ArkanExplorer

Its impossible to subdue a society little removed from the 7th century, unless you're willing to replicate the actions of Alexander the Great, Mohammed, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Abdur Rahman Khan:

That is, slaughter or enslave all males from any tribes who oppose you [1], take their women for your own [2], and enforce your own culture, language and religion [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banu_Qurayza

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susa_weddings

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuristan_Province

All of that is rather politically incorrect these days, so Afghanistan and nations like it will remain unconquerable except for nations like China who are still willing to carry out that level of annexation and assimilation.

Even if we recreated the entire Amazon Rainforest, it would only be equivalent in embedded carbon to 4-5x our annual human emissions:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/amazo....

We would have to essentially recreate the Azolla event (a geological process that took place for 800,000 years) to undo the carbon we are putting into the atmosphere:

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

The only way to stop climate change is to stop digging coal and oil out of the ground and burning it.

You're right, its not dropping: its rising

Egypt fertility rate 2006: 3.01

2018: 3.28

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...

Contrasted against neighbours Jordan and Saudi Arabia which show much more consistent declines and are now both down to aobout 2.3.

I've read the whole study.

TLDR: Correlation, not causation.

Basically, they found that Customer A spent $100 on games, and consumed 50 units worth of Piracy.

But Customer B spent only $30 on games, and consumed 10 units of piracy.

They then concluded that piracy lead to more consumption.

The obvious rebuttals are:

1. More voracious consumers of games will probably buy more and pirate more anyway

2. It sucks if you are one of the pirated games (eg. singleplayer, non-DRM), who loses out from this equation

3. Its great if you're eg. Fortnite or Steam, where pirated games serve as the enticement to join the ecosystem, and when customers do eventually spend, it comes to you given your huge size.

In 2019 the American population increased from 327.2 to 328.2.

In 2019 1.03million immigrants were granted permanent resident status.

The American population increase is entirely driven by immigration. The fertility rate is 1.73.

At some point soon the American population will begin falling, without immigration, as the baby boomers die off.

American population is driven solely by immigration, given that the average fertility is far below replacement.

If you don't want one billion Americans, then you need to propose and support:

- Ending refugee programs and withdrawing from the UN convention on refugees

- Sending refugees back to safe countries

- Building walls along the southern border

- Ending the H1B visa

- deporting illegal immigrants already in the country

- Disallowing citizenship by birth

- Ending chain family migration

The bigger issue here is that Americans are moving out of States with huge pension bills, into 'younger' states with lower taxes and fewer legacy costs. Its basically a death loop playing out at an inter-state migration level.

They closed nuclear plants because of strategic-level corruption: Former German Chancellor Gerhard Shroder accepted a senior position at Rosneft as soon as he left politics:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54462311

Germany replaced nuclear power with Russian gas.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm

474,000 of those deaths are to people aged 65 and older, so probably out of the workforce already due to retirement.

And the rest would be those with existing serious health conditions and so also likely to be not working.

If I could do a 4-day workweek, and not have to wear a mask, I'd happily work in an office again.

Have a look at the chemical composition of crude oil:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum#Composition

Its already 83% carbon by weight, and already in the ground, and already liquid.

Its impossible to do any better than that! CO2 is only 27% carbon by weight.

Could high levels of CO2 be the cause?

CO2 at 800ppm has a huge impact on mouse lungs:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27721892

Could lower levels (400s ppm) have an impact on other parts of animals?

There was no hospital overflow. I live in Ukraine and even with a totally rudimentary health system and routinely ignored lockdowns, the health system functioned like any other flu outbreak. The temporary hospitals setup in the USA and UK were never used.

If anything I am quite sure that the few lockdowns we did have worsened the spread of COVID, or at least concentrated it over a shorter timeframe, since people were now packed into shopping centres at reduced hours, were forced to socialise in smaller 'speakeasy' venues, and had a greater interaction with grandparents given the closure of schools. Without lockdowns, the virus would have spread slowly and steadily, and been concentrated in younger groups who have more social interaction with eachother, like influenza each season.

Even under a 'best case' scenario for Lockdown, and using Sweden as an example, we have spent about 50 months in Lockdown in order to save 1 month of life - statiscally for someone of advanced age and with serious existing health problems:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness...

Is there a health problem in the West? Yes, and its from obesity, which is heavily correlated to negative COVID outcomes:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8...

Sweden and Ukraine far below lockdown countries for deaths per capita: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...

Annual deaths in Sweden 2020 only 6% higher than 2018, and even then only after a weak 2019 flu/death season:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...

The COVID death spike in Sweden basically aligns with a once-a-decade flu variant:

https://swprs.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/sweden-monthly-...

So is this conspiratorial? I am using all of the available data to create this attitude.

Its been the same with lockdown. Enforce totalitarian restrictions and tracking on the plebes, whilst the rich and connected routinely ignore or are excluded from the rules.

Its possible that Lockdown is a ploy to distract from the trillions of dollars of money printing that has gone on during the pandemic, to suppress the inflation generated, as well as to normalise location and biological data collection and arbitrary interference in personal liberty and private businesses.

It seems unlikely that the motivation is really the health of the populace, when deaths and ill health from air pollution and obesity, and from the interrupted medical treatments during Lockdown itself, are routinely ignored.

You can follow the same logical pattern for all the other major issues of our time. Are the massive migration inflows of violent military-age males into Europe from MENA really about humanitarian aid, or about injecting cheap labour into the continent and providing justification for giant intelligence agencies, tracking and banning of encryption?

The same for critical race theory - is the goal the betterment of humankind, or to set the working class against eachother and to distract from insane wealth capture of the 1%?

