you pull to open...

    795:

    The "wife stays home" also seems to have religious significance to Muslims, even African and SE Asian Muslims

    Some Muslims. One of my best friends at work was a Muslim woman. Smart, kind, athletic… Only met her husband once, but he was a perfect gentleman. Lovely couple.

    Although what I've encountered closest to that wasn't so much 'women must stay home' but rather 'women shouldn't mix with men' (sometimes with 'unchaperoned' appended). Which sounds rather similar to the restrictions on middle-class Victorian women. (Complete with blaming women for any unwanted advances men make.)

    796:

    Looks like there's some data on how much abuse Ardern got compared to other Kiwi politicians. Quoting a few paragraphs of the article (you should read the whole thing):

    We counted the total number of posts about Prime Minister Ardern and six other leading politicians and bureaucrats, both men and women, from parties on the left and right, some with prominent positions in the fight against Covid, some not.

    What we found was that the Prime Minister faced online vitriol at a rate between 50 and 90 times higher than any other high-profile figure.

    While the other individuals were each mentioned in between 200 and 400 posts over the study period, the Prime Minister was mentioned in over 18,000 posts. This was 92% of the total body of posts mentioning any of these individuals.

    Of the posts our natural language tools classify as strongly negative, angry, sexually explicit or toxic, those mentioning the PM made up 93% of the total – 5438 posts were particularly abusive in this way.

    While posters who wrote about the other individuals would on average post about that person 1.7 times, those mentioning the PM would on average post about her almost five times.

    The vast gulf between the levels of posting targeted at the Prime Minister and those directed at other high-profile government figures suggests that Jacinda Ardern became a lightning rod for a range of fears, misogyny and anger throughout the pandemic. HEIA will explore potential reasons for this extraordinary volume of online abuse in an upcoming report.

    https://www.stuff.co.nz/opinion/131045572/how-data-shines-a-light-on-the-online-hatred-for-jacinda-ardern

    797:

    The problem comes up when you have things that might move around.

    Or things that might be used in a different order.

    I used to number quizzes 1, 2, 3, etc and make up a large variety, but students got upset about getting them in anything but numerical order. They felt that higher-numbered quizzes were harder, when actually I would have (say) 20 different quizzes on ionic bonding, all identical except for different elements, and all equally difficult.

    After getting basically ordered by the administration to not give period 2 quiz 10 when period 1 got quiz 1, because parents were complaining and it was my fault they were bothering admin, I changed to using names. Animals, compounds, organs, scientists — anything that related to science and didn't have an obvious sequence. Same quizzes, but no more complaints.

    798:

    Sorry, I was trying to be clear that it's some Muslims by the "at least in the designated Islamic suburb of Lakemba (viz, if you are devout enough to do that you're very likely to do it in Lakemba". But I'm not knowledgeable enough about Islam to know whether there's a religious mandate for that or it just happens to be the case.

    Separate-but-equal is hard to do outside the home in mixed societies like Australia, especially since sex and gender identity are protected characteristics. Viz, you can possibly have a business only open to women, but you need more of a reason than "I don't want men as customers". We do have a few businesses with women-only areas, like a local hairdresser that has a private room where women can unveil and get their hair cut without being seen by men (according to their sign, anyway, haircuts are not something I have to worry about).

    799:

    Apparently some doors you pull to open...

    Today in fact. Leaving an office through a double glass door. No sign. But the right door (we drive that way so ...) was locked. Luckily I wasn't carrying anything or there would have been a mostly three stooges moment. The door on the left opened just fine. A small sign just above the hand bar would be nice. Maybe with an arrow.

    800:

    Heteromeles:

    "If it's just a toxic accident of history..."

    Your post is going to needs be gnawed upon a couple times... sort of like each slice of a slightly cold but still nutritious pizza heaped with extra cheese, olives and roasted garlic...

    801:

    Your post is going to needs be gnawed upon a couple times... sort of like each slice of a slightly cold but still nutritious pizza heaped with extra cheese, olives and roasted garlic...

    Thanks! Please gnaw away. As noted, I think this idea deserves debate, and I may well be wrong.

    802:

    »The "wife stays home" […]«

    Which is why the birthrate in Japan is only 1.3

    803:

    Why would they need their own computer? Everyone should be able to use any machine on the network. Anything other than a ID number for repairs is unnecessary. My lab had about eight terminals for 12 staff. Anyone could use any terminal and had to log in. Plus another ten dedicated terminals for analysers. And names are more about the namers than the objects. If I had worked in coagulation I would have objected to using analysers named Reggie, Ronnie and Jack the Hat (most British people my age would know why).

    804:

    We had goats, and they all got names. One was named Johnsons' Breakfast, because he was destined to be sold as meat to the family of that name

    Amusingly, he ended up becoming our stud goat instead

    805:

    These days, Windoze lets you tie a computer to, say, Hectorina McGlumpher "because it is more secure if only Hectorina or IS Department can use 'her' computer". Believe it or not; that is the rationale used.

    806:

    Apparently some doors you pull to open...

    Be careful if you encounter a door marked "Lift". You might give yourself a hernia.

    807:

    Plus.

    For every user associated with a corporate machine you have a separate set of folders for downloads, pictures and so on. All that eats up drive space on the machine. Even if most user data is held in a cloud run by the organisation or rented from Mickeysoft.

    That said. Where I am at the moment we are all using laptops or tablets so we can work at whatever office we find ourselves at, or from home. I was a bit dubious about that until The Plague started and lockdown happened. Now I'm a big fan of home working, less travel into the hot zone.

    808:

    There's a good Japanese manga and anime series called "Silver Spoon", about a city boy's experiences in a residential high school for agricultural students out in the wilds of Hokkaido. He ends up "adopting" the runt of a litter of piglets born in the farm attached to the school, much to the dismay of his teachers who expect him to fawn over it as a pet rather than a product. Instead he names it "Bacon" and after six months when the piglets are ready for slaughter he is okay with Bacon being killed and cut up (indeed he makes a point of going to the slaughterhouse to see it done). He buys the carcass and, you guessed it, makes bacon from it. Very Japanese storytelling in its own way.

    809:

    They should have been called Sawney Bean, Sweeney Todd and Jack the Ripper :-)

    810:

    Yes, but a simpler solution would simply be lower-powered lights. You may remember me moaning that you couldn't get standard-socket LED bulbs of below 250 lumens.

    811:

    Anent which, t'other week I replaced my office light bulb with one of these. Daylight spectrum, 7200 lumens, yummy! Just right for a Scottish midwinter -- I barely need the SAD lamp now.

    Note that they also make a 24W LED corncob that reportedly pumps out 32,400 lumens. (I decided I didn't need the third degree retinal burns.)

    812:

    I have done similar things in a few places where I needed a bright light; LEDs are great for that, because you can get the illumination without having to treat them as serious fire risks. And, yes, SAD :-(

    813:

    Why would they need their own computer? Everyone should be able to use any machine on the network.

    For one thing, if everyone has their own machine (and only uses that one) then a clueless/malicious user can only screw up their own machine, whether with malware or by changing things they shouldn't change.

    It's also more sanitary. I ended up using my personal laptop in one shared office and only used the shared machines for entering marks for report cards. Reason being that before using a shared computer I had to clean the keyboard, because one of my colleagues would eat his lunch at it, licking his fingers and typing, so I knew the layer of crap on the keys was a mixture of food and saliva.

    814:

    Furry boots they fae Big Man? (the 7200 lumen ones; my Mother has macular degeneration and I have a couple of corridor spaces that might benefit)

    815:

    Ah yes, that's much my own view on LED lighting. Not "now it only costs a penny a year to run conventional "is that a Mars bar or a turd?" levels of interior lighting", but "AT LAST, you can get a decent level of illumination without needing several tons of refrigeration to deal with the waste heat".

    It does look rather lacking in surface area for the input power though. A Pigeon 20W LED light is an LED emitter rated at 30W mounted on a 200cm2 aluminium plate (so nearly 400cm2 of dissipating area). It gets not quite too hot to touch using my own personal asbestos fingers/soldering clamps, which I regard as an acceptable maximum continuous operating temperature for non-germanium-based electronics. That thing seems to have a surface area of 320cm2 (approximating it to a cylinder), which is, crudely, about a quarter of what I think it needs.

    "Note that they also make a 24W LED corncob that reportedly pumps out 32,400 lumens. (I decided I didn't need the third degree retinal burns.)"

    I suspect someone's finger slipped on the keyboard and hit the 3 just ahead of the 2, and nobody noticed. The figure of 100 lumens per watt seems to be pretty dependable, and is a useful equivalent of a machete for dealing with marketing bollocks of the form ""x watts equivalent" (is it arse)".

    816:

    How would you feel about Alucard, Bathory and Tepes?

    817:

    "uber religious male dominated households aren't connected to the Internet (so that stay-at-home wives can't see for themselves what the rest of the world is doing)"

    I'd rather expect that they are connected to the internet, and the stay-at-home wives use it to arsebook with each other all day. And sometimes look at the pictures on some foreign website in a foreign language with a funny alphabet and think "Gordon Bennett, the fucking state of people in these infidel countries".

    818:

    Why would they need their own computer? Everyone should be able to use any machine on the network. Anything other than a ID number for repairs is unnecessary.

    Oh, if life was so simple. Especially with all the 4,564,357 variations of software licensing that the minor vendors foist on people. And are required by the business for some people's jobs.

    Plus by assigning an internal asset number to various major things, with a sticker so that when someone says my lkjasdf is broken you can ask them what the asset tag is and not have to figure out where the serial number is and how they can see it and read it to you. Which is almost always a fail.

    User assigned laptops have eliminated most of the hassles with unique configurations. But not all.

    819:

    There's a good Japanese manga and anime series called "Silver Spoon", about a city boy's experiences in a residential high school for agricultural students out in the wilds of Hokkaido

    The 4H farming program for youths in the US is very much like this. Youths raise calves and such knowing full well they will be meat on someone's table in a few years.

    As someone who grew up between the farming and not farming worlds, I got to discover that not everyone associated the meat aisle in the grocery store with Bambi or that cute cow grazing in the meadow. And thought it rude to discuss such things.

    820:

    If I may ask. My Google Foo is failing me.

    A while back (several years I think) Charlie posted an essay or link to one about bad assumptions people make about names. Mainly it had to do with how regional variations in how names work trip up people who don't try to look around.

    I can't find it. Does anyone have a link?

    821:

    Nojay/Moz
    Common sign by escalators on the London UndergrounD ... "Dogs must be carried"
    .... but suppose you don't HAVE a dog to carry?

    823:

    Someone needs to set up a small table with a few small dogs in cages and a sign saying "dogs for rent if needed for escalator rides". Take some pics and leave.

    825:

    I get confused when people ask me what the names of my pets are, because it's usually effectively the first time the idea has occurred to me at all. To say I don't see the point would not really be accurate, because it implies behaviour evoked by some abnormal circumstance in the absence of which I would see the point; it's more that I don't see there's a point to be seen. The output of my recognition algorithm is essentially a pointer to whatever address happens to correspond to the relevant entry in struct pigeon[] (dimension up to 50-odd) (or struct cat[], dimension one), only in some language other than C where pointers are opaque and just look like the thing they point to; it's not some kind of legible filename or URL, it's simply a reference to internal context. And 'struct pigeon' has no member called 'name' any more than the corresponding structs in the pigeons' own internal contexts do.

    (Come to that, I don't really dig the "meaningful identifiers" thing in writing actual programs either. I understand fine what the point of it is, and I agree in principle, but I don't find it has much relation to the practice. Either the meaning is something dead obvious like "the number this function takes the square root of", where it couldn't possibly be anything else and still make any kind of sense; or it's something like "find the rare squoot of this number", where "rare squoot" is something just as complicated as "square root" but instead of being something you learn about in school it's something that exists only in relation to this specific bit of this specific program and nowhere else, in which case it needs several paragraphs or pages of text to explain what it is and still be less informative than reading the code. In either case I might just as well call it a or x or sewageeatingfungus or anything else that's not something anything else is called.)

    I think humans are weirdly obsessed with names anyway. People in shops who insist in using your name in every single utterance they make just so you don't think they're suddenly talking to someone else when there isn't anyone else even in the shop. Or else saying "sir" or "madam" if they haven't found out your name. No, you don't need to "call me" something, you just need to talk to me. It's as if they don't think something as complicated as a human or a pigeon or a vacuum-cleaning robot can really properly exist unless you can attach some meaningless tag to it.

    826:

    "As someone who grew up between the farming and not farming worlds, I got to discover that not everyone associated the meat aisle in the grocery store with Bambi or that cute cow grazing in the meadow. And thought it rude to discuss such things."

    They don't respond to the sight of newborn lambs in a field by shouting "mint sauce" at them then?

    "Someone needs to set up a small table with a few small dogs in cages and a sign saying "dogs for rent if needed for escalator rides". Take some pics and leave."

    And somewhere in the background there must be an unidentifiable entity in a shapeless grey cowl.

    Also someone trying to get onto the escalator carrying a parrot that barks and has "DoG" painted on it.

    827:

    I used to deal a lot with Abbot Diagnostics. When a new representative gave me her card I asked her about the X in her email address. She said it was automatically generated and the system assumed everybody had a middle name.

    828:

    I'm more likely to shout "redcurrant jelly"...

    829:

    “Apparently some doors you pull to open..”

    I was introduced to the concept of affordances by “The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman. If you walk up to a door, or any object, and it’s not clear how it is to be opened or used, it’s a design failure.

    Ideally the design itself makes it clear without having to plaster signs all over it. The book made me more aware of affordances in my built environment and more infuriated when they were missing.

    Speaking of dogs and escalators, the law in the USA requires a sign in restaurant bathrooms saying “Employees must wash hands.” I was recently eating at a new place and they’d embellished the sign with another line that said, “If no employee is available, you may was your own hands.” I’m considering making stickers of the second sentence to add to the standard signs.

    830:

    Robert Prior @ 798:

    The problem comes up when you have things that might move around.

    Or things that might be used in a different order.

    I used to number quizzes 1, 2, 3, etc and make up a large variety, but students got upset about getting them in anything but numerical order. They felt that higher-numbered quizzes were harder, when actually I would have (say) 20 different quizzes on ionic bonding, all identical except for different elements, and all equally difficult.

    After getting basically ordered by the administration to not give period 2 quiz 10 when period 1 got quiz 1, because parents were complaining and it was my fault they were bothering admin, I changed to using names. Animals, compounds, organs, scientists — anything that related to science and didn't have an obvious sequence. Same quizzes, but no more complaints.

    I don't understand why you would tell the students in period 1 they're getting "quiz 1" and then tell the students in period 2 they're getting "quiz 10"?

    Why wouldn't you just tell the students in all periods "We're having a quiz today" and leave it at that?

    831:

    "Wife stays home" and Muslim I'm having difficulty understanding. Didn't Mohammad's wife own and run a business (while he was doing religion)? And did she only run it for women?

    832:

    PS: I could understand handing out quizzes 1 - 10 all in the SAME period as an anti-cheating mechanism so that students couldn't copy each other's answers - I remember that from my school days

    ... and I know teachers DID USE different quizzes for different periods so that first period students couldn't relay all the answers to students in later periods, they just didn't make an issue of it.

    833:

    I was introduced to the concept of affordances by “The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman. If you walk up to a door, or any object, and it’s not clear how it is to be opened or used, it’s a design failure.

    Oddly enough, a number of things, from stage magic to CIA clandestine gadgets, run on precisely the opposite principle.

    More generally, design can be used to include or exclude various groups of people (animals too). I agree with you that this should be done mindfully in any case.

    834:

    I was aware of misdirection in stage magic but had never thought of it as an anti-affordance. Thanks for the idea-linkage.

    835:

    Apropos of nothing, there's a new study out claiming that the New World genocide caused by European pandemics getting loose in the New World resulted in the death of 44-78 million Native Americans in the 1500s, and the resulting rewilding lowered [CO2]atm by ca. 5 ppm, which is a good chunk of the 7-10 ppm drop that apparently coincided with the Little Ice Age.

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379118307261

    Now I'm wondering what a loss of, oh, 7.2 billion people to global pandemics (similar proportional decline) would do. Likely the resulting rewilding would suck more CO2 out of the air over the next century. Would it be enough to stave off the extinction crisis and save coral reefs? Maybe, if the pandemics roll in fairly soon.

    So hopepunk scenario, dystopia, or both? Depends on how you look at it, I guess. It's worth remembering that some "classic" American Indian cultures, including the horse-riding Plains Indians, completely post-date the 16th Century. Great disasters don't leave the survivors simply mourning for lost greatness ever after. People do get on with living, regardless.

    Incidentally, I doubt this will be the last word on the subject. As with the Mayan collapse, no academic currently involved is going to give up a lucrative career disputing causes of the Little Ice Age.

    836:

    Mike Collins @ 804:

    Why would they need their own computer? Everyone should be able to use any machine on the network. ...

    Maybe I don't want your cooties on the keyboard I have to use.

    ... and I still have that cold, so you probably won't want me using YOUR keyboard either (even with me keeping my mask on).

    837:

    I get confused when people ask me what the names of my pets are, because it's usually effectively the first time the idea has occurred to me at all. To say I don't see the point would not really be accurate, because it implies behaviour evoked by some abnormal circumstance in the absence of which I would see the point; it's more that I don't see there's a point to be seen.

    I won't disagree with your later point that humans can seem weirdly obsessed with names, but for some pets at least names can have a point: the pet itself can respond to the name and come when called. (In the case of cats, of course, this also depends on whether the pet gives a damn, which is not at all a certainty :)).

    Some pets seem to be able to go further and use names to identify individual humans. The SF writer Mary Robinette Kowal has some fascinating videos showing her pet cat Elsie using buttons to communicate and referring to her and her husband Rob by name (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-upO3rykDtY ).

    838:

    Pigeon @ 826:

    I get confused when people ask me what the names of my pets are, because it's usually effectively the first time the idea has occurred to me at all.

    Hmmm? People ask that question all of the time. How can it be the "first time the idea has occurred" every time it's asked? 😏

    OTOH, all of the pets I've owned (or who owned me?) over my lifetime have had names. I even called some of them by those names.

    839:

    Question for the USA-ians { And those who visit frequently, too }
    What is to be done about this? - Does the interpretation of the "2nd Amendment" need to be formally re-stated by Congress, or what? It's clear that- whatever the NRA & the white wing say, this is unsustainable.

    840:

    My wife's parents raise chickens (Barred Rocks, for you fowl fanciers out there). Two generations back, they discovered that one of the hens was both very aggressive (even for a chicken) and sneaky. She'd disappear for days at a time, then show up again to terrorize her coop-mates. And the chickens did indeed seem to live in fear of her, acting nervous when they couldn't see where she was, especially around feeding time.

    These were both laying and eating hens, so her (my wife's) mom insisting that they not name the animals, but my father-in-law, good man that he is, referred to the chicken in question one day as "Hennibal Peckter."

    MiL tried to give him hell for it, but my sister in law ended the argument with "we don't waste a good pun in this house!"

    841:

    Let's see: those three machines that are those three guys' have the drivers and software installed for that Expen$$$$$ive software, for which their team bought three seats, and not more. And without all the special configuration, the software won't run, and I have to screw most months after the monthly update.

    Actual part of my last job. Any more questions?

    842:

    From what I can see, plenty's being done about it. Just in the wrong direction.

    Here in Iowa during the 2022 election, there was a ballot measure to include the "right to own and bear firearms to the Iowa Constitution and require strict scrutiny for any alleged violations of the right brought before a court." It passed with more than 65%, during a relatively (for us) high-turnout Congressional cycle. It's that "strict scrutiny for any alleged violations of the right" that scares the hell out of me, because it's just vague enough to be used as a cudgel against any future gun safety laws, were we ever to be blessed with any.

    I see the pro-gun lobby as being of a like-mind to racists and misogynists we've been talking about, in that any meaningful, or even symbolic, "attack on their rights" will galvanize them to elect even more rabid pro-gun creatures into office, or... they'll or keep doing what they've been doing for decades, which is just point their Make Someone Go Away Forever magic wands people, any people in view, and push the button.

    My country is in the grips of an actual, factual death cult (the prominent use of skull imagery is, if anything, an admission), and such groups care little for "sustainability." If anything, sustainability is heresy to them.

    843:

    I don't understand why you would tell the students in period 1 they're getting "quiz 1" and then tell the students in period 2 they're getting "quiz 10"?

    They know they're getting a quiz. Standard 5 minute quiz at the start of class.

    Each quiz had an identifier on it, so I could keep them straight. Necessary because the only differences were small. So when I started I just used numbers: bonding quiz 1, bonding quiz 2, etc. Revisions would make bonding quiz 1.1 and so on. Purely version numbers and not intended for anything more.

    So the only difference between 'quiz 1' and 'quiz 10' would be difference chemicals, or different vocabulary, or different numbers, or even just a different order of questions.

    Any identifier that implied an ordinal was used to claim they were hard done by and disadvantaged. It makes no sense, honestly, until you realize that for many parents what mattered was the mark, not whether or not the student had mastered the skill. Didn't matter that these were formative instruments that didn't actually count towards the kid's final mark.

    I had a few administrators who would back up teachers and shut down the craziness, but most would do whatever it took to stop the parents complaining. I remember sitting down with one VP to decide what to do in a cheating case (parent had written essay for student), followed their instructions precisely (I took notes), and was still blamed when the parent objected to the decision. I saw the email they sent the VP (I can read upside-down and it was sitting on their desk) and they were threatening to go to the superintendent again if they didn't get their way. So admin failure: superintendent should have told them to talk to school admin rather than telling principal to tell VP to tell teacher to do what parent wants.

    Have I mentioned how glad I am to be retired?

    So instead of numbers I would have 'Graphing Quiz Wombat', 'Graphing Quiz Capybara', etc and no one made that complaint again.

    844:

    Not only is this misanthropic as all hell, it would also almost certainly not work out that way. Modern land use increases primary productivity because of industrial nitrogen fixation. If that stops, most of the land would likely end up with considerably less biomass at least in the short term.

    There are scenarios that could pull huge amounts of CO2 on net out of the air, but mostly they require civilization to continue and end up in a place where that is economically profitable. Wide spread use of carbon fixing soil management practices (Terra Petra and the like) or the high seas being managed for high primary productivity would do it (Huge parts of the ocean have very little life because they're critically short on key trace elements. But that can be rectified )

    845:

    If that stops, most of the land would likely end up with considerably less biomass at least in the short term.

    If there is a crash, I doubt prediction of most anything would be valid. Depending on how deep the crash.

    How many cities will burn?

    How much electrical power will there be.

    Water supplies? Dams?

    As these things go down there would be a cascade of bad things happening over a timeline of years and decades. And the result hard to predict as the sequencing isn't known.

    When the native populations of the Americans crashed their built environment wasn't all that different from the wild around them.

    846:

    Not only is this misanthropic as all hell, it would also almost certainly not work out that way. Modern land use increases primary productivity because of industrial nitrogen fixation. If that stops, most of the land would likely end up with considerably less biomass at least in the short term.

    Doesn't work that way, because effectively all carbon locked in annual crops ends up back in the air within a year. Meanwhile, there's a lot of GHG production fixing the nitrogen. So this adds CO2 to the air.

    Replacing annual crops with perennial plants, even perennial grasses, results in a net flow of CO2 out of the soil, because carbon gets sequestered in tissues and soil.

    Perennial crops like almonds aren't much better. Unless (as with rubber trees) the wood gets upcycled into timber, dead trees get burned or mulched, so they're short term stores.

    Long term storage is different.

    So...misanthropic scenario? Compared with nuclear war? Global famine? Yeah maybe. Our civilization has maliciously done it to others for profit, so if it happens to us by accident? Karma. And if the survivors do better than we're doing? Also karma.

    847:

    Biden went 10 MPH over the speed limit because he wasn’t paying attention.

    Trump ran over a child doing 100 MPH in a school zone while fleeing from the cops after murdering an under-cover agent he was caught trying to sell meth to.

    ... and now:

    Classified documents found at Pence’s Indiana home

    848:

    Greg Tingey @ 840:

    Question for the USA-ians { And those who visit frequently, too }
    What is to be done about this? - Does the interpretation of the "2nd Amendment" need to be formally re-stated by Congress, or what? It's clear that- whatever the NRA & the white wing say, this is unsustainable.

    What CAN be done about it? What can be done about BREXIT? Some horrible problems appear to be unsolvable no matter how obviously wrong the situation is.

    These won't change until enough people with enough power revolt against the status quo. And the history of revolutions isn't always so good.

    849:

    The important thing is: what did Trump/any Republican do right; and what did Biden/any Democrat do wrong.

    That's all that matters, everything else is just noise.

    Same with guns: what matters is that Republicans can defend themselves against non-Republicans. As you saw when the Black Panthers (I think it was) started getting black men to carry guns. That WAS NOT GOOD. Very, very not good not even slightly. Sentiment carries over to today most obviously in the "I thought that black child had a gun so I killed it" etc, etc from the government department of Killing Civilians Inside the USA.

    850:

    True, but most of my experience is with species that don't, and the rest of it is with individuals that don't :)

    851:

    "Hmmm? People ask that question all of the time. How can it be the "first time the idea has occurred" every time it's asked?"

    It's effectively the first time, because I've always immediately filed the previous instance under "weird shit, ignore" the moment it's happened, and it's been entirely wiped from active processing, so the next occurrence is just as much of a "do what?" incident as the last one was.

    852:

    Well I’m retired now but if you were working in my lab and had a cold you’d be sent home. And so would anyone else with a cold. There’s no reason to keep working when you’re ill especially with an infectious disease. Nobody loses pay for a short time off work sick in the NHS. With enough service and medical notes you take six months off sick on full pay before it goes down to half pay. Flu vaccination rate was about 75% so not a lot of chance you’d catch that either.

    853:

    We used to have a small number of sheep until a neighbour got dogs they didn't control. People would say how cute they were and ask us how we could possibly eat them: "Oh we don't eat them, we eat their babies" was apparently the wrong answer.The facts that they lived free and happy and died quickly while eating yummy food on our property were also not appreciated.

    854:

    Thought for the day: before covid having factually wrong opinions wasn't particularly fatal. You can genuinely believe that the earth is flat, created 6000 years ago, that dinosaurs aren't real, a whole bunch of stuff. And so what, you still go about your life, work in 90% of possible jobs and whatever. If your kids aren't vaccinated they're probably still not going to die of polio or even measles. You can own a gun or refuse to wear a seatbelt and probably survive.

    Covid changed that. The relative death rate between cookers and sane people is distinctly biased. Amusingly even in things like car crashes people not vaccinated against covid die much more often. In Australia cookers are roughly three times as likely to die as people who are vaccinated against covid.

    From a slightly disturbing article by a guy whose heart hates him: https://newmatilda.com/2023/01/23/left-jab-from-heaven-to-hell-in-the-shadow-of-a-covid-vaccine/

    855:

    The facts that they lived free and happy and died quickly while eating yummy food on our property were also not appreciated.

    I guess a discussion of Japanese veal would go over in a similar manner.

    My grandfather and uncle (dad's side of the family) ran a small slaughter house. (Started in 1911 and maybe still going under new ownership.) I always would skip into the back room when my mom wasn't looking. Generating much consternation. Interesting sights. One time there were 5 pig heads lined up along a wall. Once there was a very pregnant cow hoisted up with the large unborn calf on the floor. I didn't ask but I suspect there was a problem with the birth.

