richard77

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Commented on Sucker bet (a thought experiment)
As first step, I would hire as consultant a certain science fiction author with a knack for futurology to use his small but well followed blog to start collecting promising ideas. I'm sure he would be smart enough to not...
Commented on Upcoming events
Actually commercial vehicles (trucks and busses) don't engine brake. They have special devices call retarders that use hydraulics to dissipate most of the kinetic energy before brake pads start to work. On such big vehicles engine breaking would be too...
Commented on Ask me anything!
I have been a satisfied customer of Runbox for a couple of years, registering my domain with them. Based in Norway, very privacy oriented (at least they market themselves as such). They offer about one hundred aliases already with the...
Commented on The Nakamoto Variations
Variant 1) Satoshi Nakamoto is a left-leaning science fiction writer with a strong IT background. Bitcoin are his way to cause a financial crisis and the collapse of the current capitalist model before current existing AI (big corporations) transform and...
Commented on Unforeseen Consequences and that 1929 vibe
Thanks for the clarification. I was suspecting something like that, but those energy sources have low marginal costs for production, the levelized energy cost should be still higher than 16$/MWh. So who paid for the investment? China government (directly or...
Commented on Unforeseen Consequences and that 1929 vibe
A bitcoin is generated every ten minutes (the computational difficulty is scaled according to total mining power to keep generation frequency roughly constant). If cited figures for BTC network are correct, that means that every btc needs about 600MWh of...

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opsec commented on Sucker bet (a thought experiment)
There's a Sci-Fi already written about this (from Germany) http://www.andreaseschbach.de/werke/romane/billion/billion.html...
bertiebond commented on Sucker bet (a thought experiment)
Although I hate his books (his writing style is as exciting as a 15 year old GCSE student) Dan Brown's Inferno probably is a good short cut way to explain what I want to achieve. A significant proportion of the worlds problems - pollution, conflict, resource scarcity, Global warming, poverty etc - is in someway influenced by TOO MANY PEOPLE. Can't kill em all. And like hell voluntary family planning education is efficient enough. Enforced sterility on a world wide scale. Use my billions to pay for research That or spend it all training/cyber-upgrading myself into the ultimate assassin ninja...
Rick Adams commented on Sucker bet (a thought experiment)
Billions, Fiat money only means something by persistent agreement so for the fiction, and in real life, one would probably not want to destroy the structures that maintain its worth.. at least until preferred structures are available and proven. It is unlikely one could develop a single biological agent that appropriately targets populations in a way that can allow the rapid reforestation that is needed. Distribution methods are available, the Haj, Christmas, New Year, Thanksgiving and other celebrations. Existing illnesses, even if they are only available in electrical recording or presumable various bio-war repositories (Russian) can thus repurposed ( the...
Gerald Fnord commented on Sucker bet (a thought experiment)
Investments, whether in fiat money or any other, also get tricky: Selling-off any substantial amount of what you've got would likely cause a change in value of whatever you didn't sell. The coupling between the monetary value of investments and—I'll call it the 'effective value'—would seem to 'run' for high values, decreasing. (See: 'running coupling constant'.)...
LAvery commented on Sucker bet (a thought experiment)
An interesting read relevant to this post (although Abigail Disney is probably not in the $100G range). What It’s Like to Grow Up With More Money Than You’ll Ever Spend...

Responses to Comments from richard77

Common Misconceptions About Publishing—a series of essays about the industry I work in.
How I Got Here In The End —my non-writing autobiography, or what I did before becoming a full-time writer.
Unwirer—an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction.
Shaping the Future—a talk I gave on the social implications of Moore's Law.
Japan: first impressions — or, what I did on my holidays
Inside the MIT Media Lab—what it’s like to spend a day wandering around the Media Lab.
The High Frontier, Redux — space colonization: feasible or futile?
“Nothing like this will be built again”—inside a nuclear reactor complex.
Old blog—2003-2006 (RIP)

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