I think I knew this deep down, but I am curious if there's "extinct (with the usual disclaimers)" and "extinct (it ain't comin back)". i.e. the Christmas Island Shrew vs. the Dodo
I have a feeling that it depends to some extent on the organism. It would be hard for a breeding pair of Dodo's to hide for very long, whereas a colony of little shrews could creep around in the bushes without notice. "Last seen on X date" would cover both cases.
Yeah, I mean obviously GenX followed a similar track to Boomers and now Millennials are next in the generation line. Except this time, Boomers are in their 80's and GenX are in their 50s so when the Boomer grandparents are dying they're probably leaving inheritance to their millennial grandchildren who need it more than their grown-up GenX children.
Do you think you're being reasonable in saying that? I think micropayments are desperately needed, and I don't see modern payment networks doing anything to get there
"We must do something, this is something, therefore we must do it"
"Micropayments are desperately needed" - this is true.
"I don't see modern payment networks doing anything to get there" - this is also true.
Neither of those imply we must solve this problem with Bitcoin, and neither of them contradict OP's statement. Bitcoin is slow, energy inefficient, and a shit transaction currency because of philosophies built into the creation of the coin. It's a fine speculative asset, but by this point in its existence, it should be pretty obvious it's not an actually useful currency for this kind of exchange.
> "Micropayments are desperately needed" - this is true.
Probably not. They've been proposed all the way back to Chaum's DigiCash, but no micropayment system has ever really taken off. Not just crypto schemes. Schemes to put micropayments on your cellular phone bill were a flop. Even 976 numbers never got traction outside of dial-a-porn and have mostly died out.
All the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people who want to collect them. Not from consumers wanting to send them.
At that time, "micropayments" meant payments on the order of less than a cent. Chaum's system didn't try to do that.
I don't know exactly what "micropayments" means to people now. I get the impression it's more on the order of a dollar. But DigiCash really wasn't even meant to do large volumes of payments that small. I don't think a system like that has ever really been tried.
It's true that any kind of pay-per-use would be a hard, hard sell, though. Who wants to have to think about whether every click is worth the nickel it's going to cost? But it's also true that people don't like to buy subscriptions. So now we're in advertising hell. Which nobody likes either, to the point where a double digit percentage of users are blocking ads.
I think advertising took off because there was no coordination problem; nobody had to ask the consumer about whether to deploy it. And for larger payments everybody already had credit cards, so there was no onboarding issue.
> It's true that any kind of pay-per-use would be a hard, hard sell, though. Who wants to have to think about whether every click is worth the nickel it's going to cost?
I've heard this argument before, but there's a common existence proof to the fact that it's possible: video games. People who play many different kinds of video games (RTS, MOBA, MMO, RPG) get used to making decisions as to whether to buy things many times an hour with barely any cognitive load - their brains just get used to working with smaller units of time and money.
And why shouldn't they? I found sources online that say that a YouTube video earns about $5 per 1k views, or 0.5c per view. If I have to pay half a cent to watch a video, even a short five-minute one, that's almost below the threshold of caring, and even those making median income are probably going to be constrained by the actual time that they have available to watch, rather than the cost of the videos. People will spontaneously spend $20 to go out to eat - after the initial adjustment to a micropayment system, they should have very little trouble spending 60 cents to watch YouTube for five whole hours after work, especially if the micropayment system has common-sense features such as clearly showing your wallet balance over time, how much you've recently spent, and how much longer your balance will last at your current rate of consumption.
Now, to be fair, the fact that it's possible, and that people will quickly get used to it after they spend some time with it, doesn't mean that people will be interested in trying it in the first place, and that's a much harder problem, because subscription services are more lucrative for companies. I think the only way to get micropayments off the ground would be a grassroots movement supported by a bunch of content creators making their stuff available on a micropayment platform. Otherwise, companies that move away from ads (e.g. Google) will just turn to subscription services to lock their users in.
> They've been proposed all the way back to Chaum's DigiCash, but no micropayment system has ever really taken off.
