Thanks for doing some math, but the point is: Massive human disruption is far easier than geoengineering ocean flood levels.

You may be applying a niave perspective of the scale involved. A scaled-up wall doesn't account for water rising put of the ground. And one cannot pump even a centimeter of an ocean somewhere else. These average sea level effects create massive flood stages during powerful storms, leaving behind a soggy landfill. The only solution is moving to higher ground.

Sea walls stop wave damage, not water levels. The ground is porous. Desalination is not a massive pumping effect for the level of an ocean.

The primates are smart, but gullible and predictable. So, each decacde we should expect to see ever-larger forced movements of people from lowland coastal areas. The early signs would be: flooding, massive erosion, catastrophic pollution events, rising insurance premiums, real estate price drops and ultimately lower valuations then a reduced tax base. I suspect there's a map tracking these events and amounts already. Perhaps there'll be a hand-scrawled sign offshore somewhere saying "we will rebuild!"

They'll never know what it gets wrong, but a lucky customer will. And I am curious who will weave in bug fix, new features, or a breaking change upgrade. The AI? The vibe may be quite solemn indeed when the LLM cannot generate symbol sets on something it never trained for.

Donald's biggest enemy has always been himself. Read any number of his biographies. His ego is unable to be embarrassed, win or lose. And so, he can make the most short-sighted proclimations and wave off any questions about How & Why as he jets off to another golf round.

He'll mix things up a bit, raising the power of the Executive to unprecedented levels, and then fade out in a blur of elderly nonsequiteurs. Pennies won't disappear, Greenland won't be a state, and the privatized portions of the federal gov will flame out in corruption, prejudice or bankrupcy. As it has been, so it will again.

And your comment will look as ridiculous as any past administration gloating.

Cloud Services may or may not be cheaper. One can argue from examples both ways, and in the end "it depends" is a wide belt. However, the biggest change is that one clicks a few dashboards, or pays an IT consultant for a few hours time, and gets a managed service that runs on a sent-cheque, like a utility service. (Yes, it will require care and feeding occasionally). Businesses shy away from managing people - to build, test, touch-up their non-cloud-managed components - its a more difficult skill, and businesses dislike the ever-changing landscape of sequestered knowledge, compensation packages, workplace atmosphere, turnover and training, etc.

So, in the end, even if a cloud service is more expensive to some degree, the corporate comparison is to bodies-at-keyboards and herding the coders to Fix What We Want And Don't Touch Anything Else.

Corollary: This effect of boiling an employee's role, or even portions of it, down to "write a check to a service company" is the entire story of the Digital Revolution since the 1960's. LLM's are just another small (and flawed) step in attempting to get the ad-hoc requests automated. "Please compile the diverse, numbers into a filtered spreadsheet and present us a meaningful graph tomorrow" is, I'd guess, like 10-25% of what humans are doing at a business computer nearly constantly. This should be (one) Workplace Turing Test.

That will spiral, immediately. Each point of raised interest carries a segment of underpayment in the cohort of holders. If you use adjustable interest rates, adding a point causes the next due date to be slightly more underpaid. However, if you adjust rate on just new loans, and adjust for profiled holders' expectation to pay, you have current insurance mechanisms (addding gear grease & some profit).

I can agree with most of your sentiment. Here are where we disagree: The structurally-opinionated "framework" becomes a new direction for the software portfolio management. Unlike editors or even OS, frameworks are now monitored, updated, kept in the upgrade-test loop. This is both good and bad depending on how you view change: Vulnerabilities and be closed, but new ones opened; bloat added but more commodification of features, reducing what your team writes. They react more to upgrades at the cost of pure feature development.

Compare this to a use-the-design, not-the-code shop: They may build a relatively larger set of their components using the "library" philosophy, still managing the portfolio, but hopefully reacting to change at a more-targeted level. For teams that want to resist imposed-change, and minimize the influence of a framework's arc of features, popularity, or even ownership - using a library can be a step.

