This is air launch—using a balloon is just one variant. All of the schemes I’ve seen seem to have fairly small payloads, I assume the trade-offs don’t work well above some threshold.
BossSleepy
Karma: 79
The most recent episode of the 80k podcast had Andy Weber on it. He was the US Assistant Secretary of Defense, “responsible for biological and other weapons of mass destruction”.
Towards the end of the episode he casually drops quite the bomb:
Well, over time, evidence for natural spread hasn’t been produced, we haven’t found the intermediate species, you know, the pangolin that was talked about last year. I actually think that the odds that this was a laboratory-acquired infection that spread perhaps unwittingly into the community in Wuhan is about a 50% possibility… And we know that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was doing exactly this type of research [gain of function research]. Some of it — which was funded by the NIH for the United States — on bat Coronaviruses. So it is possible that in doing this research, one of the workers at that laboratory got sick and went home. And now that we know about asymptomatic spread, perhaps they didn’t even have symptoms and spread it to a neighbor or a storekeeper. So while it seemed an unlikely hypothesis a year ago, over time, more and more evidence leaning in that direction has come out. And it’s wrong to dismiss that as kind of a baseless conspiracy theory. I mean, very, very serious scientists like David Relman from Stanford think we need to take the possibility of a laboratory accident seriously.
The included link is to a statement from the US Embassy in Georgia, which to me seems surprisingly blunt, calling out the CCP for obfuscation, and documenting events at the WIV, going so far as to speculate that they were doing bio-weapons research there.
A couple of days ago I came across this deposition to the “German Corona Extra-Parliamentary Inquiry Committee”, by Dr. Vanessa Schmidt-Kruger, who describes herself as “a cell biologist and my specialist field is the functional characterisation and elucidation of proteins”.
She enumerates a range of concerns with the BioNTech vaccine, including purity; toxicity of lipid nanoparticles; dosing and long-term immune effects. There is an almost throw-away comment in there to the effect of: ”...it has also been found that when the LNPs are transported in the blood then thromboses can occur, or haemolysis – haemolysis means the sudden dissolution of erythrocytes, i.e. red blood cells, this causes hypoxia.”
I’m not in a position to evaluate any of this—the deposition is quite long, and technical (altho note that the second half of the doc is just the German version). The presentation.. somewhat twinges my “this might be crackpot” aesethetic sense (as per naming-the-nameless), but I can’t dismiss it out of hand based on that.
O! So excited to see this—I haven’t had a chance to more than quickly skim, but will dig in after work tonight. But: what about recent detection of an external field effect??? Chae et al recently found “the EFE is individually detected at 8σ to 11σ [!!] in“golden” galaxies subjected to exceptionally strong external fields, while it is not detected in exceptionally isolated galaxies...”
It seems clear from multiple lines that there IS dark matter, but this also seems like strong evidence for MOND?? DO WE HAVE BOTH????
Their sample size isn’t huge, and they call for more work to increase the confidence: “the EFE is statistically detected at more than 4σ from a blind test of 153 SPARC rotating galaxies, giving a mean value of the external field consistent with an independent estimate from the galaxies’ environments, and we detect a systematic downward trend in the weak gravity part of the radial acceleration relation at the right acceleration predicted by the EFE of the MOND modified gravity,” but even the 4σ results seem pretty compelling, no?
No, worst case is the entire developmental trajectory of infants and children might also get messed up. If gestation in martian G isn’t safe, at what point post delivery is Martian G safe?
Also, on a practical level: can you imagine how unpleasant being stuck in a centrifuge for nine months while pregnant would be?
The French Revolution was… contemporary with the American Rev, so, around 1770s. I believe there was some sort of retrenchment by the 1880, so perhaps France was “Revolutionary” for on the order of 5 − 80 years (70% certainty).
Massive changes to the legal system and other social institutions seem likely to negatively affect GDP in the short term, with the possibility of positively affecting it in the longer term.
I’d give 40% that the signal is negative for at least a generation, perhaps longer.
