uv-depression

(1) Considering there are now multiple companies planning to launch their own fleets of tens of thousands, satellites need replacing, etc, even if this was completely accurate, this will be a continuous and ongoing issue as it has been for years.

(2) The standards for astrophotography and for professional astronomical measurements are somewhat different! Also, I think you meant median stacking; mean stacking doesn't handle outliers as well.

(3) Whataboutism. Besides, you'd get no argument from me about replacing the majority of air travel with high speed rail, even without considering lights.

I agree that city light pollution is probably the bigger problem, especially for the amateur/cultural angle, but these are two symptoms of the general cause of our economic system not valuing the sky (or the environment generally).

Have you never been there? This light pollution map wildly underestimates light pollution outside of cities. I can tell you from experience you're not getting nearly 22 mpsas skies anywhere near Pemberton.

I can't just casually hop up to the Yukon for an evening of astronomy. It's about a thirty hour drive. Even relatively small towns have exurbs now because of our terrible city planning, so light pollution extends shockingly far. Alberta's probably the worst, almost the entire province (about the same land area as Texas) has light pollution.

instead of shutting down agriculture in the only marginal spot on the west coast you can grow food.

The Okanagan will be shocked to hear they can't do agriculture! Perhaps we could just turn off the greenhouse lights for a couple hours, or install retractable shields/mirorrs on top of the greenhouses.

There isn't a single "dark side" of the moon that's always in darkness, the "dark side" of the moon is the side that always faces away from us (poor choice of name). It's fully illuminated during a new moon.

Lunar regolith would probably be quite damaging to optics. It's nasty stuff. I have seen ideas for building liquid mirror telescopes on the moon, though.

Greenhouses here in the lower mainland of British Columbia have been devastating to the night sky. It's quite depressing how little society values the night sky, something that's been an important part of every human culture for longer than recorded history. I've taken friends out to thoroughly mediocre skies (Bortle 4-5) and they've been very impressed, because they're used to city lights (Bortle 9) where you can maybe see a few of the brightest stars and planets.

If you've never seen truly dark skies, do yourself a favour and go see what they look like during true night. Bring binoculars if you have them, maybe get a planisphere and a (dim!) red flashlight.

The lack of respect for the night sky includes starlink and the other internet providers dumping tens of thousands of satellites in orbit instead of building municipal internet, by the way. It's been a huge hit to the field of astronomy. Before someone inevitably says "we should just be putting telescopes in orbit", orbital observatories are obviously a huge deal and I support building more of them, but you simply can't put things like the ELT (40m primary mirror, 2800 tonnes) or the Square Kilometre Array in space.

Nonsense, but you clearly either haven't read my replies or don't understand that capitalism requires growth while some other economic systems don't. Even 1% growth per year is exponential growth and quickly will run into limits (as we are currently experiencing!).

But let's grant "both systems eventually run out of resources" for the sake of argument. The rate at which that happens then becomes clearly relevant, and if staying alive is good (I hope we can at least agree on that), using resources slower is better. Capitalism is depleting resources on a human timescale (as, again, we are currently experiencing with climate change), so instead depleting them on longer-than-human timescales is clearly the better option.

You're arguing against "degrowthers", favouring the current growth-based system. What you're arguing for is a system that requires the infinite growth you don't want to think about. So in essence you're saying "looking at the consequences of my beliefs is absurd", which is hardly a compelling argument.

You're right; sunlight will eventually run out. (Well, long before that the expanding Sun will boil the oceans). No, you couldn't have an economy in a closed system, but the Earth isn't a closed system (due to the aforementioned sunlight).

That's an absurd argument, though. The problem we have right here, right now, is capitalism destroying the habitability of our planet because its hunger for resources must always grow, so it's unable to handle the problem of fossil fuel use, or stop depleting soil, etc.

You're arguing against jumping out of the way of a moving train because we're not immortal.

