(Epistemic status: shitpost)
You‘re a kitty!
(Epistemic status: shitpost)
You‘re a kitty!
How does knowing about Ukraine’s draft affect an NYT reader’s opinion of the war? I mean it’s not going to be like
Reader: “Ukraine’s justified in defending itself from Russia!”
NYT-whistleblower: ”But Ukraine drafted soldiers to do it, and the NYT didn’t tell you!”
Reader: ”Oh, well, screw those guys, Ukraine should lose!”
… so what is it like?
Some ways a reader could respond include:
More instinctive patriotic fervour (Glory to Ukraine’s presumably-voluntary heroes!) (… and this seems like the likely propaganda angle in question)
Increased salience of hellishness of the war, therefore Russia should win asap to minimise bloodshed
Increased salience of hellishness of the war, therefore arm Ukraine to punish Russia for starting it
If you turn up the prior belief of collusion between the NYT and a military-industrial-political complex, you can imagine a “pragmatic” situation where the West arms Ukraine enough to keep Russia embroiled in a war of attrition, thereby pouring Russia’s armed forces into a meatgrinder for, from Western accountings, pennies on the dollar, and this might be pragmatic, or even hard to improve on (because arming Ukraine too much could provoke nuclear response from Russia), but, damn it all, it doesn’t feel very heroic. So, NYT is left waving the banners and playing the trumpets?
downvoted for the “affiliate link” rickroll.
(Epistemic status: shitpost)
You know the rules, and so do I
I am confused. None of these are particularly social-status-improving, or, for that matter, social-status-worsening, because none of them are conspicuous. If you buy a tailored suit or an expensive car or an expensive house, people can see that you own it, and the extravagance signals wealth (or can be interpreted as materialism or lack of prudence); none of the things on the list seem to qualify. What am I missing?
Hm. Now I thought I’d heard of gender dysphoria/transgender/etc showing up in brain imaging (eg. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26766406/) and while “develop like female brains” would be bounding happily ahead of the evidence, that seems at least like sporadic snorting noises from the garage in the night time
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Plan to uplift Royal Corgi may cause constitutional crisis
If Epstein’s thesis is, broadly, “cheap energy from fossil fuels is awesome and climate change isn’t that bad”, weaknesses would be likely to fall somewhere under these, classified in increasing controversy:
Climate change might be worse than he’s positing. Particularly, climate is a global system we only partly understand, and our error bars for the effects of inadvertently perturbing it may be quite large
Cheap energy may be obtainable from non-fossil sources. Epstein is keen on nuclear energy (why?), but, as AnthonyC points out, solar & wind are getting surprisingly cheap (for example https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-23/building-new-renewables-cheaper-than-running-fossil-fuel-plants). Obviously that only gives you a bonanza of cheap energy when the wind blows and the sun shines, but “the sometimes-free-energy bonanza will destabilise the grid!” feels a long way from common-sense
GDP may be possible to decouple from energy use by purely technical means: compare the computation-per-watt-hour of a Pentium with that of an iPad. Compare a Passive-House-standard building with an average building. How far are we from the optimal frontier? There will be, at some point, a limit, because we’re operating with optimal designs and can’t get any better, but we might be quite far from that point—countries with more energy-tight housing often have codes that require that, rather than the market doing it spontaneously? Why is that? Principal-agent problems? “Market for lemons” informational issues?
GDP may be possible to decouple even further from emissions use via selective lifestyle changes (higher-density cities, more bicycles, fewer automobiles)
GDP may be argued to be decouple-able from human welfare. Broadly, this is the “degrowth” argument. Critique here, for example (https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/people-are-realizing-that-degrowth)
… climate change is not an existential risk… Earth isn’t going to become Venus, or anything like that
Last I heard, the big question was what positive-feedback “tipping points” exist, and at what CO2-level they become triggered. This would give quite wide error bars on what average heating is caused by a given quantity of cumulative emissions. If we can burn all the fossil fuels, turn the rainforests to desert, and vaporise all the methane clathrates, and still not end up like Venus, that’s… reassuring, I guess
A town in Norway did it: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170314-the-town-that-built-a-mirror-to-catch-the-sun
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I’m not too clear about what you just spoke. Is that a parable, or a very subtle joke?
Or to take a stronger example, someone you deeply care about must be alive because you deeply love them, and at the same time you also know for certain that they are dead.
Isn’t this the “denial” psychological defense mechanism, famous for its role in Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief? In the reality the unfortunate thing is true; the impossibility is in the mind of the observer tripping circuit breakers.
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Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment, but with a large number of trained sheep
Story prompt: overengineered boiler bootstraps self to sentience, discovers climate change, goes on strike
“Pareto efficiency“ - Pareto efficiency, or Pareto optimality, is an economic state where resources cannot be reallocated to make one individual better off without making at least one individual worse off (from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pareto-efficiency.asp)
and “arms race”, if that counts as a nicer way, or some allusion to the Red Queen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race)
Epistemic status: shitpost
Second-Order selection against My Immortal
If you think we‘ve got too much Culture War, vote for people/policies/things that in your opinion will diminish the Culture War (give or take other values, obviously).
(This is a consequentialist argument)
(Epistemic status: earworm)
No-one will have the endurance to claim on his insurance / Lloyd’s of London will be loaded when they go! - Tom Lehrer, “We will all go together when we go”
I’ve yet to delve into it, but RethinkX—a think tank, doubtless with an axe to grind—take similar ingredients and produce a result pointing in the opposite direction: RE is cheap, storage is relatively expensive, so the optimal solution is RE overcapacity with storage filling the gap that remains, and volatile energy prices, often very low, sometimes quite high. A large gas- or coal-fired power plant is not at all optimised for this market, and they don’t advise you to own one. See, for example: https://www.rethinkx.com/energy-lcoe.
I think there are very many moving parts here when dealing with RE intermittency. Grid-scale storage is the obvious one, but there’s also vehicle-to-grid, and all kinds of thermal storage at the point of use (since providing heat and cooling is a major use of electricity, and thermal storage can be cheaper than storing electricity as electricity). Add to that all the principal-agent problems (the landlord owns the HVAC, and the tenant has to grit their teeth and pay for it) and time lags (how long does it take to build a 2GW power plant?)…
The need for backup dispatchable power means that even if RE were free, it would still not be cheaper, because you still have to have the backup dispatchable power stations
This is somewhat true for the capital cost of the backup/dispatchable plant, but not the operating cost, which includes fuel, and any notion of the cost of the emissions (whether via carbon tax, cap and trade, or notional non–financial cost) (and, as far as AGW is concerned, the emissions are the important factor here).
THANK YOU! In personal development circles, I hear a lot about the benefits of spirituality, with vague assurances that you don’t have to be a theist to be spiritual, but with no pointers in non-woo directions, except possibly meditation. You have unblurred a large area of my mental map.
(Upvoted!)