The result is a different beast: Consider the heavy reliance on mind that a custom 1m+LOC legacy finance, aerospace or government system has. It's 20+ years old, has a specialized team that built it from the ground-up, and is near totally impervious to most software-market influence. It's also only flexible at points thought about 1-2 decades ago, and probably has shell systems around it. Now compare it to a more modern startup that built on a framework, did the care & feeding, outgrew it and wholesale-migrated 1-3 times, and balanced somewhere between 3 and 5 "years old" in component versions. Which is a better software/team mgmt strategy? That's debatable.

2.45 is quickly attenuated by water - its how your microwave works. 5 is blocked by much more. What you're discerning is the ability of radio to reflect and stay coherent enough for communication. Radio is a complex science, and signals can have an effect on cells but not at the level people claim. Frequency, power, duration, polarization, reflection and much more make this topic difficult to discuss.

Most studies beam directly at a cellular system and observe an effect. I would postulate that most are upper limits for manufacturing checks in industrial settings, not consumer worries.

Exactly. Waterfall had so many failures that PM philosophies were bubbling up everywhere. Gated Phases, ITIL, and a host of more/less waterfallesque variants, were breaking the large project horizontally and chronogically. However, most felt they didn't need the rigor of a Space Mission in Specification or QA, so as deadlines slipped, quality went down. Business rarely have an appetite for months-ling systems without a change in features.

Agile was the concept of feature delivery in a fuzzy-then-crystalizing way to avoid all this. The feedback loop was to quicken and specs/bugs /enhancements all folded into a periodic status check.

Everything formalized after this idea was a bolt-on nightmare. Story Points were to make effort clear to non-tech team members, and yet they became an entire economy unto themselves.

Burndown charts, story subdivision or roll-up were again the PM's trying to describe large problems in terms of small bites. And what was in the codebase(s) at any one time continued to be messy with feature flags, API's, versioning, distributed systems, S, etc.

Agile isn't more than an umbrella term for a set of behaviors that say "we allow you to change your mind throughout the project". It doesn't replace anything else in architectural design, goal tracking or testing. Putting SP on things is just to keep effort instead of time as the bartering tool, and it holds back that tide only so long

This effect should have its own article. I believe Scott was deeply effected by portraying office life in the 90's with a keen sense of humor, and the platitudes therein went from pithy observations to self-described "law of ...". A few decades later he thinks he is a maestro of manipulation and cannot say a wrong thing. Then - for causes unknown to me - he thinks politics is a good choice for prognostication, and picks the deeply flawed worldview. Tragedy of Ego

Kurzweil is in denial. The promise and religion of the Singularity is a cloud of super-humanlike, and yet godlike, machines that appear to act like us but live in an electrical nowhere-everywhere. But it also touts the ability for human brains to "live on" in this form. Here, Kurzweil is badly projecting his desire to live longer than his genetics would dictate. His LLM, trained on his media and ongoing blathering, will /not/ be him. He will die like us all, and we'll be stuck with a Lawnmower Man version of Ray, still evangelizing the Singularity for decades, even as society moves on to tackle more important problems like population, energy & resource distribution, climate survival, and whatever else. More likely than not, a power outage will render the last copy of Ray 2.0, running in a byzantine rackspace of cheap old hardware in a windswept desert data center, inert.

Hot spells, storm frequency and severity, species distribution and counts, inflated food prices. Recognize the leading-edge of ACC's direct effects and then understand that it will not be reverting. Instead, each 2-3 year period will be the lowest of the measures in the foreseeable future. It may take a complete corn/soybean/cattle/wheat decimation for 2-3 years to wake people up, but eventually I think folks will be broke trying to keep normal.

Long-term shelter in exchange for capital (ferried by currency) is a normal transaction. Services for the floor of the market, as provided by public and private entities, may be disjointed or underfunded because they're naturally at the edge of a strong capital exchange. IE Social stabilization can be through incarceration and/or social services, but the profit motive is suspect there. So a bit of socialism may bound the bottom.

But land holders, brokers, servicers and users all form a complex market that the US government doesn't really want to participate in directly, but instead regulate the transaction integrity, taxes, zoning and community safety. "rent-seekers" are a necessary position for a market of short-term "land seekers". It's the leasing side of title exchange. Even the USSR had a vibrant-yet-underground subleasing system that bypassed the spirit and letter of the law.

Markets want to exist, need a currency, and demand fast, safe transactions. Impeding this just pushes the market into removing one of the aforementioned components.