For those not in the know, was Bolsonaro actually facing any criminal charges if he didn’t flee?

The richest 10% represent the absolute majority of consumer spending in this country. That share will simply increase. Ask the guys living in tents in the park if the market always finds uses for surplus labor.

Yet we’re talking now about crypto exchanges, which is just another word for bank. And the fees you pay to move money via Bitcoin are far higher than the fees you pay to move money using the conventional banking system.

That’s literally how employment works. You produce $50 worth of value to your company, and they pay you $20 for your efforts.

I view it more from the sacredness of the human voice and word.

Civilizations that existed closer to the invention of writing treated it a mysticism and magic. The ancient Egyptians would write on their tombs, “speak my name and I shall live again.” Words are extension of the spirit. They allow a piece of yourself to transcend time, place, and even death itself. Words have power. The words you write are a piece of your soul.

I don’t mind AI for replacing things that are not works of human expressiveness and creativity. Want to use an AI to test new compounds for potential medicinal effects? Go nuts. Want to use AI to optimize some soulless manufacturing process? Be my guest.

But no human being should ever be forced by their employer to have a machine speak for them. Or to make art for them. Or any other endeavor where genuine human artistry and creativity are involved. My words are my own. My thoughts are my own. Everything I write, for good or ill, is an extension of my own mind and spirit. And I find something deeply morally wrong about people who take the soulless words of a machine and pass them off as their own.

This is honestly one of the greatest uses of religious exemptions. It’s not like the store is really making that much from every individual cashier they ask to hawk credit cards. But if they did make an issue of it, and you did sue them for violating your religious rights, then they would have to pay legal fees. And even a simple legal case would likely cost them more in legal fees than they would make from many years of you hawking credit cards.

You would get more pushback if you were requesting something that required serious accommodations on the part of the company. But simply letting you not sell credit cards? That’s an easy one to get approved.

Not in the context I’m alluding to. With conventional banking, the only place to move money to is another bank. You can withdraw cash at an ATM, but large transfers have to go to another bank. If someone hacks my bank account and initiates a large transfer, that transaction can be reversed. And moreover, it will be going to an account at another bank that is owned by a known customer.

But crypto exchanges must have the ability to transfer to unvetted crypto wallets. No crypto customer would accept an exchange that simply didn’t let you transfer coins to your own private wallet. So even though the accounts themselves have KYC, you can still hack a crypto account and send the entire balance to an unknown person.

The equivalent for regular banks would be if your regular bank offered you the option to send a large cash withdrawal to a physical address of your choice. Enter any address, and any amount of your funds can be sent to any address you specify. The closest banks have to that is bill pay, and even that is just a bank to bank transfer in the form of a check in the mail.

The closest real banks actually get to this is wire transfers, and those are pretty locked down nowadays. They often require going to a physical branch, showing ID, etc in order to initiate a wire transfer. They’re locked down precisely because they’re the one irreversible transaction built into the regular banking system.

Crypto bros often fail to realize what actually secures the banking system. The banking system is not secured by foolproof cryptography. The cryptographic security of crypto solves a problem that doesn’t exist. Every bank is not the gold standard of IT security. Rather, what really secures the banking system is that there’s not much you can actually do with stolen bank login credentials. Pretty much every way you could move money out of said bank account would require you to show your face somewhere or transfer funds to an account traced to your real ID. And pretty much any method of moving money out of a bank account can be reversed.

It is impossible to construct ethics from first principles. A study of philosophy would tell you that. Logic can take you from one step to another, but at the end of your chain of reason will always lie some pure belief, an act of faith.

For example, many ethical systems can be traced to a few basic axioms, like “human suffering is bad.” Or “humans deserve to live.” Or “all lives have value.” But these are statements that cannot be produced through mathematics. There’s no equation that can tell you it’s a good thing for a child not to die of hunger. At some point, every moral system traces back to certain basic axioms that are pure beliefs, not rationally derived from any logic or mathematical equation.

All the hacking risk of keeping your money in a regular bank, but none of the protections that come from reversible transactions and KYC laws.

Do you just burn piles of money for fun? Is that your hobby?

Who gives a crap what the maximal power output per land area is? It’s utterly irrelevant.

I don’t want to be a statue!

I mean Abdul Alhazred wrote the Necronomicon, which I consider to be both science and literature.

The United States could meet its entire electricity demand just by putting solar panels on the land we currently waste growing corn ethanol.

The land argument is beyond grasping at straws. The last refuge of the incompetent.

People have been trying to do small scale fission for decades. They always slam headfirst into the square cubed law and the fact that fission plants were built giant for a damn good reason. Fission is so cost inefficient that the only remote hope you can have of making it profitable is if you build giant reactors and hope for big economies of scale. The hope of building small reactors on assembly lines has proven to be a pipe dream. Many have tried it, and it has failed again and again.

It is literally impossible to operate a fission plant without government subsidies. Private insurers won’t touch the things, as the potential damage they can do in a worst case scenario is something only the budgets of nation states can absorb. Nuclear plants always rely on national insurance schemes to make them viable.