    856:

    Covid changed that. The relative death rate between cookers and sane people is distinctly biased.

    In the US many of what you seem to be calling cookers refuse to believe the numbers. They claim they are faked. Or whatever. It has gotten sad.

    So expand on the meaning of "cooker" please?

    857:

    Population, energy, food, and who is the next OPEC.

    Interesting article about phosphorus and how we can no longer feed maybe 1/2 of the planet without it. And is so many ways we're pissing it away.

    https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/01/the-worlds-farms-are-hooked-on-phosphorus-and-thats-a-problem/

    Seems like Morocco has the biggest reserves of it under their dirt. And others here have postulated Morocco would be a great place to place vast acreages of solar cells to supply electricity to Europe.

    The politics surrounding this country could get interesting. In so many ways good and bad.

    858:

    1) Nations have borders. 2) Other nations should not interfere with what goes on entirely within the borders of a nation, which are solely and entirely the matter of that nation. 3) The UK has set a good example with Peel's Principles. That's all you can do. 4) Any interpretation of the "2nd Amendment" formally re-stated by Congress will be reviewed and corrected by the Supreme Court. That's our system.

    Have a nice day.

    860:

    the next occurrence is just as much of a "do what?" incident as the last one was.

    Reminds me of Douglas Adams description of sheep being surprised by sunrise every morning…

    861:

    Well I’m retired now but if you were working in my lab and had a cold you’d be sent home. And so would anyone else with a cold.

    I strongly suspect most workplaces aren't like that.

    I remember when my sick leave was cut in half, down to one day a month. (This in a job with a higher rate of infectious disease than health workers, because parents send sick children to school so that they are around adults rather than being at home alone, and who gives a toss about the other children in the class?). Teachers would drag themselves in once they'd run out, or when marks were due or they had a parent meeting, because as long as you weren't projectile vomiting it was easier to drag yourself through the day/meeting than argue with admin.

    When I worked as an engineer, coming to work sick was seen by management as a sign of dedication. Using your sick days meant you were lazy.

    I will note that Ford still haven't made the provision of sick leave part of Ontario labour law. So missing work is usually a cost on the worker here, despite the lessons of the pandemic.

    862:

    Reading the Fine article you referenced his vaccination gets the above-the-fold mention after his middle-aged cardiac system starts to blow out on him two days after the injection. Half-way down the very long page listing his assorted medical woes he happens to mention in passing that he's had heart problems like arrhythmia all his life, he's an ex-smoker and he has a family history of heart issues. As they say, correlation is not causation.

    863:

    New Matilda is a publication that rides the line between trolling and genuine journalism. They have a regular writer who likes to argue that Australia should dedicate a big chunk of GDP to rapidly building a civilian nuclear industry, for example. And they were on the "free Assange" bandwagon back when he was just a pro-Russia propagandist.

    864:

    Other nations should not interfere with what goes on entirely within the borders of a nation, which are solely and entirely the matter of that nation.

    I assume that was sarcasm?

    What is "that nation" was into funding coups, invading other nations, extraordinary renditions, assassinations, bombings, covert ops, and the like?

    865:

    within the borders of a nation, which are solely and entirely the matter of that nation

    That's not a principle any nation accepts today. Doesn't matter whether it's subsidising farmers or testing nuclear weapons, there's a global consensus that some actions are not acceptable.

    Or you could consider the police action taking place in Russia right now, where some sections of the country are rebelling against their rightful government... it's not entirely clear who should get to decide what counts as "within the borders". Also, it's not just Russia that has a "greater {country}" movement, or rebellious provinces with their own local governments that are to some degree legitimate.

    866:

    When the native populations of the Americans crashed their built environment wasn't all that different from the wild around them.

    Um...

    Tenochtitlan, when Cortez invaded, was a city of up to 200,000, in a civilization of 5-6 million people. London in 1500 had a population of 50,000, while England had a population of around 2.6 million.

    Similarly, Cusco, capital of the Incan Empire, had about 150,000 people, and an empire of 12 million people.

    These were very much NOT savages living in untouched wilderness. Both Tenochtitlan and Cusco were among the biggest cities in the world, and their empires were comparable in population and size to those in European. What they didn't have were the famous "Guns, Germs, and Steel," and, I might add, a long tradition of political treachery, which the Conquistadors deployed against both the Aztecs and Incas quite successfully.

    Even North America had a city of 20,000 or so in 1500: Cahokia. The Mississippi basin, Amazon basin and chunks of Central America were as populated as various parts Europe at the time, while the Incan Andes had more people living above 10,000 feet than they do now.

    That's what disappeared in the 16th Century, and researchers will continue to argue about it until the research money runs out.

    Me, I figure if some small portion of our species survives this century, with some coral reefs intact, it will be a huge win and will guarantee our long-term survival.

    867:

    What is to be done about this?

    A good percent of the US population thinks the answer is 'make sure you're better armed than the other guy'.

    That's not to say it's a good answer.

    868:

    Or just put a number in the bottom, left corner of the page, something like 27-231 in 8-point type. At that point it stops being significant.

    869:

    These were very much NOT savages living in untouched wilderness. Both Tenochtitlan and Cusco were among the biggest cities in the world,...

    You missed my point. And I'll accept that I wasn't clear.

    I know in specific or in general all that you said about the folks living in the America's of 1500.

    My point about our current cities is not size. But the crap that they are made of and that is stored and exists in them. Acres of glass, asphalt, steel, chemicals (petroleums, acids, etc...), batteries, refrigerants, long chain polymers (solid and liquid), etc...

    All left to burn or rot.

    Those cities in the Americas in the 1500s, while they had a few chemicals in small quantities, mostly were made of wood, stone, and dirt.

    870:

    if some small portion of our species survives this century, with some coral reefs intact, it will be a huge win and will guarantee our long-term survival

    I don't think I really believe that last bit, but I do think that I'd like to.

    I guess we've already talked about the differences between pessimism, cynicism, optimism and hope, so there's not much point rehashing it :).

    871:

    I prefer 'Quiz Aardvark', 'Quiz Backgammon', ... 'Quiz Zymurgy' which is then followed by 'สอบ แขน', 'สอบ หลัง'... and so on until you run out of languages.

    872:

    Not just cities. Cities by the beach. (By the ocean...)

    When the sea levels rise, that will need to be managed quite carefully. Except we won't, of course.

    873:

    My point about our current cities is not size. But the crap that they are made of and that is stored and exists in them. Acres of glass, asphalt, steel, chemicals (petroleums, acids, etc...), batteries, refrigerants, long chain polymers (solid and liquid), etc...

    I agree completely on this, but I also look at the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the Fukushima exclusion zone, and military bases around the US that support a disproportionate number of native species, and find some hope that life (especially bacteria and fungi) will find ways to capitalize on various parts of these messes, as they already are.

    The thing about coral reefs is that complete loss of reefs in the fossil record is the characteristic signal of a mass extinction. Once lost, they generally take 5-20 million years to reconstitute themselves.

    So if we get lucky enough to not destroy every coral reef, what that's saying in a bigger context is that we're keeping some critical elements of the global environments our species evolved in. That's important, because if our species survives this century, it's quite a bit easier to live in a world we evolved to live in.

    As for the argument that we're going extinct? IMO the problem with it is that the common response to "we're going to go extinct if we don't do these totally feasible but tedious things" is "oh yeah baby, we're all going to die, so we're totally unaccountable. Party on!" Whether this belief is backed by some form of religious afterlife insurance seems to be less common than the general desire to act without consequence and not give a frack.

    Partially as a result of this attitude, we're seeing chance after chance for a better future disappear for stupid reasons. For that reason, I don't bother to talk about humans going extinct. I'd rather talk about who and what survives a hundred years of pandemics and a future with many fewer humans.

    874:

    https://phys.org/news/2023-01-childhood-trauma-linked-civic-environmental.html

    Experiencing childhood trauma may lead an individual to volunteer, donate money or contact their elected officials about environmental issues later in life, according to recent research published in Scientific Reports.

    Maybe the far white is correct, it's being the victim generation that makes people into woke greenies?

    875:

    kiloseven
    Um. - I asked inhabitants of the USA, actually.
    The few answers are not good ....

    Moz
    Very slight correction: Assange was & is a useful IDIOT, trolling for Putin & - apparently - too stupid to realise it.
    Still is.
    Incidentally, I think he should be released, without charge, but with a full dossier, made public, of just what a useful idiot he was & is.
    He can then starve on the streets, for all I care.
    { His deliberate attempt to crash proper scientific research on Climate Change - again to aid petro-state Russia - was what made me decide he was a stupid but dangerous menace, but he's not worth spending state money on keeping him in jail. }

    876:

    You'll find it in a lot of small successful business owners. The local guy running (well not so much anymore) a small printing company with 10 or fewer employees. It really helps when a client from 3 years ago walks in and want a repeat of what the print shop owner did then with a few mods.

    When I did literally that it wasn't all that surprising. For several years I'd gone into the same small printing place around September wanting t-shirts for an upcoming SF convention in November, so it wasn't surprising to me to hear "Oh, yeah, OryCon again. Let me get out the file..."

    What really blew me away was being remembered by a front desk worker at a large hotel. Obviously anyone in that job is going to see lots of people passing through. (I remembered her, as she was a British woman in an American hotel, from Nottingham I believe; more than one person at the con would happily wait patiently nearby because it was an excuse to listen to her accent.) But the convention was in November and I came in for something in the summer - and she remembered me as someone from OryCon, half a year later.

    877:

    this is not the future we were expecting back in the 1980s...

    It's actually a whole lot better than I expected, insofar as I didn't expect to live to see 1990, much less 2000.

    We're nearly a year into an angry totalitarian Russian invasion of a western(ish) nation and the invasion stalled out badly before it got more than 200km in, and they still haven't gone nuclear.

    We're about the same age, and I've occasionally repeated the observation that there are reasons that people in their 50s and 60s are nervous about the Ukraine war. People too young to remember the Cold War appreciate the current omni-shambles as civilization slowly rots but mostly don't appreciate what it was like to grow up knowing that civilization could explode in one big boom, all at once, with no warning. (If you missed that part of history - it was kind of tense, okay?)

    Now Russia is trying to rampage across Europe and this is the war we were raised expecting to die in. Lots of parental aged people are feeling twitchy.

    878:

    1) Nations have borders. 2) Other nations should not interfere with what goes on entirely within the borders of a nation, which are solely and entirely the matter of that nation.

    Explain the application of the Monroe Doctrine to central America, the existence of the School of the Americas, the history of US involvement in inciting, planning, and executing Operation Condor --

    Or better yet, don't. I'll just take note of your hypocrisy for next time.

    879:

    Please note that the first Australia-specific definition of "Cooker" on UrbanDictionary is a flat-out inversion of the true meaning, evidently posted by an anti-vaxxer. (If you have an account, maybe go in and flag it?)

    880:

    My partner once (largely unintentionally) annoyed a proselytizing vegetarian aquaintance by absent-mindedly describing the lambs in a field they were passing as "very cute, in a proto-food sort of way".

    881:

    Yes, I saw that as well.

    I suppose from an anti-vaxxer POV it's true and it is a slang dictionary so...

    882:

    I don't bother to talk about humans going extinct. I'd rather talk about who and what survives a hundred years of pandemics and a future with many fewer humans.

    It's a fair cop. For my part, I don't really care to argue a case about human extinction, I'm just okay about admitting I'm living in a space where I feel the need to grieve about it, seeing is at more likely than not and however you look at it certain in some timeframe or other. But that doesn't preclude talking about survival stories, far from it.

    I'm interested in how isolated humanity pockets remain aware of each other. I'm attracted to the idea that radio would play a part, specifically shortwave, simply because we're talking about a very very disparate human diaspora. What do we need our survivors to do to avoid losing the ability to make ham radios?

    883:

    Charlie & kiloseven
    Can I mention, in passing ...
    The Invasion of Grenada?
    And
    The attempt, by the white wing, waaay back in 1982 to support the fascist Galtieri in the Falklands war, because of the "Monroe Doctrine" ???

    884:

    My six year old sister (I was ten) asked me “What is meat?” I answered “Cows cut up.” She has been a vegetarian ever since although until she is older she didn’t recognise bacon and sausages as meat.

    885:

    Well I suppose it's very legitimately harder to be sincerely conservative or right-wing if you've experienced genuine hardship. The corollary is that if few things have ever gone wrong for you, and you've never been meaningfully denied anything in life, you tend to think that's the normal, universal experience and everyone else is just doing it wrong or something.

    886:

    Greg, please don't.

    This discussion is a complete derail, and it's going to turn into mud-slinging so fast it isn't even funny.

    Drop this subject.

    887:

    No, not true.

    My father grew up poor in 30's London. He then went to sea in the merchant navy in WW2, transferred over to combined ops and ended up following the 8th army into Italy as part of their logistics train.

    When he came home he worked in the construction trade for a while (was part of the team that built the National Theatre complex on the South Bank of the Thames). At that time he was a communist and an active trade unionist. He was one of the people driven away from that by the events in Hungary in 1956. Afterwards he voted Conservative and was one of those people that worshipped the ground that Margaret Thatcher walked on.

    Oddly he was also pro-Israeli and anti-Semitic.

    888:

    Please note that the first Australia-specific definition of "Cooker" on UrbanDictionary is a flat-out inversion of the true meaning, evidently posted by an anti-vaxxer.

    Well that explains why the explanation didn't seem to match (AT ALL) the usage in the comments.

    889:

    Your father is a perfect example of why single issue politics doesn't work over time. Society is complicated.

    890:

    but I also look at the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the Fukushima exclusion zone, and military bases around the US that support a disproportionate number of native species, and find some hope that life (especially bacteria and fungi) will find ways to capitalize on various parts of these messes, as they already are.

    I'll drop this after this comment. All of your examples depend on a large number of people that society can dedicate to those areas to keep the bad things in check. And a global supply chain of "stuff" to use in doing so.

    If there is a population collapse in the billions those extra people and things will largely go away.

    What would the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone or the Fukushima area look like if everyone just left? Dropped their tools in place and went away?

    My reference points are all of those over 100 year old abandoned mines in the Rockies of the US (maybe also Canada). Gold, silver, copper, etc... that now are leaching all kinds of nasty things into the head waters of various river systems. Some are bad enough that various company and government organizations have to deal with stopping them. Mostly. Sort of. Very few people want to expend the needed resources to clean these things up and so the minimum (or less) is usually done with periodic failures to contain.

    891:

    I prefer 'Quiz Aardvark', 'Quiz Backgammon', ... 'Quiz Zymurgy' which is then followed by 'สอบ แขน', 'สอบ หลัง'... and so on until you run out of languages.

    I went with themes, and made absolutely no effort to start each quiz with a sequenced letter (which would have defeated the point of using names). So I'd have quizzes Aardvark, Antelope, Dik-dik, Elephant, Kangaroo, Mammoth, Elk, etc…

    Anyway, it was just an example of a situation where using just a sequence of numbers to identify something was not a good solution.

    PS. Re: using a small number in the corner… Students tend to graffiti things, and I wanted any identifier to be large enough that it couldn't be obscured with a few strokes of the pen.

    892:

    describing the lambs in a field they were passing as "very cute, in a proto-food sort of way"

    There's the famous story (possibly apocryphal) of Queen Victoria's party, on the way to Balmoral, seeing lambs in the field and one of the ladies-in-waiting calling them "delightful creatures", with the Queen agreeing, "especially with mint sauce".

    893:

    yup... Russia indeed leading the way back to feudalism...

    "State Duma approves law to keep member’s income tax and assets private in blow to transparency in Russia"

    PREDICTION: 2025 for politicians in UK to do much the same (they are no longer hiding their evil schemes in advancing towards the past)... 2032 for politicians in US (who would have to strangle one or more Supreme Court justices to terrify 'em into not ruling it unconstitutional)... with Canada fighting a bitter rearguard action before succumbing as well in 2043

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/25/russian-mps-vote-to-hide-details-of-their-tax-returns-from-public-view

    894:

    Er, you DO know that, in the UK, their tax details have been private since time immemorial? And that only a few types of asset need be disclosed. For example, do you SERIOUSLY believe that a single flat is Sunak's sole source of external income?

    https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmregmem/230109/sunak_rishi.htm

    As usual, when Russia is blamed for leading the way to somewhere undesirable, it is actually very late on the scene.

    895:

    do you SERIOUSLY believe that a single flat is Sunak's sole source of external income?

    It's entirely plausible!

    ... When you consider his wife's outrageous pile of wealth.

    Being PM was Margaret Thatcher's vocation, generously bankrolled by her indulgent husband the hedge fun mogul. Similarly, Rishi is currently being PM while Akshata manages the money.

    896:

    I forgot ...
    Today is the last day of the short Open Season for Haggis-shooting { 30th November - 25th January }
    After this they should be nicely fattened-up for breeding in the spring.
    Mine, tonight will have home-grown mashed spuds, with garlic in the mash + onion (+etc) gravy, leek & separate onion stir-fry & - of course a really nice shot of the Water of Life.
    Enjoy.

    { P.S. Charlie @ 887 - noted. }

    897:

    SHIT: "It was if the walls of all the houses in Geneva had been turned into glass" - And that really is the autocrat or religious spy's wet dream come true.

    898:

    I think the Democrats need to be very aggressive. The NRA (National Rifle Association) should be rebranded the "Pro-Murder Lobby." The Republicans should be rebranded the "Pro-Murder and the Extreme Court should be rebraded the "Pro-Murder Court," while justices who vote in favor of Scalia's very wrong interpretation of the comma in the second amendment, should be rebraded "Pro-Murder Justices." At this point it's just that bad.

    https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/2019/08/06/what-second-amendment-its-all-comma/1922436001/

    899:

    If one were being ethical, or even realistic, one would regard an allowance from one's spouse or even just one's spouse picking up all the bills as a form of income. It is, after all, the case if the benefactor were a more distant relative. That was my point about the rules requiring disclosure of only some kinds of assets.

    For example income from dividends is NOT disclosable, nor are holdings in collective investment vehicles.

    https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmcode/1882/188204.htm

    900:

    Mods, if my above comment is part of the discussion OGH wants dropped, feel free to remove it. Thanks.

    901:

    "...while Akshata manages the money."

    And doubtless makes helpful suggestions about governance...

    902:

    I suspect there may have been some really grotesquely stomach-churning culture from the north-east end of the Med 6000-plus years ago that predates writing, the culture and detailed traditions of which are otherwise lost to history. But bits of those traditions linger on in the toxic influences it left to its successor societies.

    Ever think about writing about this culture? I mean, it does seem like it might be able to fit into the Laundry universe, if only back story. It's interesting enough to me though that I'd read something standalone.

    Not that you're lacking for planned books to publish.

    903:

    You haven't read Dark State, have you?

    Published in 2018, written in 2014-16, by me.

    Describes exactly this technology, used in context.

    904:

    H @ 867 writes: "That's what disappeared in the 16th Century, and researchers will continue to argue about it until the research money runs out."

    I think I read that estimated carbon fixation from the disappearance of regular burning, due to population collapse of North American tribes,  accounts adequately for the drop in CO2 levels and resulting Little Ice Age. If I'm imagining this article it does sound plausible, doesn't it? Supposedly the Mississippi divided a vast expanse of eastern forest from treeless prairie to the west only because deliberate burning kept tree growth from overshadowing grassland. If nothing else it indicates the scale of activity by indigenous people, whose sudden decline must have led to environmental side effects of some kind or another. Now I'm wondering if it caused a surge in numbers of passenger pigeons, maybe by leaving more grass seeds unburnt for them to eat? Reports of flocks covering the sky for days sounds unnatural, like a Biblical plague of pigeons.   

    905:

    Think of all the cars that wouldn't be driven, putting pollution into the atmosphere!

    906:

    A lot of us were annoyed, after one of the major changes to the structure of our contracting company, a few years into my last job, when we no long had "vacation days" and "sick days", but it was all lumped together as "PTO" (paid time off).

    When my ex and I came to the UK for Worldcon in '14, when we got back, it was a case of "I'd better not get sick", becuase I have one day of PTO left.

    907:

    Oddly he was also pro-Israeli and anti-Semitic

    Fairly common in your father's generation. People like him did not actually want Jews dead, just out of sight, and saw giving Jews their own country in some godforsaken desert as a good compromise.

    Does not really happen any more because a) many Jews chose not to emigrate to Israel, and are still "in sight", and b) thanks to global communications, Israel itself is now "in sight".

    Which brings up an interesting alt-history question: What would have happened if ALL European and American Jews went to Israel circa 1950? Or maybe not literally 100%, but close enough that remaining ones became unnoticeable?

    908:

    You've missed all the arguments about "the birth rate is dropping! We need more children to prop up the economy!"

    909:

    My reaction was 1953, Shah of Iran, and supporting the warlords (and those who became the Taliban) in Afghantistan when the USSR went in, and, oh, yes, a couple of small disturbances in Afghanistan and Iraq.

    910:

    Skimmed the article.

    DAMN. For the 4,374th time, will ANYONE take me up on the offer to go look up, online, Samual Johnson's dictionary, from the 1750s, that EVERY ONE of the Founding Fathers would have been familiar with, as it was the first and only at the time... and read where he advocates a comma AS A PAUSE, as though reading aloud? That, I maintain, is all it is.

    911:

    Wasn't going to happen. My grandfather really wanted to go in the mid-fifties, sold his grocery store in Philly... and got as far as Atlantic City. They wanted young people to build the country, not older folks who needed taking care of.

    912:

    for those dreaming of a post-human world... sadly you are not going to see rewilding as fast nor as widely as you expect...

    as just one of many factors please consider there's all manner of toxins just about on verge of breaching containment... some of those toxins are outright fatal whereas others are mutagens and/or carcinogens and/or slow killers

    right now there's some minimal effort expended upon repairs of storage and mitigation of leakage but nothing close to keeping up... without those (insufficient) efforts for sure to be massive surges of toxins spilling forth within months of humanity's disappearance which will spread in whatever directions are downhill... which includes oceans... as one awful instance consider coal ash ponds...

    https://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_85582d344dde73cb224881f00b625330

    then there's all manner of chemical processing which will needs be shutdown in a slow, painstaking sequence lest there be toxic clouds released... without the technical specialist alive... please attempt to imagine a couple thousand instances of 1984's Union Carbide disaster...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

    no, those first decades post-humanity will not be rewilding... more akin to mass destruction which will spread 'n spread... requiring decades (centuries?) for those chemical compounds to break down into lesser noxious things...

    913:

    A slightly technical question, maybe a request or gentle suggestion:

    There are many posts in the blog with the header "X replied to this comment from Y" where Y is a prolific poster and the antecedent comment isn't obvious. Sometimes, with patience, it's possible to figure out the meaning, but it's a pain at best.

    Would it be possible to modify/enhance the blog software to change the automatically generated header to identify the commented original posting, like X replied to this comment from Y in #NNN?"?|

    914:

    Troutwaxer @ 899:

    I think the Democrats need to be very aggressive. The NRA (National Rifle Association) should be rebranded the "Pro-Murder Lobby." The Republicans should be rebranded the "Pro-Murder and the Extreme Court should be rebraded the "Pro-Murder Court," while justices who vote in favor of Scalia's very wrong interpretation of the comma in the second amendment, should be rebraded "Pro-Murder Justices." At this point it's just that bad.

    https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/2019/08/06/what-second-amendment-its-all-comma/1922436001/

    One problem with that comma is it wasn't in the original passed by Congress. It was introduced by one of the copyists who were hired to write out the amendments sent out to the states (another copyist introduced TWO commas and others NO commas).

    The comma is not in ALL of the original copies, just some of them ... but when the "2nd" Amendment was ratified, the scribe who made the official version enshrined in the National Archives copied it from one of the versions that had the added comma.

    It's really stupid to allow so many murders just because a copyist made an error.

    915:

    It's very variable - the UK has a lot of toxic waste tips and other places that have regenerated pretty well - unless they are disturbed. Places with less resilient ecologies don't do as well. It's a far more serious problem for lakes and rivers than land.

    The more common error people make is thinking that the ecologies would go back to a particular previous state (or, indeed, ANY previous state). Well, in some places, they would, but not in others (where the ecologies have been too disturbed). In the UK, there would be a disastrous deer population explosion, possibly including feral cattle and sheep, and whether it was controlled at all would depend on how fast dogs reverted to wolves. That could be fairly quick for muntjac, roe and sheep but would take longer for red deer and cattle. Furthermore, the uplands of the UK have been converted into moorland, with an iron pan, and will not regenerate at all on their own. The lowlands will, and farmland can turn back into woodland in as little as 20 years, depending in the closeness of seed trees.

    916:

    Note that if you click on the "reply to Y", it will take you to the post being replied to.

    917:

    That header is a link? Just click on it to see the original and hit Back to return to the reply.

    918:

    THANK YOU! That's something I never knew.

    919:

    Australia has rabbits, mice, rats, cats, cattle and camels now. Plus a range of imported birds and plants and etc. Which would go wild in their own various ways, leading to all sorts of "doesn't look much like Australia". Whether that's fields of buffel grass in the desert or prickly pear on the flood plains, the cane toads will breed happily...

    I read the other day that feral "domestic" cats are getting bigger, someone shot a 15kg, 1m long one recently. So we might end up with a decent-sized feline capable of taking down small children in the near future. Just as we have feral "domestic" dogs (dingos) that don't work quite the same way proper doggies do.

    920:

    newest entry in category of "batshit crazy stuff really happening" in US... just maybe the police are off their leash? turning a bit feral, hmmm?

    a high student student refused to play kickball so police officer, pepper-sprayed and arrested the 18-year old

    so... how's things going for you?

    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/25/video/school-police-tennessee.html

    921:

    I should add that there are plenty of feral and/or wild dogs too - they are so developed as a wild population that the distinction has become more or less irrelevant, and there are only a few isolated areas where wild dingos without feral dog genes still persist. The main point to take away is that they do not "revert" to wolves any more than the rest of the ecosystem simply slips back to its previous state. Rural areas bait dogs and 1080 (sodium fluoroacetate) is used so widely that you need to muzzle your own dog in some areas to prevent them picking up baits. I'm skeptical of studies that show wild dogs don't co-operate socially, and suspect there is selection bias at work in the populations such studies have access to. It's an odd negative or even counterfactual to need to prove... given the ubiquity of scavenging resources while there are lots of humans around.

    The other thought I had about "reverting to pristine" ecosystems relates to Bill Gammage's book about pre-colonial land management, and how it's been interpreted since publication including along the lines of Bruce Pascoe. But I guess Frank bangs on about this stuff too and repeating it won't add much :).

    922:

    I think I read that estimated carbon fixation from the disappearance of regular burning, due to population collapse of North American tribes, accounts adequately for the drop in CO2 levels and resulting Little Ice Age. If I'm imagining this article it does sound plausible, doesn't it? Supposedly the Mississippi divided a vast expanse of eastern forest from treeless prairie to the west only because deliberate burning kept tree growth from overshadowing grassland. If nothing else it indicates the scale of activity by indigenous people, whose sudden decline must have led to environmental side effects of some kind or another. Now I'm wondering if it caused a surge in numbers of passenger pigeons, maybe by leaving more grass seeds unburnt for them to eat? Reports of flocks covering the sky for days sounds unnatural, like a Biblical plague of pigeons.

