existentialistjoy

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• Commented on Down tools
  The plan isn't spare juice - the plan is to replace tankers which have to come and go from the group, with a dedicated jetfuel-manufacturing ship, which is basically a hull stuffed to the gills with chemical plant and reactors....
• Commented on Amazon: malignant monopoly, or just plain evil?
  Regional rights map very badly onto reality at this point - the actual market for any media content which is distributed digitally is "Native and high-fluency speakers of the language it was produced in". Dividing that market up between regional...
• Commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
  Pseudo-random number generators are for people with an inexplicable fear of soldering wire. Pointing a geiger counter at the nearest wall works fine....
• Commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
  The entire point of going with one time pads is that it frees you from engaging in an arms race of mathematical cleverness. It's unbreakable, and the practical burden of moving pads just isn't that great. Trading in the perfection...
• Commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
  And really there is just no point. A one terabyte harddrive costs chump change. Fill it with a pad, and that should cover your com needs for fracking ever unless you insist on high-definition teleconferencing every friday....
• Commented on Interstitial note
  .. 400 years of gate war? There should be no targets left. All the planets would have been evacuated (to make them pointless as targets) or destroyed, and everyone still living doing so in randomly jumping floating stations to avoid...
• Commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
  The main thing is that large amounts of storage is cheap, and any entity which needs secure communications almost certainly has in person meetings on a regular basis anyway - The cheap way of setting up a one time pad...
• Commented on The prospects of the Space and Freedom Party reconsidered in light of the crisis of 21st century capitalism
  Yhea, but the Savannah got retired in an era of very cheap oil. Modern freighters are spending really quite absurd sums of money on fuel over their service life, and this is an expense that is about to go up...
• Commented on The prospects of the Space and Freedom Party reconsidered in light of the crisis of 21st century capitalism
  Doesn't actually help that much - Emma Maersk still spends upwards of 60 million dollars / year on fuel despite sailing quite slowly. Nuclear freighters would cost more to build, but not half a billion more....
• Commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
  I.. really do not understand why anyone at all uses any encryption other than one time pads. Making very large ones with current tech is very cheap, and while ensuring a secure manufacture and distribution takes some effort, it isn't...
• Commented on The prospects of the Space and Freedom Party reconsidered in light of the crisis of 21st century capitalism
  It should be noted that for large freight ships going nuclear would probably drop operating costs quite considerably - they spend a lot more time at cruising speed than the military does, so the economics are actually more favorable for...
• Commented on Trust Me (I'm a kettle)
  One possible equilibrium is shifts in law enforcement to adapt to the new circumstances - common place crimes (speeding, IP violations, jaywalking ect) being removed from the books, or reduced to an automated yelling at and a symbolic fine, while...
• Commented on A deceptively simple question
  I have a prediction that runs counter to a lot of the expectations above. The hard and software piloting cars will be behind air-gap security. At most there will be a heavily restricted and extremely paranoidly coded feed for traffic...
• Commented on Time tourism
  Well, the obvious thing is to write time travel that isn't about tourism. But most other goals seem really likely to devolve into wish fulfillment power fantasies really darn quick. Although I have, in fact, tried to write the story...
• Commented on Things publishers can't do (yet)
  Re; all you can eat buffets; For food, you need to remember that the dominant costs for a restaurant are rent and wages. Ingredients bought wholesale are much cheaper than the equivalent bought at the supermarket, so the fact that...
• Commented on Me, talking
  As long as it is not prone to spontaneous or accident related bangs, how dangerous it is if misused is completely meaningless. There are already a surfeit of ways to kill in the world, adding another to the number is...
• Commented on What are the big issues of 2013 going to be?
  Mains parity is meaningless - mains cost includes a lot of taxes, and the upkeep on the grid. Not taxing solar kwh's is tax avoidance, and given that distributed production absolutely requires an even stronger and more complex grid than...
• Commented on What are the big issues of 2013 going to be?
  The problem is that steel, concrete, copper cabling, ect - all the things that turn a photovoltaic cell into a power source, as opposed to a stack of black tiles in a warehouse, do not get 20% price reductions year...
• Commented on What are the big issues of 2013 going to be?
  Large flat roofs are vastly better for this kind of thing - But even if it happens, this does not imply that residential solar will follow. It is the difference between work that can be done at normal builders rates...
• Commented on What are the big issues of 2013 going to be?
  Solar costs are at this point dominated by balance-of-system costs. - The cost of the panels themselves is no longer the only thing that matter. This has consequences: 1: retrofit solar rooftop installations are a dead end. The labor costs...
• Commented on What are the big issues of 2013 going to be?
  Eh.. If the US falls over due to politically induced idiocy, and that causes the EU to run the printing presses... Then that will darn well work. And make the US government look unspeakably bad. "2nd US republic incoming" bad....
• Commented on The ticking clock, stopped
  Aging is not really wear and tear, tough. If it was, we would die much younger. Dialing up the repair mechanisms keeping off entropy to the point where they keep ahead of it does not violate any biological laws. I...
• Commented on The ticking clock, stopped
  Cohort studies on immigrants show that the majority adopts the secular values and lack of faith of Scandinavia in less than a decade, regardless of where they are from. Immersion is an extremely powerful persuasive force. The south is hanging...
• Commented on The ticking clock, stopped
  People very highly committed to the ideologies of an era, or a given scientific paradigm are always going to be a very small minority of the population. And out of that tiny minority, most will be able to let go,...
• Commented on The ticking clock, stopped
  Most philosophy about the virtues of death strike me as highly elaborate "sour grapes" reasoning. For one thing, not a single person advancing these arguments ever decides that the perfect length of life is 43 years and commits suicide when...
• Commented on The ticking clock, stopped
  Re: oil. The tesla S just won several automobile of the year awards. Gasoline for personal transport is already dead, it just has not fallen over yet....
• Commented on The ticking clock, stopped
  Eh, moving is not actually needed. Hypothetical: If countries a, b, and c adopt policies that channel the entire tripling of output to the one percent, while country d has everyone work a third as much and otherwise has no...
• Commented on The ticking clock, stopped
  The "wages" worry is wrongheaded. The net effect of this is a society with 2 to 3 times higher productivity per citizen as a result of drastically lowered dependency ratio and improved overall health and energy, and a much lower...
• Commented on The ticking clock, stopped
  Boxers do not age out so much as they accumulate damage. Current forms of boxing might well get killed/outlawed as a result and be replaced by martial arts competitions that do not involve concussions. US football? Also likely to go....
• Commented on The ticking clock, stopped
  Noone is going to lengthen the terms on loans. The increased risk to principal would entail a risk premium sufficient that a longer loan would in no way be significantly cheaper, and binding yourself to contracts that long would not...