I’ve reached the same conclusion—it’s likely going to have to be asteroids, not planets.
I really appreciated this challenge, as I’d like to get more into data analysis. Thank you for the effort.
What. In. The. World. Happened. In. 2018.
SVXY 2012 − 2021 VIX 2012 − 2021 SVXY falling off the cliff looks like it was associated with a spike in VIX, but why didn’t the previous, bigger spikes have the same effect, sooner?
[ETA]: “For example, SVXY was crushed in the volatility run-up of 2018. The instrument has since reduced leverage to half exposure...” That may explain the shift in behavior since 2018, but not what happened leading up to it. Altho perhaps that might be sufficiently explained by the counter-intuitive behavior of leveraged/inverse ETFs—this page on the SEC’s site actually has a surprisingly good explain-it-like-I’m-twelve:How can this apparent breakdown between longer term index returns and ETF returns happen? Here’s a hypothetical example: let’s say that on Day 1, an index starts with a value of 100 and a leveraged ETF that seeks to double the return of the index starts at $100. If the index drops by 10 points on Day 1, it has a 10 percent loss and a resulting value of 90. Assuming it achieved its stated objective, the leveraged ETF would therefore drop 20 percent on that day and have an ending value of $80. On Day 2, if the index rises 10 percent, the index value increases to 99. For the ETF, its value for Day 2 would rise by 20 percent, which means the ETF would have a value of $96. On both days, the leveraged ETF did exactly what it was supposed to do – it produced daily returns that were two times the daily index returns. But let’s look at the results over the 2 day period: the index lost 1 percent (it fell from 100 to 99) while the 2x leveraged ETF lost 4 percent (it fell from $100 to $96). That means that over the two day period, the ETF’s negative returns were 4 times as much as the two-day return of the index instead of 2 times the return.
Still. Curious.
I think there will be more variance with respect to pre-covid.
I’ve been fully remote for the last year and a half or so—well before covid. It’s been… a’ight. Some of my team mates, in my judgement, have not been good collaborators—they probably wouldn’t be good face to face collaborators, but being remote with them added an extra element of unpleasantness. It requires different skills to remote collab well.
I’d guess that I’m more suited to full-time remote work than at least 80% of people (altho maybe not 80% of programmers..)
Will remote be at least 2x what it was previously? Maybe. Could be. I don’t know what it was previously, but I think it was pretty low, so that’s perhaps not a hard threshold to cross.
It’s not clear that switching to primarily remote work will be a win or stable. Some people seem to find video conferencing really draining, and it’s unclear what sort of impact it’ll have on innovation and team forming. I suspect post covid we’ll be in a world with much more video conferencing—I think that you’re right that certain types of occasional meetings will be much more online, such as meetings with lawyers/accountants. But I suspect that people will still want to be in the same space with the people they work with regularly, at least a few times a week.
Hi, thank you for the comments! Do you have any preferred resources for learning about leverage investing/using a margin account?
I tried to join late, around 5:15, couldn’t get in, sorry I missed you, Mati.
100% in US stocks gives a SWR of 4.3%;
I’ve much less experience doing data analysis than @gjm appears to. This was a really nice way to get started, I may go back and try some of the other D&D exercises. My analysis was less mathematically rigorous, but the roster I got for being helpful seems close-ish to me. One thing I did note is that
there does seem to be a strong territorial advantage:
- Pyros: win most in pyro & vita territory
- Vita: wins most in pyro and vita
- Geo: wins most in geo and vita
- Cryo: cryo, pyro
- Necro: pyro, necro, cryoMy roster was more or less eyeballed by looking at stats of who seemed to loss most against whom and then selecting from the top two candidates. I got VA, VA, GA, GB, C; the first four all defending, C attacking.
I was toying with the idea of trying to figure out more complex analysis of this, but then got too curious and read gjm’s spoilers above, which made the point that there isn’t enough data to support serious modelling.
