jgreen10

Decades of optimism along the lines of "something bad is coming, but we can still fix it" did way too little.

Perhaps now that it's actually bad something might happen.

At this point, geo engineering is probably the safer option compared to letting the planet spiral into an uninhabitable waste land. Of course, it should be combined with cheap and abundant renewable/nuclear energy.

Now that things are bad, there might actually be popular support for this, though we may still have to wait for the current political class to retire.

The amount of carbon emissions is simply far too large for sequestration efforts, natural or otherwise, to make a significant dent.

In the end, what the world needs is an abundance of cheap energy without proportional carbon emissions. Everything else is secondary.

Does AI completely dominate the translation industry? I suspect not, though it made translation more accessible and widely used.

When I was in university around 15 years ago, the idea of peer-to-peer currency was floating around as an evolution of the tit-for-tat idea in BitTorrent, which was still popular at the time.

The expectation back then was that peer-to-peer would continue to evolve, especially in the area of distributed computing. Clouds did not exist yet, but projects like SETI@Home were having some success in terms of sharing compute resources. A peer-to-peer network could meter you for your consumption of compute resources through a lot of microtransactions in a virtual currency that avoided traditional banks or credit card providers.

Then came the first and least efficient implementation of peer-to-peer currency: Bitcoin, which did not sell the distributed computing capacity, but used it to do meaningless computations. It was clever, since up until that point the problem of zero-cost identity had been unaddressed, but appears to have few practical applications. It is surprising to me that people view it as some kind of alternative currency or store of value and send real currency to "trusted" exchanges. You deposit money just for the pleasure of doing a transaction? Yeh, sure, you don't need to agree on a global, trusted intermediary, but you still need to trust your exchange not to screw you over.

Ethereum is closer to the original ideas behind distributed computing and peer-to-peer currency, but the Internet has largely moved on from peer-to-peer networks. Today I can instantly get all the compute resources I need in a trustworthy, secure environment, and only pay for what I use. BitTorrent has also lost a lot much of its relevance with streaming services providing a greater level of convenience.

I like the show so far. I don't mind that some people don't. Let's see what happens next.

As a software engineer, I am seriously considering going back to college and studying nuclear physics.

I believe an abundance of emission-free energy is about the only thing that can move the global economy to where it needs to be. Fossil fuels need to be out-competed with very cheap electricity. Once you achieve that, capitalism will ensure that all fossil fuel burning devices will gradually disappear. Other methods that try to fight capitalism (e.g. CO2 taxes) are ultimately losing battles, because the global political goodwill will never be there.

Solar is great, and cheap, until it's not. You need to cover vast areas of land in solar panels to power the whole country (incl. cars, freight, industry, ...), which is impractical and extremely costly, and still only works part of the day/year. It's an important part of the solution, but not the solution.

Nuclear is about the only thing that can provide continuous abundance at a reasonable cost, though we need new technologies.

The numbers in the article are shaky.

For instance, the Netherlands had a trade surplus of $76 billion in 2017, but shows up as having a trade deficit.

France does not appear in the list of Germany's export partners, but it's actually number 2.

Due to unprecedented urbanisation you effectively have runaway inflation in large cities, which is wiping out whole economic classes. Raising interest rates would be the only sane thing to do from the city perspective, but outside of the cities high interest rates would wreak havoc to the small amount of industry and jobs that remain there. I don't think any country has come up with a solution to the economic imbalance created by the flight of capital to cities.

When I'm in Russia, I find the state-controlled media surprisingly critical of government policy and very outward looking. They are clearly ignoring the elephant in the room: the country being an ungovernable pool of corruption that can only be kept together by instilling nationalism and foreign threats and an authoritarian leader, but then again, it's not like US media are really asking critical questions. With or without free press, no one wants to hear that they're in a mess. It's much nicer to think that everything is good, but the evil-doers are trying to ruin it.

Hey soneca, could you give me a transcript of the conversation between Dilma Rousseff and Lula da Silva on January 31st, 2011? If you can't, then you'll have to go to prison.

It's an irrational, unreasonable request, which makes it highly questionable as a legal ruling.

Well, applications that want to use Citus can just use whichever PostgreSQL client is available.