To me, "Tip for AI skeptics" reads as shorthand for "Tip for those of you who classify as AI skeptics".
That is why the meta commentary about identity politics made complete sense to me. It's simply observing that this discussion (like so many others) tends to go this way, and suggests a better alternative - without a straw man.
I read it more as a claim that people who advocate against AI are picking arguments as a means to an end rather than because they actually believe or care about what they're saying.
Agreed. It feels like the FAA and related government agencies have a rule set based on now-outdated assumptions about the difficulty and cost of space launches. Even just a couple of decades ago, it was never thought that this number of satellites could practically be launched. Similar to many other problems of tech moving too fast for regulations.
This is a regionalism in parts of the US, which I’ve seen described as Pittsburgh and its surroundings.
I come across it often and struggle with cognitive dissonance every time - I know of the regionalism but it feels so strongly like a glaring grammatical error.
I see/hear the specific phrase “needs fixed” most often.
This isn’t true - the cap on SALT tax deduction hasn’t changed since it was put in place in 2017.
Some members of congress, apparently from both major parties, are proposing legislation to raise the cap from $10,000 to $100,000 or otherwise raise or remove the cap. But these proposals are not certain to go anywhere.
China is a nuclear power and neither the US nor China is interested in MAD. Any attacks on Japanese territory would probably lead to a hot war with the US, but almost certainly not nuclear annihilation.
China overtaking the US seems a lot more likely based on sheer numbers. China’s population is over 4x larger than that of the US. So China “just” needs to reach a GDP per capita of 25% to have a larger economy than the US. This metric has been growing rapidly in the past decade or two and from a rough search, seems to currently stand around 17-18% of the US’s figure.
Of course GDP isn’t the only factor in world power status, but it sure is a big one.
Compared to the US, China also has a far larger labor force, a greater ability to manufacture things, and greater government control over its population.
Access to natural resources is similar for many things, less for some (like oil and gas) but greater for others (like rare earth minerals).
> If worldwide carbon caps and tariffs become a thing, the oil and gas in the ground suddenly becomes nearly worthless if you can't use it.
It may be worth less, but it won't be worthless. I have a hard time seeing another fuel source for long distance aviation (although we may move to synthesized fuel in the future).
Companies will also need feedstock for plastics - that use won't be affected by carbon caps at all.
Those tariffs are also a joke in and of itself. As we can already from the oil price cap idea you can only enforce things when the world plays along, but looks increasingly like the global south is fed up by these dictates. So good luck enforcing carbon caps and tariffs when the majority of the world population doesn't play along.
You can still have them, but ultimately it's the people in western societies that will pay the price with their own pensions and social services gradually degrading.
We kinda enforce "don't trade slaves" globally... And "No child labour"... And "don't steal other countries ships when they sail near your country".
"Don't emit more than your fair share of carbon" is just another rule like the others. If most countries agree, but there are a few dissenters, we can deal with it like other international disagreements - warnings, then sanctions, then war.
Currently, we're far from that, because we don't have a majority of countries agreeing on carbon caps.
Nah - it'll go down like Venezuela [1]. The government of a country flagrantly ignores the internationally agreed carbon caps, and so some country or group of countries get together and sponsor a coup.
It happened to Venezuela because they refused to align with US interests, and with other economic and political issues, they were an easy target. The wikipedia page [1] has a nice summary of the list of countries on each side of the dispute, and you can see a nice 'pro USA' and 'anti USA' divide.
I think China could easily fix their demographics if they wanted to.
They have sufficient control of their population that if they said "everyone of child bearing age must try for a child this year and next", they'd probably double their population within 2 years.
The 'demographic problem' is only a problem because they don't see it as an issue worth fixing.
Lots of them don’t want to have kids. The government has many ways to influence the public. But I don’t think it’s true to say that they have so much control over their populace that they could do anything like double their population in 20 years, let alone 2.
People in China are just people, right? Many of them don’t want to have kids. What’s the government gonna do?
Of course, hypothetically, the government blocks people from leaving the country and literally forces them to procreate but that’s getting a bit imaginative (it would be turning the China that exists today into something very different).
Realistically I think the government is worried about their demographic problem and is using every reasonable tool in their arsenal to attempt to address it.
> See the Cultural Revolution and Great Famine etc for examples of what it can do. Basically anything.
Even assuming China is all powerful and can achieve "anything" here, the policies would still have a latency of an entire generation. Unless you include time-travel as part of "anything".
There's nothing that needs solved. It's ideal to shrink the global population while boosting per capita quality of life. The focus should be on improving per capita, not on expanding the overall economic size or population numbers.
Providing housing to young families will not make a meaningful dent to declining demographics in the affluent world. People do not want to have so many children (3-5 or more) and it's not due to lack of housing. That's a cultural change and no amount of housing is going to reverse it. And even in the financial scenario, the housing aspect is only one chunk of the huge cost of raising several children.
