gshubert17

3 times as long (6 years for the Senate vs 2 years for the House)

Alas, net zero carbon is not peak heat. It’s peak carbon dioxide. It’s peak rate of temperature change due to greenhouse gases. Global average temperatures will continue to rise past 2060 (or whenever we get net zero). I’m not sure what the models predict. Perhaps the total temperature rise could be 3.5 degrees by 2100.

Edit: Two responses, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44252450 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44252408, seem to be dupes. As rickydroll states, the time stamps and id numbers show it to be the first.

Written or printed out at 3 digits per centimeter, 202 trillion digits would make a string about 670 million kilometers long -- or about the distance between Earth and Jupiter.

See: http://literateprogramming.com/cweb_download.html

My oops too. The extra 1 argument belongs with range, as you have it here.

Since the first element in range() will be 0, should the last line be ...?

    return prod(1,range(n+1))

Solar-powered railgun accelerating rocks to lunar escape velocity in directions chosen to make the desired delta-v. Speed the moon up or slow it down or change whatever other orbital elements you please.

This would work better to change the orbit of a small asteroid. For the moon it would take (a lot) longer.

Both manufacturing corporations and mutual investment funds are ways to aggregate smaller amounts of capital into big enough sums that large factories or investments are possible. I don't think it's necessary to rely on multi-billionaires for investment in wild ideas.

Would taxation of intellectual property reduce rent-seeking behavior? Any idea how it might be implemented?

Just before the section on Moore's Law, it says this about silicon purity:

Electronic grade silicon (EG-Si): 99.9999999 pure ('nine nines pure') Thats one impurity atom in every 10.000.000 silicon atoms.

I believe that should be 1.000.000.000 (10^9 atoms) to correspond to nine nines pure. Just as one impurity atom in every 100 (10^2) atoms would be 99% (two nines) pure.

Estimates range from about 1 T$ [0] to 4 T$ [1] or 5 T$ [2].

[0] https://www.britannica.com/event/World-War-II/Human-and-mate...

[1] https://moneywise.com/life/lifestyle/financial-facts-about-w...

[2] https://www.whatitcosts.com/world-war-ii-cost-united-states-...

A Visa fact sheet [0] claims 276 billion transactions in a 12-month period, which would be less than 9,000 per second, but still an impressive figure.

Fedwire, the settlement system operated by the Federal Reserve, processed 196 million settlements in 2022, each about $5.4 million, for a total of over $1,000 trillion. [1] That would be about 16 settlements per second. Visa handles many more smaller, individual transactions; aggregates and nets them; and uses Fedwire to settle them between member banks.

Bitcoin could be used in a similar manner, handling a relatively small number of larger settlements; leaving other systems to handle smaller, individual transactions.

[0] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/global/about-visa/documents/ab...

[1] https://www.frbservices.org/resources/financial-services/wir...

archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20240116022603/https://www.popul...

also, originally published in 2023

I think that individuals who care about meaningful, non-deceitful content, will have to create their own parallel net in which content can be sanity-checked and fact-checked.

Fast, free, or fact: pick any two. The current internet is fast and free, but is increasingly non-factual. An alternative emphasizing meaningful facts and observations will almost necessarily be slower.

We might even be able to use pressed bleached dead trees as a backup medium.

Indeed, Neal Stephenson in _Anathem_ (2008), in describing an alternate world (in which his "reticulum" is our "network") wrote "Early in the Reticulum—thousands of years ago—it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information."

"So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. ... " Generating crap "didn't really take off until the military got interested" in a program called "Artificial Inanity".

The defenses that were developed back then now "work so well that, most of the time, the users of the Reticulum don't know it's there. Just as you are not aware of the millions of germs trying and failing to attack your body every moment of every day."

A group of people (the "Ita") developed techniques for a parallel reticulum in which they could keep information they had determined to be reliable. When there was news on the reticulum, they might take a couple of days to do sanity-checking or fact-checking. I'm guessing there would need to be reputation monitoring and cryptographic signatures to maintain the integrity of their alternate web.

If Congress were interested in policy changes, would a tax on plastic (to cover recycling, cleanup, and future medical costs) be a way to go?

I toured an NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research) facility in Boulder around 1979; got to sit on a seat on their Cray-1. So yes, weather and climate calculations.

Required minimum distributions start at about 5% (not 10%) at age 72, and increase with age. But your general point stands. RMDs will add to one's tax bill, by regular tax brackets and having up to 85% of Social Security benefits taxed too.

The last sentence said something about a computationally stable (model/state) of society. I suppose such stability would be helpful in looking for a sustainable economy or society. But I'm not clear either, on what that sentence means.

Possibly the "Limits to Growth" report (1972) by Meadows, et al. They used a simple model of resources, population, economy, pollution, etc. Some would say an over-simplified model. The report sparked a lot of controversy. I am not aware of significant changes to their World3 model that might be useful trying to integrate climate change models with economic-resource and population models.

If Google didn't index this guide, how would people find it?

"Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist"

Attributed to many people, including Kenneth Boulding, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/07/11/exponential/

I've had the same Medicare advantage plan with Kaiser in Colorado since 2019: My monthly costs for Kaiser, and then for Medicare part B:

2019: 370.50 135.50

2020: 360.50 144.60

2021: 294.50 148.50

2022: 236.50 170.10

2023: 236.50 164.90

2024: 236.50 ??

Before 2019 I had a different plan. I was retired but not yet eligible for medicare. Prices for such pre-medicare plans have increased significantly over this period. edit fix formatting

What happened to the rotation rate around the beginning of 2019, to cause the big change in the slope of the UT1-UTC line (https://crf.usno.navy.mil/ut1-utc)? After adding 5 leap seconds in 11 years, no leap seconds have been added or subtracted since the end of 2016.

The key is that this phenomenon was well known and predictable. First get the date right, then wait until local noon for the sun to be at its maximum altitude. The Egyptians had long had excellent calendars, so they could use past records to predict the date.

There are interesting opportunities in some niches. Twenty-five years after I got an MS/CS degree and had worked as a software engineer at various places, I was looking for something different. A public charter school in Colorado had just started; they taught students K-12 and sought teachers with subject matter expertise and teaching skills. They explicitly didn't require ed school certification. I worked there for 13 years before I retired.

At this school, 2 one-semester "tech" classes were part of high school graduation requirements. One was on operating systems and office software. At times these were Windows and Office; at others Linux and OpenOffice. The other was much like the material in Brian Kernighan's "D is for Digital", on basic concepts, history, and brief experience programming. We covered a little shell scripting, a little SQL, web pages with HTML and JavaScript.

We had an elective programming class, but its enrollments were quite small. The ones I just mentioned were taken by just about everybody.

ISRU - In-Situ Resource Utilization

The farther humans go into deep space, the more important it will be to generate products with local materials, a practice called in-situ resource utilization.

Global advertising spending is around $750 billion. Assuming advertisers believe most of their money is well-spent, can I infer the percentage of human beings that actually do ignore advertising is small?

Ariel and William James Durant, authors of "The Lessons of History", where the quote appears on page 12, itself a quote of their earlier volume 6 from "The Story of Civilization", specifically "The Reformation", page viii.