NotAtWork

If I used a locksmith to get in to your house without your permission, it would be "breaking in" in colloquial language.

Your reply is overly pedantic, when taken in the best light.

If I had a pet dragon, I could fly to Europe without paying the airlines.

Clearly, it's reasonable for people not to expect to have to pay airlines for travel to Europe.

The government currently kills people as part of exercising its policing powers, which most people agree are overly aggressively used.

If this lowers that rate, it's possible that the difference in beatings, shootings, and home invasions will be basically even, because there isn't a large portion of the criminal element which is waiting for better encrypted cellphones to do these things (hint: other things about cellphones make these problematic, and most depend on other evidence anyway when prosecuted), where there is a reason to think that police being restrained in using illegal investigation methods will decrease the rate at which police use other illegal investigation methods.

These same people seem awfully shy when I ask to go through their photos, just to see if they have any using drugs.

But that's exactly it: if you leave a gaping hole for the feds to get through I (in the sense of a hypothetical attacker) can go through it too, especially with how easily most federal secrets leak out and the fact that rekeying is essentially impossible for this use.

That model oversimplifies the question to the point of not having anything to say about the real world.

It doesn't, for instance, counter-balance the trade benefit with an assessment of the societal cost of our production moving overseas.

I mean, there are other substantial factors that make this not an ideal free market:

- The time to set up certain kinds of facilities, eg, good physics labs or mechanical engineering labs, can be on the order of several years to a decade.

- There is a limited ability to scale up, as it relies on its own out put to keep functional (eg, professors and TAs).

- Non-responsive hiring managers whose cultural sense was normalized before many of these changes impacted colleges (eg, >20 years ago) haven't adjusted their hiring practices, and place an artificially high reward on college degrees.

> lists internet access as one of the boondoggles of the education system, to be slashed and feared, and veered away from as it detracts from our books! and our socialization!

> says that we should use more internet in our solution, because this is the future and clearly interconnectedness is the future in book! and socialization!

How am I supposed to take your opinion seriously, and what actually is your opinion, when you say such contrary things in such little time?

I only find them more productive until about 300-500 LoC.

It's about at that point, particularly if there's multiple files, that I find myself suddenly wishing for stronger type systems.

That being said, most things I write (outside of work) aren't that long, and you can get started faster in dynamic languages.

> I find projections of viable sustained fusion nonsense given 62 years of failure to achieve it. Every last single other energy source tapped by humans, sustained nuclear fission included, had previous exemplars occurring on Earth, and was adapted by humans either before history, or (in the case of fission) within a matter of single-digit years of initial attempts.

We have a precious example occurring not on Earth, and within a few decades had figured out how to make large pulses out of it.

Your summary also does a great disservice to the history of using assorted biochemicals as fuel, from various plant and animal oils through initial study in refinements and use of various technologies to aid in their burning.

You can hardly claim, as your statement implied, that we had full mastery of burning hydrocarbons the first time we tried - or that it was anything like when we tried to scale that technology up.

Given 62 years, we have systems with controlled fusion and systems without energy reclaim that are energy positive. A lot of the lack of progress is due to the relatively low level of funding. (The entire cost of fusion research so far is about the same as one stealth bomber.)

I find it unlikely that over doubling the time, with better technology, won't let us solve the capture problem, especially since the facilities of many studies are actually using old technology which we already know how to do better than. (Example: the ignition laser could be purchased in reduced size and with more efficiency for much less than it cost to initially build the laser.)

Your argument seems to largely be "It's complicated to me compared to what I know about these other methods, so can't happen!"

> Technology is a function of available energy (Tainter, White, Prigogine), not vice versa.

This is super unrelated to what we're talking about, because not even you are arguing that we're going to run out of the ability to produce electricity in <100 years.

Neither of those were examples I cited, and I cited two other, specific examples.

I have the feeling you didn't read what I wrote.

Some of your problem predictions are 100+ years in the future. I generally regard these as nonsense.

Looking at the relative rates of technical growth and computing power, it's incredibly unlikely that we'll be able to accurately pick out what the future is going to bring.

Examples of technologies that are expected in the next 50-100 years: 3D printable organs which can be transplanted, based on your own stem cells; the first smarter-than-human general purpose AI; fusion power; the ability for bioengineering to be done with a home lab kit. (We're actually at the cusp of the first and last of these now.)

That level of bioengineering, computing prowess, and cheap power will have an incredibly hard to predict effect on issues like food production, ecosystem maintenance, etc.

So which of your warnings are only problematic at 100+ years?

> One possibility: global warming, war, and desperate overexpansion of agriculture causing complete terrestrial desertification.

I'm considerably more worried that a giant space rock is going to come turn my continent in to a pool of molten rock.

I don't think your evaluation of human ability to cultivate environments realistic.

The vast majority of the external effects of forests and wildernesses is the effect of a few major species. In nature, those species are supported and interacted with by a complex network of other species. However, this established relationship isn't necessarily optimal for the few species of interest to us.

I find it likely that we're able to cultivate select main species of interest in forests if we set our minds to it, especially considering the large scale agriculture that we already do.

There's simply nothing to suggest that you can't construct an ecosystem with many fewer elements or the elements rearranged to, say, make room for houses, that has the same external effects as other ones. In fact, the success of many environments-in-a-bottle, indoor marijuana production, etc, suggests that we do have the ability to make relatively stable environments in which the necessary components of an ecosystem can thrive.

No one is suggesting that we do something silly like wipe out all the major predators while we let herd animals run free (which is the case with wiping out the wolves in Yellowstone), but rather that we can get away with a lot less moving parts and that we can tune the parts quite a bit to suite our fancy.

The only large scale human dependencies on plants relate to weather, oxygenation, water flow, and soil control. The last two we know we can do with intentionally seeded groves and other such constructs of plants we choose (using a reasonable selection), and don't need to replicate the full array of plants. In terms of oxygen, seeding the oceans with an algae would be far more efficient, but we really only need ferns, which are incredibly efficient at producing oxygen and are relatively hardy plants.

The final complexity is weather, which I must admit I know relatively little about, but am dubious there's any material reason it wouldn't work fine with planned forests.

Again, no one is saying "Fuck it, kill all the things". I just think we can get away with many fewer species - and sometimes who groups of species, where another can reasonably fill its role.

Or are you telling me we couldn't survive with 3,500 kinds of beetle... we really need all 350,000.

My number is high partly to account for humans being more spread out.

A lot of our bottle necks occurred at times before we really spread out all over the place.

> a world with just farms and cities and the animals that can survive within is not going to bode well for us or any other species

In what way?

The main threat is disease if we shift to being large aggregations of essentially the same animals. We've run in to this problem before, with bananas as a particular case. However, we already know the solution to that. The answer is that you preserve several cultivars of the species, and intermingle them. We already see this kind of behavior with pets, gardens, zoos, etc. I fail to see why you think we're likely to end up with anything but more of the same kinds of pruning-but-not-completely-destroying-families behavior.

I'm also failing to see why you think we need thousands of kinds of lizards that are all basically the same, rather than a few hundred, and why such a bottle neck is either unnatural (hint: we've hit smaller choke points before) or why it would be particularly dangerous.

Ed: A key word.