If it's true that Chaum fucked up the deal to have it shipped with Windows 95, then this is a bad example.
Not saying it was ever "desperately needed." But being on everyone's computer by default, somebody would surely have found a use for it. Probably gambling, which is more than sufficient for bootstrapping.
Then it's a race: does the consequent acceleration of malware become such a nasty pain point that Microsoft just removes Digicash from the Windows 98 installer? Or does pets.com accept it as payment first, and it therefore becomes entrenched? :)
If micropayments were really that useful to people wanting to USE them, it would be done with steam wallet funds or steam trading cards by now. That pseudo-"payment network" is good enough for illegal casinos yet nobody has ever tried to do micropayments with it, because consumers do not want to pay slices of pennies for everything, because being nickle and dimed is literally a negative idiom
NOBODY wants to pay a penny per grain of rice. People want to pay $10 for a nice bowl full of rice.
VERY FEW CONSUMERS want all news to be stuck behind a five cent paywall before you can even decide whether it's worth that. Consumers WANT to pay for "good journalism" as an abstract service.
Even more so consumers want things free... Or as cheap as they can get...
Subscriptions are one option when they are less hassle than alternatives.
And they already know where things will end up. Now it might be cents to get something, but soon there will be adds and after that the price will go up. Probably to full units...
so put the 10 cent button in the middle, or at the end of the article?
microtransactions exist within the realm of individual video games already though. spend $10 to get 5000 in-game tokens and 150 tokens gets you better gear.
for the calorie and cost conscious rice eater, why should I pay $10 for a bowl when I'm only going to eat half? per-grain is ridiculous, but a la carte pricing on food isn't. Not everyone is a fan of buffets.
I don't want to pay for a whole newspaper when I'm just reading the whatever section, and micropayments would let me do that. Whether or not that's a good thing for the newspaper is a different question.
> microtransactions exist within the realm of individual video games already though.
Yes. That does work.
Linden Lab, the people behind Second Life, spun off their money system as a startup, called TiliaPay.[1] Tilia obtained money transfer licenses, linked up with JPMorgan Chase Payments, and offered a system where you could process a 2 cent transaction with acceptable operating costs. Unlike most "game points" programs, users can trade with each other and cash out in dollars. That's why they had to become a regulated financial operation.
It never took off. It does work, but Second Life and, to some extent, VRChat are the only real customers.
The number of installs of adblocking software would seem to contradict you. Consumers are cheap and don't want to pay for things, but they also don't want to watch ads. They also don't want 15 $10 subscriptions to things they barely use. But they also want to support creators. So there's some intersection point where people are willing to put some money in, and receive fewer and less aggressive advertisements in exchange.
The answer is federation. Don't try to sell me "subscribing to one specific blog", sell me a sensibly curated and rich network.
People might be willing to pay $10 per month for a broad spectrum of quality content, but they don't want to spend 13 cents for a given arbitrary single article. It's an annoying decision burden, even if you try to shunt it away from them with delayed end-of-month billing (constant fear of a surprise $300 bill) or a prepaid-credit scheme (where you have to still check your balance regularly).
It has to be unmetered at the moment of use -- no surprise paywall popping back up-- and it has to cover enough content that you're not reliant on "if we lose our #1 draw, the entire platform falls over".
The perfect prototype was basically the Japanese phone-book manga magazine. If you liked one or two series consistently, it was enough to justify buying the book, and since you already paid, you may as well explore the other 18 series in there to see if there's something you like.
There was something similar with Coil.com, based on the Web Monetisation API. Basically you paid $5/month, and it was shared on a pro-rata basis between on content you consumed that supported the API. Coil themselves had content lists on their website to discover, but the goal was for the monetisation to happen organically.
Most companies fail. But I think something like that could work.
It's what Google Contributor should have been. Not the bizarre v1 where your money tried to outbid ads, or the pay-per-view v2 that also only supported a handful of websites.
Google Contributor was dead on arrival by the usual issue of launching ... too small.
It could never get a following because the initial set of providers and customers would be always too limited to gain proper usage numbers which in turn would prevent it from being expanded.