> There's nothing that needs solved. It's ideal to shrink the global population while boosting per capita quality of life. The focus should be on improving per capita, not on expanding the overall economic size or population numbers.
Then why do we simultaneously import millions of workers each year to make up for the supposed shortage of natural population growth (caused by policy)?
But many of those coming here are not well educated. Hard working maybe, adventurous certainly, but often economically deprived and undereducated as a result, or so I’ve read.
There is a real illegal vs legal split here, legal immigrants tend to be quite well educated. The majority of illegal immigrants have a high school degree but they are definitely less educated than the average American.
That said, while undocumented immigrants tend to be less educated being able to work when we didn’t pay for any of their education is still a boon. It’s something of a waste to pay for 12 years of education and then have someone doing manual labor.
If you immigrated to the west as a working proffesional, then you have to have job offer, education and usually you have to be somewhat well off to be able to afford lawyers and get through the visa process.
I don't think you can fix population issues in 2 years. Takes ~20 to make an adult (unless you have a liberal, multi-cultural society -- American adult citizens could be made in an afternoon if we shifted some laws around).
PRC demographics are extremely advantageous for great power competition / building comprehensive national power going forward. The TLDR is PRC leadership has been too preoccupied with sustaining 1.4B people, huge% of which are old and undereducated (to be blunt: a drain) that drags on her potential. Shedding quantity while improving quality will significantly improve PRC competitiveness.
Family planning / One Child Policy = concentrating resources on only kids = PRC now produces comparable STEM talent as all OECD countries combined. Demographic bomb collapists narrative fixate on absolute population decline without realizing PRC is starting to undergo the largest (by an order of magnitude) high-skill demographic divident in "recorded history" that will last decades. Meanwhile reducing net population = declining import dependency over time = more strategic (military) flexbility. Combine with massive home ownership % and high savings rate, and most of population likely settle around middle / low high income = no expectation for onerous social safety nets.
Over the next 10-30 years, we will see PRC (even with shit tier TFR) close/lead in technology due to having the largest and likely best talent pool (courtesy of PRC scale), that exceeds what US can produce domestically + immigration. Which will also erode western dominance/economy for high value niches it tried to fence off for itself. Also a PRC with increasingly less import vunerability due to lower absolute population, which mitigates much of the geographic shortcomings, i.e. first island chain "containment" nations that will be forever import dependant will lose their geographic leverage. Meanwhile increasingly burdensome social nets will drag down / destablize developed economies vs PRC who can sustain domestic serenity on relatively lean welfare estate.
Yes, generally, PRC nationals (Tier 2/3/4 cities) will (continue) to have worse QOL relative to developed societies. But in terms of overtaking US, and improving existing strategic enviroment, demographic trends are pointing up, up, up.
The US could solve the population difference fairly easily by having some family friendly policies, and walking back laws that are destructive to families such as by incentivizing divorce etc.
Mostly off-topic, but I love the scale used for score bars on this site. Each category has a scale from 0 to {highest score of all devices of this class}.
So every category where the current phone is the best has a 100% full bar. Where it’s not, you can immediately visualize if it’s 70% as good as the best device or 99% as good - even if the high score for that category is, say, 136.
A lot of stricter review sites will say something like (made up example) “no phone gets above a 4/10 score for zoom; only a DSLR/mirrorless exceeds that.”
Which is totally valid! But I want to know how the device I’m reading about scores within its category. Those smaller bars make it look like this gadget has one major weakness despite its other high scores, when the reality might be that it actually has the best - or close to the best - zoom ability out of all devices in this class.
This kind of communication seems like an interesting problem for Starlink (or other satellite internet constellations) to solve. What if the satellites had extra antennas pointed outwards and relayed the data back to the ground at high bandwidth?
Seems like it would avoid a lot of the issues like atmospheric interference, frequency congestion, and careful placement of receiver infrastructure.
the gynormous size and sensitivity of ground antennas dwarfs those other factors. Otherwise, don't you think that an agency known for sending things to space would have considered sending things to space?
However, when using laser comms, sometimes a delay does make sense.
>What if the satellites had extra antennas pointed outwards
Pointed outwards towards what?
And I don't understand how that solves atmosphere interference issues. Still gotta go through the atmosphere at least twice for ground to ground
In actual fact, I believe the long term Starlink plan does include satellites in higher orbits, but I don't know their role
Lowest long distance latency is potentially a big competitive advantage for Starlink, so they'll probably try to get the shortest ground to ground path for some high priority customer data, and higher orbits on the signal path will detract from that goal
There is no fixed or computable phase relationship in optical wavelengths. But the constellation could operate as an Earth-sized radio telescope pointing all directions at once, probably for a few seconds a day to avoid exceeding downlink bandwidth. There, the phase relationship is anyway computable, in principle.
Probably they have not, yet, because they will be lofting new ones all the time, so have time to get it right. And, it might not really be computable, in practice.
That is why the meta commentary about identity politics made complete sense to me. It's simply observing that this discussion (like so many others) tends to go this way, and suggests a better alternative - without a straw man.