alexgmcm

That makes sense if these price rises reflect real shortages of goods and not just more money in the economy.

Essentially, we are seeing cost-push inflation and it's not clear when it will go away given the supply chain problems.

People keep saying we can feed 10 billion people. We can. But at what cost to the diversity of biological systems?

Also those 10 billion people in the future will be consuming far more per capita as developing nations continue to industrialise.

This is a good thing as everyone deserves a decent life. But if we are all going to have a decent life without destroying the planet then we need to be mindful of how many of us we can sustainably support.

I mean "Stop at two" isn't a particularly awful policy, yet that is sufficient to curtail population growth.

I doubt it even needs to be a policy in many countries - I don't know many people with more than two kids.

A dam bursting can cause mass fatalities, it's definitely a lot more severe than a minor inconvenience.

And the alternative to nuclear at the moment isn't really solar or hydropower (most places aren't suitable for it) but rather coal and gas. And those are continually polluting the environment not just with CO2 but also carcinogens and other pollutants.

Of that list of accidents only Chernobyl is still uninhabitable, so it's hardly "literal millennia"

Three Mile Island didn't even kill anyone and many believe neither did Fukushima.

If Le Pen or Zemmour get through to the second round then I imagine Macron will win, as voters unite to avoid them winning, much as happened in the previous elections.

Although I guess Le Pen and Zemmour might split each others vote, preventing them from reaching the second round.

And the Paradise Papers as well.. but who knows - third time lucky?

I also left a PhD in the field (albeit right at the very start of the PhD) but this was also my impression.

I was shocked at how bad the state of the literature was with so many dubious papers, especially since the explosion of ML techniques.

I came from a Physics background and there you could generally trust the literature was legit and not just smoke and mirrors to get published.

Have EEG devices improved much in recent years?

I read some books by Nicolelis' several years ago and it seemed back then that really useful BCI's still required invasive surgery because not only do you need to gather signals from a large number of neurons you also need to be able to distinguish them (and in EEG the signals are merged together and then further obscured by the effect of the skull etc.)

It will be interesting to see how much adoption Neuralink can get with the invasive approach.

Does the salary compensate the amount of effort to get there though?

I had a friend who was a chemist but she left the field to pursue data science instead after her pharmaceutical company started even more layoffs in R+D - it seems pharma companies are more interested in intellectual property law than drug development these days.

Just ban the fiat exchanges.

The hardcore crypto types would carry on using it but like 95% would give up - that's sufficient.

It worked quite well at first - I mean they had Sputnik, Gagarin etc. not bad for a country that was some backwards serfdom just half a century before.

But then they lost their ambition - a major point being when they stopped trying to develop their own computing technology and just reverse engineered IBM chips instead.

I did Physics and turned out okay (I work in Data Science now) but a lot of that seemed like good fortune.

I think the future for CS education could definitely be online courses - the Nand2Tetris course has stuck with me more than anything I did at University, for example. And Prof. Roughgarden's Algorithms courses were similarly high quality.

Really I think once online courses work out how to solve the credential problem and actually get taken seriously by employers, the college bubble could burst.

I'd argue it's still worthwhile for degrees like Computer Science if only because HR like candidates to have a degree. (Although this is slowly eroding and may change in the next decade or so)

But the value of less directly applicable degrees like the humanities, social sciences and arts has decreased a lot.

I think in the past simply having been to University, irrespective of the major, was a strong signal. Nowadays graduates are a dime-a-dozen so you'd better have a major that brings real value to your employer.

Plus a lot of the younger generations may have older family members who graduated from college yet have little to show for it.

If you want to do it old-school style you can go out and break some windows[1]

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

Having seen Threads, I'm not sure surviving a nuclear war would even be desirable.

Our "MASSIVE efforts" don't seem to be doing much so far: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...

And that's just annual emissions, Atmospheric CO2 concentration is even worse: https://climate.nasa.gov/internal_resources/1914

If we go into the 2030's and we are still doing business as usual with our near-exponentially increasing global CO2 emissions then I suspect a large amount of climate damage will already be 'locked in'.

The issue is I don't think that scenario is realistic.

We don't have declining global CO2 emissions and there are no signs we will have that any time soon. In fact, annual CO2 emissions continue to increase at an almost exponential rate.