There was also flattr by brokep (one of the Pirate Bay guys), which basically gave you a like button to put on your blog, and your monthly payment was split between all your likes.
> no micropayment system has ever really taken off
This is true, but it's not really the same thing as "we don't need micropayments" and "there's no configuration that would work for micropayments." Hell, ad networks are basically micropayment networks, just not for consumers, and the current economic configuration of "everything is free, we just sell all your personal data" is pretty new, so it's not like we haven't already invented new economics for the internet.
> All the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people who want to collect them. Not from consumers wanting to send them.
Well, yes, but that's every kind of payment in the world - in just about every transaction in the economy, it's the people producing the thing that want money for the thing, not the consumers who want to pay them.
Less glibly, the current economic arrangement of the internet is eight shades of fucked. Nobody's getting paid for their work, content on the internet has sprinted to the lowest, shittiest, clickbaitiest denominator, social networks are incentivized to tear society apart so people spend more time hate-scrolling, and GenAI is coming to hoover up any of the remaining scraps individuals could've possibly been getting for their content. The fuckup of the last 50-odd years of economic policy is the monomaniacal focus on the individual as a consumer and the absolute exclusion of the individual as a producer from policy. If you want a good economy, you need to pay people for things.
The good news is there's a revitalization of just fucking paying people for things - Patreon's a good example, there's a whole lot of new writer-owned sites making good enough money to be sustainable (defector, autopian, 404media, etc), and generally there seems to be a much larger appetite for paying for things than the last 20 years of the internet would have lead one to believe.
I genuinely believe that a system in which users could easily pay small amounts of money for content they're enjoying and producers could easily get compensated for their work on reasonable terms without the friction of building a durable (subscription) relationship and without the machinery in the middle taking 30% from both sides would be transformative. We're nowhere near it, but man, we sure have tried the other ways, and they're all pretty crap.
I agree that micropayments would be incredibly desirable. If an acceptable system came around to accomplish that, I'd use it pretty heavily (as a customer).
> Well, yes, but that's every kind of payment in the world - in just about every transaction in the economy, it's the people producing the thing that want money for the thing, not the consumers who want to pay them.
Nope. Credit cards, in the form of Diner's Club, were invented by Frank McNamara, a millionaire who went to a restaurant for dinner and forgot to bring enough cash. ATMs were conceived by Walter Wriston, CEO of Citibank, because he saw too many people waiting in line at his teller windows for cash. The big push behind FedNow today is from the parts of the U.S. Government that pay out money for tax refunds, medicare, and pensions.
Yes, they are. The current dominant payment models are (1) individual patronage (which doesn't scale, and disproportionately concentrates rewards/wealthy to the very most popular creators) and (2) ads (which are incredibly problematic in almost every way imaginable).
> They've been proposed all the way back to Chaum's DigiCash, but no micropayment system has ever really taken off.
"Nobody's gotten it to work yet, therefore it's a bad idea" is a basic fallacy that has been disproven many times throughout history, especially in the past few decades, where there were many ideas (e.g. VR, machine learning, high-level programming languages) attempted in the past at points when the technology and/or market culture simply weren't right yet, that were later validated as good ideas.
> All the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people who want to collect them. Not from consumers wanting to send them.
Yes, because free-with-ads and subscription-based services are the two dominant payment models. Both are incredibly problematic (ads come with huge privacy and coercion issues, subscription services remove media ownership and don't proportionately reward creators for their work), but because they're already established, consumers don't feel a need for something else.
This argument is like saying "All the enthusiasm for eating healthily comes from doctors who want to pitch diets to people. Not from individuals wanting to eat healthily."
Paying for individual pieces of content is clearly superior to having your attention and personal information sold to advertisers, but because ad-supported services have a price tag of zero, there's no transparency as to what data is collected and sold, and the ad-supported model is popular and familiar, consumers will choose that over a new unproven system.
That does not mean that micropayments are worse. The principled arguments for micropayments are far stronger than that of either ads or subscription services.
