bookofsand

Malthus thesis was that populations grow exponentially, whereas resources grow linearly, thus population will relatively soon overshoot the available resources. Malthus was also an optimist. We are in a situation where we have a hard limit on the amount of (fossil fuel energy) resources we can globally expend. At least according to the Paris agreement. Take your time to internalize the consequences of this hard limit. Hint: TotalEmissions(fixed) = Population * PerCapitaEmissions.

PS. I pointed to one Mustafa Mugambo Mutone. The future that his descendants will inhabit will hopefully see a convergence of lifestyles across cultures and continents.

Speaking of US and China, obvious candidates are immigration policy and one-child policy. Other levers: female education, child mortality reduction, shift in cultural norms towards small nuclear families, access to contraceptives. The entire 'western' world is experiencing population decline, and not for lack of resources.

As a curiosity, I saw a few years ago an article from Africa: 'Meet the Ugandan Businessman with 13 Wives, 176 Children'. I hope we can agree that this kind of reproductive behavior is utterly unsustainable in a world that has learned about its limits (and sadly overshot them already).

https://face2faceafrica.com/article/mustafa-mugambo-mutone

Edit: Of course landmass is an approximation. Of course Alaska / Arizona are not Iowa. On the flip side, Tibet / Xianjiang are not Guangdong either. The core point that given that TotalEmissions = Population * PerCapitaEmissions and the Earth only cares about TotalEmissions. We've got to price for the Population term somehow, lest it becomes an unaccounted externality.

We are comparing energy / sqmi. US and China have similar landmass. 3.8M sqmi vs 3.7M sqmi. Comparing their total energy consumption is, up to a constant factor, the same as comparing their energy / sqmi consumption.

Countries should decide for themselves if they'd like to be crowded, thus per capita energy poor or sparsely populated, thus per capita energy rich.

US and China have relatively similar land masses, thus arguably similar levels of available resources. China happens to have a population 4.2 larger than US, thus 4.2 lower per capita resources. If US resource consumption is unsustainable, then so is China's.

The author needs to familiarize himself with the concept of MTBF. It's surprisingly short for high order artifacts. Entropy will introduce errors and break down every single high order system out there. I am aware of two exceptions: the biosphere and, on a much much smaller scope, cloud storage. The core characteristic of both systems is redundancy and repair: every piece of the system is continuously monitored and replaced by a healthy clone before enough errors accumulate to render it inoperable.

Short of developing artificial life, the proposal will not work. Of course, developing artificial life is one of the big existential risks humanity faces. I'd rather we study gardening instead :)

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

The solution to climate change requires indeed keeping large numbers of people poor and making existing people poorer. And it will fail indeed because of populist backlash. We should plan indeed for climate change, though not sure what to personally do beyond buying a praying book (100% dead serious).

Sobering: As of 2021, there is no 'western lifestyle' country on the face of the Earth that has emissions in line with the requirements of the Paris accord emissions, which is about 2.5 CO2 t/year/capita for a global population of 10 billion (2050 estimate). Even countries like Sweden, Switzerland of France, which are >90% nuclear & renewable in their electricity production, still have 4.5, 4.7 and 5.1 t CO2 t/year/capita. I have yet to hear concrete proposals of where the 50% cuts should come from, other than large scale technologies that have not been developed yet.

To a first, second and third approximation:

poor = small energy footprint

rich = large energy footprint

Assuming the problem is that the global energy consumption is too large, the last thing we want is to increase the energy footprint of the people we already have. Moving people from poor countries to rich countries means greatly increasing those people energy footprint. It is in direct contradiction to the stated goal of reducing the energy footprint of humanity, and serves as a strongly visible signal that the ruling class is not serious about reducing global emissions.

The Amazon rainforest is being destroyed to grow more money. Money is fungible, if beef were banned they's cut the forest to do something else with the land.

https://matadornetwork.com/read/mapped-united-states-canada-...

The name sounds nordic. Oslo, Stockholm & Helsinki would end up with a climate similar to Northern Manitoba. I tried to drop a Google StreetView to get a sense of the landscape. It was not possible, there are simply no roads and no cities at those latitudes.

Even the richest of the rich need a supply and support network. Money won't suffice.

While the SUV-driving crowd is stomach churning, it is also small in the big picture. The huge elephant in the room is global population size, moving apace toward 10 billions and possibly beyond. Industrializing 10 billion people turns out to be a very dirty business.