So first of all we'd have to decrease emissions and invent and deploy some CO2 extraction tech to help lower the current atmospheric CO2 concentration.

To me, it seems far more likely that if SRM was deployed many would just see it as a way to continue with business as usual without having to suffer the effects of global warming.

What concerns me about almost all of the Solar Radiation Management (SRM) proposals is that they don't address the root issue of high Greenhouse Gas (GHG) concentrations.

This means that we would have to continue them indefinitely, forever, without fail. (I'm assuming that we would just use the SRM measures to continue with business as usual, but having seen our progress against GHG emissions so far, that doesn't seem an unfair assumption.)

And should we fail to do so then the protective effect would dissipate leaving us with full solar radiation on a planet with presumably much higher GHG concentrations. This would not only cause temperatures to soar to hitherto unseen heights, but to do so in an incredibly rapid manner.

It's not clear that our ecosystems would be able to withstand such a drastic and sudden change.

We know that infinite growth is not possible on a finite planet. I also don't think we will be doing asteroid mining etc. on any scale or timeframe relevant to the current climate crisis.

Therefore we know there is some limit - and we are just arguing about where that limit is.

The Global Footprint Network with their "Overshoot Day" believe we are already beyond that sustainable limit and, to be honest, with increasing populations that (quite rightly) demand Western living standards, I doubt we will ever be sustainable.

I think the CO2 graphs are trade-adjusted but those resource usage graphs come from USGS so I doubt it takes imports into account (especially given imports would include processed goods, manufactured parts etc. where estimating the resource use would be tricky)

It should just say "hit by bus" given the self-driving nature of the bus had nothing to do with the incident and in fact would have prevented it.

But that wouldn't be news. It matters because most people will just read the headline and go away thinking self-driving technology is dangerous.

I have no experience of Roblox development, but if it teaches transferable skills to 'real' programming then it's still probably a net good.

I mean, don't people learn that at University when they have to live with others? Or maybe if they are in their first job?

But when housing costs are such that you have people in their late 20's and early 30's still living with roommates it seems like a societal problem.

Yeah, it's weird as if I'm browsing /r/buildapc I wouldn't even mind seeing relevant ads - same for stuff like /r/books etc.

It does seem like a huge missed opportunity.

I really dislike the new design, it feels super-bloated like it's trying to be a social app (and indeed they force the awful Reddit app on you too).

I use Reddit Enhancement Suite and the old design and I find it far superior. It feels more compact and efficient, like HN.

I don't understand how they expect tenants to be able to backpay all the rent if they weren't able to work due to the pandemic.

If they were prevented from working or lost their jobs due to the Government lockdowns it only seems fair the Government pays their rent.

Germany's per-capita emissions are significantly higher than other Western European nations like the UK and Spain though (9.44 vs 5.55 and 5.40)[1] and pro-nuclear France manages even lower per-capita emissions than those (5.13).

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...

Neither of these reduce greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere and I'd be concerned that rather than being used as an extremely short-term fix while we reduce emissions they would just become a band-aid to continue business as usual.

The problem is that once we go down that path we'd have to do it permanently, and if we were ever unable to keep up the release of aerosols or the maintenance of the solar umbrella etc. then the temperature would rapidly soar to wherever it would have been in their absence.

It just seems incredibly high-risk and avoids actually solving the root problem. I saw such geo-engineering described as "a band-aid on a bullet wound" which seemed quite apt.

Still their per-capita emissions are lower, which is kind of what really matters given nations and borders are essentially a social construction, personal consumption/emissions are not.

As I mentioned previously, reducing China's total emissions would require reducing their per-capita emissions to such a low amount it would essentially be condemning much of the population to live in abject poverty (especially as large parts of the nation has not yet industrialised).

Given the far, far higher per-capita emissions of countries like the USA, Canada, Australia, Saudi Arabia etc. it wouldn't surprise me if China refused to slow economic development in order to reduce emissions.

But how much of this is due to Western nations essentially outsourcing emissions to China by shifting manufacturing etc. there?

The per-capita emissions are important because countries with high per-capita emissions likely have a lot of low-hanging fruit.

I mean reducing per-capita emissions in the USA could be done by improving public transport etc. whereas in China it would likely be condemning millions of people to poverty.