Agreed! Perhaps power bills will be a little above $zero, but the combination of solar, batteries, and long-distance transmission is already cheaper than fossil fuels in many circumstances. And this trio is only going to get cheaper and better. I don't foresee a bright future for grid power coming from either fossil fuels or nuclear, unless insane laws prop them up.

Thanks, ToasterMonkey. That's exactly what I meant.

Unless we know for sure that P != NP, we can never know for sure that any encryption is safe. (If verifying that a secret crypto key is correct is in P, and P = NP, then finding that crypto key has to also be in P.)

However, we currently know that there's a way for a big enough quantum computer to crack today's RSA encryption. It's generally supposed that several state-level agencies (and probably some other actors) are storing today's encrypted messages on the assumption that they will be decryptable in the future. Why not add protection against future interlopers now? Personally, I want all of my sensitive communications that rely on RSA to be irrelevant and obsolete long before the first big quantum computers turn on.

Today we don't know if it will be 10 or 100 years before there's a big quantum computer. Given that there's at least some chance it will be less than 30 years, and seeing how slowly we transition away from old software, I fully support a careful augmentation of today's standards with something that at least has a chance of being quantum-resistant.

(My opinion also is that quantum computers in practice are going to be significantly faster than classical computers only of a pretty tiny set of tasks. RSA was a little unlucky that arguably the best quantum algorithm can break it.)

I disagree. I want there to be low-friction ways to buy tiny parts of large companies. A stock exchange is waaaaay better than every investor independently evaluating every potential company. No system is perfect, but the SEC and stock exchanges are MUCH better for the little guys than the law of the jungle.

I know you're asking an anti-science user about what they would want. That said, even the left-wing scientists didn't act optimally.

One thing we could have done is be more morally flexible about challenge trials. See https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.1daysooner.org%2F for a missed opportunity.

If the MRNA vaccines had come 6 months sooner there might have been a chance to preempt a lot of the COVID mutations that made vaccines less effective. It was physically (but not politically) possible to have a timeline that fast.

My take is that at root, it was moral realism that made COVID such a mess. "Moral realism" is the idea that there *is* one set of simple rules we can stick by that will always tell us the right thing to do. I am not a moral realist, and I think the world is complicated enough to send us occasional circumstances where it's better to set aside the moral codes that were appropriate in the past.

Because of moral realism we decided it would not be ethical to allow volunteers to be deliberately exposed to COVID in vaccine challenge trials, nor to commander the know-how on making MRNA vaccines at scale.

Right-wingers often complain about the vaccine not being a choice. I am miffed that I was forbidden to choose to try out the vaccine candidate back in February 2020, all because we collectively adopted the idea that the correct moral code for all circumstances could ever be as simple as "first, do no harm".

My friend next door found a loophole to the "no-AI-therapy" rules. He runs an LLM bot that does Tarot card readings, but first it asks you a bunch of questions about your life. It can then legally say something like: "Oh, the next card is the High Priestess. It looks like you may be in an abusive relationship. Want to talk about it?"

My $0.02 is that AI-based therapy might be very useful to a segment of the population who can't afford human-provided services. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

Companies are valued based on the latest stock transactions. If I can sell one billionth of MSFT for $4,000, then MSFT is valued at $4 trillion. That's just extrapolating the company's whole value based on the latest marginal transactions.

To buy all of MSFT would take more than $4 trillion (since there would be true-believer holdouts demanding more) and if all owners were to try to sell all of MSFT they would get less than $4 trillion for it (since the owners are dumping the stock). Still, for buying and selling small fractions of the company, $4 trillion is exactly the right valuation for the whole of it.

You're not wrong. Still, wouldn't only the crooked candidates be the ones taking the fall?

Some physicists these days like Sean Carroll think that the arrow of time and causality arise thermodynamically. All fundamental physical laws are time-reversible, so the only way for there to be a difference between "forward" and "backward" in time is because one direction was closer to the Big Bang than the other. Increases of entropy are the engine of time asymmetry and causation; there's no other way for us to sensibly say the past causes the future (and not vice versa) since at a fundamental level the physical laws all work as well forward and backward (caveats about the weak nuclear force notwithstanding; it's not the weak force that prevents you from un-scrambling an egg by swishing in the reverse direction).

The current best picture implies a temporally upside-down world "before" the Big Bang by our coordinate system, which is precisely as problematic as an American saying that by their coordinate system, in Australia they build their roofs "under" their houses. Both branches of the timeline have arrows of time pointing away from the shared Big Bang just like both continents have "up" pointing in opposite directions from a shared center of the Earth.

If the idea of the Big Bang being an entropy minimum holds, then saying black holes from a previous universe "cause" dark matter now is a problem. That's because it defies the idea that the Big Bang was a causal root of everything that happens in our local space. To make the idea in TFA work there would have to be another route to an arrow of time. While that's not impossible, it's an extremely tall order, and it would require a lot of rethinking of fundamental concepts that underpin our ideas about how the world works.

Some topical videos:
Up and Atom video on the arrow of time (great intro; 15 minutes: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...)
Sean Carroll's latest thoughts (more depth, cutting edge, > 1 hr: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...)

Agreed!

Einstein taught us that gravity fields are indistinguishable from acceleration. Suppose you have an ideal acceleration sensor. If Earth's local gravity field is unknown at the 0.1% level, you'll have an error in your acceleration signal of about 1 cm /s /s. Let that accumulate for an hour and you are 1/2 (a) (t^2) = 65 km away from where you thought you were.

Much of that will be in the vertical direction, but not all of it!

If you're a public company you'd have to declare a big expense like paying a ransom.