If US were to ban ICE cars and truck and switch go horse-and-buggy tomorrow, it will save 29% of US emissions. US accounts for 15% of global emissions. Thus the overall global savings will be 4.35%, or about 1.44 GT CO2/year. Fantastic. Yet 95.65% of emissions will still be going out every year. In 20 years, emissions have grown from 25 GT CO2/year to 36 GT CO2/year, or about .5 GT CO2 / year. The whole 4.35% savings would turn out to be a minor blip, overtaken in about 3 years by new emissions elsewhere in the developing world.

We are already 40+% above Paris agreement 1.5C emissions levels of 25 GT CO2/year. We need deep cuts on massive scale. If the world were even remotely serious about tackling CO2 emissions for a rough but perhaps survivable crash landing, we'd see:

* World wide moratorium on building new coal/gas/oil power plants and ICE vehicles.

* World wide moratorium on economic growth. Good bye lifting the third world out of poverty. Good bye western retirement.

* Gradual phasing out of industry in developed countries. Good bye middle class lifestyle.

* Ban of immigration from low emission countries into high emission countries.

https://www.c2es.org/content/u-s-emissions

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...

A. The per capita approximation means the whole world has to be brought at third world status.

At projected 2050 population levels of 10b, and 25GT/year emissions, per capita emissions allowance is 2.5t/year. There is no industrialized country with this level of emissions, the lowest being Sweden, Switzerland and France at 4.5, 4.7 and 5.13. These countries have moved >90% of their electrical production to nuclear and renewables and cut their emissions in half compared to the 1990s. Possibly they are also externalizing their food and industrials production.

B. What is 'fair' share? Population as of 2020? 2050? 1950? Land area? Forest mass?

The most obvious issue is population. Hard to believe, but in 1950, at the beginning of the current Golden Era, world population was a mere 2.5 billion people. At those population levels everybody on Earth could have had afforded the industrialized lifestyle of Japan, Germany or Netherlands, with about 10 CO2t/capita emissions.

The vast majority of companies ask for a 'we own everything you breathe' agreement as a prerequisite for employment. The vast majority of employed software engineers don't have the luxury to work on side projects, unless they relinquish the IP to their employer for no additional compenstation, which renders monetization moot.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event.

Such negative values occurring shortly after the GOE require a rapid reduction in primary productivity of >80%, although even larger reductions are plausible. Given that these data imply a collapse in primary productivity rather than export efficiency, the trigger for this shift in the Earth system must reflect a change in the availability of nutrients, such as phosphorus. Cumulatively, these data highlight that Earth’s GOE is a tale of feast and famine: A geologically unprecedented reduction in the size of the biosphere occurred across the end-GOE transition.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6717284

Your suggestion is probably the correct solution technically speaking, as it funnels the screen reader I/O stream through browser APIs.

The immediate objection is that most popular screen readers (JAWS, NVDA) are native apps and not browser extensions, (some?) extension-based screen readers being immature. mwcampbell articulated it as much in a different post, asking for a native desktop client as opposed to a browser based client. Alas, 'native desktop client' is a different technology than Cloudflare RBI, subject to different tradeoffs, which may well be at odds with the goals of Cloudflare RBI as a product.

A hypothetical browser accessibility protocol is likely to prove insufficient, as native screen reader apps will themselves become an attack vector.

Unlocking the situation requires a wider industry buy-in beyond Cloudflare. Screen readers must be rearchitected with security in mind. IT departments must manage accessibility apps. Advocacy groups must commit to roadmaps that include a lot of change, and that may even degrade the status quo for many years to come. Given that existing screen reader apps have decades of engineering already poured in, it will be hard and expensive to enact change. A good early step could be creating an industry standard various entities can rally behind.

https://www.afb.org/blindness-and-low-vision/using-technolog...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/screen-reader

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28031514

https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-and-remote-browser-is...

For blind people, TTS settings are very personal.

Is there a whitepaper that articulates concrete solutions to reconcile the myriad flavors of screen reader configurations with Browser Isolation technology?

40 years of ecosystem recovery from a vantage point (Landsat) in a 6 minute video about Mt St Helens post 1980 eruption: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13614

1000 sqmi of rewilded land: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Exclusion_Zone

Subsistence agriculture? Slums? Manhattan hyper density?

Cuba (2.68), Tunisia (2.60), Ecuador (2.43), Egypt (2.32), Brazil (2.25), Vietnam (2.20)?

Under climate emission targets & global equity assumptions, western (#) lifestyle must end. In political terms, the western middle class lifestyle must end, the global elites will still ride their jets 'for the common good'.