    Yes and no.

    Prairies won't turn into forests, although they do support regular fires. The burning was on the edge of the prairies and in western forests. In the east they created oak savannas which have now mostly vanished. I did my PhD research on some of the few oak savannas remaining. They're hyper-diverse (100 species plus per acre), and kept open by regular fires since the last ice age. As an aside, anyone who thinks humans aren't a part of nature really doesn't get it. There's some evidence that neanderthals were burning to create oak savannas in Germany back before modern humans existed. Human fire's been rearranging landscapes since the ice ages. And there's Australia. Out west, Indian Fire helped keep the ponderosa and other pine forests open, made, yes, more oak savannas all along the West Coast, and was generally used quite a lot. Not all that burning stopped in the 1600s, but a lot did.

    Passenger pigeons are certainly an oddity, not just because of the giant flocks but because there are so few pigeon bones in middens pre-1491. You may well be right about them. Others have speculated that the vast flocks of ducks on the Western flyway were a consequence of the depopulation of California Indians, but that's far less settled.

    Anyway, if human numbers dropped enormously, efforts as "simple" as burning oak woodlands into savannas would make a lot of space for diversity in a hurry. No, it's not as simple as flame and pray, because knowing when, where, and how to burn is tricky, but the tools are comparatively simple. Moreover we've got evidence from Australia about the utility of well-managed fires. After the aborigines got booted and stopped burning the place, up to one-third of Australia's mammals became rare, endangered, or extinct. That's a reasonably good testimony to the level of care they were giving the place prior to the arrival of the Newcomers. Humans are not necessarily evil.

    923:

    Charlie Stross replied on January 25, 2023 10:03 in 879:

    Explain the application of the Monroe Doctrine to central America Criminal.

    the existence of the School of the Americas Criminal.

    the history of US involvement in inciting, planning, and executing Operation Condor Criminal.

    Thousands of other acts perpetrated against the sovereignty of other nations: Criminal.

    Smedley Butler was (eventually) right.

    924:

    I'll drop this after this comment. All of your examples depend on a large number of people that society can dedicate to those areas to keep the bad things in check. And a global supply chain of "stuff" to use in doing so.

    I get where you're coming from. As EC noted up above, it's worth looking up the terms phytoremediation and mycoremediation before giving in to despair. Stamets' Mycelium Running is a good popular book on the subject.

    For example, one of the weird things researchers have found is that some arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (the most common group of fungi on land) actively sequester heavy metals inside their hyphae. This means that these AMF pick up a bunch of elements from contaminated sites, but only pass the plant nutrients onto their plant partners. This was found when researchers wondered how plants could grow on a Soviet-era toxic waste site. Stuff like this happens. I'm not blase about it, but I'm noticing that the standard environmentalist panic about these real problems sometimes ignores the bloody-minded evolutionary pragmatism of organisms. There are things that adapt to these problems anyway, and sometimes do so on a time span of years to decades.

    925:

    Supposedly the Mississippi divided a vast expanse of eastern forest from treeless prairie to the west only because deliberate burning kept tree growth from overshadowing grassland.

    Both sides of the Mississippi river were wooded. The plains don't start for another few 100 miles. On the west side, roughly, of the the state of Missouri. There is an area called the Ozark Mountains in Missouri. But it's a fuzzy line. More to do with rainfall. And the geology of the inland sea in pre-history. And there were trees. Some large clumps of them. Just mostly not towering tall ones.

    It's complicated. Those open vistas you see in the movies had/have lots of irregularities.

    926:

    What would have happened if ALL European and American Jews went to Israel circa 1950? Or maybe not literally 100%, but close enough that remaining ones became unnoticeable?

    At the end of WW2 (1945) there were roughly 12 million surviving Jews worldwide.

    At the official foundation of Israel in 1947 there were roughly 600,000 Jews in Israel.

    As of 2022 the population of Israel (including non-Jews) is only 9.3 million. In roughly double the land area of Israel in 1950 (hint: in 1950 the West Bank was part of Jordan).

    So you'd have immense population pressure -- there would only be housing for about 5-10% of the population -- and a food crisis, not to mention the ongoing state of actual low-grade shooting war then raging between the Arab neighbours and Israel. (Israel was at war with Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Libya at that point.) There was a temporary cease-fire after 1948, but ongoing constant cross-border raids in both directions.

    Dump roughly 10 times as many Jews into Israel in 1950 as existed previously and the (very antisemitic) beligerents would take it as a threat of escalation and the war would catch fire again.

    So the answer to your question is "absolutely nothing good would come of this".

    927:

    Would it be possible to modify/enhance the blog software

    No.

    The blog software was the last open source release before Six Apart took it fully commercial again. A license for the later versions costs $1000/year, recurring.

    Are you offering to pay?

    928:

    ROTFL! For the class I'm taking, I had to write a scene of 750 words or less. I set it in an alternate world, where we've got Mexican-American peasants dealing with the crop that sunlight->chain reaction in the heavy metals of the plant->electricity, and you connect cables to the genengineered connection points on the plants. The plants, of course, are guraniaums....

    929:

    Yes. What I meant by that is "something that would routinely prey on red deer (and possibly feral cattle)'. So functionally equivalent to wolves. Many domestic dogs (e.g. labradors) could prey on the small deer (and do) without trouble.

    930:

    Charlie @ 904
    Oh yes, I have ... - so what ... this is "real life" ...
    Um, err ...

    931:

    newest entry in category of "batshit crazy stuff really happening" in US...

    Then there's the Republicans in Iowa, who want to ban food stamp recipients from buying foods like white bread (gotta be brown), fresh meat (gotta be processed or tinned), white rice (gotta be brown, cooking oil (boil everything?), etc.

    I think at this point it's obvious that cruelty is the point.

    933:

    a high student student refused to play kickball so police officer, pepper-sprayed and arrested the 18-year old

    Well, we all know that American school place far too much emphasis on sports…

    934:

    The first phrase in the second amendment is nominative absolute, an affectation imported to English from Latin and Greek. It is grammatically independent, used to provide additional circumstances for the main sentence. So the founders, most of whom were schooled in the classics, would have intended the first bit to tell us that the amendment was about militias. Bear in mind that the proximate cause of the war with GB was an attempt by the crown's troops to take an armory in Concord. In '91 or '92, I had a PC version of the OED. It had precisely one definition of "to bear arms:" "to serve as a soldier, to fight." Until Scalia and company decided to change the definition. Consider as well the sizing of armies by the number of men under arms.

    935:

    Not only cruelty is the point, they can pretend to be looking out for the poor people's health. The bill limits SNAP to the same foods purchasable with WIC: https://www.dhhs.nh.gov/sites/g/files/ehbemt476/files/documents/2021-11/wic-approved-foods.pdf

    Which was designed under assumption that pregnant women and nursing mothers already have high-calorie foods such as bread, butter and cooking oil, but may be missing out on fruit, vegetables and dairy.

    Fruit, vegetables and dairy are good for you. If that's all you get to eat... not so much.

    936:

    It's deeply cruel, paternalistic, and apathetic, but I suspect the main push for that legislature is from both the factory farms and the biggest grocery chains (I'm thinking specifically of Hy-Vee, which looks like a plucky underdog next to Wal-Mart and Target, but which is a merciless bully to the other local grocers. They're also one of the biggest employers in the state) wanting to jack their prices up, especially the price of meat. Some of that is hiding price gouges under the umbrella of inflation, but some of it is probably a few people realizing that Big Iowa/Midwest Meat is living on borrowed time.

    937:

    What would have happened if ALL European and American Jews went to Israel circa 1950?

    By the end of WWII the Jewish populations of North America and Europe had politically and socially diverged a lot. In Europe, Israel was an escape from a decade or more (centuries?) of horrors.

    In the US it was more of an mental state than a physical place. Israel was supported but many/most didn't want to give up the decent (within limits) life they had in the US.

    My opinion based on my readings. I'm not Jewish and not a scholar of the situation so take my opinion as you will.

    As an aside, had dinner with someone a few years ago who told the story of his parents. They were Jews who wound up in Dachau at the end of WWII. And the war had been hard or them. His father had noticed that it was much easier/faster to get refugee status to travel to the US if married. So to get out of the camp he found a lady (maybe several) discussed the situation with her, they married, and in a few months got to the US and later became citizens.

    938:

    It's deeply cruel, paternalistic, and apathetic, but I suspect the main push for that legislature is

    You may be right. But in the US, January after state legislature elections is when all of the crazy but will never pass bills are introduced. And they almost always die off. It is a sop to their compainge promises. They introduce the bill, brag about it on Twitter and Facebook then move on. And maybe even get a big time city or national newspaper or magazine to write about it.

    Texas had some real crazy ones this year. Turning Austin into an administrative zone run by the legislature was one of them. "Got to keep those crazy socialists in their place after all."

    939:

    it was much easier/faster to get refugee status to travel to the US if married.

    I think both that and people getting married because of it are common. My ex's parents met and married in a camp outside Vietnam before becoming Australians. It makes considerable sense to follow the incentives given to you...

    940:

    he plants, of course, are guraniaums....

    Glad to help.

    941:

    Charlie, I think you've inspired someone. Note the embroidery on the bagpipe: "THIS MACHINE KEEPS PORTLAND WEIRD."

    https://youtu.be/c_PDRK0Tynk

    942:

    Now Russia is trying to rampage across Europe and this is the war we were raised expecting to die in. Lots of parental aged people are feeling twitchy.

    Well, I'm a tad younger than many people here, but I was a child in the Eighties. This is not the war I was expecting to die in. That one was more spread out, basically being more West (Fulda gap anyone?) and North (Finland's borders, hello). Also the Baltic Countries were Soviet Union, though as of late I've come to understand that the integration to the Soviet Union was probably not perfect there, at least not in the sense that Russia was Soviet Union.

    Also I remember there being a concentrated NATO response, in the vein of later WW2, not this 'yeah yeah Ukrainians are being killed but Germany still makes a lot of business with Russia so we shouldn't participate too much'.

    I also think that even Russians know that nuclear weapons are better left unused - they're a huge risk when used and probably wouldn't really make a difference in the battlefield.

    At least I'm not anymore expecting to die in a nuclear fire or the aftermath, but rather in the slow collapse because of the climate change and environmental collapse. Being relatively young I might be able to see this happening quite far. (Not that I want to.)

    (Kind of half-joking here if that's not clear. I was also pretty convinced that Finland had good enough defense that Russia would realize that attacking us would be a no-go because of the costs involved, but the Ukraine war makes me doubt that there is enough sense in Russia not to. Though it will take at least 5-10 years in my very unprofessional opinion for them to get to any shape where they could attack anywhere after the Ukraine war ends, one way or another.)

    944:

    I was also pretty convinced that Finland had good enough defense that Russia would realize that attacking us would be a no-go because of the costs involved, but the Ukraine war makes me doubt that there is enough sense in Russia not to.

    why would they want to? apart from a random dedication to doing evil for its own sake of course, which i realize is plausible for many

    do they still want to stop the germans from attacking st petersburg like in 1939? does finland have a minority population of russians it's been secretly mistreating lo these many years?

    945:

    why would they want to? apart from a random dedication to doing evil for its own sake of course, which i realize is plausible for many

    Russia is the heir to an imperial power. Like the UK. (Look at the nasty English nationalist strand in British politics.) Like the USA (only the USA still has a trade empire insofar as it's still the nearest thing there is to a hegemonic world power).

    The difference between the British imperial decline and the Russian one is that Russia has no natural land borders -- it tends to sprawl and occupy its neighbours. The British empire was mostly overseas (although the last residues of it still exist on GB, where Westminster is seen as an occupying foreign power by many in Scotland and Wales).

    Culturally Russians think of Ukraine much as Home Counties Gammons think of Scotland. Only more so: Scotland is looked down on as the wild highland fringe full of shouty barbarians, but Kievan Rus is where identity originated and so modern Ukrainians are vile pretenders who need to be put in their place. Or something like that.

    There's also the huge problem that Russia is a resource extraction empire -- lumber, coal, oil, gas -- and Ukraine is sitting on some of the best farmland and biggest natural gas fields in the former USSR. Putin's regime's focus is on digging up and shipping out fossil fuels, so naturally a land grab for the biggest source on their borders made as much sense to him as invading Kuwait made to Saddam back in 1991.

    Putin is so surrounded by yes-men and courtiers telling him whatever they think will make him look on them most favourably that nobody told him the truth and his own xenophobic prejudices held sway. (And there are the persistent health/medication rumours.)

    946:

    do they still want to stop the germans from attacking st petersburg like in 1939? does finland have a minority population of russians it's been secretly mistreating lo these many years?

    There are similarities and differences to the situation with Ukraine. Finland was an autonomous duchy under the Russian empire and achieved independence during the Russian revolution, leading to a short civil war, where the anti-Soviet side won with the assistance of the Imperial German Army. Stalin had a high level aspiration to re-integrate former organs of the Russian empire, something that has informed and been part of the rationale for Putin's revanchism.

    I was going to suggest the main difference was that Finland didn't have a similar role in the formation of Russian identity to that played by Kyivan Rus, but it turns out that this isn't really the case and that a trade route linking the Baltic to Constantinople via Kyiv is a bi part of the story.

    947:

    The neuroscientists in the local vicinity are strongly encouraged to name the rats and mice on which they experiment, with the explicit goal that they will care about the wellbeing of those rats and mice. (Right up until, you know, said rodents are euthanised by perfusion, then decapitated, and then have their brains dissected, dyed, and imaged. Before that, though, having happy and contented subjects is really important, both for the obvious ethical concerns, and also because subjects that are scared, stressed, starved, or otherwise unhappy tend not to act very "naturally")

    All of those rodents have non-personal identifiers - three each to the best of my knowledge, since each system keeping track of them assigns its own unique ID to each. A 6 digit number; a 12 character alphanumeric, and a 32 character alphanumeric, because, you know, mice breed like crazy, and we're damn well taking care of scaling issues up front!, comparisons to "number of grains of dust in the inner solar system" notwithstanding.

    Oddly, this only applies to rats and mice. The folks working on zebrafish don't do it. The folks working on fruitflies definitely don't do it. The sole researcher working on marine worms also doesn't, but she has so few of those that they don't even have alphanumeric IDs, either.

    I've even had a couple of rats named after me. One was adorable, the other was, not to put too fine a point on it, a right and absolute bastard, who far preferred trying to bite the experimenter to any form of food based reward.

    948:

    Nah, there's still large chunks of the world where a servant class is considered essential, and a stay at home wife is a basic marker of not being in the servant class.

    And in smaller social circles too.

    A story from many years ago: On day on an American Air Force base, two fresh young lieutenants were walking through the officers' accommodation neighborhood when they spotted a dirt-covered man rooting around in the bushes of a neighbor's house.

    "Hey, look," one of them remarked. "I didn't know the Major rated a gardener."

    The well-encrusted figure looked up and told them, "I don't."

    949:

    no, i'm more or less on top of the background to the ukraine invasion, i'm just wondering why anyone thinks it's likely to be the prelude to having a go at somewhere like finland, let alone sundry nato members

    even young zeihan has been dialling back his predictions of imminent ukrainian victory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDVH_JJIRWI

    950:

    People already anthropomorphize their robots; everyone I know who owns a Roomba (including me and my wife) refers to them as "she".

    You probably know different Roomba owners than I do. On the other hand, I'm well aware that the company is perennially flooded with questions along the lines of "Our Roomba and our cat aren't getting along. How can I get it to be friendlier?"

    (Admittedly, I'm a person who grew up with R2-D2 being 'he' and thinks BB-8 should be 'she' so there's that...)

    951:

    I was going to suggest the main difference was that Finland didn't have a similar role in the formation of Russian identity to that played by Kyivan Rus,

    i'm still finding myself seduced by the simplicity of the explanation that finland doesn't have russians

    952:

    There's a good Japanese manga and anime series called "Silver Spoon", about a city boy's experiences in a residential high school for agricultural students out in the wilds of Hokkaido.

    My favorite Japanese agricultural school story is Moyasimon: Tales of Agriculture, though I'm not sure there's much competition in that micro-genre. To be sure, the protagonists are over in the fermentation labs so most dead things are either already dead when they arrive or too tiny for humans to care about individually.

    953:

    Charlie @ 946
    NOT forgetting the long-traditional rhetoric about "Rus" being the "Third Rome" - as mentioned in, of all places, Eisenstein's film(s) about Ivan Grozny, yes?

    954:

    oh look... 500+% growth... if this was a stock this would be time to cash in and get out of the market... every time I've checked that page, the graph of world wide death rate had some spikes but * never * went vertical...

    ...till now

    I really do hope its better reporting along with lagging paperwork rather than actually sudden surprise heaps of still warm corpses... perhaps its time to get my fifth vax and then go out to stockpile toilet paper, bottom shelf vodka and other dire necessities just in case civilization teeters too closely upon the abyss's edge

    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-cases.html

    955:

    Moyashimon and Silver Spoon do have similarities -- Silver Spoon's school has an underground cheese factory run by the Siddhartha teacher, a very important resource for the school's pizza parties and microorganisms obviously play a large part in that operation.

    I enjoyed Moyashimon myself although the long sidetrack into French viniculture towards the end of the story rather threw me off.

    956:

    If you go by the talking heads in Russian media, the end goal is to resurrect the USSR -- ahem, the Russian Empire -- including its satellite states, break up and Finlandize the EU (Finland of course will be Russified), humiliate the USA (including taking back Alaska), and so on.

    (In other words, it's about as credible as the Empire 2.0 guff from the Brexiters.)

    The real consequence of the Ukraine invasion (apart from hastening the collapse of Putinism) is most likely to be felt in China, where it looks to have been a harsh and unpleasant reality check on Xi's ambition to forcibly re-take Taiwan.

    The problem however is that Premier Xi is as much an autocratic single-point-of-sanity-failure as Putin, and has a vastly more solid economy to back his moves. Although the grotesque mishandling of ending lockdown there suggests that it's very brittle.

    957:

    More relevant, I think, is that Finland doesn't have a Russian naval base on its territory.

    Russias real meddling started around 2010, after Ukraine made it clear that they wouldn't be renewing the lease for Sevastopol when it ran out in 2017.

    958:

    where it looks to have been a harsh and unpleasant reality check on Xi's ambition to forcibly re-take Taiwan

    i mean he could take it but it would be a bit killing-the-goose-that-laid-etc, those fabs and their staff are unlikely to operate smoothly during and after such a transition even if they don't get trashed in the process

    good thing the americans have been doing everything in their power to make sure the loss of face which might trigger such an event doesn't happen

    959:

    The problem however is that Premier Xi is as much an autocratic single-point-of-sanity-failure as Putin, and has a vastly more solid economy to back his moves. Although the grotesque mishandling of ending lockdown there suggests that it's very brittle.

    One of my concerns about Russia, and I think this also has some hold in Germany and France, too, is that it's not very clear what happens in Russia after Putin goes away, one way or another.

    There's one option that the whole country goes into the same kind of mess it was during the 1990s, which is kind of bad for everybody involved, and I wouldn't be that happy being next to them, though military invasion would probably be off the table. For diplomatic and economic relations I think this would be also bad - who would you negotiate with you can trust to be in a position to be relevant to you in a couple of months or years?

    Then there's also the option that only the highest people change, but not the system that much. My fear is that somebody really competent gets to the president's seat and manages to reform the systems so that they work better than they have done so far. Getting rid of corruption (or most of it), figuring out a way to get more accurate data and trust it, and staying in power when doing all of this is not easy but I wouldn't rule it out. Then you'd have a Russia with quite a lot of resources and less corruption, so the next invasion wouldn't get into a quagmire so quickly.

    The only 'good' thing about this is that doing all that is hard and requires time, and for example building up domestic industries takes also time and effort. I'd say it takes at least 10-15 years until even in a very optiomistic scenario Russia would have a working domestic industry and has had time to build up the armies.

    There is, or at least has been, a lot of technological expertise in Russia. It's just that it seems to me that the focus has not been on making complex things, but rather making simple things, selling them, and buying the complex things from other people. This can change, but there's much inertia and opposition to it.

    Of course, Russia might not have 10-15 years to rebuild everything in peace. For starters we have the climate change, again, or still, which probably will have some unexpected effects during the next decades.

    Oh, and why Russia would attack Finland? I have really no good reason, but the mentioned Finland having been part of Russia, if an independent grand duchy, seems to me like a good reason to get us into the fold again - at least that was what Stalin tried. At least reasoning against it by saying we have a big army and many Russians would die attacking us doesn't seem like as good a reason as it was a year ago.

    960:

    Then you'd have a Russia with quite a lot of resources and less corruption, so the next invasion wouldn't get into a quagmire so quickly.

    It's not just resources/corruption that's an issue: background reading on the Ukraine invasion fiasco places a lot of blame on obsolete logistics models. The USSR never got into multimodal containerization or motorway/autobahn style high speed roads for transport -- it's all break-bulk goods shipped on railway tracks, so they get to the end of the railhead and then run into mud or dirt tracks.

    And there's stuff like their artillery rockets, which rely on lotsa strapping young conscripts to hand-load the next brace of (unguided/barely guided) rockets after every volley, compared to M270/HiMARS, which has a built-in loading crane and loads an entire prepacked container of (GPS-guided) rounds in a couple of minutes.

    Basically, they haven't advanced since the late 1960s/early 1970s in most respects. Which shouldn't be a surprise (blame Leonid Brezhnev and his heirs!) but it'll take a lot more than an anti-corruption drive to fix 70 years of missing road-building ... especially with (as you noted) climate change and global net-zero carbon emissions coming at them fast.

    961:

    My sympathies. I have my first cold since Nov 2019 and I'm blaming my grandchildren. I'd forgotten what they do to you.

    UK self-assesments have to be submitted by 31 Jan; this year will be guess the figures and correct later when I have a functioning brain. Realising I could do this saves me so much worry each year.

    962:

    Oddly what he usually brought up in anti-Semitic rants were a couple of pre states actions in mandate Palestine.

    Namely the bombing of the King David hotel and this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sergeants_affair. What particularly ground his gears about that was booby trapping the bodies.

    And, yet, he was still pro Israel.

    963:
    The British empire was mostly overseas (although the last residues of it still exist on GB, where Westminster is seen as an occupying foreign power by many in Scotland and Wales).

    Would that Dave_the_Proc were still around on the blog to raise a quizzical eyebrow from Belfast. :-P

    964:

    (Admittedly, I'm a person who grew up with R2-D2 being 'he' and thinks BB-8 should be 'she' so there's that...)

    I named my vehicles when I was younger (and had vehicles with personalities). Both were male, because they were way too temperamental and unreliable to be female.

    Gender-assignment based on observations of my classmates in engineering. Although that wasn't exactly a random sample, given that girls were discouraged from applying to engineering back then, so those that did so (and got in) had to have focus and dedication.

    965:

    Charlie @ 957
    Actually the Brexshiteer rabid foaming is sane & reasonable, compared to the verbal antics coming from RU.
    What's really dangerous is that, unlike the Brexit lunacy, which will crash completely, quite soon .....
    They seem to have no inkling that they are going nowhere at all, or into a solid brick wall at high speed ....
    Which will make the inevitable "Untergang" even worse & much more dangerous.

    966:

    Thanks, I'd forgotten about the Woodie Guthrie angle. Did you know he wrote a song about Trump's father?

    967:

    "...who far preferred trying to bite the experimenter to any form of food based reward."

    I wouldn't go near that rat, but he/she had the right idea! Biting the person doing experiments on you is a very good idea.

    968:

    If I were Taiwan I'd drop the hint that if China looks like they'll be getting control of that area, the fabs get blown to bits. Sorry guys, you get fish, but no chips!

    969:

    That is a rather inane thing to say. The Taiwan/(rebel province of) Formosa thing is a lot lot more complicated than the wellbeing or otherwise a handful of silicon fabs, up to the point where the Taiwanese government regards itself, on paper at least, as the legitimate government of mainland China. It's a bit like the "Six Counties" crap the UK went through in the latter half of the last century along with another country's constitution explicitly laying claim to Norn Iron.

    The (mainland) Chinese are working on building out top-of-the-range silicon capabilities for themselves, in part because of sanctions imposed by the Americans who hate the idea of other countries not doing as they're told and in part because it's worth a lot of money on the world markets. It might take them time to achieve today's best-practices manufacturing but it's one of those things we in the West associate with the incrutable Orientals, the tendency to take the long view. It's notable that the CCCP still has Five-Year Plans for industry, agriculture etc.

    970:

    I think in the long term you're right, but in the short term - next 5-10 years - taking Taiwan without taking the fabs would be considered expensive and pointless.

    971:

    "People too young to remember the Cold War appreciate the current omni-shambles as civilization slowly rots but mostly don't appreciate what it was like to grow up knowing that civilization could explode in one big boom, all at once, with no warning. (If you missed that part of history - it was kind of tense, okay?)"

    I guess that depends a lot on the level of propaganda you were exposed to/believed in. Nobody ever had any of my classes spending five minutes every day pretending the Russians were bombing us and sitting under the table to make them stop, or whatever the thing was that was thus reported, which always came over as being a piece of very US-style overreaction, typical in being pointless, bizarre, and kind of hard to believe they seriously did it.

    "Now Russia is trying to rampage across Europe and this is the war we were raised expecting to die in."

    That war was really "expected" to provide a rather large number of military and military-related people with the justification for continuing to be paid to sit around counting Russian tanks and writing a new fantasy piece every week about shooting them, or playing with interesting technology and leaving pits in the bin for the cleaners to complain about. And various other things of a similar kind. It was useful for making sure that a lot of people were too constantly concerned with not saying the wrong word three times in a row in case the moon suddenly decided to stop orbiting and fall on the planet to have any headspace left over for being properly evil about things. The whole point was about it not happening to keep all the gravy taps running.

    I didn't find the "Russian bogeyman" idea much more convincing than a real bogeyman, either. I reckoned that if anything did kick off deliberately it would most likely be down to some American losing their nut, not the Russians; if it was the Russians it would be down to some kind of accident. (On which note, apparently Stanislav Petrov was not the only one.) And When The Wall Came Down I reckoned it now meant a large-scale proper war was more likely, not less.

    The thing about the USSR was that there were always about three factions in the Kremlin all trying to take over from each other and all with the kind of desperate incentive not to lose out that political losers in the US rarely have to worry about. The number of people for whom the destabilisation of some upheaval as drastic as Actually Starting The War would rather rapidly result in their own personal bullet in the back of the head was always an extremely powerful motive for the organisation as a whole to jolly well not do it. By contrast, someone in the US who did it could not only expect to survive, but to still maintain their cushy state of existence far better than most other people.

    The political structure of the USSR did not allow anyone to gain such certainty and security of power that they could safely do anything on so drastic a scale. (Even Stalin doesn't count.) They did not have the single point of vulnerability to the leader suddenly making some quite insane decision that Putin managed to create. Though it has to be said that the worry always used to be what would happen to the current structure when Putin either kicked the bucket or did cock up and get himself booted, since he always used to be a distinctly sensible chap.

    972:

    "change the automatically generated header to identify the commented original posting"

    It already does, in its href.

    973:

    "Reports of flocks covering the sky for days sounds unnatural, like a Biblical plague of pigeons."