Hi Ruben, it’s true that omega-3s seem to be important, but the research on omega-3 supplementation consistently seems to find almost no effect or tiny effects, or sometimes even small harmful effects (examine.com’s pages are a good starting off point for this).
Again, while it’s true that seafood may have yucky contaminants in it, eating small fish close to the bottom of the food chain here seems like a situation where moral and nutrition concerns align—briesling sprats and pilchard sardines have very very tiny wee little brains, and it seem less likely to me that they suffer much. They’re also wild caught, so have at least had free lives.
The supplement industry, OTOH, also has documented problems with contamination, and many supplements are poorly absorbed—consuming an isolated compound generally doesn’t seem to be fungible with eating a whole food.
Are supercomputers the right target to benchmark against? My naive model is that they’ll be heavily optimized for things like FLOPs and bandwidth and not be particularly concerned with power usage or weight. What about systems that are more concerned about power-efficiency or weight?
There is evidence that pescetarians have better health outcomes than vegans. These studies aren’t definitive, but it’s also worth noting, that Asian diets are often high in fish, and there are some populations with very good health outcomes there, such as the blue-zone population in Okinawa, Japan. Dietary science is very much a mess, but I strongly believe that if vegans advocates aren’t clear about the dietary science, this issue could cause a LOT of blowback. If, eg, in 10 years, it’s definitively show that consumption of fish adds, say 3 years to health-span and vegans have been misleading the public about this, I predict that it will be very bad for the social acceptance of veganism.
Beyond the considerations of being misleading about the dietary science, IF some amount of fish consumption is indeed healthy, then the moral case is far from clear. Humans are animals too. Many of us find staying healthy an intrinsic good, and having our loved ones be healthy is also an intrinsic good. This would trade off against the welfare of fish.
Personally, I would be very very happy if fish consumption was show to be neutral or negative for health outcomes, both for the animal welfare considerations, as well because of the state of the oceans, and also for aesthetic reasons: fish are incredibly beautiful and majestic animals and I find it unsettling to consume them. Currently, I eat sardines from the seafoodwatch.org’s recommended list a couple of times a week—this is my main deviation from veganism. I’d be happy to return to full veganism if the evidence supported it.
Because I’m a professional DeFi thought leader, I had never actually deployed a contract to Ethereum before.
🤣
“Honesty is reached through the doorway of grief and loss. Where we cannot go in our mind, our memory, or our body is where we cannot be straight with another, with the world, or with our self. The fear of loss, in one form or another, is the motivation behind all conscious and unconscious dishonesties: all of us are afraid of loss, in all its forms, all of us, at times, are haunted or overwhelmed by the possibility of a disappearance, and all of us therefore, are one short step away from dishonesty. Every human being dwells intimately close to a door of revelation they are afraid to pass through. Honesty lies in understanding our close and necessary relationship with not wanting to hear the truth.
“The ability to speak the truth is as much the ability to describe what it is like to stand in trepidation at this door, as it is to actually go through it and become that beautifully honest spiritual warrior, equal to all circumstances, we would like to become. Honesty is not the revealing of some foundational truth that gives us power over life or another or even the self, but a robust incarnation into the unknown unfolding vulnerability of existence, where we acknowledge how powerless we feel, how little we actually know, how afraid we are of not knowing and how astonished we are for the generous measure of loss that is conferred upon even the most average life.
“Honesty is grounded in humility and indeed in humiliation, and in admitting exactly where we are powerless. Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are. To become honest is in effect to become fully and robustly incarnated into powerlessness. Honesty allows us to live without not knowing. We do not know the full story, we do not know where we are in the story; we do not know who is at fault or who will carry the blame in the end. Honesty is not a weapon to keep loss and heartbreak at bay, honesty is the outer diagnostic of our ability to come to ground in reality, the hardest attainable ground of all, the place where we actually dwell, the living, breathing frontier where there is no realistic choice between gain or loss.”
- David Whyte, from a recent episode of Harris’ Making Sense podcast.