I'd love it if my media players/viewers just compensated artists directly commensurate with how much I consume. I'm not comfortable using a middleman for this because all of the available middlemen are giving a pittance to the artists while spending the rest of that money on technologies that make life worse for everyone. I don't want to legitimize that behavior by paying somebody for it.
Piracy + donations is often the most ethical option available today, but even better would be Piracy + micropayments on use because then it would happen whether or not I bothered to look for a "donate" option.
The commenter has constructed a strawman argument by misrepresenting the original position on L402 and Lightning Network payments. They conflate issues with the base Bitcoin network with the Lightning Network, which L402 actually uses.
Strawman arguments against Bitcoin often stem from a combination of factors: the complexity and rapid evolution of the technology, widespread misunderstandings fueled by media simplification, resistance to financial system changes, and a lack of technical knowledge among critics. These issues are compounded by confirmation bias, lingering associations with Bitcoin's controversial past, and sometimes vested interests in traditional systems. Overcoming these strawman arguments requires ongoing education and clear communication about Bitcoin's current capabilities and limitations.
Also, Lighting is capable of using other blockchains.
If you really want micropayments, then use one of the newer, better base systems that do the same things better on every metric, including not ripping through half a percent of the electricity generated in the world.
Even if Bitcoin were the only choice available, micropayments aren't needed desperately enough to justify the climate impact. But in fact it's not.
If censorship resistance and reliability are your metrics, there really isn't a serious competitor. There is huge incentive to claim to be so, however!
But if you're trying to build something for decades, as you should be for internet infrastructure, there isn't much option.
> If censorship resistance and reliability are your metrics, there really isn't a serious competitor.
Given the public ledger of Bitcoin, I would hardly say it has "censorship resistance". On that metric I would think Monero or some such would be better:
Micropayments, especially when coupled with authentication for APIs, are desperately needed for AI calls (think tokens). And, mining costs have nothing to do with validating payments, so it doesn't cost more to run transactions over Lightning.
> including not ripping through half a percent of the electricity generated in the world.
Lightning network consumes half of the energy on the planet?
Because L402 pretty clearly states that it uses Lightning and not plain Bitcoin. Using the power consumption of all Bitcoin would be deceptive and dishonest.
Lighting is built on Bitcoin. Using Lightning encourages Bitcoin, and in fact requires doing transactions on the base Bitcoin chain. In fact, if Lightning-based Web micropayments caught on, it would drive the base transaction volume over the hard cap that's imposed by the current Bitcoin protocol.
And it turns out that Bitcoin's energy usage responds not to the transaction volume, but to the total available miner income: transaction fees plus total block rewards. Rewards still dominate. Driving the transaction volume up is at best not going to reduce them, but the bigger issue is giving the Bitcoin chain a reason to exist.
So, your 1% figure was Bitcoin in general, not Lightning, and you intentionally used the wrong value to be misleading.
> Using Lightning encourages Bitcoin, and in fact requires doing transactions on the base Bitcoin chain
...which is irrelevant to the fact that you intentionally used extremely misleading language in order to deceive readers into thinking that the same technology that powers L402 consumes 0.5% of the world's energy.
> In fact, if Lightning-based Web micropayments caught on, it would drive the base transaction volume over the hard cap that's imposed by the current Bitcoin protocol.
What does "caught on" mean? Show us the math, because you clearly can't be trusted to be truthful.
> And it turns out that Bitcoin's energy usage responds not to the transaction volume, but to the total available miner income: transaction fees plus total block rewards. Rewards still dominate. Driving the transaction volume up is at best not going to reduce them, but the bigger issue is giving the Bitcoin chain a reason to exist.
> So, your 1% figure was Bitcoin in general, not Lightning, and you intentionally used the wrong value to be misleading.
You cannot use Lightning without using Bitcoin. And nobody is actually planning to change that so far as I know. I said that the "base system", which is Bitcoin, was what was using the power. I do expect that people reading technical discussions have some minimal knowledge of the systems involved.
> What does "caught on" mean? Show us the math, because you clearly can't be trusted to be truthful.