    I dunno, sounds bloody great to me.

    974:

    One of the things I like about Charlie's writing is that he shows the nasty consequences of all the unthinking acceptance of this technology shit that people just think is all gee-whiz and wonderful. Using real examples. For instance the one you refer to was reported in the literature and Charlie's use of it is closely based on the reports. The world needs more people doing stuff like this, to counteract the utter apathy and ignorance displayed by the public to what they're getting themselves into. Unfortunately they probably still wouldn't take any notice.

    975:

    Well you'll like this. (I think it is based on US markets.)

    Half of the smart appliances sold are never connected to the Internet. And many of those that do connect drop off very quickly.

    The article I read said in talking to the appliance manufacturers they seem mystified as to why people didn't want them to know personal details about their fridge, stove, washer, dryer, etc... Especially since the main reason for it wasn't product improvement but to send out emails about "you need to order a new expensive filter from us now" and such.

    I'm a tech nerd. I have all kinds of tech around my house. I like my tech oriented 2016 Civic. But I've yet to be convinced that my fridge needs internet access. So far the most I've wanted is my washer and dryer to tell me when the current loads are done as I can't hear them in the living areas of my house. But that is IT.

    Well I am looking at the SENSE power monitoring setup. But that's not tied to selling me a Samsung fridge water filter.

    976:

    One of the things I like about Charlie's writing is that he shows the nasty consequences of all the unthinking acceptance of this technology shit that people just think is all gee-whiz and wonderful.

    This is true of tech since the stone age.

    This is a variation of radar. We likely CAN do it with just the 50/60Hz flooding our homes for our power use. But the accuracy and detail would likely be poor. Think of early WWII radar (long wave) and later WWII radar (short wave).

    Amazing what you can do with real time DSP though.

    978:

    Let me note that a well-known Chicago SF fan, who went to Israel and served in their forces still lives in Chicago... no matter how Israel Uber Alles, sorry, "Eretz Israel" he talks.

    979:

    If we did it in elementary school, I don't remember it. But then, I can't imagine the point... I lived in Philadelphia. As in home of the Philly Navy Yard, and (count 'em) seven major oil refineries.

    If the missles came, there'd be so may aimed at Philly, we'd be dust in the wind.

    980:

    I did work at the NIH, so I'm aware of the existance of this document from posters on the walls.... https://grants.nih.gov/grants/olaw/guide-for-the-care-and-use-of-laboratory-animals.pdf

    981:

    No? No Russo-Finnish? Allow me to introduce you, in the US, to Italian-Americans, and African-Americans, and....

    982:

    If slice-'o-life depictions of Asian farmers entertains you, don't overlook Nobel literature prizewinner Mo Yan's "Life and Death are Wearing Me Out", a farcical fable of a 1950s era Chinese landlord who is multiply reincarnated as various farm animals. I can't help but wonder if Kim Stanley Robinson's "Years of Rice and Salt" didn't inspire him to take on the project, it really cuts a wide swath through generations of Chinese rural and small town life, shrewdly highlighting many of the political and social challenges China faced in modernization. Beautiful scenery descriptions are my biggest takeaway from it. Howard Goldblatt's translation leaves out some of the funnier, cruder parts, but you still capture 95% of what's there to be had in English, at least for contemporary Chinese writing.

    983:

    My fear is that somebody really competent gets to the president's seat and manages to reform the systems so that they work better than they have done so far. Getting rid of corruption (or most of it), figuring out a way to get more accurate data and trust it, and staying in power when doing all of this

    Running the risk of aspirational optimism, getting rid of the corruption and making Russia a more functional country might actually lessen the chances of war with their neighbors (I'm not as optimistic about war with countries closer in parity to Russia). Russia is a totalitarian dictatorship propped up by/cannibalizing a kleptocratic oligarchy, and that kind of setup relies on institutional corruption and mistrust of objective reality. If you get rid of the corruption, you've gone a long way towards turning Russia into a decent place to live, and there does seem to be a correlation between that and lower belligerency on the world stage.

    (Belligerent totalitarians who "improve" their country when taking power usually only do so in the short-term, and usually by putting their own stamp of corruption on the national institutions. You can use Hitler or Reagan as an example)

    Half of the smart appliances sold are never connected to the Internet. And many of those that do connect drop off very quickly.

    We got a Shark, a Roomba-like vacuum, about a year back. Our house is old by American standards, so there are a lot of WiFi dead spots where the walls are full of signal-blocking material (and/or ghosts). The poor thing -- we named her Tranquility, because our living room where she lives is Apollo Program-themed -- has to map her way back to her charge station anew every time, because she can't connect to the station's "map." At first this bugged us, and we felt sorry for our vacuum the way you might feel sorry for a dog who gets confused. Then we decided we were just fine with not mapping out the interior of our house to anyone who might be able to get into our WiFi.

    Obligatory recognition of just how damned strange our present time is.

    984:

    forcibly re-take Taiwan

    There's a world-wide dependency upon Taiwanese chips... little doubt that Taiwanese government's got a plan in the event of a failed defense against invasion... call it "Blind Samson Protocol" because they'd make certain to wreck everything (or as much as possible in just a few frantic hours) as close to scorched earth as possible...

    even if China could survive without those 'chip fabs' the rest of the world's economic activity would be crippled because of dependencies which in turn would result in a reduced demand for Chinese products and thus cripple Chinese exports to the point where there'd be sudden, massive unemployment as factories are idled... could well be possible to defeat Taiwan perhaps lop off enough heads to conquer Taiwan... but at the cost of triggering unrest on Chinese soil... 50+ million unemployed all with bellies to feed

    digression: as far back as the 1980s rumors of what motivated Egypt to sit down with Israel in mid-1970s included mention of an Israeli "Blind Samson Protocol" which consisted of sharing the pain if ever there was a successful invasion, by way of nukes... with two earmarked for Aswan Dam which at the time generated more than 50% of electricity in Egypt... between a prolonged blackout, widespread flooding, radioactive fallout, et al, Anwar Sadat would have ruined a wrecked nation... whether or not a 'physics package' was actually transported to the American desert for demonstration via an underground test firing with many, many interested observers from various governments is a matter of paranoid gossip not confirmed fact... what is fact was a peace treaty nobody was expecting back in '73 but was signed in '79...

    985:

    Robert Prior @ 932 & 933:

    newest entry in category of "batshit crazy stuff really happening" in US...

    Then there's the Republicans in Iowa, who want to ban food stamp recipients from buying foods like white bread (gotta be brown), fresh meat (gotta be processed or tinned), white rice (gotta be brown, cooking oil (boil everything?), etc.

    I think at this point it's obvious that cruelty is the point.

    Oops, forgot to include link:

    https://www.businessinsider.com/iowa-republicans-bill-ban-snap-recipients-meat-sliced-cheese-2023-1

    While I take your point (and agree) with how viciously stupid (stupidly vicious?) this proposal is, I would like to point out that brown bread & brown rice are better nutritionally.

    Perhaps what we need are laws that require legislators to only be allowed to have as much food as (and only food from those categories approved for) SNAP (Food Stamp) & WIC recipients can have.

    And make the penalty for legislators violating that law 30 days in jail on "bread (brown of course) and water".

    986:

    So.....Thunder the Wondercar?

    987:

    alantyson @ 937:

    It's deeply cruel, paternalistic, and apathetic, but I suspect the main push for that legislature is from both the factory farms and the biggest grocery chains (I'm thinking specifically of Hy-Vee, which looks like a plucky underdog next to Wal-Mart and Target, but which is a merciless bully to the other local grocers. They're also one of the biggest employers in the state) wanting to jack their prices up, especially the price of meat. Some of that is hiding price gouges under the umbrella of inflation, but some of it is probably a few people realizing that Big Iowa/Midwest Meat is living on borrowed time.

    I doubt corporate agriculture or the grocery chains are behind restricting the scope of government food assistance. It's against their interests. They want people to buy MORE food, not less.

    Food Stamps started out as a FARM SUBSIDY program. Still is.

    988:

    Troutwaxer @ 942:

    Charlie, I think you've inspired someone. Note the embroidery on the bagpipe: "THIS MACHINE KEEPS PORTLAND WEIRD."

    https://youtu.be/c_PDRK0Tynk

    Not to rain on your parade, but that whole concept dates back to Woody Guthrie's guitar

    989:

    "Reports of flocks covering the sky for days sounds unnatural, like a Biblical plague of pigeons."

    I dunno, sounds bloody great to me.

    Indirectly it was sort of like each Native American killed by smallpox turned into ten thousand pigeons back to rain their terrible vengeance on the heads of invading frontiersmen. Who then overreacted by shotgunning at the sky until that particular species died off and is now extinct, if I recall correctly. Sad all around, especially thinking of all the white spattered faces twisted with rage as they blasted ammo upwards. The original Elmer Fudd archetype was born.

    990:

    alanlyson ( @ 984 )
    OK, agreed, RU is a totalitarian dictatorship propped up by/cannibalizing a kleptocratic oligarchy
    How, historically have such societies & countries collapsed & how bad does it get "inside"?
    Note I'm assuming that someone else doesn't take the opportunity to invade & loot the place.
    Can anyone think of examples, perhaps?
    China at the change of a Dynasty, any dynasty?
    Also
    Belligerent totalitarians who "improve" their country when taking power ... I would add Musso to that list, too, but not Franco, because Spain was already dirt-poor.

    991:

    ilya187 @695:

    Or chemical. This was the scenario I kept seeing back in early to mid 80's: Soviet tank divisions roll into West Germany through Fulda Gap, NATO forces bring them to a halt, Soviets use chemical weapons to break through

    The acoup blog has an interesting take on why banning chemical weapons has had traction where banning land mines has not.

    Chemical weapons just aren't any good. Or at least, you get more bang for your buck using conventional weapons. Conditions have to be right to use chemical weapons, and countermeasures are too easy and effective.

    He brings up two data points: Moscow 1941 and Berlin 1945. In both cases, a murderous dictator had his back to the wall. And yet neither used chemical weapons.

    Howard NYC @894:

    PREDICTION: 2025 for politicians in UK to do much the same (they are no longer hiding their evil schemes in advancing towards the past)... 2032 for politicians in US (who would have to strangle one or more Supreme Court justices to terrify 'em into not ruling it unconstitutional)... with Canada fighting a bitter rearguard action before succumbing as well in 2043

    Cascade by Rachel Rosen features similar stuff re: the USA and Canada in some future (maybe 20-30 years down the line). USA has fallen apart, but Canada is still a going concern... the same way that bits of the Titanic were still above water two hours after it struck the iceberg.

    What got me in that book was the fascists using the Red Ensign (Canada's pre-1965 flag) as one of their identifiers. They wanted a white ethno-state, after all. And lost no time setting up death squads when they got into power.

    992:

    While I take your point (and agree) with how viciously stupid (stupidly vicious?) this proposal is, I would like to point out that brown bread & brown rice are better nutritionally.

    That is true, but brown rice is more expensive. Also, prohibiting cooking oil? Flour? Preferring processed meat to fresh meat?

    993:

    I doubt corporate agriculture or the grocery chains are behind restricting the scope of government food assistance. It's against their interests. They want people to buy MORE food, not less.

    Yeah no, that's a good point. I'll admit I'm predisposed to blaming the big agricultural and monopolistic grocery companies because they're the cause of so many other problems in rural North America. My gut tells me they're getting something out of this or else they'd be more vocal in their opposition, but I will admit I don't have any solid evidence to point to.

    994:

    Hah! NI is in an odd Heisenbergian state of superimposed Ireland/UK dualism, though, and if there's a border poll and the public vote to leave the UK they won't get nearly the pushback from London that Scotland is getting right now. Nobody in power on the mainland wants the Troubles to come back, and meanwhile there's a settlement that the DUP and Sinn Fein both grumble about but don't want to go to war over.

    Wales and Scotland, though ...

    995:

    The rules in the UK are considerably tougher. This is one of my wife's areas of expertise. There is currently no Brexiteer pressure to relax them (unlike for farming).

    996:

    Actually, there would be more likely to be a pushback from London if they DON'T vote to leave! Some polls predict a large majority in favour of unity south of the border, and a large one against it north of the border. That would probably mean a large overall majority in favour of union. Sinn Fein would then start to cause trouble if London said that means 'no'.

    997:

    which always came over as being a piece of very US-style overreaction, typical in being pointless, bizarre, and kind of hard to believe they seriously did it.

    Brits who haven't visited the USA tend not to have a good grasp of how freaking huge the place is.

    We didn't get the duck-and-cover stuff in the UK because, from the early 1960s onwards, there was a tacit understanding that in event of a nuclear exchange the civilian population were doomed.

    (I never lived more than 5 miles from two or more strategic nuclear targets until the Cold War ended.)

    But the USA is huge. Suburban sprawl meant that in event of a nuclear exchange there was a very good chance that your home would be 10-50 miles away from the nearest mushroom cloud, not 1-5 miles. So, potentially it was survivable -- broken windows, damaged roof tiles, and fallout if you were unlucky with the prevailing winds, but mostly the mass casualties would be confined to the inner cities (cough, where the poor folks live).

    The Soviet missiles were less accurate than western ones at first, so they generally built much bigger single warhead gadgets and targeted military sites until the late 1970s, when they finally had enough plutonium and a small enough CEP to build multi-warhead MIRVs, at which point ...

    998:

    NI is in an odd Heisenbergian state of superimposed Ireland/UK dualism

    Don't look, Ethel?

    Also, does that make Arlene Foster and Edwin Poots Irish photons?

    999:

    Well, we don't want them to think about escaping so they can run around the Lake District carrying bubonic plague.

    1000:

    Let's see, a good friend lives in Cary, and takes the commuter rail to work in downtown Chicago, 40 mi away.

    On the other hand, it's not only poor people who live downtown, it's Big Money to own some of those houses and condos. And if the nukes came weekday daytime, game over.

    1001:

    "We didn't get the duck-and-cover stuff in the UK because, from the early 1960s onwards, there was a tacit understanding that in event of a nuclear exchange the civilian population were doomed."

    I think everyone knew that anyway. That stuff did try and pop up a couple of times, but everyone just took the piss.

    1002:

    with two earmarked for Aswan Dam which at the time generated more than 50% of electricity in Egypt

    The Aswan High Dam fronts a reservoir containing roughly 100-200 billion tons of water. That's hundreds of cubic kilometres of water -- several years' worth of Nile seasonal flooding.

    If the damn dam is ever nuked, it will create a wall of water 50-100 metres high rolling down to the Med at roughly 100-150km/h, with 90% of the population of Egypt -- 107M people -- in its path.

    Forget losing half their electricity, Egypt as a nation would cease to exist and the death toll would exceed both world wars combined.

    (Rumour has it that in October 1973, a couple of weeks into the Yom Kippur War, the USSR was shipping nuclear-capable missiles to Egypt, a then-reliable Soviet ally who was very much on the back foot at that point. So the IAF played paintball with the dam -- splashing cans of paint across it -- then rolled some A-bombs out onto the apron and parked them prominently next to a couple of Skyhawks right where the spy satellites could see them. Negotiations started promptly.)

    1003:

    That is true, but brown rice is more expensive.

    As brown rice is in its natural state and white rice has been processed to remove the husk, this is a perverse artifact of the food retail supply chain rather than a law of nature.

    1004:

    from the early 1960s onwards, there was a tacit understanding that in event of a nuclear exchange the civilian population were doomed.

    That was how it was understood in New Zealand. Not so much from direct strokes as from nuclear winter and post-apocalypse fuckits trying to run away from the consequences. Basically "On The Beach" with a bit of "Tomorrow, when the war began".

    And then when I was growing up France bombed us and the US got very threatening indeed, neither of which helped convince me that the "good side" in the cold war had merit.

    So the IAF played paintball with the dam

    Speaking of "very, very slightly less evil than the other guy" behaviour.

    1005:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/newzealand/comments/10m1lvh/boris_johnson_at_wellington_zoo/

    A headline like "Boris Johnson at the Wellington Zoo" had me expecting some stupid-looking animal with unruly blond hair and while that true it turns out to be a homo sapiens rather than anything interesting.

    1006:

    I think everyone knew that anyway. That stuff did try and pop up a couple of times, but everyone just took the piss.

    And not every school kid in the US ever did such a drill or was even told about it. Maybe less than half. Maybe way less. But the old films do make for good fear mongering, err, story telling.

    Born in 54. Grade school from 60 to 66. No drills. Not even during the Cuban dust up. But we did get predicted targeting maps and expected fallout patterns based on the wind. We were a second or third level target. But being within a few 100 miles of SAC bomber and missle bases to the west and a major military base 2 hours to the south, well it would not have been a nice place even without a near by strike.

    And I still have the transistor radio my dad bought at the time. $20 or $30 in 1962. Still works. Or did last I tried it. Maybe 10cm wide x 3 cm thick x 4 or 5 cm tall.

    1007:

    As brown rice is in its natural state and white rice has been processed to remove the husk, this is a perverse artifact of the food retail supply chain rather than a law of nature.

    The cheaper price comes from volumes of scale, not processing costs.

    1008:

    JReynolds
    THIS is the Red Ensign - OK?

    EC
    And if "the South" does not want the economic basket-case of NI?

    Charlie @ 1004
    Same as pure salt is more expensive than salt-with-addatives, right?
    I know because pure salt is used in preserving veg, but salt-with-addatives isn't - it makes everything go brown - & doesn't taste as nice, either.

    1009:

    In Australia like-for-like white rice is roughly the same price or the brown is cheaper. I suspect because rice bran has a non-zero value as well as the lower processing costs. But a lot of places only sell one or the other in any given variety (brown rice is a health food product while rice rice is a staple - the local grocers here generally have at least five types of white rice and if you're lucky there's a few 1kg bags of brown rice hidden somewhere. The supermarkets have both, but often it's Australian medium grain rice, brown or white and then if you're lucky white jasmine plus they all have "added value" parboiled rice in 27 fun flavours and mixes (including "mexican" which I assume is a shits'n'giggles approach).

    1010:

    A propos of nothing .... Do we hope that this actually comes to trial? - the popcorn-sales could be immense!

    1011:

    I grew up in the heart of the Canadian oilfield, and (I discovered in my teens) about 4 km from the Operations Center of NORAD, which would certainly have been a primary target. As such I assumed I would be dust in a nuclear exchange, and as a young person lost a fair amount of sleep over it.

    1012:

    As brown rice is in its natural state and white rice has been processed to remove the husk, this is a perverse artifact of the food retail supply chain rather than a law of nature.

    No argument, but the result of the law would be less food. And less healthy food, looking at what the restrictions would be.

    1013:

    THIS is the Red Ensign - OK?

    So's the one he posted, which over here is called "the Red Ensign", not "the Canadian Red Ensign".

    https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/former-canadian-flag-the-red-ensign-gets-new-darker-life-as-far-right-symbol

    1014:

    I assumed I would be dust in a nuclear exchange, and as a young person lost a fair amount of sleep over it.

    I didn't lose sleep, just assumed that I probably wouldn't see 30. Saskatoon was a tertiary target, so I also took note of where there was something high to jump from if the blast didn't get me immediately.

    1015:

    As brown rice is in its natural state and white rice has been processed to remove the husk, this is a perverse artifact of the food retail supply chain rather than a law of nature.

    Can't resist, because there's some interesting stuff here.

    Yes, brown rice is more expensive, "harder to cook" (meaning it takes longer) and "less tasty" (according to a couple of nieces and nephews who don't like us eating brown rice.

    The reason for all this is of course that the bran has been removed. The bran has most of the non-starch nutrients, most notoriously thiamine, and it has a distinct flavor.

    Why remove the bran? White rice, which is predominantly starch, keeps a lot longer than brown rice. Thus, it was used for long-distance shipping and to pay taxes to local ruler, who then fed their palaces and armies with the rice they taxed from their peasants. The people in the palaces mostly got to eat stuff other than rice. As for the rest....

    Originally, beriberi (thiamine deficiency) was a problem in situations where people were stuck eating little but white rice--foot soldiers, enlisted sailors, people stuck with food shortages, that sort of thing.

    Anyway, brown rice is more expensive in part because there's less of a market for it, but also because it doesn't keep as long.

    1016:

    Brown rice keeps for a couple of years in an oxygen-free environment, which these days should be easy enough to manage if you need to. Down here harvest is in late summer which also means that when I buy it in midsummer what I'm getting has been stored in air for 6-9 months. But I've also bought brown rice in early winter that was clearly labelled as being a year and a bit old. So I'm not sure what changed, or what the original story was, but it doesn't seem to be "brown rice only keeps for a few months".

    Unless the change is in the way we separate the rice or how much of it we strip off, it seems to me that they could easily have said "white rice is famine food, brown rice is day to day food".

    Plus the number of things that can go wrong in grain sheds or even silos is longer and much more interesting than "the oil goes rancid".

    1017:

    1010 - In the UK "Mexican rice" has token quantities of tomato, capsicum, veg oil and black beans added; it can just about be made into a palitable starch/carbs for a meal by adding 1 tsp dried chilli flakes to 250g rice mix and stir-frying.

    1012 - Can't think why; as up-thread lots of the UK assumed similarly and just ignored this beyond "If happens, we'll all glow together ;-)"

    1018:

    I've never actually tried it. I only really use parboiled rice when I'm camping, and generally only for breakfast (rice+milk+sugar+heat, sometimes +dried fruit). I keep looking at the exciting flavours and wondering whether I could get away with just eating rice. I should buy some just in case it's not awful.

    OTOH most of where I ride has enough shops that rice noodles + cheap veggies + the occasional roadkill or fish and chip stop does me just fine. When it doesn't I substitute dried veggies, and if there's no roadkill (ie, I'm not in Australia) I'll use TVP or something.

    1019:

    You can get away with eating only rice for awhile, although the problems with various nutrient deficiencies will get you in trouble eventually.

    The big problem with eating mostly rice is you'll need to eat a lot of it, same as if you were eating John Muir's diet of potatoes and milk. You'll also need some salt and some veggies or at least chili peppers. This is the classic Asian rice and pickles meal. Note that I'm not recommending it for long durations, merely mentioning it. We eat a fair amount of rice in our house. Rice, beans, salsa, and veggies is much better for long term diets, as is nixtamalized corn, beans, and squash.

    For those who are diabetic, a mix of brown rice and barley seems to have the lowest glycemic index.

    1020:

    And if "the South" does not want the economic basket-case of NI?

    While my experience is VERY limited. When the topic has come up people from the south are expecting the island to be unified. Just not sure when it will happen.

    1021:

    for cheap-healthy-fast meal for one... tin of sardines ($1.00) and 4 oz of wheat spaghetti ($0.30) and half bottle of pasta sauce ($0.75)...

    nice extras to boil in the water with spaghetti: onions (unless you in Philippines where prime cut steak is currently cheaper), minced garlic, green peppers, spices to tongue's preference, etc

    calories = 191 + 760 + 50 = approx 1000

    protein = 22.7g + 28g + 0g = approx 50g

    cook spaghetti as per box... drain off cook water into another pot to be exploited as basis of veggie broth made from over boiling scraps 'n skins (if you are ambitious)... mash sardines whilst dribbling in pasta sauce... mix together... eat... reheat... eat...

    makes for two large portions

    still need fresh fruit and veggies... but when as today I'm dragging downwards from low level maybe-long-covid and certainly depression it is about all I can handle in complexity

    note all items are long shelf livespan... bought only when on sale at significant discount to typical New York City prices... example being the pasta sauce being no frills 'house brand' whenever it goes on sale (4 jars for $6.00 two months ago)

    1022:

    If capitalism is people getting paid to put capital into a venture, is labourism when people get paid to put labour in?

    1023:

    Eating well on the cheap is not difficult, but it does take some practice. I am occasionally astounded at how little some of my friends and coworkers know about how to prepare food.

    1024:

    The corollary is that any government who elected to nuke the Aswan Dam would be immediately become the worst criminals against humanity in history and relegate their nation to pariah state status for a dozen generations, or the end of civilisation, whichever came first. And that's leaving aside the possibility that, if the perp happened to be a deniable-to-medium scale nuclear power, some other nuclear power didn't consider glassing them on general principles with no consequences to them. The last possibility seems unlikely, so pariah it would be, with propagandists enjoying a massive boon on both "sides".

    1025:

    Why would one want to nuke the Aswan Dam?
    When a decent bunker-buster &/or several hydrostatic mines would do the job, but with zero radiation or fallout?

    1026:

    Still a crime against humanity, of course.

    1027:

    tl;dr If one perceives their enemy credibly threatens to exterminate one's nation, then the mass murder of their population centers and infrastructure shifts from unthinkable (war) crime against humanity to "justifiable" vengeance.

    Nothing about that matches what I would consider to be moral, ethical, or legal.

    Unfortunately, the context of an "existential war" tends to erode/deprecate concerns with morality, humanity, and posterity.

    The decision makers may have feared that losing the war could have resulted in (another) genocidal campaign of extermination, where they would be "pushed into the sea" and slain by their surrounding opponents.

    The assumption of an existential conflict makes escalation a less unreasonable (though horrifying) course of action.

    If one believes that everyone whom one cares about will be killed after losing a conventional war, then nuclear escalation might appear less monstrous (Note: it still is monstrous).

    As a small nuclear-armed state, they may have chosen to take their presumed killers with them. With no concern for the loved ones of armies allegedly poised to wipe out the loser's civilian population.

    Their thought process might parallel a Babylon 5 character's quote: "Then I die. But I will not go down easy and I will not go down alone." This quote was followed up by that character dropping a large nuke on his current location when trapped among his enemies.

    Also, if the population of one's country faces extermination, one might not care about the future reputation of their soon to be dead state, and poisoning the lands of those who slew them becomes a feature, not a bug.

    Again, that would be a monstrous act, but logical from a certain (inhumane but all too human) perspective.

    1028:

    Certainly a gamble with existential forces though. I'm not sure any state could survive after murdering 100 million people in an afternoon. If it were Israel that did it, it would instantly mainstream antisemitism to the detriment of innocent jews the world over. The chance that one of the nuclear powers would flatten Israel unilaterally is very small but not negligible. But those things notwithstanding, I'm not sure any state could survive the inevitable isolation. So really doing this could be seen as a kind of state-level suicide, therefore not logical from any perspective that takes reasonable reactions into account. People who say things like "I didn't realise I had to worry about feelings" are incompetent.

    1029:

    As war plans go, it was part of the "Samson option" -- what Israel would do if it was on the receiving end of a nuclear attack or comprehensive invasion and liquidation on the ground (by enemies who, at that time, were talking in terms of exterminating the Jewish population).

    Yes, it'd have been a war crime. But if it ever happened there'd be no perpetrators left alive to prosecute -- they'd already be dead.

    Israel is so geographically compact that all it would take is a couple of 1Mt bombs and everybody is dead or dying. (Including Gaza and the West Bank.)

    Egypt is a lot larger, but Nasser and his heirs' grandiose piece of hydraulic engineering -- intended to end the annual inundation of agricultural lands by the Nile, not just to provide electricity -- became a single point of strategic failure for the entire nation in event of a nuclear war.

    And in the 1960s/70s when these plans were being laid, everyone knew that the future of warfare was nuclear. (See also the history of the Iraqi and Iranian nuclear weapons programs, the Israeli and South African nuclear weapons programs, etc ...)