According to WRI calculator, in 2018 world GHC emissions totaled 47.6 Gt. Paris accord 1.5C target is 25 Gt. Population in 2050 projected at 10 billion people. Back of the envelope calculation gives per capita target of 2.5 CO2e t. As of 2020, even countries with green electrical energy production (nuclear & renewables) like Sweden, Switzerland or France are still at 4.5, 4.7 and respectively 6.3 CO2e t/capita emissions.

As of 2021, there is no country with a western lifestyle and 2.5 CO2e t/capita emissions, closest being Sweden with 4.5 and Switzerland with 4.7. Perhaps a ray of hope, both these countries started at 8 CO2e t/capita 30 years ago in 1990.

(#) 'western' roughly includes Western Europe, North America, East Asia, Australia and Arabian Peninsula.

https://www.wri.org/insights/4-charts-explain-greenhouse-gas...

https://unepdtu.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/un-egr19-es-4...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-electricity-fo...

https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...

In the old days errors came with error codes. This helped searchability using an index in a printed manual, but also Google. Unfortunately people are not good at pattern matching random many digits numbers, so this is not very useful in the front line. I wonder if world triplets, possibly semantically meaningful, could be used as error codes of sorts in the compiler error space.

Unionize.

Ambiguity. 95% of the cases you forgot the semicolon, the other 5% you forgot something else.

No, developers don't read compiler error messages, unless absolutely necessary. The economics doesn't work out: the compiler creates hundreds of error messages in a few milliseconds, whereas developers only have a very limited budget of attention.

What developers do is to check where the errors show up, usually just the first error, and use pattern recognition techniques, aka 'experience', to fix the error in its context. Only if the fast track error recovery process fails, repeatedly, do developers spend minutes to carefully read the compiler error messages and deeply make sense of it.

This matches the article thesis: the 'better' compiler messages are, the more likely is that pattern recognition techniques can use the error message as part of the fast track error fixing process.

Inflation with a chance of hyper.

Interesting. Just saw this headline in the local newspaper the other day: "New president of business operations Catie Griggs wants Mariners to be ‘most progressive team’ in MLB".

https://www.seattletimes.com/sports/mariners/new-president-o...

I went SWE and I'm p**ed that Mechanical Engineering pays 2.5 less. It destroys the know-how basis of this country, if not the world. Might as well call it the Tech Disease, modeling upon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease.

It just so happens that employees are more divided than ever on "social justice" / identity issues. We are on a wild wild ride.

Even if we become a space faring species, land will still be a zero sum game.

* Within the Solar System the amount of land available on bodies with not-crushing-gravity is limited to a few times the Earth surface. This includes hospitable bodies like Venus, Titan or the Moon. The entire area of Mars is slightly smaller than Earth's land area, with climate conditions significantly worse than Antarctica. Sobering map: https://brilliantmaps.com/solar-system-surface

* Inter-stellar travel is subject to prohibitive time and energy costs. Physically speaking there is no way for Alpha Centaurians to visit their Earth properties on a regular basis, or vice-versa. This renders the whole concept of 'property owned by foreign stellar body inhabitants' moot.

Fauci holds enormous power on how research money is granted or withheld. You're going to hear very few professional scientists, which desperately need grant money, speak against Fauci. That is until Fauci is removed from his position of power.

I'm not following the Fauci situation closely either. But there are scientists of the opinion that the Wuhan lab, partly funded by US money via Fauci, was playing with fire. For example, in this tread someone else posted (in support of Fauci) an article that contains this fragment:

Paul cited Richard Ebright, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University and a critic of gain-of-function research, who disagrees with the NIH. Ebright has said that the EcoHealth/Wuhan lab research “was — unequivocally — gain-of-function research.”

https://www.factcheck.org/2021/07/scicheck-fauci-and-paul-ro...

This is the 'it depends on what the meaning of the word is is' defense:

A few of their [2017] experiments combined different elements of viruses to better understand what’s required to infect human cells. Specifically, the 2017 research used the backbone of WIV1, a bat SARS-like virus reported in 2013, and swapped in the spike protein of two newly identified bat coronaviruses to see if they, like WIV1, can use the human ACE2 receptor to enter human cells. [...]

Is that gain-of-function? Again, there are different definitions and opinions on that. We reached out to the NIH asking for a more detailed explanation of why the 2017 paper didn’t meet its definition, and we’ll update this story if we get a response.