Bitcoin can do, charitably, six TPS, and there is massive community resistance to changing that.
It takes a minimum of two on-chain transactions to be able to use Lightning: one to get the Bitcoin to fund a channel (it is not legitimate to assume many people already have Bitcoin, because they don't), and a second to actually open the channel. In reality, anybody who used Lightning on a regular basis would also do multiple other on-chain transactions, to change the funding level, eventually to close the channel, probably to have multiple channels, and occasionally to lock in balances when counterparties misbehaved or were suspected of misbehaving.
But let's pretend it's just two. That means that, even if Lightning uses the entire capacity of the Bitcoin block chain, freezing out all other transactions. it can create at most three channels per second, worldwide.
According to Wikipedia, the New York Times has 9.9 million online subscribers. It would take 3.3 million seconds, (917 hours, 38 days) to onboard all the subscribers of that one Web site, if the Bitcoin chain were doing nothing else. And the fees would of course spike through the roof if that actually happened.
Now suppose this thing caught on to the level of, say, Instagram, which supposedly has 2.4 billion user accounts. I picked Instagram as an example of a "middling" platform, before I looked at any user numbers from any service. Let's be nice to you and say that people have three Instagram accounts apiece (they don't), but for some inexplicable reason each of them would only have one Lightning channel. Let's further say that only half of them would join "the micropayments system" (micropayments have no prayer of working if there are more than one or two systems with significant use). That's 400 million channels. Creating them would take 1543 days, or over four years, of the full capacity of the Bitcoin chain.
And, again, all of that is based on a bunch of rosy assumptions I made to rule out typical Bitcoin-lover objections. Ten times that would be more realistic.
This should be intuitively obvious to anybody who has even the slightest idea how Bitcoin and/or Lightning work.
Irrelevant to the fact that you used intentionally misleading language to massively overstate the potential energy/climate impact of using L402 built on Lightning.
> I do expect that people reading technical discussions have some minimal knowledge of the systems involved.
An intentionally unrealistic expectation. You know very well that just because a person is "technical" doesn't mean that they have a base level of understanding of every single technical system in existence, and you exploited that to mislead readers.
> And, again, all of that is based on a bunch of rosy assumptions I made to rule out typical Bitcoin-lover objections. Ten times that would be more realistic.
This, and all of the above, are arguments about the scalability of Bitcoin. Not the power consumption or climate impact. You've convinced me that Lightning is fundamentally not a scalable technology, but you've provided zero evidence that it'll have any significant climate impact, much less that the impact is meaningful relative to the provided value of having a distributed micropayment system that replaces the brainrot that is ads.
> This should be intuitively obvious to anybody who has even the slightest idea how Bitcoin and/or Lightning work.
Another intentionally unrealistic expectation. I have a decent understanding of Bitcoin, but no prior knowledge of Lightning, nor knowledge of transaction throughput limits or power consumption. This is not "slightest idea" knowledge, this is details that most people will not know.
no, it's just that there is a subset of environmentalists that are totally unhinged and think they know better than everyone what should and shouldn't get an energy allotment. Rather than calmly advocating for raising the carbon tax until the externalities present in carbon emission are priced (and seeing what uses are actually cut in the face of proper pricing), they take to any social media they can to complain about a specific use of energy they don't like. I am just happy it has been kept to Karen level virtue signalling online and hasn't yet converted to [insert favorite authoritarian from history here] levels of repression on the populace because the thing that has made the last few hundred years of massive progress work is recognizing we are too dumb to make those decisions and letting individuals pursue their own ideas and spectacularly succeed (but mostly fail).
Goodness, child. What I suggested was that people shouldn't voluntarily support a stupid and wasteful project like Bitcoin (especially when, again, there are alternatives that are superior in every way including carbon).
YOU are the only one talking about coercion. Perhaps that says something about your mindset.