    1030:

    "Blind Samson" was a deliberate labeling, a reminder of what happened to a hero betrayed and what he did on his last day alive...

    MAD (mutually assured destruction) was not a Jewish notion, nor was it incorporated into Soviet policy... rather it was purely American in origin and widely disseminated in order to get everyone familiar with it, discussing it, and therefore several steps closer to acceptance (and thus indifference) of MAD... and for decades (1945 to 1992) there was lots of sabres rattled and at least a dozen almost-launches (lots 'n lots of rumors about seniormost officials suddenly dying of heart attacks in both Washington & Moscow)...

    ...but no WW III...

    speaking as a Jew there is one question I would ask all you morally pure folk who insist that an Israeli version of MAD is wrong...

    which of your grandmothers ended up as a bar of soap?

    no argument that land titles in the Middle East are a snarled tangle of who owned it last, who owns it now... with too many kings-warlords-clergy selling off lands they really never owned...

    acreage bought for cash from the 1880s onwards is now being reclaimed by Arabs because it is no longer sand but productive farms... towns... cities... there are roads, housing, factories, schools, sewer processing, water pipes, electrical-telephone-data cabling all installed by Israelis... thus habitable and profitable to own... hence efforts to demand it back...

    territories conquered in various wars (1947-2023) has been held as both buffer zones and punitive punishment for invading...

    counter attacks by IDF are always asymmetrical ("every time you punch me, I seek to cut off your fist") to deter further sneak attacks on unarmed civilian targets... such as this week's latest round of brutal cruelties... "Palestinian militants fire rockets, Israel responded with missile strikes"

    Israeli policy boils down to one non-negotiable demand ==> stop killing Israeli civilians

    which is upsetting to all you moral folk who support Palestinians by expecting Jews to just die quietly...

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/27/concerns-over-escalating-violence-after-israeli-forces-kill-nine-palestinians-during-west-bank-raid

    1031:

    Greg is not great on checking things up. The current scenario is probably as I described.

    https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2022/12/03/poll-shows-northern-ireland-rejects-unity-by-large-margin/

    There isn't the same recipe for the Troubles that there was in 1969, but it is important to remember that it two only 2 years to go from the first conflict to carnage. What's more, the mechanisms used to keep the 'Irish Americans' under control have almost certainly been disbanded, and they were where the money and armaments came from.

    The Northern Ireland Act makes it clear that a majority in the north is what matters, but would Sinn Fein accept that if there were overwhelming support for unity in the south?

    1032:

    What's more, the mechanisms used to keep the 'Irish Americans' under control have almost certainly been disbanded

    A particularly scary angle is that thanks to the tireless activities of the NRA, weapons compatible with NATO-spec assault rifles are ubiquitous and relatively cheap for civilians to purchase in certain states with direct access to the sea (hint: transport). Yes, machining a receiver capable of full auto fire is mostly illegal in the USA; but it's also entirely possible. NI has a long, crinkle-cut coastline, yachts and fishing boats able to cross the Atlantic are A Thing, various former paramilitaries went into organized crime and cross-border smuggling (Brexit didn't exactly help with that), and we know damn well that certain meddler (Mr. Putin's KGB munchkins spring to mind) with sufficiently deep pockets would love to tie up the British Army in an armed insurgency at home.

    If the Troubles were somehow restarted this decade -- I don't believe there's a public appetite for it, but things can snowball fast once the tit-for-tat atrocities get started -- I would expect large numbers of US-sourced AR-15s and ammo to show up on the streets of Belfast within weeks. And absolute fucking carnage would potentially ensue.

    1033:

    for those looking for a new reason to day drink... the earth's core is getting wonky... might have stopped turning properly...

    https://lite.cnn.com/2023/01/26/opinions/earth-core-slowing-down-science-lincoln

    but fear not there's a fix...

    ...Hollywood to the rescue

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Core

    (ideal fodder for a MST3K shredding if everyone can agree upon a time slot for all of us to simiu-watch-and-snark-post)

    1034:

    Yes, though full automatic is less useful than it is often believed to be (see Che Guevara: Guerilla Warfare). It's really only useful in battlefield conditions and when slaughtering large numbers of (unarmed) people in a crowd. I agree that I don't think that things will go pear-shaped this decade, but that's assuming a modicum of sanity on behalf of Sinn Fein and HMG.

    Yes, of course, agents of countries we are waging war on might try to stick their finger in, but I don't see them as being important. They have been blamed for many things in my lifetime, from colonial unrest onwards, but the evidence has all been that they have had little to no effect. Putin is our current Emmanuel Goldstein - you may remember some previous incarnations, including Gadaafi. People are far too fond of scapegoats.

    1035:

    "Yes, of course, agents of countries we are waging war on might try to stick their finger in, but I don't see them as being important. They have been blamed for many things in my lifetime, from colonial unrest onwards, but the evidence has all been that they have had little to no effect. Putin is our current Emmanuel Goldstein - you may remember some previous incarnations, including Gadaafi. People are far too fond of scapegoats."

    The IRA had access to Semtex (Czeck plastic explosive). They got it from somewhere.

    1036:

    1025, 1026 - Who is going to believe that Israel actually had at least one aeroplane that could carry a 10 thousand kg conventional bomb and drop it with reasonable accuracy? The cited Douglas A-4 (Probably an E variant in this case) has a take-off weight of 11_100 kg. and was designed as a light attack/tactical nuclear strike machine.
    Even using the McD D F4-E, peak takeoff weight is only 28_030 kg and I don't think they have the capacity to load out a 10 tonne store under fuselage.

    1037:

    I was primarily refering to the first few years (up to 1972), when the USA was the dominant supplier. I can't remember when the PIRA / Sinn Fein was classified as a terrorist organisation by the USA, but it was later than most people think.

    Semtex was exported to a great many countries, who then sold it on, just like any other dual-use product. Itr was a part of the later phase, and was mostly obtained from Libya, who sold it to the IRA because the UK had been actively supporting USA terrorism against Libya (Tripoli and Benghazi 1986). But, while Libya was a significant source of armaments, it always was secondary to the USA and never was of money.

    1038:

    Israel had F4 Phantoms back then. Also, 10,000kg is one heavy nuke -- the first generation US implosion bombs (Fat Man design) were on the order of 4,600kg, and within 15 years they had the W54 warhead, which weighed around 25Kg. (No, that's not a typo.)

    It's almost inconceivable that by 1972 the Israeli nuclear weapons program wouldn't have had either a compact implosion device or a U235 gun-type device that was considerably lighter than Tall Boy -- something on the scale of the UK's WE.177 free-fall H-bomb (which weighed under 300kg and entered service in 1966).

    1039:

    "It already does, in its href."

    Please forgive my cluelessness in such matters, but how does one view the href?

    1040:

    Please forgive my cluelessness in such matters, but how does one view the href?

    The 'this comment from XX' part of the 'YY replied to this comment from XX' is a HTTP link. You can click that to see the comment that is being replied to. The 'href' is the link portion, and I think most modern (desktop) browsers show where the link is pointing before you click it.

    My Chrome on Windows shows the link at the bottom of its window when I hover my mouse cursor over it.

    That's the thing - you can see which comment it was (although not the number) and click the link to see it. I often open it in a new tab (for me, right-click on the mouse and select 'open in a new tab', but there are many ways of doing it on most browsers.

    1041:

    Yep. ALL less processed food, because it's not stamped out like laundry detergent, they charge more for (see Whole Foods == Whole Paycheck as an example).

    1042:

    I am reminded of a story from the early seventies in Philly, about a couple who were seriously into macrobiotics. They were on the #7 diet (brown rice and water, and yes, really). They were happy, and then she got pregnant, and they were happier, until she collapsed one day. Taken to the doctor, he asked what the hell she had not been eating, shot her up with a horse needle of iron, and told her to eat a can of spinach a day, including the can (ok, I'm exaggerating but...)

    1043:

    Yep. ALL less processed food, because it's not stamped out like laundry detergent, they charge more for (see Whole Foods == Whole Paycheck as an example).

    Funny thing about Whole Foods is that in many ways, the food's cheaper than at Vons (the big local chain).

    Cheaper in this case means:

    --Organic produce from WF lasts longer than the equivalent stuff from Vons, and often from the local farmer's market. It's also noticeably cheaper.

    --House brand WF products (their 365 logo) are generally cheaper than their equivalents from Vons. This is especially true of organics.

    --If you want products without added salt or sugar (I know, a niche area), they're often only available at WF, and at equivalent cost to the doped versions.

    BigMuddy's been messing with this a bit since they bought up WF, but it's still generally true.

    Now I quite agree that if you don't choose carefully, you can blow a lot of money at WF. But if you focus on produce, store-brand, and stuff you can't get anywhere else, it's actually worth shopping there if you can afford it at all. Vons and other stores oddly can be both more expensive and lower quality.

    1044:

    About Finland and NATO:

    https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nordic-nato-membership-sweden-turkey-spat-means-finland-might-take-unilateral-route-a-24fa8c22-d8d4-4b61-9c1d-220f98ceedfc

    Sweden-Turkey Spat Means Finland Might Take Unilateral Route
    By Anna-Sophie Schneider
    24.01.2023, 16.40 Uhr

    After a right-wing extremist burned a copy of the Koran in Stockholm over the weekend, Ankara is even less likely to approve Sweden's NATO bid anytime soon. Finland has said it might have to move ahead on its own.

    1045:

    This was reported on Quora today.

    Swedish media suggest that Moscow was behind the protest aiming to sabotage Sweden's NATO membership bid - Swedish journalist Chang Frick, affiliated with Russian propagandist channel RT, paid for Danish far-right activist Rasmus Paludan to publicly burn the Quran near the Turkish embassy in Sweden.

    1046:

    I'm not sure I followed that. You seemed to be suggesting that if an Israeli government launched a Samson Strike in response to an attempt to the destruction of their country, then the surviving general population would be considered guilty of a war crime.

    Isn't that like holding all Saudis responsible for 911 or all Muslims in the UK for the July 2005 bombings or all Russians for the destruction in Ukraine or all Germans for WWII or all the British for Dresden?

    Isn't that exactly the sort of thing we have been taught is seriously wrong?

    I recall seeing an article regarding someone in the Taiwan military suggesting they had some plan in place to hurt the mainland economy if the PRC invaded. They were not going quietly. The Three Gorges Dam is only a third the capacity of the Aswan, but it powers a lot of that region...

    1047:

    Administrative notice:

    RED CARD

    I have just unpublished about 25 comments relating to Israel, the Palestinian killings, the Samson option, and similar shite that does not belong on this blog.

    If you continue posting it I will ban you as well as unpublishing your comments.

    THIS FLAME WAR STOPS RIGHT NOW.

    1048:

    Mike Collins @ 1046
    Given the - previously noted - tendency of Putin to "meddle" - I find that all too easily believable { Even if it isn't true! }

    1049:

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-01-27/radioactive-capsule-lost-in-wa-emergency-public-health-warning/101901472

    There's some serious WTF here, from "an area of 1400 kilometres" to it only becoming news two weeks after it got lost. The capsule is tiny – 6mm diameter by 8mm high. so you're only going to find it with a radiation detector, and after two weeks you'd have to assume they've driven up and down that road multiple times with detectors.

    1050:

    onto less fraught topics...

    anyone looking for a free web-based game that's zero reflex dependent and good for exercising you brain might I recommend

    https://www.brainzilla.com/logic/logic-equations/

    whereas this one is just utterly a joy of eating everything you come across without gaining a single calorie...

    https://poki.com/en/g/hole-io#

    Q: does anyone have a favorite they're willing to share?

    1051:

    The report is very coy on what the lost source actually is but with a reported half-life of around 30 years I'd think it was Sr-90. The other type of source used in engineering uses Co-60 which has a five-year half-life and is mainly a gamma emitter. I am surprised the individual pellet was that small though, radioactive sources are usually encapsulated in larger sealed packages emblazoned with the rather scary instruction -- "Drop and Run".

    The Fukushima radiation monitors used aircraft and helicopters to map fallout from the damaged reactors over a large area. I don't know if similar detectors could be used to try and find this needle in a haystack.

    1052:

    "The 'this comment from XX' part of the 'YY replied to this comment from XX' is a HTTP link. You can click that to see the comment that is being replied to."

    Thank you, that's very helpful.

    1053:

    I think we're still at the news-suppression stage of the cycle, the mining company and their subsidiary that runs WA are currently trying to keep everything quiet while the solve the problem. This leak was inevitable but not desirable from their PoV.

    Likely the fear is that someone has picked it up (intentionally or otherwise) and it's now rattling around the front of their car irradiating anyone who sits there. Trouble is that that vehicle could be anywhere in Australia by now - there's not much on that road so anyone on it is probably going somewhere a long way away (just pointing it out for people in countries where 1400km is a long way)

    1054:

    *https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-01-27/radioactive-capsule-lost-in-wa-emergency-public-health-warning/101901472*

    Holy radioactive emus Batman!

    I like the advice to simultaneously stay five meters from something the size of a fingernail, while simultaneously carefully checking tire treads, just in case.

    1055:

    I'm sure that if you look at the capsule really, really closely it has printed on it in 2 point text "do not eat"

    1056:

    In the middle of an article about a "Dignity Index" to rate public discourse on how polite and respectful it is (not).

    the need to teach adults the skills we have learned to teach kids — how to manage anger, how to show empathy, how to collaborate.

    Pointing out the problem: n the United States, support for partisan violence is now approaching levels recorded in Northern Ireland at the height of its troubles. Threats against members of Congress have increased tenfold in just the past five years. The country has entered a state that experts call stochastic terrorism, according to Rachel Kleinfeld, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. That means there is so much vitriol and fear in the air that it is highly predictable that someone, somewhere will violently attack a target of that hatred.

    Note that this is subtly different from, but also as well as, the background noise of everyday murders and maimings that are the price of freedom and democracy (but only in the USA). It both pleases and frightens me that a common response to violent language here is "don't talk like that, this isn't America".

    https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/01/20/tami-pyfer-dignify-politics-00078409

    On that note, Second Thought on utube talks about "Why is American Patriotism so Weird"

    1057:

    When we lived in Silicon Valley we found much the same thing - people complaining about “whole paycheque foods” but in fact we spent less money and ate better by shopping there for almost everything. Not cornflakes, or OJ, or toilet paper, stuff like that, but veg, fruit, meat, cheese... way better quality for noticeably less. I guess it may not be the same now, twenty years later, but going shopping on a Saturday lunchtime could usually involve enough free samples to count as a good lunch. Chat with the staff about what you like and they’d grab things, open packages to proffer alternatives to taste, Hell, they even found actual good locally produced chocolate.

    And stay away from Sr90. I was born with fairly serious Sr90 poisoning. Finger and toe nails that were... strange. Blood issues similar to haemophilia. Mutant powers that still puzzle my handlers.

    1058:

    If I recall my Greco-Roman mythology correctly the rapey version of the Medusa tale was mostly the invention of Ovid, when after being exiled by Augustus he started depicting all authorities such as gods and heros as malicious and capricious. The versions by earlier poets were less problematic.

    1059:

    I just enjoyed an open-source dungeon-crawl called "Flare." (Be sure you finish all the side-quests!)

    1060:

    I suppose one of those was mine. I interact daily with a friend and classmate from primary school in Sydney who now lives in the occupied territories or the new settlements or whatever you want to call it and who has just lately been made a Rabbi. He used to look like Harpo Marx, but these days mostly wears a hat. He's taught musical theatre in high schools for decades. Look mostly he and I talk about Wordle, but in any case I might excuse myself and lurk a while.

    1061:

    Troutwaxer:

    link please

    my brain needs junk food content to displace the urge towards [REDACTED TOPIC] flame wars

    1062:

    Well you'll like this. (I think it is based on US markets.) Half of the smart appliances sold are never connected to the Internet. And many of those that do connect drop off very quickly.

    No doubt.

    Apropos of nothing in particular, did you see the "Would you like a new TV?" Scandinavia and the World strip?

    But I'm sure large corporations and intelligence agencies never think of guarding against people taking the single most obvious precaution, right?

    1063:

    my brain needs junk food content to displace the urge towards [REDACTED TOPIC] flame wars

    yeah we gotta stop giving charlie reasons to shut the blog down really, plus what must qntm think

    i think it's here: https://flarerpg.org/download/

    1064:

    from The Economist: "Airfinity, a London-based data firm, estimates that around 9,000 people are probably dying of covid in China every day."

    yes, the population is 1.412B but still that's staggering... what makes it relevant to this particular blog is how government packages policy and oft times only allows distribution of favorable data sets in support of officials taking their victory lap... "austerity" in UK... "LGBT/WOKE" suppression in US...

    ...and projecting those trends (and temptations) in governmental regulation-oversight-suppression-encouragement to whatever is the next 'big thing' in ultra cool "FutureTech™"...

    such as the not-quite-beaten-enough chestnut of human downloads into forklifts

    1065:

    Moz
    And, as far as I can see. all of that violence or threats of violence are coming from one side only, same as in 1856-61.
    The "libs" are being constantly attacked & dehumanised by the, let's face it, fascists on the white-right. And, as Charlie noted in another (NI) context, the amount of armament around is really scary

    1066:

    I remember a sketch on Radio 4 from the 80s about a couple of ok-yah types complaining about their treatment after being arrested on some protest and locked up. They had (of course) been fed the same standard bang-up diet as everyone else, ie. entirely bog-standard food items like sausages and things with sugar and salt in "and would you believe it, white bread?"

    1067:

    May contain nuts. Do not puncture or incinerate even when empty. For nutritional information see main packaging. Use gentle in-out motion.

    1068:

    Howard --

    If you like city-building games with modest amount of (turn-based) fighting and no micromanagement, I very much enjoy "Forge of the Empires". It is browser based, so no installation necessary. Also available on mobile devices, but I prefer the browser by far.

    1069:

    Yes, that's it. There is also a small but pretty good modding community for the software, so you can load those too. (The Flare software is actually meant as a D&D-type game engine.)

    BTW, Hasbro pretty-much surrendered yesterday. I was very pleased.

    1070:

    How is Forge of Empires on advertising and general intrusiveness?

    1071:

    If anyone wants, I've got a generalized alt-history question

    The Revolutions of 1848 and other happenings (start at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848 if you're as clueless as I am)

    1848 was the height of the Irish Potato Famine, the start of the California Gold Rush, the year Das Kapital was published, and the start of Europe's Arab Spring "Springtime of Nations." Like the Arab Spring, there were a bunch of populist/socialist/Republican revolts that mostly failed, but which laid the groundwork for multiple European diasporas which massively reshaped the US (and probably Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Australia...)

    My questions if anyone wants to chew on them are:

    A) is there any way the Springtime could have been more successful in left-wing/progressive terms? Were there key events that would have caused things to go very differently, or was there a need for organization and armaments that the rebels lacked?

    To pick one offbeat example, is there any possibility of a "Papal Republic of Italy" with the pope and catholicism mirroring the English Crown and the Church of England?

    B) Assuming revolutions could have succeeded, what would have been the downstream consequences?

    C) Which Harry Turtledove books cover this...?

    1072:

    Referring back ... It would seem that an arrogant, neckless Gammon still wants to go to court
    I wonder if, as usual with Gammons, it's all bully & bluster, or is he stupid enough to go through with it?
    Hint: I hope Half-cock tells said Gammon to get stuffed.

    1073:

    RE: Whole Foods.

    WF is a bit different under Amazon, but not necessarily in a much worse way. IIRC, they got in trouble initially with logistics and overexpansion, so Amazon buying them out isn't as stupid as it sounds.

    What happened next was Amazon tried to introduce their stuff into WF markets (stands selling Kindles, for instance). That didn't work. Most of the overtly Amazonian things have faded into the background in the WF stores, and the biggest one is that package pickup system against a wall.

    What has changed in WF is that there's somewhat less selection and product shortages are more common. Some of this I think is Amazon rationalizing WF's supply chains, most of it is probably the pandemic and the extinction crisis. The thing that makes me a bit more sad is that the employees seem to be more stressed and less informed, which is predictable given Amazon's known corporate culture, but sad nonetheless.

    I really should go into the "Amazon Fresh" grocery store nearby. Apparently it's clean, high end, and no one goes there. If this experiment fails, it may well be that WF remains as the grocery division of Amazon and they stay somewhat independent otherwise.

    1074:

    One thing changed after the Amazon takeover of Wholefoods:

    WF pulled out of the UK.

    (We used to have a branch in Glasgow; there was at least one more in London. But HQ pulled the plug on the UK well before Brexit, and they're not visible in the EU IIRC. Which is a bit sad because provisions of organic groceries and the sort of stuff WF sell is lamentably bad in the UK -- you've got whatever range the supermarket chain of your choice sells, and that's about it. Actual wholefoods/organic shops in the UK generally have a feel that an American acquaintance of mine cruelly but accurately characterised as "that late 1970s Moscow shopping experience".

    1075:

    "RE: Whole Foods"

    Yes, I don't Wholly Hate on Whole Foods. We shop now and then at the local one and the nearby(*) Trader Joes and find that, with a bit of prudence, they can give good value for the money. Not worse and often better than the Big Chain supermarkets in the area. Stick to the basics and look for deals.

    (*) The two-point correlation function between the locations of WF and TJ markets is highly peaked around two or three blocks separation.

    1076:

    Not Harry Turtledove, but Howard Waldrop's A Better World's in Birth! (collected in Other Worlds, Better Lives) has German unification happening in 1848.

    The hammer and sickle instead of the swastika behind the politician gives you an idea how the revolution proceeded.

    1077:

    H @ 1072
    Um, err ... 1848 was a widespread famine across the whole of Europe, actually.
    That was what drove the failed revolutions.
    Even in England, the least-affected nation, some people starved to death.
    As for a "Papal Republic" - forget it.
    Even by the standards of the time, the RC church was utterly reactionary & backward-looking, which says a lot.

    1078:

    I hadn’t heard that WF had tried UK adventures.

    They’re not here on Vancouver island (at least, not in my area) but we have tiny local chain called Naked Naturals that has a flavour of the idea. Of course, they are under pressure from the billionaire owner of the bigger local ‘normal’ supermarket operation and the local council are oddly unsupportive of hopes of expanding.

    1079:

    Re the Springtime Of Nations, and off the top of my head:

    The course of North American history would change at least as far as the nationalities and probably the numbers of the migrants. So, probably no Amish? Sutter's Gold Rush is 1849; that would drag a lot of people in, but numbers trailing off if the European Springtime gave some sort of sense of a future worth staying around for. More of California might be Mexican. Reduced migration might mean the USA wouldn't have the economic heft to become dominant as early or as strongly as it did.

    Given a more socially liberal Europe, the history of the slave trade would probably be shorter?

    In Latin American, Gran Colombia might be the dominant state.

    Spain might be a bigger player, with a more eastern bias, than in our timeline, depending on the Philippines' history.

    I do see the possibility of a Papal Republic. Our timeline has a failed Italian attempt to secede from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1848; if that had succeeded, then popular opinion might force the Vatican into moderating its position. I'd see a steady move back rightward in the next fifty years, though.

    1080:

    Re the Springtime Of Nations, and off the top of my head:

    The course of North American history would change at least as far as the nationalities and probably the numbers of the migrants. So, probably no Amish? Sutter's Gold Rush is 1849; that would drag a lot of people in, but numbers trailing off if the European Springtime gave some sort of sense of a future worth staying around for. More of California might be Mexican. Reduced migration might mean the USA wouldn't have the economic heft to become dominant as early or as strongly as it did.

    Given a more socially liberal Europe, the history of the slave trade would probably be shorter?

    In Latin American, Gran Colombia might be the dominant state.

    Spain might be a bigger player, with a more eastern bias, than in our timeline, depending on the Philippines' history.

    I do see the possibility of a Papal Republic. Our timeline has a failed Italian attempt to secede from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1848; if that had succeeded, then popular opinion might force the Vatican into moderating its position. I'd see a steady move back rightward in the next fifty years, though.

    1081:

    How is Forge of Empires on advertising and general intrusiveness?

    On the mobile app, pretty annoying. Browser version, not at all.

    1082:

    About the late 1840s European potato failures... Yeah, I know. I figured if I led off with that, someone would tell me it was only Ireland.

    Anyway, Ireland got the worst of it (e.g., second table in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Potato_Failure ) with actual population declines from 1845-1860. Of all the other countries affected, only the Netherlands showed a population decline, and then only in 1847-1848.

    As for the Papal Republic of Italy, apparently that was an actual proposal to Pius IX, that in return for him supporting a revolution to throw out the Austrians, he'd get to be the figurehead of a (more) unified Italian Republic. Pius turned the offer down, and the revolution fizzled soon thereafter, purportedly setting the tone for the rest of 1848.

    I know nothing of this history, but my ignorance-based guess is that Pius IX predicted accurately that the rebels had no chance and refused to get involved with them. I'm guessing that the continuing political upheaval thereafter led to some part of Italian emigration to places like New York.

    The part of me that likes alt-history is amused by the thought of the Vatican reduced to something comparable to the House of Windsor, with the Pope as a religious leader and political figurehead of something resembling a democracy. As a setting for a more progressive Age of Empires, it as a certain offbeat appeal.

    1083:

    For people with storage space, you can get a lot online. Arjuna in Cambridge used to be very good, and probably still is, but it's not feasible for us to shop there any longer.

    1084:

    Here's another thought: by 1848 Karl Marx was already getting deeply involved in organizing the Communist League (although it was nothing like the thing Lenin made of it more than half a century later: most of Europe's social democratic parties have as solid a claim to be descended from it as the Chinese Communist Party, if not more). He kinda-sorta drifted to the UK in 1845, but mostly seemed at home in Belgium after being kicked out of Prussia (the King of Prussia did not approve of this populist anti-clericalist labour movement organizer).

    If the revolutions stuck in 1848 there's a good chance that Marx would have returned to Prussia. And might well have gotten actively involved in the politics of the post-revolutionary republic, rather than brooding in the British Library and writing the book he's most famous for.

    1085:

    JReynolds @ 992:

    Chemical weapons just aren't any good. Or at least, you get more bang for your buck using conventional weapons. Conditions have to be right to use chemical weapons, and countermeasures are too easy and effective.

    I spent 30 of my 32 years in the Army as a NBC Operations specialist. I don't know who told you "countermeasures are too easy and effective", but that's NOT TRUE!

    You should try working in MOPP 4 for a day or so 1 ... preferably somewhere like Ft Hood Texas ... in August.

    Soviet doctrine from that period was to use nuclear weapons to break through at the beginning of an offensive and to use chemical weapons, particularly persistent nerve agents as area denial weapons - air bases, equipment depots, maintenance activities and ammo storage areas. Non-persistent [G-series] agents break down in a day or less; persistent[V-series] agents last longer than a day ... the Novichok ["newcomer"] agents - used against the UK in 2018 - had not been fielded while I was still in.

    1 One thing to be aware of is the Chemical Protective Overgarments provide protection from vapor or SMALL droplets for UP TO SIX HOURS. It's also effective against alpha particle contamination. You just have to brush that off.

    You can continue to use your mask, gloves & booties, but the suit has to be switched out - IF you're going to have to be working longer, you better hope the "Supply Room" isn't in the contaminated area and has an adequate supply of new "suits" on hand.

    1086:

    That is certainly a good point about Marx. Whether he would have made a big difference... Hmmm.

