Thomas Jørgensen

Recent Actions

• Commented on Same bullshit, new tin
  That reminds me of a fairly probable way the future could get better. 1: Reliable diagnostics for the major anti-social personality disorders. 2: leading to a clean bill of health as regarding those becoming a de-facto requirement for a large...
• Commented on Same bullshit, new tin
  Yhea. No grids unless the area is well on its way back to being less "post apocalyptic" and more "Resurgent industrial state". Howard NYC: Re:Secret wisdom. I'm going to push back on this too : in modern society, a lot...
• Commented on Same bullshit, new tin
  If an area does not have water, nobody lives there, which means nobody needs metal. If it does have water and isn't insanely flat, you can build a dam. Frankly, if you are positing a major die-off I just expect...
• Commented on Same bullshit, new tin
  ... Post apocalyptic smiths will likely mostly be using induction and arc furnaces. Electricity is just a whole lot easier to source than fuel that burns hot enough for metallurgy. I know that the idea that the future will look...
• Commented on The coming storm
  Heteromeles: This is singularly irrelevant. If you plan to reduce electricity consumption, you are planning to fail to address climate change in any meaningful way whatsoever. The current best plans for reducing the carbon emissions of a nation-state are the...
• Commented on The coming storm
  Novo Nordic gets to tailor the education of several entire engineering specialties in the danish educational system entirely to their liking because they hire the vast majority of the graduating class each year. This is why they haven't move production...
• Commented on The coming storm
  If Solar becomes a serious power source as opposed to "Greenwashing for natural gas" that really does imply a whole lot of HVDC cabling running north-south - putting the panels where the sun doesn't disappear for 3 months a year...
• Commented on I should blog more, but ...
  And by hashes, of course. It's not difficult to verify you have a complete and correct data dump even without checking it against the original....
• Commented on I should blog more, but ...
  Don't need them. The transmitter just repeats itself a lot. That you have a complete record is verified on the recieving end, not the sending one....
• Commented on I should blog more, but ...
  That's a really easy solve. Do what the nuclear industry does. All data dumps are by one way optic fiber. It's just an optic fiber connection where the sending side has no receptors whatsoever. Can't hack it if it can...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  Once you're in space you don't need super high thrust, so you can use a Dusty Core Fission Fragment rocket to heat reaction mass instead. The fission fragment rocket is fun! You grind pure fissile into nano-scale dust, suspend the...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  .. What if it was? I'm now trying to think of some reason for Radio Astronomy to suddenly be worth Oceans Of Money. SETI for fun and profit? Picking up Galactic Public News Broadcasts (Deeply outdated) turns into a good...
• Commented on Finding true love in the cosmos
  ... How about this. Fermi Paradox, Subtype : Alien Hyper "Freyas" (Hat-tip to the host). In the deep past an alien species existed which, while not very human, did have both something which resembled a market economy if you squinted...
• Commented on Place your bets
  I've seen a lot of people making this argument from various political corners. It's a popular idea. It's also just one more version of austerity thinking and just as wrong as the rest of them - The poor don't give...
• Commented on Place your bets
  ... An AI that can actually output a good set of meta data for that kind of hyper-compressed speech stream would also be a valuable tool for teaching. Because that means prompt automated feedback on intonation, rhythm, ect. The market...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Since basically every city in the western world is short on housing, I would say that the obvious resolution to this is a lot of office towers getting converted into open-plan apartments....
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  ... electrolysis of the lifting gas is neither a meaningful cost or obstacle for high altitude ballooning. Heck, you might do it that way just because splitting some tap water for each launch is simpler logistics than ordering in gas...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  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...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  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...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  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....
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  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...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  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...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  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...
• Commented on WTF
  The debt limit is not derived from the constitution in any way, shape or form. It's simply a law. It is in fact pretty blatantly unconstitutional given that it questions the validity of US debts.. which is expressly forbidden....
• Commented on WTF
  It's not just gambling. I have long subscribed to the theory that a whole lot of the very strange pricing on used books on amazon and similar is just people who want to pay taxes on illegal earnings so they...
• Commented on WTF
  Then there is the "Time travel as Fermi Paradox answer". All civilizations eventually invent time travel. They proceed to keep changing their own history until that results in a history in which time travel can never be invented by them....
• Commented on WTF
  Yhea, but if you are in "The harvest is going to suck" mode, that really isn't a show stopper. Put two engines in it. Nobody is going to let the perfect be the enemy of Eating....
• Commented on WTF
  Engines generally don't object to being run constantly at their optimal speed. Will a repurposed car engine last the life of the boat? Perhaps not. But it wouldn't be a problem until you put enough hours on it to actually...
• Commented on WTF
  That it already exists is the point? Known, reliable solve. Mechanized Fishing vastly beats farming on "Calories per work and resources invested" up until you overfish the seas, which a single small city cannot do. Being up a river is...
• Commented on WTF
  Hence the freezers. It's more a security concern than it is a travel time concern as your boat is a lot easier to catch on a river than at sea. Fortunately, riverine piracy was.. uhm.. Frowned Upon does not quite...