But OK. It turns out I'm not opposed to what you suggest. By all means, let's go ahead and raise carbon taxes high enough to drive emissions down low enough that we all parboil at least a bit later in the game. That should happen regardless of Bitcoin. We can start by raising them above their current median worldwide level of (checks notes) zero. This will, of course, involve overcoming the political obstacles that have kept them from catching on, but sure, great.
I haven't run any numbers, but I'm guessing that any meaningfully effective carbon tax is going to be higher than the Bitcoin block rewards you could get from the electricity the carbon represents... and that such a tax would drive the price of electricity in general up enough that Bitcoin fees would put even Lighting out of reach of most users.
In a sane, functioning market, that would kill Bitcoin, since there are cheaper and more effective alternatives. But I imagine it'd still stick around the way it always has, as a speculative vehicle for would-be rent seekers. Seems like there's no greatest fool out there in the Bitcoin market.
Bitcoin Cash works for small payments as Bitcoin was originally designed to do.
Artificially limiting the block size to try and push fees up as high as possible is simply not a good designe choice that was added long after Satoshi left.
Rates were low, the cost of servicing $14 billion in debt was $0.
CEO's had the company take the debt on, paid themselves fat bonuses and hoped that the little people downstairs would invent something new that would save the company.
You think Shari Redstone, who has 77.4% of the voting power in Paramount, just let her employees get rich at her expense? She hired them, she offered the compensation.
She paid the CEO $30 million a year to lose $30 billion in market cap (of which National Amusements share is $23 billion) in just 4 short years, so I would say that they got pretty rich at her expense.
Obviously, but your comment implied malfeasance on the part of the CEOs (“paid themselves fat bonuses”), whereas my comment illuminates you to the fact that the CEOs action’s and compensation were subject to a single owner’s approval.
That is about as market price as it gets. Also, if you dig into the proxy forms, I bet you would find those CEOs probably got paid in Paramount stock with various lockup terms before they could sell, so they probably didn’t make out as well as you think.
Yeah. Episodic streaming content has been incredible for the past few years, but now TV studio execs realized that indiscriminately pumping money into everything, all the time, inexplicably, isn't a good business move! So they've just started firing the big staffs they've picked up and cancelling projects. Because, when you realize you've been making irrational moves, the answer isn't trying to make rational moves– it's making equally irrational moves in the opposite direction.
The CBS Viacom merger was a cynical plan from the very beginning. It even drew shareholder lawsuits which they ultimately had to settle. The writing was on the wall as early as 2015, though, when the company started restructuring several core businesses in moves that I saw at the time as "thinly veiled cash grabs."
During a time when they could have been making deeper investments in these business and capturing large parts of a growing media market they completely ceded the space and any expertise they had in it all to pad their own paper value. Immediately after the merger they lost a lot of licensing revenue because they drastically overestimated the value of the corporate assets they cherry picked for themselves.
been browsing r/sauna for years in the lead up to building my own sauna. Those trumpkin notes really are the key. It's unfortunate that the sauna industry has very few (if any) DIY kits that follow best practices for traditional saunas
The counterpoint to this is Greg LeMond's (possibly apocryphal) quote about cycling training: "it never gets easier, you just go faster." LeMond is the only American to win the Tour de France.
In regards to flossing, I used to never do it, until a new dentist told I oughta or my teeth would fall out in my 20s.
I was 16 when that happened, and I have flossed every single day since. Now I can't brush my teeth without flossing. The process just feels incomplete without it.
"multiple storms have already spilled over into the hypothetical category 6"
If they do go this route, I'd like it if they future-proofed it and include categories 6-10. Seems inevitable we're gonna see the first category 7 in the next 5-10 years.
Confusingly, the paper[0] cited by this article seems undecided on this front. Figure 1A of the paper puts Hurricane Patricia (2015) into hypothetical category 7, but the "current and proposed categories" in Table 1 stops at declaring category 6 wind speed > 86 m/s (or 192mph, 167 knots, 309 km/h), and category 7 doesn't make an appearance elsewhere in the paper.