    1087:

    Given a more socially liberal Europe, the history of the slave trade would probably be shorter?

    This is what got me into wondering about 1848.

    The point that struck me, reading about the Civil War for my "Secret Project," was that something like 1/4 to 1/3 of Union soldiers in the Civil War were European immigrants, while very there were far fewer immigrants fighting for the Confederacy. Worse for the South, they had to put down internal immigrant rebellions in places like North Texas.

    So if there are fewer European immigrants flooding into the US in the 1840s and 1850s, the Union Army would be maybe only 2-3 times the size of the Confederacy, not four times, and the industrial productivity of the North would also be less. What does that do to the trajectory of the Civil War?

    Note that I'm not at all discounting the impacts of progressive politics, but the numbers might matter a bit.

    1088:

    Holy radioactive emus Batman!

    1089:

    Sorry, my html is rusty so I wanted to see if my tags were correct. Then I hit submit. What I intended to include was that it is reported that Hanford, WA has radioactive rabbit droppings.

    1090:

    Gran Colombia was history by 1831, so events in Europe in the late 1840s would have no effect upon it. Unless someone was able to reconstitute it (unlikely, IMO, but then I know next to nothing about those countries).

    JohnS. @1086:

    Thanks! I stand corrected.

    1091:

    1082 ref 1071 - Concur about the browser version; not tried the mobile "app".

    1092:

    Of course, part of that may just possibly be that those of us on the left aren't so stupid as to post what we're thinking.

    1093:

    Let me note that a) in the US, there are a lot of other options, in some places. Back in Austin, there was a nicer tiny chain called Sun Harvest. Whole Foods won out. Where we are now, there's one called MOMs (mom's organic market), and yes, they still have bulk dry foods.

    The only upscale I go to is Trader Joes, which I'll be doing Tuesday after Aldi, because that's where I get my espresso beans - whole, vacuum packed. The only espresso beans I've ever gotten that actually are oily on the outside. Much better than any others I've tried.

    1094:

    David L @ 1007:

    I think everyone knew that anyway. That stuff did try and pop up a couple of times, but everyone just took the piss.

    And not every school kid in the US ever did such a drill or was even told about it. Maybe less than half. Maybe way less. But the old films do make for good fear mongering, err, story telling.

    Born in 54. Grade school from 60 to 66. No drills. Not even during the Cuban dust up. But we did get predicted targeting maps and expected fallout patterns based on the wind. We were a second or third level target. But being within a few 100 miles of SAC bomber and missle bases to the west and a major military base 2 hours to the south, well it would not have been a nice place even without a near by strike.

    And I still have the transistor radio my dad bought at the time. $20 or $30 in 1962. Still works. Or did last I tried it. Maybe 10cm wide x 3 cm thick x 4 or 5 cm tall.

    I don't remember doing "duck & cover" drills in grade school (or later). I do remember the air raid sirens were tested for 3 minutes at 1:00 pm every Saturday. The school had a closet off the cafeteria storing "fallout shelter" supplies. The church I attended as a child had them too stored under the stair at the end of the building.

    Considering how few ICBMs the Soviets actually had, I think the only target in North Carolina back then would have been Seymour Johnson AFB down in Goldsboro which had B-52s at the time.

    Remembering the night two atomic bombs fell—on North Carolina

    Supposedly one of the bombs was only prevented from detonating because one of six safety interlocks "worked" so the detonation sequence couldn't be initiated - a very close call

    ... except when I was training to be an NBC Operations NCO at Ft Bragg back in the early 80s one of our instructors told us ALL of the safety interlocks failed and the Air Force DIDN'T KNOW why the bomb hadn't gone off 😕

    1095:

    Remembering the night two atomic bombs fell—on North Carolina

    And one is mostly still missing. They did get the pit and nuclear bits out but in general it was a muddy water hole constantly filling with water. The US government bought the rights to a circle around it and left the rest deep in the mud.

    1096:

    Greg Tingey @ 1073:

    Referring back ... It would seem that an arrogant, neckless Gammon still wants to go to court
    I wonder if, as usual with Gammons, it's all bully & bluster, or is he stupid enough to go through with it?
    Hint: I hope Half-cock tells said Gammon to get stuffed.

    I wonder if he'd accept an "Arkell v. Pressdram" T-shirt in lieu of?

    1097:

    A) is there any way the Springtime could have been more successful in left-wing/progressive terms?

    I've got nothing on B and C, but I'll have a go here. Chartism. It was a heck of a lot more modest than some of the progressive social movements of the time, but arguably it took off in Australia after the UK transported many of the leaders. The suppression of dissent in the UK may have been less severe than some European powers of the day, but it cracked down on Chartism pretty hard, arguably counterproductively. I'm not sure things could have been different, most of the Chartist reforms eventually happened anyway.

    1098:

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/28/board-games-climate-crisis-daybreak

    There's also board games, even cooperative ones, for those who are that way inclined.

    1099:

    Heteromeles:

    "Revolutions of 1848" were (varying degrees) successful due to (varying degrees) of coordination of suppression by the Powers That Be -- combo of government, hereditary aristocracy, seniormost military, church clergy, moneyed elites, landed elites, etc -- which worked together (varying degrees of frantic) at suppression... so ask yourself what happens if longstanding rivalries between those special interest groups prevented effective enough suppression... and not just at top tier of the political foodchain...

    there were orders issued to break heads, arrest troublesome individuals, publicly beat one or more troublemakers in town squares as example of what could be done to * everyone *... now imagine what happens if troops (and police and minor ranked bluebloods) get a bit too frisky... a single beating becomes a riot which includes looting by troops and all-too-likely rape...

    in 1840s there was telegraph but no radio so all orders issued by seniormost officers got routed through the hands of a few dozen telegraph operators... if one (or more) of these lowly men heard of their families looted and/or sisters raped... no need for active mode of sabotage just screw up troop movements by sending orders for "A" to "B"... ordinary errors occurring more oft will mess up responses...

    heck if all you had the clerks do was delay critical orders by a single hour there will be knock on effects rippling...

    with multiple clerks in varying locations pissed off at how they (and their families) were abused despite not being participants in the rebellions all too plausible the responsiveness will be weakened to the point of being too ineffective and those in rebellion will be heartened and be able to recruit more support... overt rebels plus many more (cautious) people offering bits 'n pieces of resources...

    consider how the lingering shell of the Holy Roman Empire labeled as Austo-Hungarian Empire was a motley assemblage of bits 'n pieces chained together and included a dozen distinct variants of Christianity with sprinkling of Jews and Moors and (covert) anti-religious reactionaries... if the AHE failed to fully and quickly and brutally suppress each 'n every rebellion then it would all too likely shatter 'n scatter... look at what happened to Yugoslavia in our timeline... not just there but other places... "centrifugal nationalist forces" and "ethnic identity stubbornness"...

    one itch I never scratched was writing about what might happen if French-controlled Basques could effectively ally with Spanish-controlled Basques to carve out a 'homeland' that amputated chunks of France and Spain...

    so what I would suggest as a nasty piece of revisionist history would be for Europe to fracture into a couple hundred city-states none larger than perhaps 50,000 to 150,000 population... with seaports declaring themselves "imperial cities" as many had been in the Middle Ages... with aristocrats declaring themselves as princes or kings of their country estates plus a half-dozen adjoining chunks of land to form up a backward assemblage of backwater territories each ignoring directives from central authority of national capitals and refusing to be part of any empire... what happened between 3rd century AD to 6th century AD after the fall of the Glory That Was Rome... only a whole lot worse and much, much fractured given there is lots of guns and everyone knows the 'secret recipe' for combining saltpeter plus sulfur plus charcoal into 'freedom' from whomever they deem to be tyrants...

    especially the Irish who realize nobody in London cares if they live or die so why not die on their feet rather than live on their knees? suppressing the Irish drains resources the British Empire cannot afford (sort of a homegrown version of what USSR bleeding themselves in Afghanistan in 1980s) so there's an opportunistic uprising in Scotland that's verging on successfulness... word reaches the locals chaffing under the British Raj in India who start tentatively their own series of rebellious actions...

    meanwhile... in North America... efforts to form up a centralist Canadian government based in Ottawa fail... Quebec declares itself autonomous and tears down any signage not including French... the USA dissolves into the disunited united states, with some slave some slave and some uncertain... Mexico continues its long slide into chaos... Caribbean Basin is a brutal assemblage of slave plantations nobody has time to worry about given chaos closer to their front door...

    whereas in South America there really is not much of central government and what there is pretty dies of neglect 'n humiliation of being ignored by the land gentry each declaring himself a prince upon his vast estates...

    FOR ANY ALT-HISTORY NOVEL: just consider "for want of a nail" being deliberate removal of horseshoe nails to lame horses plus wagon wheels improperly repaired plus intentional leakage of water barrels aboard warships plus short count of soldier paychests plus any of a zillion minor misdeeds which re-enforce and ripple...

    1100:

    John S @ 1097
    😁
    And ANOTHER grotty, shifty rich, arrogant tory crook has been banished to the back benches ...
    I've asked before - how long can this go on for, until there's no-one left?

    1101:

    Re: 'If you go by the talking heads in Russian media, the end goal is to resurrect the USSR -- ahem, the Russian Empire ...'

    Wondering whether Putin's new general is going to try this by still mostly relying primarily on Wagner. Also wonder how both Russia's and China's developing friendship with various African countries will factor in on both autocrats' visions of empire reconsolidation.

    I'm guessing Russia's make-friends with African nations is mostly to gain access to 'manpower*' supply given some recent media reports of Wagner people deserting. Not sure that any of the African countries have well enough developed commercially attractive tech, agriculture or energy to impact current global economics.

    Oh yeah - China and now Russia forming 'friendship bonds' with countries/cultures that have been horrifically abused by Western Europeans and Americans shouldn't be a tough PR sell to most African countries' electorates. Also wonder whether any similar indigenous NA group is large enough and fed-up enough to consider a friendship accord with Putin/Xi thereby providing them with a legit entry point into the Americas.

    *Also includes pirates!

    1102:

    "The report is very coy on what the lost source actually is but with a reported half-life of around 30 years I'd think it was Sr-90."

    The story in the NYT this morning says it's Cs-137. I assume for gamma radiography.

    1103:

    While OGH may have a less unreliable source of information, (a) all of that sort of claim I have seen has been selected by anti-Russian media (Bridgen is representative of the UK establishment, right?) and (b) almost all have been living outside Russia and hence are more likely to be anti-Putin than pro-Putin. I have never seen such claims reported in an even vaguely neutral source, and I can't check on the the official Russian line because of UK censorship.

    1104:

    Interesting that it's supposedly Cs-137, that's not a usual isotope for this sort of work. The radioactive material in the source isn't pure metal, it's an oxide or other stable chemical compound with good mechanical properties and resistance to melting or boiling in a (hopefully accidental) fire. Cesium compounds have typically quite low melting points while cobalt and strontium oxides melt at over 2000 deg C plus.

    From a cursory glance at the literature it seems that Cs-137 sources are low-emission and used in things like non-invasive fluid flow measurements rather than X-raying welds -- they don't produce a lot of gamma rays and the peak energy is low compared to Co-60 sources. The shape and size of the source given in the press reports would support that use case, part of an flow measurement instrument rather than an inspection camera source.

    If it is actually a Cs-137 source then the radioactivity threat from its loss is a lot less than if it was a Co or Sr source (in my opinion anyway).

    1105:

    At a wild guess based on my very limited biochemistry, cobalt is probably the safest, because it is least likely to be absorbed into the body. That is a more important indicator of risk than radioactivity as such.

    1106:

    SFR
    And, of course said African cointries either don't realise or are deliberately ignoring that the RU/PRC would be considerably WORSE than the old "Western" colonial powers, horrible thought that is.
    Ask a Tibetan or an Uighur or a Tatar (etc) about this, of course.

    EC
    Oh do GROW UP!
    Bridgen is representative of himself & a few similar uneducated, arrogant bullying Gammons.

    1107:

    "From a cursory glance at the literature it seems that Cs-137 sources are low-emission and used in things like non-invasive fluid flow measurements rather than X-raying welds"

    Yes, I was mistaken in assuming radiography. From the Wikipedia article on Cs-137,

    In industry, it is used in flow meters, thickness gauges, moisture-density gauges (for density readings, with americium-241/beryllium providing the moisture reading), and in gamma ray well logging devices.

    Caesium-137 is not widely used for industrial radiography because it is hard to obtain a very high specific activity material with a well defined (and small) shape...

    1108:

    Greg, really! Are you really so comprehensionally challenged that you can't recognise even obvious irony?

    1109:

    Re: 'I have never seen such claims reported in an even vaguely neutral source, and I can't check on the the official Russian line because of UK censorship.'

    The below source does not mention 'manpower' - that was entirely my own idea* tossed in and based on recent Wagner personnel issues covered in the media. BTW - a few fairly reliable Western media have reported that many, many Wagner mercenaries were recently 'recruited' in RU prisons while doing time for very serious crimes. (A 6 month stint with Wagner was quite literally their get-out-of-jail-free card.)

    Anyways ... this was the first time I've ever read anything on the below site about Russian politics. That said and given your above (as well as your previous comments re: lots of anti-RU bias in Western media), I did look up the author and a couple other names associated with this site and they looked legit, i.e., they might indeed be sufficiently competent/knowledgeable to write this stuff/offer 'learn-ed' opinions.

    https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2022/12/04/russia-africa-summit-sergey-lavrov-embarks-on-courtship-and-assessment-tour/

    *Hey - given how the past year's events have been going (incl. RU media reporting, and censorship of dissenting RU journalists), even the most ludicrous ideas might turn up as RU military options.

    1110:

    Oh, yes, THAT has been widely reported and is almost certainly true, subject to the usual distortions. It's been a standard form of recruitment when there is a shortage of volunteers since time immemorial, in many countries. And, yes, of course, Russia is trying to forge links with countries that are not yet part of the USA hegemony, just as China is; that's just standard diplomacy.

    I was referring to the claim that Russia want to recreate the Russian empire; as far as I can see, there is not a scrap of evidence for it.

    1111:

    "I was referring to the claim that Russia want to recreate the Russian empire; as far as I can see, there is not a scrap of evidence for it."

    Real question: What would constitute such evidence?

    1112:

    Re: '... a standard form of recruitment when there is a shortage of volunteers since time immemorial, in many countries.'

    Still? - Which countries?

    I did see 'The Dirty Dozen' but hope that the US military at least learned its lesson to not recruit/place any trust in socio/psychopaths like Archer J. Maggot (Telly Savalas) who BTW are a helluva lot more common in fed jails than the measly one-out-of-twelve suggested by this film.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dirty_Dozen

    Meant to ask:

    How's your Ca treatment/therapy going?

    1113:

    Cobalt is an essential trace element (vitamin B12). The have also been concerns about absorption of cobalt from artificial joint replacements.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4637398/

    1114:

    If I recall, it was done (possibly semi-officially) in the UK in WWI, possible WWII, but We searching gets just too many hits about prisoners of war. Also, remember that Russia is a backwards country compared to 'the west'.

    There aren't all that many countries that have a desperate need for recruitment, at present, because most of the conflicts around the world don't involve huge numbers of soldiers. This isn't a wholly reliable source, but I saw it reported in more reliable ones:

    https://www.dailywire.com/news/ukraine-releases-prisoners-with-combat-experience-to-fight-in-struggle-for-our-state-against-russia

    The chemotherapy worked only to some extent, it started growing again, and I am currently on immunotherapy. It's still 'some months up to a couple of years'. But I hope to get some enjoyment out of the summer, at least.

    1115:

    Exactly the same (mutis mutandis) as would constitute evidence that the USA wants to create a global empire (*). Statements from people in or close to the establishment or actions on the ground - in both cases, reported in reliable sources and not twisted by hostile propagandists.

    (*) Ignoring the facile response "We can't do that becauae we don't have an emperor."

    1116:

    Re: '... hope to get some enjoyment out of the summer, at least.'

    And your key source of enjoyment out of the summer is likely to be ... ? (aside from this blog of course :))

    1117:

    Regarding the use of Wagner Group prison troops, today's ISW assessment suggests that this was probably a stopgap to give the Russian military some breathing room to focus on force generation over the autumn/winter ahead of a renewed offensive when the weather improves and that Prigozhin misjudged his criticality to the overall Russian effort as a result; leading him to overplay his hand back in Moscow and piss off a bunch of other power players around Putin.

    Now that the Wagner forces have burned through a goodly chunk of the fifty thousand prisoners they were given and their Bakhmut operation has culminated at Soledar, Prigozhin's utility has declined and so Wagner positions are being backfilled by regular troops and Prigozhin has been given a couple of not too subtle reminders that the Boss is still the Boss and that Gerasimov, Shoigu et al also work for the Boss, so knock it off with all the shit-talking that's been making us look bad.

    1118:

    Gardening, seeing close relatives and friends, probably a trip to the Western Isles and, if I do well, a bit of triking.

    1119:

    EC @ 1109
    Given your history of being remarkably sympathetic to that nice Mr Putin { At least until 24/2/22 } ... I find it difficult, shall we say?
    ... I was referring to the claim that Russia want to recreate the Russian empire; as far as I can see, there is not a scrap of evidence for it. - Really?
    I suggest you go back through these pages, & re-read some of them - especially comments from Charlie concerning the "Mystical" RU propagandists { Like Dugin } rabbitting on, at great length, about doing exactly that ... "Grand Duchy of Finland" & re-conquering "the Baltics" etc ...
    OK?

    Oh, yes - @ 1115
    Sympathies - do what you can. Don't go down without a fight.

    1120:

    There's also board games, even cooperative ones, for those who are that way inclined.

    Lots of them. Here's a list I put together for science (including climate science games):

    http://science.robertprior.ca/science-games/index.html

    1121:

    thing about leveraging convicts to sign up for military service...

    it can be defined as a win-win-win for the government if-and-when the convict-soldier dies gloriously far from home away from soft-hearted media (and next-of-kin) in the place of a better valued soldier and offers a savings from one less convict to warehouse in prison with added plus of convict never being returned to the streets as a potential risk to law abiding civilians

    1122:

    many, many Wagner mercenaries were recently 'recruited' in RU prisons while doing time for very serious crimes

    Well, 'enlist or serve jail time' was apparently a choice offered in the Land of the Free (and still is, although the military rejects such candidates now).

    https://www.wjhg.com/2021/12/28/new-legislation-would-allow-military-service-lieu-prison-time/

    If you want men who are going to brutalize a mostly-helpless civilian population, RU prisons are probably a good place to recruit. Especially if they have permission to do what they are doing time for, as long as it's to Ukrainian civilians…

    1123:

    all orders issued by seniormost officers got routed through the hands of a few dozen telegraph operators

    Almost certainly using a military code (and/or a cypher for stuff the code book didn't cover) because military instutions have been using code books and cyphers since before Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, and they're not stupid enough to trust civilian telegraph operators.

    the Irish who realize nobody in London cares if they live or die so why not die on their feet rather than live on their knees? suppressing the Irish drains resources

    Again: you've got the Protestant nobility living in Ireland, never mind the ulstermen and the city dwellers on the coast, who are mostly not going to make common cause with the dirt-poor tenant farmers in the interior (where the roads were so poor that logistics alone militated against any kind of coordinated uprising.

    just consider "for want of a nail" being deliberate removal of horseshoe nails to lame horses

    You know, that's something occupying powers have been sensitive to ever since the year dot. It's called "sabotage" and the usual punishment used to involve a gallows in the village square, or a nearby grove of trees, or something equally grisly and demonstrative.

    1124:

    Try searching for "Penal Military Unit".

    1125:

    The main hit doesn't refer to the UK, but this does:

    https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/49047/in-wwi-which-countries-used-prisoners-as-soldiers

    I don't think we ever had penal military units, but I have seen quite a few other references to people enlisting as a way of getting off petty offences in WWI; some may have got early release, and it may have applied to more serious offences. But, as I said, I believe that it was done semi-officially, so there will be few clear records - a very British way to do such things.

    1126:

    From the article you linked:

    That’s because most branches of the military now explicitly prohibit service as an alternative to criminal conviction.

    "Most"? US has only 6 branches, I wonder which ones DO allow it. I suspect only USMC.

    1127:

    Charlie, which version of Edinburgh do you inhabit, or are you a Glasgow native now? Auld Reekie in my timeline has New Leaf Co-Op, Real Foods, Dig In, and several others. I've never quite made it to Moscow but I do have first hand memories of the selection in Hungarian shops in the 1970s, as well as in rural corner shops around South Africa in the 2000s, and the cornucopia of delights offered by any of these Scottish organic/wholefood shops is not even in the same conceptual class.

    I concede that none of these shops is quite as gigantic as a typical WF store, but most seem to be happy to order one's favourite things.

    1128:

    When I was in Malawi in the 1960s (as a single tourist), I could buy 25Kg sacks of mealie meal or tins of spam; the remainder of the shelving was empty. I lived on fried spam for a week :-(

    1129:

    Auld Reekie in my timeline has New Leaf Co-Op, Real Foods, Dig In, and several others.

    Yeah, I know them well: there's a Real Foods on my own street, for example.

    You could drop the entire stock into one aisle of a Whole Foods Market and have shelf space left over. (And that's when half the refrigerators aren't closed because of a power fault or something.) They're the size of a small local grocery store, not a supermarket (even a dwarf one).

    1130:

    I was referring to the claim that Russia want to recreate the Russian empire; as far as I can see, there is not a scrap of evidence for it.

    This is a constant them of Russian bloggers and podcasters with news commentators for spice. From inside Russia.

    US media shows these in the original with subtitles or voice over all the time.

    Expand your sources.

    1131:

    Wow. Either Robert Prior is way less common than I would have guess or you grabbed the domain very very early in the days of the DNS registry system.

    1132:

    I don't think we ever had penal military units, but I have seen quite a few other references to people enlisting as a way of getting off petty offences in WWI; some may have got early release, and it may have applied to more serious offences. But, as I said, I believe that it was done semi-officially, so there will be few clear records - a very British way to do such things.

    Until a few decades ago in the US, many times a judge might give a defendant found guilty of a not too serious crime a choice:

    • A year or two in jail.

    • Bring me your enlistment papers in 3 days

    Not so much anymore. Although I understand during the 2nd half of the 2000s the US army lowered their standards. A lot. Which helped somewhat but not a lot as many washed out in boot camp or basic infantry training.

    1133:

    I suspect only USMC.

    I suspect not. The Marines I know are proud they are not the village idiot class.

    There's the jar head myth and reality. Reality is not the myth. Even if at times they find the myth useful.

    1134:

    RE: Revolutions of 1848

    I've got nothing on B and C, but I'll have a go here. Chartism. It was a heck of a lot more modest than some of the progressive social movements of the time, but arguably it took off in Australia after the UK transported many of the leaders

    Well yes, universal suffrage and human rights eventually did go mainstream.

    Trouble is, I didn't phrase question A) well at all. Most of the revolutions got squelched, as basically 75% of violent revolutions do. I was thinking whether it was possible for more of the revolutions to have succeeded.

    I'm looking at Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848 ), and what they're saying is that a number of problems (industrial exploitation of labor, rural exploitation of farmers, food shortages), and authoritarian rulers basically created a powder keg. The revolutions in 1848 were initially successful (spring-summer 1848), but the revolutionaries fell out amongst each other (summer-fall 1848), opening a space for successful reactionary takeovers in late 1848 and 1849.

    So I guess the way to narrow the focus is, how could things have happened differently in the summer of 1848 so that the middle part (revolution eating its children) didn't happen? To put it another way, why didn't they copy the American Revolution more than the French Revolution?

    1135:

    I lived on fried spam for a week

    And frying brings out the best of the SPAM aromas.

    1137:

    Flight tracking news for ADS-B Exchange.

    https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/01/the-flight-tracker-that-powered-elonjet-has-taken-a-left-turn/

    I learned about ADS-B here. We shall see.

    1138:

    ISTR it was a 137Cs source out of a scrapped radiotherapy machine that went on a sightseeing tour around ?Mexico leaving a trail of corpses.

    1139:

    Oh, nauseating, school dinners. First school I went to had a habit of feeding us spam fritters, and the dining hall and surrounding regions used to stink of them all the time. They were quite horrible, but I used to hope for them all the time because the alternatives were all somewhere between extremely horrible and vile beyond belief.

    1140:

    As much as I didn't care much for the meals at my somewhat rural schools in Kentucky in the 60s, SPAM was never on the menu.

    Lived next door to the head of the high school (grades 9-12) cafeteria. She claimed ketchup was one of the items used to fulfill the mandate of 5 items in each meal. I would have had trouble using a slice of bread to get to 5.

    But if you want a real aroma, fry some packaged bologna. Will run people out of the building.

    1141:

    Andras Salamon
    Not forgetting the amaing "Italian" deli on Leith Walk - Valvona & Crolla

    1142:

    So I should trust the equivalent blogs that come out of the USA? Your government is trying to make the people defenceless, kill them with vaccines, and install communism. Sheesh. I gave you the example of Bridgen speaking for UK. You may not realise it, but you live in a world of online propaganda and invented 'facts', especially w.r.t. Russia. This is not new, because it has been pernicious since 1990, and got much worse after 2010.

    Alternatively, you could provide evidence why (a) those blogs and genuine and (b) speak for the Russian government.

    1143:

    Yeah. I had the spam fried, because it reduced the grease slightly, and that caused and causes me gut trouble.

    1144:

    I had a buddy who was given a choice of the Navy or prison after he took his Dad's new Mustang without permission and totaled it. He served on an aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War and, because of his emotional issues, he was considered unfit for any duty other than nuclear weapons security, so he sat in the armory and got stoned every day.

    1145:

    “They're the size of a small local grocery store, not a supermarket (even a dwarf one).” Let’s not start a fight that will bring in the International Astronomical Union.

    1146:

    Do you remember the huge scandal in the 1980s when the Reagan Administration declared the ketchup was a vegetable?

    1147:

    It was considered such by schools LONG before the 80s. The Reagan Administration just got in trouble saying the silent part out loud.

    1148:

    Re: 'Your government is trying to make the people defenceless, kill them with vaccines, and install communism. Sheesh. I gave you the example of Bridgen speaking for UK.'

    Whoa! - can't tell whether you're being serious or 'ironic' and I did read the bit about Bridgen.

    timrowledge @ 1146:

    Since you brought up astronomy, David Butler recently posted a year in review video (length 39:20 min). Great visuals from various telescopes.

    '2022 Review - Hubble and James Webb'

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHOpnh_RkD8

    1149:

    I have come to believe you would not believe any evidence on this subject which contradicts you opinion. I could go on but I'd get flagged.

    So be it.

    1150:

    "Flight tracking news for ADS-B Exchange."

    Well, dang. I hope the new owners keep up the "what we see is what you get" model, but a certain amount of paranoia is appropriate.

    Anyway, to go back a few threads, I've continued to use ADS-B Exchange to follow the activities of those Pallas Aviation LM-100J aircraft that have been flying to secondary military airfields in Europe since the start of the Ukrainian War. It's pretty certain that they're doing stuff by/for the CIA. My current guess is that they're stocking caches with materiel for use by partisans in case Russia gets its act together and occupies larger parts of Ukraine.