A person's net worth can legally decrease in a puff of paperwork. It's a simple matter to write a promissory note that (for one of a variety of practical reasons) probably will never be acted upon. Art pieces can have a value that's hard to determine too. Wealth per se is very slippery, subject to debate, and is thus not usually a good candidate for something to be taxed directly.

I think we should target passive income tax increases instead. Passive income should include any income generated because you own something. Governments already tax dividends and capital gains from stock purchases. Usually, passive income is taxed at a lower rate than wages; in Canada capital gains are taxed at 50% of the rate of wages.

I'm in favour of the capitalist system where there's an incentive for companies to form to provide services the consumer wants. It's an efficient way to run the economy. However, I join with the French economist Thomas Piketty who says it's a bad idea if passive income is so lucrative that wealth inequality is expected to grow exponentially. If wealth inequality does grow exponentially, then the $10 my great grandfather stole from your great-grandfather may have a significant impact on the relative well-being of my grandkids versus yours. I would much rather a world where historical injustices are expected to slowly melt away, rather than exponentially increase their present-day implications.

It's possible to have our capitalist cake and eat it too with a frosting of equality; we just need to increase the taxes on passive income and decrease the taxes on wages. Thomas Piketty suggests we increase capital gain and dividend taxes until the expected return on investments after taxes is slightly less than the expected increase in GDP. If we put a lot of these extra capital gain and dividend taxes towards decreasing taxes on wages, then folks will have more to spend and it's likely the economy will grow faster.

I'm worried that the rich have set up a system that permanently enshrines them with exponentially increasing shares of the global wealth, while the poor are not savvy in what they're requesting. It's clearly feasible to tax passive income; wealth is a harder target. If you (like me) want a little more global equality delivered by a workable plan, please consider shifting the target of your chants from "Tax the Rich" to "Increase Taxes on Capital Gains and Dividends;" much less pithy, but also much scarier to the wealthy because it's so much more plausible to implement.

PS.I think these changes should be implemented gradually, as in phased in over the course of 10 or 20 years. That leaves lots of time for estate planning, for imperfect international coordination, and for plugging any loopholes that come up.

PPS I also think real estate tax advantages (capital gains exemptions or tax-deductible mortgage interest) should be slowly phased out. It's not possible for a primary residence to be both a fantastically good investment and also something that's eminently affordable - the former requires that a house is a fantastic investment, the latter requires that a house not appreciate too much.

... is a terrible idea. But at some point in the future, it will be slightly less bad than not solar geoengineering. And when that time comes, we'd better have researched the best (least harmful) way to avert disaster. (Critics will say "postpone" rather than "avert," but that depends on whether we can keep it up while we're addressing the root causes.)

Well, I guess they didn't ask *should* dark matter's main rival theory be dead. The answer to that is most definitely yes, in my opinion.

Here's the thing. It's not like it's just galactic rotation curves that give evidence for dark matter. Watch this video (fast forward to 2:36 if you don't want the intro) to see a list of observational evidence explainable by dark matter: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F....

We know almost for sure that dark matter exists because it does so many things other than just explain the galactic rotation curves. We can see gravitational lensing from dark matter clumps. Check out the bullet cluster, where the non-dark matter seems to have collided but the dark matter sailed on through. The power spectrum of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background fits the dark matter hypothesis. The list goes on: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F.... Mond could not explain even half of these items; dark matter existing would explain each of them.

Is it possible that there's dark matter and also Mond? Maybe, if Mond is so weak it makes indetectible perturbations. However, it hard even to write down a theory of Mond that respects special relativity. (Mond typically says to strengthen gravity for any acceleration below some cutoff value, but making that cutoff value observer-independent isn't all that easy to do.). Mond was a really cool idea and I wanted it to be true when I heard about it in 2003. Unfortunately the evidence just isn't there, and dark matter is more or less undeniable at this point.

The big question is what dark matter is made of, and the most boring (read "probably correct") hypothesis out there is that dark matter is made of axions (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FAxion). The strong force seems to obey CP symmetry precisely - every experiment you can do that involves just the strong force looks identical whether you use regular matter or a mirror-image setup made of antimatter. The symmetry is so precise, it's kind of like walking into a room and seeing a pencil balanced on its tip on the table. Frank Wilczek and Steven Weinberg asked: suppose there's an invisible string on the eraser end of the pencil holding it up. What properties must that string have? It turns out that not only would the candidate particle (they called the axion) solve the strong CP symmetry problem, it would also be a weakly interacting particle that would have been made in just the right abundance in our early universe to account for the mass of dark matter we observe today. We haven't found axions directly yet, but it does feel like the puzzle pieces of dark matter and CP symmetry could fit together.

What I'd like to see is the governments investing in things like high-voltage DC that ultimately make it more profitable to burn less CO2. Imagine if solar from the Sahara could reach the cloudy UK with only 30% energy loss, hydro dams could store more water when it's windy or sunny anywhere in their hemisphere and generate more when other renewables are not available, and energy users who are able to time-shift their demand (e.g. electric car charging at home) can do so in a free market that naturally helps blunt the peak hour demands.

I think a planet-scale free-market grid is not quite feasible with off-the-shelf technology quite yet. However it seems to me that if we had one, in most cases you'd have to subsidize fossil fuels to keep them competitive with renewables. My hope is that rich countries can try to pave the way to a planet-scale electricity grid, the consequence of which will be that fossil fuels die a natural death with no subsidy needed.

If this sounds like science fiction, check this video out: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F.... Some early long-distance transmission projects have paid back their initial investment 100% in just one year. I would love to see governments at least getting out of the way of, or even better investing in, seriously high-power long distance electrical transmission.