I was really hoping to find an authoritative listing of the strongest storms, but it is missing in both the linked article and the underlying paper. The paper itself uses data from International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship, which has a confusing website. As a non-expert, the website's top windspeed[1] category lists the following storms with maximum wind speeds of >167 knots (category 6 in the proposed scheme):
There is some research regarding an increase in Saharan dust storms that retards hurricane development in the Eastern Atlantic. Apparently this is still trending upwards and has resulted in fewer hurricanes forming over the last few decades.
Wikipedia gives Typhoon Ida (not to be confused with various hurricanes named Ida) a wind speed of "only" 175 knots (325 kph; 202 mph) which accounts for the largest outlier in the list.
Confusingly, that wikipedia page cites the same IBTrACS system that I referred to, and in that page[0] the max intensity is listed at 213 knots. The data shows that the 213 knot speed was seen for measurements across twelve hours on 1958-09-24.
You are looking at the data for the CMA (China Meteorological Agency). The official data center for the Western Pacific according to the World Meteorological Agency is the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA/Tokyo), but the IBTrACS dataset does not have wind speeds from them for 1958.
The Wikipedia article is sourcing data from the JTWC (Joint Typhoon Warning Center), the US wind column for 1-minute sustained wind speeds. In general, the Wikipedia convention is to include wind speed data from the JMA and JTWC when available.
The scale is somewhat arbitrary (plot the points) but category 7 would start somewhere around 225MPH. Highest ever recorded is 215MPH, so category 7 is worth having in reserve.
While that is probably most sensible, it doesn't seem like a lot of fun. Instead, I recommend we call a new global conference, every few years, to discuss the addition of each individual natural number to the Saffir-Simpson scale.
Not necessarily because there may not be any difference between a wind speed of 350mph and 400mph wind in term of destructive power. Both may simply be able to strip the land bare and deliver the everything above it many miles away as well as temporarily moving parts of the sea miles inland.
Well that's easy. The meteorologists can remember that category number = 10 v' / c, where v' is the maximum median windspeed over a one hundred acre convex region, and all anyone else needs to know is that every storm is cat 0.
I seem to recall a video (perhaps KurzGesagt) that a magnitude 25 earthquake would overcome the binding energy of Earth - the planet would be in separate pieces. That definitely is an upper limit: when the "earth" in earthquake literally cannot take more.
Earthquakes are sort of naturally limited though. A 9.0 is going to be catastrophic no matter what, and while I’m not saying a 10 couldn’t happen it would probably be something like once in a billion year event.
10.0 is firmly in "if it happens nobody's gonna be around to care what it's designated" territory I think. There's a practical point at which the death tolls are going to be sufficiently high that the number probably shouldn't matter.
Though in tornadoes there definitely are EF-4 designated twisters that are hotly contested online as being truly EF-5; often that's down to where damage occurs in the lifetime of a tornado though and it being difficult to prove windspeeds when a system is moving through, e.g.: trailer park vs an industrial park.
I don't think it's quite as cut and dried as that. A 9.5 hit Chile about 60 years ago, and about 95% of the most directly hit town survived. Which is not to minimize it - there were thousands of fatalities - but it was human scale tragedy, not apocalypse.
It’s actually a function of energy released. The earthquake can get bigger if the fault slip is larger. A magnitude 12 quake is technically possible but requires an entire hemisphere to slip 500 meters. There’s a really interesting paper that takes the moment magnitude scale to its logical extremes.
I would guess that atmospheric pressure is going to matter a lot for the expected "damage", so it would not make sense in places where it's wildly different ?
Part of this tweet[1] stood out to me. I wish I was more optimistic about Buttigieg handling this appropriately, but I'm not aware of any significant action on his part over the Norfolk Southern freight explosion a year ago.
"He has been saddled with a messy, stupid lawsuit built on bad decision after bad decision, from predecessors who--between a rock and a hard place in the impossible task of avoiding disparate impact while preserving objective standards--elected to take the easy road and cave to political pressure to implement absurdities. He has extraordinary power to end this mess in a moment and begin to make things right for those who were directly denied a chance at the jobs they had worked towards thanks to an arbitrary and perverse biographical questionnaire."