Everything I’ve seen is the cost would be quite manageable. Sure, you’re talking billions a year. But the figures I’ve seen are that it could be funded by something like a fraction of a penny per gallon of gasoline sales. It would require international cooperation, but it might be as simple as just adding an additive to jet fuel.

Termination shock is a legitimate fear. But again, the cost is relatively cheap. It’s not something we can’t continue to fund even if we have a major depression or a world war.

I couldn’t justify rolling the dice on this if the stakes weren’t so dire. But look at it. We’re literally talking about the near-certainty of complete societal and ecological collapse from climate change. I’ll trade “possible death” for “certain death.” It’s not the perfect solution, but we are well past the point of perfect solutions.

And moreover, it gives us what we really need: TIME. We have a path to a carbon-free future. But a planetary civilization is the slowest of ships to turn. We’re trying to completely revamp the very material foundations of our entire lives. Solutions like atmospheric CO2 removal are not practical with today’s technology. But, in principle, with sufficiently cheap power and good enough automation, meaningful direct air capture should be possible.

For example, by 2050 the world will be pretty awash in solar panels. Project the production curves forward, and we’ll be sitting on a massive abundance of cheap available power. Especially in the summer time, we’ll have access to vast amounts of otherwise wasted power. And if you had really good automation and robotics by then? Maybe then it becomes possible to affordably construct an industrial complex that would rival the current world’s petrochemical complex…all just to take CO2 out of the air. Totally impractical now. But 2050? Or 2100?

Or, in the worst case, you don’t need to sustain this forever. My understanding is that the main mechanism that governs the timing is ocean currents. It would take about a thousand years for ocean currents to move enough water up to the surface and back down to return atmospheric CO2 to pre-industrial levels, but we’re talking a task on the order of centuries, not forever.

Atmospheric aerosals are already emitted into the atmosphere in huge quantities and are already cancelling out some of the effects of CO2 buildup. By deliberately increasing these, deliberately adding aerosols intentionally, rather than as a byproduct of combustion. The cost would be pretty affordable, and we could completely eliminate the extra heat retention of our higher CO2 levels.

Obviously there are risks, but it’s not like we haven’t already been adding huge amounts of aerosols to the atmosphere with little negative effect. It’s not a perfect solution, but it sure as hell is better than the alternative.

But people have weird attitudes about it. The same folks who are firmly convinced that climate change has now doomed us all will often oppose atmospheric engineering efforts like this based on vague fears about messing with forces we don’t understand. Obviously any technique will have unintended consequences, but when the alternative is civilization and biosphere collapse, it seems pretty damn silly to be worrying about hypothetical unforeseen consequences.

Not among the general population, but among internet nerd culture, nuclear has a certain level of support purely for cultural reasons. There’s a culture of people on the internet who like nuclear primarily as a cultural shibboleth. If you can convince yourself that the only reason nuclear hasn’t taken off is due to unreasonable fear and technical illiteracy, then supporting nuclear is extremely self-affirming. Supporting nuclear is a way of saying to yourself and others “I am a rational and scientific person. I know the facts about nuclear. I know the fears of its safety are overblown. I’m smart and intelligent while the common rubes are scientifically illiterate fools.”

The truth is that while groups like Greenpeace exist, nuclear has failed largely because it’s just too damn expensive. But fission fanboys never talk about the cost. They just wax endlessly about how safe nuclear is, or repost old canards about how coal releases more radiation than nuclear, or the per-watt death figures. Etc. Endless repetition of factually correct but utterly irrelevant information.

A lot of people support nuclear for largely cultural reasons.

There will be diversity in the future grid, but that diversity will be in the forms of energy storage used. I think the grid of the future is almost entirely solar but with different energy storage systems optimized for different time scales. For storage on the order of seconds, you use fly wheels to replace the spinning mass once provided by gas turbines. For daily swings, vast warehouses full of old electric car batteries work well. For longer term storage, you can use chemical energy storage or flow batteries. Think making vast tanks of ammonia or methane. You use excess electricity in the summer, store it as chemical energy in vast tank farms, and then burn it or run it through a fuel cell in the winter.

Although, for seasonal variation, the most practical solution might be just to spam solar panels. It just depends on the price ratio of solar panel cost to storage cost. You could have a grid that just had so much solar deployed that it is able to cover energy demand even on cloudy winter days. You just flat out build that many panels. Maybe then in the summertime you’re capable of producing 10x your normal power needs.

Seems wasteful, but this would just encourage a lot of very energy-intensive industries to become more seasonal. We have a farming season, why not an steal smelting season? Why not an AI model training season? Maybe for datacenters, the big runs are done during the summer when power is dirt cheap. Then the companies spend the winter planning next year’s runs, etc. Or the extra power could be used to make synthetic fuels from CO2 pulled from the air. Maybe we never figure out how to make batteries good enough to power a trans-oceanic jumbo jet. But maybe we don’t have to. You offer dirt cheap energy on a seasonal basis, and people will find uses for it eventually.