What? Some resources are renewable. There's a finite amount of solar energy, but it doesn't "run out" (on human timescales). Growing food doesn't need to remove from the biosphere, even if the way we do it now does do significant damage. So we absolutely must stop using non-renewable resources (i.e. fossil fuels), but if we find an amount of renewable ones combined with recyclable non-renewables (like metal) that are sustainable then we can reach a steady state.

An economic system based on perpetual growth can never reach a steady state, unless you believe that physical goods can become an arbitrarily small portion of the economy.

If physical goods remain a constant proportion of the economy without having more of them but get more expensive, all that's happening is inflation, not economic growth.

But the claim must be that physical goods can become an arbitrarily small portion of the economy. Nobody would dispute that they've become smaller. Do you believe that food can become arbitrarily cheap relative to total wealth? Or steel, or silicon? In other words, can the food you eat require an arbitrarily small portion of your income? And looking at nation-states only is an accounting trick; the economy is global.

You again say "it's absurd" and provide no argument. I think the case is not as clear cut as you would like it to be. Solar energy is not an infinite resource.

You're making a very strong claim ("literally zero sense"), but you've provided no argument as to why. I don't believe that the economy can become arbitrarily decoupled from physical goods, which is a hard requirement for infinite growth with finite resources.

To believe this, you must believe that the economy can become arbitrarily decoupled from any physical good. Do you believe that food can become an arbitrarily small proportion of the economy (and so arbitrarily cheap relative to income)? Steel? Purified silicon? Infrastructure like bridges?

I don't. Perpetual growth is incompatible with finite resources. Fortunately, human flourishing does not depend on infinite economic growth; there is, for example, enough food for everyone on the planet. Capitalism is just bad at allocating resources by any metric other than its own. (Yes yes, it's better that feudalism was. I think we can hold ourselves to a higher bar than that.)

But it objectively makes cities worse. People love visiting Europe in part because they don't do this to nearly the same extent (obviously this varies by country/city). People aren't entitled to not having their opinions be proven wrong, nor are they entitled to ignore negative externalities (pollution, noise, danger, unpleasant city centres, and so on).

are reasonably happy with the status quo.

They're not, except for the having a car part. Road maintenance, especially in the suburbs, is hideously expensive and is falling further and further behind. Cars are the least efficient mode of transit, so traffic gets worse and worse. "Just one more lane" always makes it worse (induced demand), but that's the only solution being tried. The only way to make traffic better is to get significant numbers of people to switch to other modes, and you're simply not going to do that with "incremental improvements" because the status quo is so abysmal for anything other than a car. Cars themselves are horribly expensive and yet are required in most US cities; most are in effect paying a tax to car companies to participate in society.

being told they are wrong for liking their car.

Who said this?

Americans will vehemently deny this, but you're absolutely right. Decades of car industry propaganda has convinced people that the ability to drive anywhere is true freedom, and they can't see that the freedom not to need a car (all the time) is better for everyone; cities are quieter, more comfortable, and less polluted with fewer cars (no, electric cars don't fix this). It leads to other absurdities, like US cities frequently having parking minimums for bars. That's insane!

There's also the classic problem of people wildly misinterpreting statements and getting mad about it. You can say "we should design cities not centred around cars" and people will hear "I'm going to make it illegal for you to own a car". Or my favourite exchange, "Let's improve public transit" followed by "but public transit is bad for me, I can't take it".

With frontier LLM agents, the digital loop is happening now to an extent

I see no evidence of this, just a lot of people claiming it (very loudly, for the most part).

that extent probably grows larger (research automation) soon

The word probably is doing a lot of work here.

The usual constraints of physical law still apply

There are knowledge constraints, too. I can't build a quark matter processor without understanding quark matter to a vastly higher level than we do now. I can't do that without experiments on quark matter, I can't do experiments without access to a lot of energy, material, land, &c, that need to be assembled. There are a huge number of very difficult and time-consuming instrumental goals on the path to fundamentally better compute.

A separate point: there's also deductive exploration (pure math) as distinct from empirical exploration (physics), which is not bounded by any physical constraints except for those that bound computation itself.