    Anyway, the ADS-B data to date on number of flights since 5 March; Nowe Miasto is short for Nowe Miasto nad Pilica:

    Airplane

    N67AU 79
    N71KM 42
    N96MG 86

    Destination

    Aalborg 10
    Boboc 31
    Lielvarde 33
    Nowe Miasto 93 (!)
    Siauliai 3
    Sliac 37

    Month

    MAR 39
    APR 16
    MAY 25
    JUN 21
    JUL 15
    AUG 22
    SEP 18
    OCT 5
    NOV 6
    DEC 19
    JAN 20

    1151:

    To put it another way, why didn't they copy the American Revolution more than the French Revolution?

    Well that part is easy: while we call it the America Revolution or revolutionary war or something along those lines in general, even outside the USA (and I'll continue to do so after this paragraph), there's really only a very constrained logic to calling it that, and in the general usage of the term "revolution" it definitely was not one. It would be better characterised as a mutiny, in which the mutineers declared their own state as part of their aims and the eventual outcome. A "revolution" would have changed the government of the country the mutineers were seeking to succeed from, that is the British Empire, and perhaps caused an upheaval of the social order there. This obviously didn't happen, the Empire grew to its maximum strength in the century and a half following without really being that much affected by the loss of the North American colonies.

    Skimming through that wikipedia page shows a few interesting themes. There were nationalist mevolutions especially the Habsburg Empire but there were also things like the pan-Germanic movement. A lot of these eventually succeeded in some way (even if it took a couple of decades and Bismarck). The ones you're mostly thinking of are probably the social revolutions, and I guess there's a lot more complexity and difference among those than between them and things like the nationalist movements (which they overlapped to some extent anyway). The high-level take on the social movement revolutions of the 1840s is that they were mostly liberal-democratic movements led by artisanal, petite-bourgeois or urban middle classes on behalf of the communities they saw themselves as leading, and at least some broke down due to divisions in those communities, especially in relation to the emerging industrial proletariat and the populations finding themselves disconnected from both the agrarian old ways and the urban manufacturing mode of living. I think that part of what makes our perspective looking back on it all now a bit odd is that ultimately the goals of the liberal-democratic movements eventually became the norm in the West.

    Even in the USA, where the "revolution" has been led by gentry or even aristocracy, there were local equivalents to Chartism (e.g. Tammany Hall) that were apparently ultimately successful (as you say, universal male suffrage was mainstream by the end of the 19th century at least). As a key distinction between the US and French experiences, by the 1780s the great cities of France did have a growing proletariat while the original colonies were still largely agrarian. Part of the Western expansion was a way to provide opportunities for settler-enrichment that disenfranchised Europeans simply did not have access to. And I guess that's also one of the reasons imperialism was so popular.

    And that's actually an angle you might be interested in exploring as a counterfactual... not entirely a crapsack dystopia but still perhaps a worse world history than the one we had. Social and political revolutions in Europe sustained and driven by considerably more imperial expansion than occurred in our history.

    1152:

    because of his emotional issues, he was considered unfit for any duty other than nuclear weapons security, so he sat in the armory and got stoned every day.

    I ind that deeply unreassuring for some reason!

    1153:

    There was conversation in the US that the first aid packages were in essence back filling former Soviet block countries with Nata/US munitions and arms as they shipped their Soviet/Russian standard things to Ukraine. As that was the fastest way to get arms to Ukraine that they could use.

    Now it might be munitions (and bigger things) which will wind up in Ukraine. As no US "things" will go direct. It all goes through other countries.

    1154:

    =+=+=+=

    [ sung in a shrill quasi-English accent ]

    SPAM!

    SPAM!

    SPAM!

    SPAM!

    SPAM! glorious SPAM!

    =+=+=+=

    Charlie Stross:

    Almost certainly using a military code

    most likely encoded (later decoded) by lowly clerks since it is time consuming and tedious task...

    though for high value messages the rank of the soldier (not civilian) goes up with the sensitivity of the content... but no matter if encrypted or 'in clear' the routing is essential and frequently mis-sent even if everyone is really-really-really trying not to mess up ("SNAFU")...

    then there's simply delaying some portion of message traffic for an hour as lowkey 'n plausible sabotage...

    that's something occupying powers have been sensitive

    under such evolutionary pressure, the mode is ever more subtle sabotage as the clumsy become gallows fruit and the clever live to sabotage another day (Niven Snark #14: "Think of it as evolution in action")

    =+=+=+=

    1155:

    Ironic, of course! I was pointing out what believing the blogs that come out of the USA leads to.

    1156:

    Charlie Stross:

    I forgot to mention... those originating snippets were intended as dramatic sub-plotlines in whatever hypothetical alt-history saga I might someday write about the overlooked 'n unnoticed folk caught up in a war in need of lashing out at oppressive overlords...

    like maybe Ukraine if they lose their war and we have to contend with USSR 2.0 ("this is not your farther's communism")

    1157:

    Which is just silly; as any fule know, totatototototo is a froot!

    1158:

    Either Robert Prior is way less common than I would have guess or you grabbed the domain very very early

    Well, it's a Canadian domain, and I have had it for a long time (a decade at least, I think).

    There's several other Robert Priors in Southern Ontario. An architectural technologist, a lawyer, and at least two more…

    There's quite a few in America, judging by the email I get when they use first do last at gmail dot com, which I've had since the days it was invite only. One is a democrat, but the rest are MAGA-type Republicans in half-a-dozen states.

    1159:

    SFReader @ 1102:

    Re: 'If you go by the talking heads in Russian media, the end goal is to resurrect the USSR -- ahem, the Russian Empire ...'

    Wondering whether Putin's new general is going to try this by still mostly relying primarily on Wagner. Also wonder how both Russia's and China's developing friendship with various African countries will factor in on both autocrats' visions of empire reconsolidation.

    I'm guessing Russia's make-friends with African nations is mostly to gain access to 'manpower*' supply given some recent media reports of Wagner people deserting. Not sure that any of the African countries have well enough developed commercially attractive tech, agriculture or energy to impact current global economics.

    My guess is Russia is trying to undermine or evade sanctions. I doubt they're going to recruit that much cannon fodder manpower out of Africa ... but raw materials OTOH ... or western "tech" the African nations could buy & resell to the Russians ...

    1160:

    Howard NYC @ 1122:

    thing about leveraging convicts to sign up for military service...

    it can be defined as a win-win-win for the government if-and-when the convict-soldier dies gloriously far from home away from soft-hearted media (and next-of-kin) in the place of a better valued soldier and offers a savings from one less convict to warehouse in prison with added plus of convict never being returned to the streets as a potential risk to law abiding civilians

    There's also some evidence that those who do sign a contract with Wagner are NOT permitted to leave when their contract is up. That guy who defected to Norway said he'd signed a six-month contract with Wagner and was not allowed to leave at the end of it. That was one of the reasons he decided to escape.

    The guys who signed up to get out of prison are still in prison, just a different one.

    1161:

    To put it another way, why didn't they copy the American Revolution more than the French Revolution?

    The American Revolution was basically a part of the empire deciding that it was no longer a part, with considerable support of a foreign power. The French Revolution was the overturning of the government of an entire country, despite considerable opposition from many other countries.

    What great power would fill the role of France in the American Revolution? (Money, troops, supplies, naval vessels…)

    1162:

    What great power would fill the role of France in the American Revolution? (Money, troops, supplies, naval vessels…)

    If you leave out the navy, then possibly the Habsburgs. You could probably even develop a timeline when the Austrian Navy got an earlier start. Austria and France were allies in the Seven Years War and Austria had more experience with reform movements (something to do with heirs going and learning politics in Italian republican city states). I guess it would end up being a timeline difference based around the rivalry between Habsburgs and Bourbons, but per my remarks (about a crapsack dystopia with even moar imperialism) above it could, for instance, see a Habsburg empire that retained considerable overseas possessions.

    1163:

    Charlie Stross @ 1153:

    because of his emotional issues, he was considered unfit for any duty other than nuclear weapons security, so he sat in the armory and got stoned every day.

    I ind that deeply unreassuring for some reason!

    Also deeply BULLSHIT. The U.S. military takes "nuclear weapons security" too seriously. If he had "emotional issues" he'd never be assigned to "nuclear weapons security" in the first place.

    He might sit in the brig ** and get stoned every day, but not in the armory, especially the armory where nukes were stored.

    **And he'd only sit in the brig so long until the Navy could make a port call & transfer his ass to a stockade state-side where he'd be court martialed, busted back to E-1, forfeited all pay & allowances and got out with the Big Chicken Dinner after serving his sentence. The UCMJ ain't no joke.

    PS: I know that some people DID smoke pot on Navy Ships ... at least on the big ones - the aircraft carriers ... but you had to be careful NOT to get caught. [According to my informant, a buddy from High School who signed up right after we graduated in 1967] the place to do it was on the fantail, up UNDER the flight deck, 'cause at night it was dark under there and the wind was always blowing AFT carrying any smoke (and smell) away from the ship.

    By the time I joined, the Army had got REAL SERIOUS about drugs & it was not worth the risk to my "career" - my drill pay made my house payment for a number of years; made it possible to pay the mortgage off early, and now half my retired income is retired pay.

    I'd have only had to piss hot one time to lose all that. I knew people who did & got kicked out losing everything.

    I got nothing against pot, but I just couldn't afford to get caught, so I abstained. Sometimes deterrence does work.

    Big Chicken Dinner = Bad Conduct Discharge - the worst & lowest discharge you can possibly get. You get a BCD and you're almost certain to have an active prison sentence before they kick you out.

    1164:

    There's several other Robert Priors

    Take my fairly common first name and tack on a very common last name and I'm duplicated all over everywhere. In high school there was one 2 grades behind me.

    There are multiple property owners in my county with the same name as me. Different middle names.

    1165:

    "There was conversation in the US that the first aid packages were in essence back filling former Soviet block countries with Nata/US munitions and arms as they shipped their Soviet/Russian standard things to Ukraine."

    Yes, that's also on the list of possibilities, particularly as concerns the first Pallas LM-100J flights in March. But there have been huge numbers of C-17, C-130J, A-400 and 747-400 flights going into Rzeszow since then that would have easily backfilled the contributor countries in addition to bringing in heavier gear (e.g., HIMARS) going directly to Ukraine. There's something special about the CIA-adjoint Pallas flights into the obscure airfields, and stocking up for possible partisan action in Ukraine if Russia advances is my current best guess.

    1166:

    My name is the opposite. If someone has my last name, they are within a couple of degrees of related to me. If someone has my full name they are either my long-dead great-grandfather's younger brother, or a non-direct ancestor who was a noted historian and persecutor of Lutherans circa 1530ish.

    A crapsack dystopia with a global Hapsburg Empire would probably have had my family on a different path. Rather than being somewhat broke petty nobs who sent most of their kids to Canada to start something new, we'd probably have become horrible colonial administrators. As well as continued the 800 year tradition of dying fighting the Turks.

    1167:
    • To put it another way, why didn't they copy the American Revolution more than the French Revolution?*

    I'm looking at it more in the mechanistic notion of getting the inevitably feuding rebels together to form a working coalition government.

    Still speaking largely from ignorance*, I think the critical difference between 1789 (US Constitution ratified, 13 years after independence was declared and 6 years after the Treaty of Paris) and 1848 was that the US had space and time to internally negotiate something that worked. In 1848, they had a matter of months. I'm willing to bet that, the less prep time you have, the less probability of a good outcome, especially if radical change is the goal.

    One possible alternative might have been if the earliest revolutions (Sicily, France, and Baden) somehow managed to succeed, rather than getting crushed or subverted. Success in this case might mean something like the British or "Republic of Italy" model, where the monarch gets to keep a figurehead throne, while everyone else forms a Parliament or Republic primarily at first to beat back the reactionaries. A revolution model wherein the authoritarian ruler doesn't die might make it harder for the reactionaries to strike (they stage a blood bath to get less than they're being offered now as a term of surrender...).

    Would this be "the Magna Carta Gambit?"

    I rate this kind of alt-history as really low probability, because what power-mad authoritarian is going to either believe or honor such a bargain?, but it does beat the "things could have been much worse" alternative.

    *It's a rabbit hole I'm trying to avoid going down. Unlike Reconstruction, I don't think the MAGAtry are copying strategy or tactics from 1848. That said, 1848 does have large global downstream effects, so if it could have gone differently, things might be very different now, and not necessarily in a crapsack way.

    1168:

    I think the critical difference between 1789 (US Constitution ratified, 13 years after independence was declared and 6 years after the Treaty of Paris) and 1848 was that the US had space and time to internally negotiate something that worked.

    The colonies had working governments prior to 1776. Many (most?) for nearly 150 years. They had practice.

    1169:

    You may be right -- My recollection is pure hearsay. He also discussed spending ten days in the brig on bread and water and I think that he was given a general discharge. However, the US military had serious discipline issues at the time; I think that he was assigned to the USS Coral Sea when more than a thousand crewmen signed a petition asking not to be deployed to the war zone.

    1170:

    Lets see.. Fun alternate histories:

    "The Sugar Republics". The French revolution takes a few different turns here and there, Nappy catches a cannonball, Robespierre dies of an infected splinter at age 12, whatever and the upshot is that the Republic doesn't turn into an Empire, and during one of the wars decides that they hate slavery, they hate Perfidious Albion, and they can serve both causes by making trouble in the sugar islands. Battle hardened sergeants, crates of muskets and ships are sent to foment revolution, staging out of (and recruiting from) Haiti.

    It's much easier to overthrow islands where most of the population is slaves filled with burning hatred of their nominal sovereign than it would be to attack the the home islands. They fall like dominoes in a line, with the local plantation owners mostly either getting killed or held for ransom.

    Haiti stays nominally french, though this is a pretty loose state of affairs until much later and the rest turn into little statelets focused on exporting sugar and rum and buying.. everything else. French trade fleet (and thus it's fleet in general) gets rather a lot larger.

    Consequences? Other than the US being mad as hell at the French?

    1171:

    he was considered unfit for any duty other than nuclear weapons security, I don't believe that. I was ships company on JFK, CV 67 though the end of Viet Nam. Sailors never had anything to do with nukes security. Marines did.

    1172:

    The French revolution takes a few different turns here and there, Nappy catches a cannonball, Robespierre dies of an infected splinter at age 12, whatever and the upshot is that the Republic doesn't turn into an Empire, and during one of the wars decides that they hate slavery, they hate Perfidious Albion, and they can serve both causes by making trouble in the sugar islands.

    Well, the Republic did hate slavery, at least in theory. Declaration of the Rights of Man and all that. Ended slavery in French colonies in 1794. It was Napoleon that brought it back.

    https://slaveryandremembrance.org/articles/article/?id=A0065

    If you haven't read it, may I recommend Tom Reiss' book The Black Count? Won the Pulitzer for biography in 2013.

    General Alex Dumas is a man almost unknown today, yet his story is strikingly familiar—because his son, the novelist Alexandre Dumas, used his larger-than-life feats as inspiration for such classics as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers.

    But, hidden behind General Dumas’s swashbuckling adventures was an even more incredible secret: he was the son of a black slave—who rose higher in the white world than any man of his race would before our own time. Born in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), Alex Dumas made his way to Paris, where he rose to command armies at the height of the Revolution—until he met an implacable enemy he could not defeat.

    The Black Count is simultaneously a riveting adventure story, a lushly textured evocation of 18th-century France, and a window into the modern world’s first multi-racial society. TIME magazine called The Black Count “one of those quintessentially human stories of strength and courage that sheds light on the historical moment that made it possible.” But it is also a heartbreaking story of the enduring bonds of love between a father and son.

    https://www.tomreiss.com

    1173:

    Still speaking largely from ignorance*, I think the critical difference between 1789 (US Constitution ratified, 13 years after independence was declared and 6 years after the Treaty of Paris) and 1848 was that the US had space and time to internally negotiate something that worked.

    Well, the American colonies were a long way from the mother country, with well-established local governments. So they had space, weren't starting from scratch, and had a powerful ally running interference and providing significant support.

    https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/france-american-revolution

    Frankly, without the French (and Spanish) rebellious colonies couldn't have broken away. Not only supplies and troops, but tying down British forces elsewhere in the world. (From the British viewpoint, America was a sideshow compared to India.)

    I think the biggest difference is the local governments. In America the colonial governments that already existed cut ties with Britain, and eventually cobbled together a layer on top of the existing colonial governments, but it was in many ways a colonels' revolt that got rid of an unpopular general but didn't remake the army, instead taking control themselves.

    1174:

    Consequences? Other than the US being mad as hell at the French?

    IIRC, the Louisiana Purchase was tied up with the Haitian revolt. Assuming this is correct, why should France give up its North American claim?

    This is an interesting scenario.

    1175:

    Consequences? Other than the US being mad as hell at the French?

    Well if (post-revolutionary) France found a way to recovery overall naval supremacy (which it had and lost almost a century before in the 9 Years War and the War of Spanish Succession) then quite a few possible differences could emerge, including the relative growth of British power worldwide.

    1176:

    That occurred to me too. Along with implications around Mexican independence and the Californias.

    1177:

    For those who haven't yet taken the little glowing pill here's a more technically literate write-up:

    The capsule contains caesium-137, a radioactive isotope which spits out electrons (or beta radiation) and high-energy photons (or gamma radiation).

    Just as the source won’t be dangerous unless you’re close to it, it won’t be easily registered by gamma-ray detectors unless they are in close proximity. Authorities say they now have vehicle-mounted detectors to aid their efforts, but scanning 1,400 km of road is a formidable task. Searchers have conceded “there is the potential that we may not find this”.

    https://theconversation.com/a-tiny-radioactive-capsule-is-lost-on-a-highway-in-western-australia-heres-what-you-need-to-know-198761

    1178:

    I imagine we'll be very lucky if searchers actually find it, but also very unlucky if it ever ends up being a problem, or results in something bad. Not that it cancels out or anything. I guess I watched the demolition of the Queensland Radium Institute from my workplace which was right next door. Months of digging with a backhoe-mounted jackhammer because they weren't allowed to blast. Still feel it in my bones on winter mornings :).

    1179:

    Off-topic for the thread but maybe of interest to Charlie, I have read today that Slaadi are now covered by WotC's Open Gaming License.

    1180:

    sad (but easy) way to locate misplaced toxins -- random example being a coin sized chunk of radioactive goodness -- wait ten years for any cancer clusters to appear in a family

    or in a workplace where some bastard with a grudge against co-workers duct tapes the radioactive item to the underside of a desk for a month, then moves to another unloved co-worker's desk, month after month... ugh

    1181:

    Rbt Prior @ 1173
    And, a reminder, especially to non-British { non-English? } people just what an arsehole Boney was.
    At a long-ago SF con, the subject of the Corsican Tyrant came up - & someone from (?)Italy(?) spoke up about how we all hated him, but "some of us still thhink of him as a Liberator" - there was considerable confusion.
    Unfortunately, at that time, the re-introduction of slavery by Boney was not well-known, as if it had been, the idiot supporting him would have been told to shut up & piss off much more quickly.

    1182:

    Thanks for the link.

    This comment was a real laugh out loud moment:

    "a) Never again in your life will you have the chance for this kind of god-tier ninth-level casting of Malicious Compliance"

    1183:

    Well, if he was completely useless and his superiors were stuck with him, they may have called a crate of MRT a nuclear weapon and assigned him to guard it :-)

    1184:

    My last name is perhaps the most scattered of the Scottish clans - not rare anywhere Britons emigrated to, but not very common anywhere (even in Scotland). I doubt that anyone else has my full name, despite none of the three names being rare - certainly, Google fails to find any. Sometimes, it's the combination that is unusual.

    1185:

    I've seen one American detective show where the murder weapon was a radioactive source pointed at the boss's seat in his office from outside (the office was on a building site hence the availability of the source). It took a lot of time to kill him, not surprisingly. The crime was solved when a detective noticed that all the fish in a fishtank in the office had died.

    1186:

    The 1848 revolution is the overt point of divergence for The Difference Engine, with which Gibson and Sterling invented Steampunk

    1187:

    Well, yeah. Once their owner died there'd be nobody to feed them or change the water.

    1188:

    Sorry, but the odds on everything in the world falling apart into city-states approaches zero as a limit. At the very least, one area cuts the water to another area, famine, and the area that did the cutting has a bigger (and well-fed) army now.

    The USSR bleeding itself in Afghanistan? You mean while St. Ronnie was arming and training the warlords, and the folks who became the Taliban, because didn't matter, COMMIES!

    1189:

    Shit. I somehow missed you were on chemo.

    And I was looking forward to meeting you in person in Glasgow in '24.

    Enjoy what you can, my friend.

    1190:

    Um, yep. Had a friend, a long, long time ago, who told me late one night he'd been in the Resistance (strong anti-Vietnam war resisters), gotten caught for not going in when the draft called him, and was offered the choice by the judge of jail or the Army.

    He said he'd give almost anything to go back and choose jail. Yes, he wound up in 'Nam.

    1191:

    Yes, a little while ago I spent some time idly thinking about an alternate history in which the Louisiana Purchase fails due to opposition in the US Congress. A brief sketch (which is about as detailed as my thoughts about it):

    1) Louisiana remains with France and is then divided between Britain and Spain at the Congress of Vienna. The Latin American revolutions of the 1820's go off as scheduled, so the Spanish part becomes part of greater Mexico. Freebooters from the US infiltrate both parts, attempting to colonize or seize land for the US. Many clashes among British/Indian/US/Mexicans along and west of the Mississippi; US-British antagonism remains high, Britain ships soldiers/artillery/industrial support to North American natives, leading to NA polities being set up in the west.

    2) Tejas and NW Mexico break off from Mexico proper, but this time around. The former does a better job as a state so there is no Mexican-American war per se and both Tejas and "Nuevo Mexico" remain independent (likewise Alta California).

    3) I suppose we have to say something about the Civil War? This time it goes off a few years earlier; a less-powerful Union has greater problems reconquering the Confederacy. Anti-slavery (but not necessarily pro-Union) public opinion in Britain conflicts with Westminster realpolitik with regard to support of which side Britain comes down on. Realpolitik wins to start off with, but British support switches when slave revolts lead to Black-ruled enclaves/free states along the Mississippi and New Orleans. The upshot is a failed state in the South with generations of conflict.

    4) Empires are weaker in this timeline, and anti-colonial movements start earlier, like in the 1870s. Marxism remains focused on economic thinking, but I am imagining a visionary Native American thinker publishing a "Manifesto to the Colored Peoples of the Earth" in 1878 or so that becomes a founding document of anti-colonialism.

    1192:

    Ah, yes, Dan Quayle, "tomatoes are a vegetable".

    1193:

    whitroth:

    though admittedly snark-motivated my intent was to identify already present fault lines -- economic, political, social, religious, stubbornness -- available to clever enemies to forcibly fracture by way of maliciously applied force

    just looking for A way for the worst possible end to all empires occurring more-or-less simultaneously... sooner or later there'd someone looking to patch together these bits 'n pieces in order establish himself as king with there being successive 'wars of consolidation' across multiple generations and thus a world always in a state of active military operations

    1194:

    I forgot to comment on this analysis yesterday, but I did appreciate it.

    Calling Tammany Hall a chartist operation strikes me as a bit funny, although I'd make worse gaffes if I ventured beyond the bunyip aristocracy in historical Aussie politics*. AFAIK, Tammany Hall is now known for its graft and corruption, under Boss Tweed among others. They were one of the groups whose ward heelers would ply barflies with free rotgut on election day, then parade them down to the precinct en masse to vote for their candidates as often as possible, while deploying others to intimidate people who might vote otherwise. Crossing the streams a bit, this was what the Temperance movement was trying to kill: 19th Century liquor licenses were seen as a key point of political patronage, because the licensees not only sloshed out the vote but normally funded campaigns. This alco-politics as a precursor to our present narco-politics. Tammany Hall was in the thick of this. The US "chartists" (in America, Universal suffragists) were generally also pro-temperance.

    *I keep amusing myself with the idea of a sunburned take-off on the dragon-lord trope. Instead of dragons, it's bunyips, with, of course, their associated Newcomer aristocracy of pets handlers. Having the First Peoples and their Law in the mix might be an interesting human-based play on the standard trope of (demi)human(oid)s Others What Were Here First. Doing this in a respectful way would be hard, of course.

    1195:

    If I may ask?

    TikTok

    Is banning TikTok a topic of discussion/debate anywhere outside of the US? Here it has gone from "we must do" this to "ouch", the legislation rules to do this are going to get complicated in a globally connected information world.

    https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/01/us-tiktok-ban-could-be-thwarted-by-import-law-enacted-in-the-1980s/

    1196:

    »Is banning TikTok a topic of discussion/debate anywhere outside of the US?«

    In the sense of banning /only/ TikTok ?

    No, that is a US-only thing.

    For instance in Europe the target list of such discussions almost always list US-based antisocial networks.

    1197:

    Is banning TikTok a topic of discussion/debate anywhere outside of the US?

    AFAIK it's a non-issue in the UK. (We have our own peculiarly brain-dead internet censorship debate going on instead.)

    1198:

    Heteromeles @ 1175:

    Consequences? Other than the US being mad as hell at the French?

    IIRC, the Louisiana Purchase was tied up with the Haitian revolt. Assuming this is correct, why should France give up its North American claim?

    This is an interesting scenario.

    That one is fairly easy. Napoleon needed money for a war with England. And he didn't have the military to spare to enforce his "claim" in North America against other claimants.

    Selling Louisiana to the U.S. was a Win-Win.

    Don't know how the Haitian revolt might have figured into it.

    1199:

    Or the opposite - alliances.

    1200:

    You'd have to ask someone who knows what "ticktock" is other than the sound made by a mechanical clock.

    1201:

    What is Tik Tok? - gives you AN answer ... not that I'm really any the wiser.
    Charlie - what is our peculiarly brain-dead internet censorship debate then??

    1202:

    TikTok (notice the spelling) is a social media app that allows folks to share videos. It has taken the US (and I suspect other places) by storm. Facebook is trying to figure out how to get the eyeballs back on them.

    The issue is that at the root of all the legal filings it is a Chinese based company. And China has a law saying companies must turn over any data they have to the government when asked. (No court process, just ask.)

    And since TikTok collects location (and other) data about videos up laoded and users viewing them it can create a very extensive map of what the users are doing when and where. Sort of like when US soldiers in Syria were discovered to be revealing their current base by using Fit Bit's cloud tracking system of sharing exercise event. Especially jogging runs.

    Not arguing for or against any of this just curious as to how it's playing out in other countries.

    1203:

    RE: Haiti and Louisiana.

    My recollection is that Haiti was a fairly key port in France protecting French ships going to and from New Orleans. As the pirates of the Caribbean proved, having bases in that island-rich sea meant it was easier for them to prey on merchant shipping and coastal towns, so the powers that be, from the 1500s to the present, grabbed islands to provide naval bases to protect various mainland needs. A 1890s example was the US grabbing Puerto Rico and Cuba from Spain, in preparation to getting the Panama Canal Zone from France. The reason for all of this was (and is) to protect the short route between the US West and East coasts.