The correct punishment should have been to ban them from manufacturing fossil-fuel-burning engines.

But we're already going to be building those batteries anyway: Electric cars.

What we need is a proper international standard for cars to be able to interact with the grid, to be able to charge and discharge based on grid conditions and pricing.

Its stupid to have everyone coming home from work at 6pm and plugging in their cars to charge right at the existing afternoon demand peak, when solar is waning. Just getting those cars to delay charging until around midnight (allowing user override) would shift a huge amount of peak demand.

Same concept if you don't use your car during the day - it should be able to discharge right into the morning and afternoon peaks, at your control. The user should be credited for this onto their car account.

It might even make sense to have dedicated high-voltage circuitry in houses and apartment blocks, to be used for EVs, solar, etc.

And we should really figure that out immediately since EV production is ramping up right now. We can't just rely on single automakers (Tesla) to work out these societal problems.

What's the end-goal of China though? Is it to engineer ethnic bioweapons:

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

Or to figure out the genes for intelligence, health etc. and to modify their population with them?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_(stock_market)

"In a form of what is now considered illegal front running and self-dealing, a bucket shop holding a large position on a stock, and knowing a client's vulnerable margin, might sell the stock on the real stock exchange, causing the price on the ticker tape to momentarily move down enough to exhaust the client's margins. Through its opportunistic actions, the bucket shop thereby gains 100% of the client's investment.

The term bucket shop came to apply to other types of scams, some of which are still practiced. They were typically small store front operations that catered to the small investor, where speculators could bet on price fluctuations during market hours. However, no actual shares were bought or sold: all trading was between the bucket shop and its clients. The bucket shop made its profit from commissions, and also profited when share prices went against the client.

Bucket shops were made illegal after they were cited as a major contributor to the two stock market crashes in the early 1900s."

We still have widespread chip and computer shortages, and in some regions of the world electricity shortages, because of the amount of silicon and energy being wasted on mining.

One of the biggest pollutants now in water are PFAS, microplastics, and other hormone disruptors.

How to we get rid of those without needing to rely on expensive multi-stage filters that need to be replaced every 4 months?

EU Politicians pass anti-privacy legislation to 'protect' us from terrorism....

Which is caused by the open borders and migrant settlement programs promoted by the EU in the first place.

Convenient isn't it?

That's basically a society without mass immigration - manual labour becomes more expensive, so educated people spend their time automating tasks and inventing and operating robots.

The simplest solution remains to ban the formal exchange of crytpo for fiat, across Western nations.

Its a lot harder to justify giant ransomware campaigns when you're paid in Amazon gift cards instead of easily exchangeable cryptocoins.

I have internal statistics that 80% of Switch game instances are in handheld mode.

Docked-only features like DLSS are unnecessary.

Even with DLSS, the CPU heavily limits performance anyway.

Indies are making so much money on Switch that there is a guaranteed pipeline of titles, plus Nintendo 1st-party, to keep the system relevant for about another 3 years, until hopefully we see a Switch 2 with much more powerful CPU and GPU (with basic raytracing), still 720p handheld, with maybe a standalone dock with a DLSS chip for 4k docked.

China's fertility rate (assuming it is accurate) is excellent by the standards of other high-IQ populations, at 1.69.

By contrast, Taiwan is dreadful, at 1.07. Eventually, China will be able to just sail in.

The real threat to our chip supplies is that the world will run out of intelligent Taiwanese people to operate TSMC.

50,000 people petitioned France last year to recolonise the country:

https://www.euronews.com/2020/08/06/over-50-00-sign-petition...

FSD is going to need more than just automakers - it will need roadbuilders.

Specifically, building the roads, signs, and traffic lights to be machine-readable, not just human readable.

Imagine if we could recreate the road network in software, with realtime status of traffic lights. There would be much less reliance on cameras and image recognition.

This probably already occurs in some control centre somewhere, it just needs to be made available over the air for vehicles to access.

Most cities will spend more on pensions than on infrastructure - the average is 13.5% of total budgets:

https://reason.org/commentary/city-budgets-bend-under-growin...

The pension systems across the West are fundamentally broken. If we're going to talk about ponzi schemes, pensions are the ultimate.

We need to privatise pensions completely, and encourage people to work later into life. Corporations and governments should have no responsibility for pensions - if someone can physically work, but doesn't have the money to independently retire, then they should continue to work.

Humans produce about 2tonnes of CO2 annually, and even at an industrial scale, CO2 scrubbing costs about $1,000/tonne:

https://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/december/extracting-carb....

And that's at an industrial scale - residential scale would be even more expensive. Not all of the CO2 in the air has to be removed though and humans are not at home all the time.

It would cost, at the very highest range, $50t to stop climate change over 20 years. That's $2.5t per year, or $2,500 per middle class person for 20 years. Plus, we get a whole lot of benefits from a cleaner environment without oil and coal.

https://www.globalgiving.org/learn/cost-to-end-climate-chang....

Its cheaper and more effective to just... deal with oil and coal usage as a collective, rather than all of these ad-hoc individual amelioration measures.

Playing the devils' advocate, is the key to affordable housing to allow neighborhoods, builders etc. to exclude by race?

Folks might not be able to choose where they live, but at least they will get cheap housing? Is that a fair trade?

Its not about O2, is about an excess of CO2.

All of these schemes about CO2 capture don't make sense atmospherically (we're physically digging out too much carbon to put it back into the ground economically) -

But CO2 capture makes sense inside buildings.

Of course, all of this is just an extra burden on the individual - buying air filters, CO2 capture, expensive ventilation, CO2 monitors - when we could just restrict our coal and oil usage in the first place, much more economically.