Sure, but physics requires math that is definitionally applied, not pure, and engineering requires physics.

what experiments it would do within that space are hard for us to imagine

The only thing you could do in a "digital space" (a.k.a. on a computer) is a simulation. Simulations are extremely useful and help significantly with designing and choosing experiments, but they cannot _replace_ real experiments.

Like, the time window from the discovery of fire to the discoveries of Quantum Mechanics but in a flash.

And my point is that there's no good reason to think this is possible and many to think it isn't.

it's more of a fun sci-fi idea

It's being presented as extremely serious possibility by people who stand to gain a _lot_ of money if other people think it's serious... that's the point of the linked post. Unfortunately, these AI boosters make it very difficult to discuss these ideas, even in a fun sci-fi way, without aggravating the social harms those people are causing.

I think that when the singularity occurs all of the problems in physics will solve, like in a vacuum, and physics will advance centuries if not millennia in a few pico-seconds

It doesn't matter how smart you are, you still need to run experiments to do physics. Experiments take nontrivial amounts of time to both run and set up (you can't tunnel a new CERN in picoseconds, again no matter how smart you are). Similarly, the speed of light (= the speed limit of information) and thermodynamics place fundamental limits on computation; I don't think there's any reason at all to believe that intelligence is unbounded.

My point is is that if leftists cannot talk about immigration policy in a nuanced way

Does nuance mean agreeing to your framing of a situation? If so, I guess not. That's not what it means to me.

a naive idealist

Insults aren't helping your case.

associate the effects of a bad policy with the policy itself.

What are the effects you're referring to here?

Humans see patterns in everything, that's how we work.

Here's a pattern I see: American-owned propaganda networks take over Canadian news and trying to drum up racist sentiment and lots of people falling for it.

Is that what I said?

How else am I to interpret someone seeing a group of people working low wage jobs and concluding that everyone from their country is a bad influence?

will only drive people towards right-wing extremists

The right talks a big game about personal responsibility, but somehow their worst beliefs are always someone else's fault. Funny, that.

naturally become associated

Now see, that's exactly what I'm talking about. It's _not_ natural or inevitable.

Questioning immigration policy is not racism. Anti-Indian sentiment [ justification for said sentiment ]

Wild sequence of sentences.

is now widely agreed has contributed to a noticeable decline in the quality of life for all.

Citation very much needed.

A lot of people who have never had issues with immigration policy before have become very anti Indian immigration as a result.

So we just let racists determine national policy now? I wonder how that's working out in the US.

Leaving aside the fact that this is a single picture of a chart with no source provided (or sample size, or methodology)... that's eighth on that chart, not fifth, and just says "immigration" with no further detail.

collectively our greatest fear

Citation very much needed. This sounds like _your_ concern that you're trying to launder through projecting onto the rest of the country.

Yeah, and all of that's already true right now because messages are stored on those users' devices already. You'll be heartbroken to hear that those users can also take a screenshot of your disappearing messages and send it to anyone. There are fundamental limitations to what a messaging app can protect you from.

Do you also think it's "strange" that they're introducing that (optional!) feature while also storing all the messages on your device? The cloud backup is strictly more secure than that on-device database. Their blog post on the subject also explicitly says it won't include disappearing messages that disappear within 24 hours.

That backup system presumably uses symmetric encryption, which is not nearly as vulnerable to quantum-accelerated attacks.

That character is actually the en dash (properly used in ranges, e.g. 5–10). The em dash is [shift][option][-]. I would also include triple hyphen in that list; for those of us used to TeX a double hyphen (--) is an en dash and a triple (---) is an em dash.

GP was incorrect that it doesn't increase supply, but correct on pricing. Besides, if I can't afford $3000/mo rent, it doesn't matter to me how many rental units are available at $4000/mo. With massive pricing collusion having been the standard for the last few years (RealPage) and the demand for housing always being extremely inelastic, the supply/demand curve is extremely complex.