    Anyway, France starts losing Haiti. What is New Orleans and the Mississippi then worth? Prior to 1763, France had had a couple of ways into the Louisiana Purchase territory: through Quebec (up the St. Lawrence, portage/paddle through the Great Lakes, portage at what's now Chicago to the Illinois River and down to the Mississippi), or go trundle upstream from New Orleans, with Haiti protecting the sea-route to New Orleans. The third way, get into the Pacific and go in from the Pacific Northwest, was even harder. In 1763, the British took Quebec, leaving New Orleans and upstream as the only viable route. With the fall of Haiti, this became untenable too.

    So I agree about your points, but the additional point is that even had it been peacetime, Napoleon probably would have sold Louisiana to the US, because without Haiti or Quebec, it would basically have been a bottomless hole in the French budget, and it wasn't clear that anything could be extracted from the Territory that would repay the cost of defending and settling it.

    And then there's the Comanche Empire to consider...(see my next post).

    1204:

    You'd have to ask someone who knows what "ticktock" is other than the sound made by a mechanical clock.

    You're showing your social hipness. Or not.

    1205:

    I think that there's also a limit, that the videos there can't be more than 30 sec.

    Talk about pointless....

    1206:

    Yes, a little while ago I spent some time idly thinking about an alternate history in which the Louisiana Purchase fails due to opposition in the US Congress. A brief sketch (which is about as detailed as my thoughts about it):

    This is an interesting scenario. Thanks for sharing it! If you're interested in playing with it, especially with the politics of the Southern Plains, I've got a suggestion...

    This comes from The Comanche Empire ( https://www.amazon.com/Comanche-Empire-Lamar-Western-History-ebook/dp/B001HZZ05C , summary in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comancheria ).

    The basic point was that the Plains Indians weren't passively sitting around, drunk with firewater and with tears trickling down their cheeks, while they waited for their Manifest Destiny on the Rez. Until the end of the US Civil War, they were major powers on the Great Plains. For example, until 1865, the Comanches regularly raided into Texas, New Mexico, even northern Mexico, taking property and slaves, some of whom they sold to traders in New Mexico. Yes, there were non-black slaves in the Spanish Southwest, and not all of them were taken by Spaniards. As another example, by 1865 the Texas Confederate troops were having more trouble losing territory to the Comanches than they were with the Union.

    If this is something you're interested in, it's worth realizing that the American interior West prior to 1870-ish was not controlled by European powers, the borders that did exist were pretty porous, safety on the Trails connecting towns was as problematic as on the Silk Road, and European laws (including from Washington). mattered fairly little.

    Weaken the European powers further, and I'd suggest this strengthens in the Indian position.

    The follow-ons get interesting. Settlers were going to try settling the Plains regardless, but with colonial powers struggling for dominance rather than cementing their holds, the American West would remain fairly lawless. From the 1840s on, America had been an immigrant haven, and in the late 19th Century on, immigrants got sent to homestead the West. If this didn't happen, where would European immigrants go? Would they even go to America, or would they go to Brazil, Argentina, Chile, or Canada? Or stay home?

    I don't know, but it does make things interesting.

    On an unrelated note, it's too bad it's hard in alt-History to get rid of beaver hats in European fashion. That would make things even stranger...

    1207:

    I think that there's also a limit, that the videos there can't be more than 30 sec.

    Talk about pointless....

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok

    It hosts user-submitted videos, which can range in duration from 15 seconds to 10 minutes.

    Pointless to you. And me. But not to others. Many use it for advertising. Especially to younger folks.

    I think some of the activities people discuss here is pointless. But I'm not them and to each their own.

    1208:

    Not a bad day today.

    I found an appliance repair place that would take both my 4k monitor that just stopped working a month or so ago (I had this problem once before & it turned out to be a $0.15 part - starter for the back-light) ... and my microwave oven that died a couple weeks ago (worth repairing to keep as a spare since it's the best I ever found for doing microwave popcorn).

    I just don't fit in with today's "throw-it-away-and-buy-another-one" culture.

    On the way home I noticed something (big bright colors) going on in Pullen Park and turned in to be nosy about it ... I think they're going to have some kind of "Japanese Lantern" display.

    I ended up just sitting on a park bench enjoying the sun for a couple of hours. Saw a couple of "sun dogs" that appeared as tiny little bits of rainbow.

    1209:

    You're showing your social hipness. Or not.

    That's me; so unhip it's a wonder my legs don't fall off. Or alternatively, so uninterested in the activities of "influencers" I have better things to do 25/8/53 (hh/d/ww).

    1210:

    That would be the Online Saftey Bill.

    It's, mmm, how best to put it, entirely idiotic in the name of "but think of the children".

    The original intent was to better safeguard children online from material that is either a) illegal or b) "legal, but harmful" (e.g. discussion of suicide, drugs, alcohol, sex, rock and roll, that sort of thing). Like all "think of the children" activities, it's politically very popular, and also very popular amongst the wider population who haven't actually looked at the nitty gritty details of how it's supposed to work. Simultaneously, it's not allowed to infringe on freedom of expression by removing material that is of "journalistic value" (which is undefined).

    The scope is, paraphrasing, "basically everything on the internet" (lit. "any user to user service").

    It has several obvious, fundamental, problems, including:

    • Doing nothing on the grounds you have no idea who or what age your users are is criminalised
    • Age/user verification is a massive privacy issue, and creates a honey pot for all sorts of criminal activity (because it tends to involve troves of personal information)
    • Troves of personal information about children, which tends to be regarded as even more of a problem than about adults
    • Age verification even with troves of personal information isn't particularly reliable because it turns out people lie about that sort of thing.
    • It's not entirely obvious that "legal but harmful" material is particularly harmful to children in aggregate, although a number of tragic stories have of course been offered in support (child who suicided had suicide information in internet history)
    • It's full of poorly defined phrases, which leaves service providers (everyone from ISPs, to facebook, to our gracious host here) faced with the difficult problem of facing serious (criminal) penalties for failing to do... (insert hand waving here) stuff. It's an environment that actively discourages any sort of user-generated interaction. And that's not just "social media is bad", that's "forums are bad", "blog comments are bad", etc.

    It's a complete crapshoot, with a complete lack of agreement about even the terms of the problem between the various factions who argue that children must be protected, no matter the cost; and factions who argue that it will, essentially, force the UK to be largely hived off from the rest of the Internet on the basis that what it is demanding is impossible.

    1211:

    David L
    And China has a law saying companies must turn over any data they have to the government when asked. (No court process, just ask.) - Ah, that explains it.
    So, I won't be going anywhere near that one then. { I hope }

    Atropos @ 1211
    Oh shit - THAT - yes, well.
    Every possible lying crooked excuse to get at your & everybody else's data - including all "secure" Bank Transfers, of course.
    Yes?
    I am horribly afraid it will pass & then 10 years of total fuck-ups.
    How typical of the tories - has the potential to be even worse than brexit, possibly.
    Yes - THAT BAD.
    ... Over & above all the horrid things you've mentioned, of course.

    1212:

    By a remarkable co-incidence I've been reading about the Comancheria myself recently, as an outcome to reading Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove series of novels about Texas and the southern plains in the 19th century. That's not unrelated to my mentioning the Mexican War of Independence above, because it was partly driven by Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808.

    I still think for my own alt-history along these themes I want my point of divergence a century earlier, with the War of Spanish Succession and the preceding Nine Years War. I am mostly joking when I describe a much more prominent Habsburg empire as crapsack: I see no obvious reason why a Greater Austrian Empire would be notably worse than the British one, and in some ways it might have been a somewhat better.

    I get the thing about Tammany Hall, and sort of did before posting. Nonetheless the wiki material suggests it started as a movement to expand the franchise... There are many such discordant notes in the history of social movements. In terms of offering an Australian example that illustrates how central corruption is to Australian business culture, I refer you to the Rum Rebellion, which was simply an eruption of the culture in which monied interests used political power in the colony to enforce monopolistic commerce. Arguably it's a straightforward outcome of British primogeniture, but IMHO it's a taint that pervades the expectation of the wealthy-born classes in Australia today.

    1213:

    Oh and by way of correcting myself in earlier comments, "mutiny" is probably too uncharitable a rendition of what should (probably) be properly called the War of US Independence. It's just slightly awkward because there was no USA before the declaration, just some colonies. But the point is that it was a war of independence, not a revolution.

    1214:

    Greg: were you completely oblivious to the government trying to ram through an Online Safety Bill?

    1215:

    Charlie
    Of course not - see my comments.
    But I had zero idea as to which current lunacy { There are far too many of them around, at present } you were actually referring to.
    Depressing, isn't it?

    Damian
    Erm, no.
    As I, & other people have said before, the "American Revolution" was to protect the then rich, monied & propertied { Slaves are property, remember? } against what they saw coming from Britain.
    The "taxation" issue was a very clumsy move by the then Brit guvmint, that provided a convenient excuse.
    And, even then, they would have lost, hands-down, if the French had not intervened.

    1216:

    Talk about pointless....

    Twitter was microblogging, limited to 140 characters (then 280). Mastodon currently has a 512 character limit (although the fediverse protocols allow other server instance types with longer message lengths).

    Is that pointless too?

    "The street finds its own use for technology" is so very true this century. In particular, TikTok seems (I don't use it) to be occupying the video ecosystem niche equivalent to twitter -- short content, unlike YouTube (much of which is hours long).

    1217:

    "on the basis that what it is demanding is impossible. "

    Based on my experience of (French) politicians, this is not an obstacle for the law to be voted.

    1218:

    Charlie Stross & whitroth:

    "pointless" is very much a perspective... I personally have little need for ESPN{1} or FoxNews{2} ditto for TikTok...

    yet both are major revenue sources for their owners and thus heavily prompted as well carefully protected from unwelcome government interference;

    if someone found a way to monetize cow farts there'd be an end to climate change tomorrow; TikTok can be understood for exploiting ("monetize") a certain set of demographic groupings -- not just teenagers or bored hipsters but an always spreading wave of seduction -- intersecting within certain modes of usage...

    you are on the bus commuting to 'n from school-work-dentist... you are at the dentist and there's nothing to read but golf magazines from the Reagan Administration(if US dentist) or knitting magazines printed when Margret Thatcher roamed the UK (if NHS dentist)... including those so unlucky to be low ranking employees taking a piss break, in need of a brief distraction from an overwhelming workload with a viciously micromanaging supervisor...

    the videos delivered up by TikTok can be regarded as visual junk food intended to ease dull tedium of an otherwise wasted moment in limbo...

    problem being these videos got to be habitual and verging upon addictive... everyone has attention deficit, but under varying conditions... not everyone is susceptible to TikTok but there's enough out there to provide a large enough audience to generate further content and then as content accumulates there is more reason to watch it... another egg-chicken-egg positive feedback loop not too different from the 'network effect' of any social media -- or if you are old enough to recall early days of fax machines -- along with motivation to be both consumer as well as producers...

    {1} ESPN being US-centric sports addiction delivery system; for those obsessed it is something more closely followed by those addicted than any diabetic's attention to insulin/glucose levels or Zelenskyy's interest in closely tracking the movements of NATO tanks and related consumables; I haven't a clue what's the UK eqv other than an outdated vague sense of 'football on the telly';

    {2} FoxNews is a loathsome US-centric cable channel delivering right extremist content of interest to BSGCs including WSCNs, neo-Nazis, re-enslavement of women, etc; there's an especially detestable talking head, Tucker Carlson who appears to have had a demonic soul grafted onto him at birth by some religious cult hellbent upon conquering the world;

    1219:

    Selling Louisiana to the U.S. was a Win-Win.

    Yep. The Louisiana Sale (from the French perspective) was one of the few times that Napoleon looked at something, realized that he couldn't win, and cut his losses.

    If he'd known to stop in 1805 (after Austerlitz), in 1808, before the invasion of Spain, (and especially before 1812, the invasion of Russia), he would have been ruler of France and a large chunk of client states for the remainder of his life.

    The funeral games after his death in 1821 would have further convulsed Europe.

    Re: TikTok:

    A good cartoon from Sarah Andersen.

    1220:

    the videos delivered up by TikTok can be regarded as visual junk food intended to ease dull tedium of an otherwise wasted moment in limbo...

    I don't think it's any kind of accident at all that the length format for TikTok videos is a perfect fit for network TV advertisement duration (back before the TV ad industry discovered cable TV and fragmented into a myriad of micro-targeted sectors that were much cheaper to buy per second of screen time and much more closely correlated with target demographics).

    Something about the 15 second to 10 minute slot correlates with our sense of novelty in visual stimuli. It also overlaps with some actual network TV formats -- a particular favourite of mine is the Japanese MTV cartoon series Usavitch from a couple of decades ago, for example: episodes are approximately 2 minutes long! (And it ran for six seasons.)

    1221:

    "on the basis that what it is demanding is impossible. "

    Based on my experience of (French) politicians, this is not an obstacle for the law to be voted.

    Based on the emails I regularly get from Republican politicians, it is not an obstacle in America either.

    (I'll grant that their laws/goals/rhetoric becomes a lot less impossible when you assume that when they say "American" or "person" they really mean "white male evangelical Christian Republican", and anyone not fitting that definition doesn't count.)

    1222:

    HowardNYC@1219: you are at the dentist and there's nothing to read but golf magazines from the Reagan Administration(if US dentist) or knitting magazines printed when Margret Thatcher roamed the UK (if NHS dentist)...

    You're behind the times, or your dentist is. My dentist subscribes to a service which provides a stand with a selection of crisp new lifestyle magazines, refreshed every month. Whether they're worth reading is another matter, of course.

    OGH@1221: Something about the 15 second to 10 minute slot correlates with our sense of novelty in visual stimuli. It also overlaps with some actual network TV formats -- a particular favourite of mine is the Japanese MTV cartoon series Usavitch from a couple of decades ago, for example: episodes are approximately 2 minutes long! (And it ran for six seasons.)

    FWIW Shaun the Sheep episodes run at 7 minutes.

    1223:

    We could always restart the Great Rhubarb Debate. Let's not :-)

    1224:

    New blog entry is up

    1225:

    Up to 10 min? Didn't know that.

    And I'll not that I believe my daughter who's writing (as well as working full time) has a tiktok channel. (and a blg. And a vlog. and... (why, yes, she does know she has this issue of overcommitment....)

    1226:

    Let me note that one of the things we get in school about the American Revolution is that Britain was doing the usual of "you send us raw materials, and we'll sell you manufactured goods, and no, you may not manufacture stuff there."

    1227:

    Sorry, I don't understand "micro-blogging". Rather, it always struck me as a platform for one-liners.

    1228:

    "on a bus commuting..." or "medical office"? I'm sorry, I don't understand this "boring time" concept.

    I was moderately annoyed when I bought this house, and cut my commuting time from about 50 min to 25 min - that's 25 min less reading time.

    Are you telling me you leave the house WITHOUT A BOOK?!

    1229:

    I have no idea. Since I migrated a couple weeks ago from kubuntu to almalinux, about half the time links to twitter come back in firefox as "protocol error".

    1230:

    Sorry, I don't understand ...

    We live in a world of different people. Not clones. Some like long form reading (books). Some shorter. (Like Wired's 30 minute reads.) and Some just a paragraph or two. (Most newspaper and magazine articles.)

    And the same applies to online content. Some blogs are full of essays, some a few paragraphs per entry, and some blogs use platforms like Twitter to just send out a few sentences at a time.

    And then we get into the video vs. written word. Personally I like audio pod casts when working by myself (physical things) or driving/walking. But my wife can't stand such.

    I've learned that different people are wired to ingest information differently and to each their own.

    1231:

    Why alma linux?

    1232:

    whitroth:

    yes I know you're snarking but there is a serious subtext to your observation... folks such as we, who actually read books -- paper or kindle or phone -- are not 100% of humanity...

    also there comes the point where folks no matter how literate tend to seek out brain-eqv of junk food such as Cheetios(tm) or potato chips or crisps or sunflower seeds or * whatever *

    notwithstanding quality content -- eqv of tofu burgers and/or decent done barbecued chicken or a carefully assembled deep dish pizza -- Game of Thrones, Sopranos, Masterpiece Theater, et al, there are moments when trash teevee is a must have...

    if my eyesight could handle it, there'd be the TikTok app on my phone

    1233:

    Re: 'Russia is trying to undermine or evade sanctions. I doubt they're going to recruit that much cannon fodder manpower out of Africa ... but raw materials OTOH ... or western "tech" the African nations could buy & resell to the Russians ...'

    Good point - but my impression is that contracts under which any advanced US (or EU) tech is sold expressly forbids resale to specified (unfriendly) countries. I think this came up during some of the media coverage re: sending German-made tanks to Ukraine.

    About various alt-history US/European revolutions ...

    Think folks missed another possible culture ... the Dutch. The Dutch maintained a strong presence in the US economically and politically for years i.e., New Amsterdam/NYC, Vanderbilt, Van Buren, Roosevelt, etc.

    Short videos ...

    I watch them on Twitter pretty often - most are TikTok. Video content ranges all over the map, it mostly depends on who you're 'following'. For example, today my Twitter feed had a tweet from Tim Blais (acapellascience) with the first video of his new Immune series. Watchable via TikTok or link to YouTube.

    Apart from good quality scientific info, a great way for kids/younger folk (esp. BTS fans) to learn and remember how this part of the immune system works using SARS as the case example.

    Leukocyte (BTS Dynamite Parody) | A Capella Science: Immunology I

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFE8HQKpPlI

    About personal data security & TikTok -

    I'm wondering whether more people will start using different devices for different purposes: one laptop for sensitive personal (financial/medical) info and communications, another for work only (don't want to give your boss/corp employer access to your most personal data either), and then another device for personal comm, media, games, videos, music, etc. Most people I know have more than one device and quite a few use different devices for different purposes. I enjoy having music in the background and having it stream off another device means I'm not likely to screw up anything I'm working on that also needs reliable Internet connectivity/bandwidth.

    EC - Re: widely dispersed Scottish Clan names

    OOC - Do these clans ever argue about who has rights to a clan crest?

    About Victor Hugo ...

    Great source material for musicals and operas. Oddly, most never made it big in the US apart from Les Miz and I'm wondering how much of the audience really get the underlying messages. Ironic and very convenient for the economically advantaged musical theater/opera ticket buyers to have the most anti-rich/nobility musicals/operas performed only in a foreign language so that they don't have to actually understand what the story is about.

    Anyways, here are three few musicals and five operas definitely tied to Hugo's books:

    Les Miserables Notre Dame de Paris* The Man Who Laughs* Rigoletto Ernani La Gioconda Il Giuramento Lucrezia Borgia

    *Notre Dame de Paris and The Man Who Laughs had shortish runs in the US, performed quite well in Europe and have become part of the regular repertoire (i.e., keep coming back every couple of years) in SKorea. Damned good production values there too! (Danged I'd love to see these shows live over there.)

    1234:

    Occasionally, but I don't follow such things. Also, as crests are an invention of the feudal system, I don't regard them as important.

    1235:

    1229 - For about 25 years I did leave without a book when commuting, but I was driving myself or getting a lift from a friend or travelling in a works minibus with friends...

    On YouTube, look for the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre.

    1236:

    SFR
    Almost all Operas, these days, have "surtitles" - so you know what is being said/sung, even if you don't know the language.
    The "fun" comes when they mistranslate - I have seen this one, oh dear

    1237:

    I'm wondering whether more people will start using different devices for different purposes: one laptop for sensitive personal (financial/medical) info and communications, another for work only (don't want to give your boss/corp employer access to your most personal data either), and then another device for personal comm, media, games, videos, music, etc.

    After setting up a blog for someone 12 years ago and learning about how cross site tracking, cookies, etc... all work... I went into Facebook and asked them to purge all my information (I know but you take what you can get). Now I have a browser that gets used ONLY for Facebook and a few other odd things. Plus I'm big on private windows in all 3 of my regular browsers.

    I DO get to MFA when logging into banks more than most folks.

    1238:

    I've had a separate device used only for internet banking for some years now. That won't immunise me against a hacked router, of course.

    1239:

    Re: "surtitles"

    True - but usually if you're at the opera, you're there for the music so it's really easy to not read the lyrics.

    Okay - so what interesting surtitle snafus have you seen? Some of the SKorean and Japanese musical theater videos on YT have subtitles which is useful for unfamiliar foreign language musicals. I'm guessing that most such subtitles are phonetically based automatic translation (AI?) systems because some translated words don't fit the meaning I'd expected based on the musical score and translated lyrics up to that point. Even so - after a while my brain becomes adjusted to that and comes up with the likeliest word via homonyms. Anyways, folks who are easily annoyed by translation errors would probably stop reading the surtitles early on.

    waldo @ 1239:

    re: 'hacked router'

    Thanks - hadn't considered that.

    EC @ 1235:

    Re: 'crests - feudal system'

    Had to look up when the feudal system ended in Scotland - 2003?! Wow!

    https://www.bloomsburyprofessionalonline.com/view/abolition_feudal_tenure/abolition_feudal_tenure.xml#:~:text=Abolition%20of%20the%20feudal%20system,in%20force%20in%20November%202004.

    1240:

    The local agency of an international paedophile gang are having a Streisand contest over whether a recently deceased gang official should be commemorated for his offending rather than for his protection of gang assets from those offended against.

    The "people's church" keep removing memorials, and are trying to get the public celebration banned, and the other side keep replacing the memorials and gathering to remember.

    Twitter video sorry: https://twitter.com/PPantsdown/status/1620550491276181504?t=nX90z7JtAv3yieBy7kku_g&s=19

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/jan/31/police-seek-court-order-to-stop-lgbtq-protesters-marching-outside-george-pells-funeral

    IIRC the form submitted is a "notice of intention" and can't be refused, hence the plod asking for a separate court order prohibiting anyone and everyone from gathering... legal fun times, but then that's what the deceased was known for in its later years.

    (Also, it's not just the gays, it's a whole lot of people. The deceased offended against so many different groups that when they bury him it's going to be "take a number and get in line"... and the grave is going to need a connection to the literal sewer system as well as the metaphorical one)

    1241:

    SFReader @ 1234:

    Re: 'Russia is trying to undermine or evade sanctions. I doubt they're going to recruit that much cannon fodder manpower out of Africa ... but raw materials OTOH ... or western "tech" the African nations could buy & resell to the Russians ...'

    Good point - but my impression is that contracts under which any advanced US (or EU) tech is sold expressly forbids resale to specified (unfriendly) countries. I think this came up during some of the media coverage re: sending German-made tanks to Ukraine.

    True. That mainly applies to major end items (weapons & such), but how do you enforce it against someone buying "duel use" electronics for the domestic manufacture of "smart" appliances. Maybe someone buys a million components & manufactures 900,000 TVs & refrigerators (and 100,000 components go unaccounted for ...)

    Buyers in "third world" countries will sometimes comply with U.S. laws & sanctions. Sometimes they WON'T & Russia is always ready to exploit that.

    1242:

    Moz @ 1241:

    The local agency of an international paedophile gang are having a Streisand contest over whether a recently deceased gang official should be commemorated for his offending rather than for his protection of gang assets from those offended against.

    What is a "Streisand contest"? Google was no help.

    The "people's church" keep removing memorials, and are trying to get the public celebration banned, and the other side keep replacing the memorials and gathering to remember.

    I wonder what they'd say if it was Westboro Baptist Church protesting some LGBTQ+ person's funeral?

    1243:

    A Streisand contest is when one side is actively trying to get the Streisand effect and the other is wishing it didn't exist (being charitable. Another explanation is that they see this as a way to further remind their victims who has the power).

    If the QUILTBAG in question had raped and tortured several members of the church and then used their wealth and power to both avoid consequences and further punish the victims, while denying guilt and fleeing the country I have a feeling that a lot of people would be really torn between their dislike of the how the victims behave and intense dislike of the crimes. Much as many of those who remain Catholic despite the church do.

    (there are, of course, people who actually do support the paedophile gang and have no qualms about its actions, just as there are supporters of any other organisation and/or ideology you can think of).

    1244:

    It's been found!
    No glowing Aussies, then.

    SFR
    Richard Strauss - "Der Frau ohne Schatten"
    Surtitle: The King/Emperor is turning into stone
    Direct translation: The K/E is becoming stone

    Moz
    Ah another, erm "mistranslation" eh?
    The local agency of an international paedophile gang - The Roman Catholic Church - oops.
    LURVE it, incidentally.

    1245:

    I'm wondering whether more people will start using different devices for different purposes: one laptop for sensitive personal (financial/medical) info and communications...

    Count me as an early adopter of that. After years of skepticism I had to accept that it was the 21st century and I couldn't buy everything by going to a physical location and trading colorful paper for the stuff I wanted - but I also wasn't going to trust financial information to some random wifi connection or even on a potentially stealable laptop. I've got a desktop computer plugged into a wired connection which is the only device that makes ebay purchases (or whatever). I'll still window shop on other devices, often in private windows, but none of my laptops will ever see a credit card number.

    1246:

    Re: 'The K/E is becoming stone'

    Boy, oh boy! ... are you ever nitpicky! Suggestion: Don't ever use Google translate. :)

    Scott Sanford @ 1246:

    Re: 'desktop ... purchasing'

    Haven't used a desktop in a while. At this point a 'computer' is like my coffee mug: I carry it everywhere with me.

    1247:

    SFR
    Not "Zum wechseln (in)" then?
    It was the psychological difference that I noticed first.
    Or maybe, simply using plain "werden" was easier?

    1248:

    I was thinking about things like: what happens when the important decisions affecting many, many people's lives are made by an inflexible, broken algorithm?

    Getting back to the original blog post, this isn't science fiction but reality.

    Leaving aside the negative effects of algorithm-driven social media, things like the availability of credit, sentencing of criminals, hiring for jobs, and more are all driven by algorithms now. Even if a human is in the loop, the safe choice is always to go with what the algorithm recommends — because if they don't, they can be blamed for any negative outcomes (even if the negative outcome is just 'algorithm predicted a better result').

    Cathy O'Neil won the Euler Book Prize for Weapons of Math Destruction, a book on this topic.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons_of_Math_Destruction

    She's done a TED talk, for those that prefer watching to reading:

    https://www.ted.com/talks/cathy_o_neil_the_era_of_blind_faith_in_big_data_must_end

    1249:

    Leaving aside the negative effects of algorithm-driven social media, things like the availability of credit, sentencing of criminals, hiring for jobs, and more are all driven by algorithms now. Even if a human is in the loop, the safe choice is always to go with what the algorithm recommends

    As someone who plays the credit card points / rewards game, algorithms are big in getting and keeping cards. I can apply for credit via a major bank web site at 2am and get approved or denied within 90 seconds. Less than 30 seconds most of the time. For a credit line of $4K to $20K. There just can't be a person involved given that time window. Less than 1 in 15 to 20 times the application will get held for a person to review. Now my and my wife's credit rating is in general impeccable and has been for a while now. Someone with a history a missed payments or frequent job hopping might be algorithmically denied or just always referred to a human for review.

    1250:

    algorithm

    I think I tripped the SPAM filters with my last comment. It was about algorithms and how the CC industry works.

    1251:

    Chilling comment tossed off in this article John Carmack Interview in the context of this thread.

    "But if I just look at it and say, if 10 years from now, we have ‘universal remote employees’ that are artificial general intelligences, run on clouds, and people can just dial up and say, ‘I want five Franks today and 10 Amys, and we’re going to deploy them on these jobs,’ and you could just spin up like you can cloud-access computing resources, if you could cloud-access essentially artificial human resources for things like that—that’s the most prosaic, mundane, most banal use of something like this. "

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